I think I may need to be specific, but I’m going to put it in spoiler tags because porn (NSFW language, no actual porn within)
Spoiler
Your example of incest is a good one if arguing attitudes, but I’m specifically talking about pornographic acts that have no sexual value beyond the presentational for third party visual stimulus: things like the male actor taking his penis out mid-intercourse and slapping it against the mons pubis a few times before re-entering. Google search this (if you dare!) and you’ll find hundreds of young women talking with somewhat perplexed amusement about how men think this is something women like or get any pleasure from because they see it in porn. This is a specific behavior learned by media.
I don’t think intent of audience reaction becoming action (“getting people to perform specific behaviors”) is a meaningful distinction, as yes, people tend to see through and resent instructive directives or lessons unless they are coming to the media object for that purpose (I’m thinking of those early Jordan Peterson videos, sadly in the same post as talking about dick-slapping). But most reactions/responses genuinely imparted in media are broadly unintentional, for better or worse. Sometimes artists (also regret using this word in the same post as Jordan Peterson) subconsciously lock onto something that resonates in the zeitgeist and it manifests in mirroring what’s on screen, but often the impact (attitude or behavioral, and I’m not convinced a distinction matters as much between these two functionally for the result, either…) comes as a surprise to everyone involved
Anyways, back to talking about three movies I’m never going to watch…
I've always felt that Haneke wasn't just making a comment on the possibility of media influencing people but also commenting on the type of society that finds it entirely acceptable to consume said garbage in the first place. It's one thing to say that someone like Jordan Peterson may influence young men's behavior but I very much thing it should also be a matter of discussion that Peterson is allowed to so freely spew his pseudo-scientific nonsense commercially. It's bunk. It's fraud. But it's given the same level of gravitas as a peer reviewed study.
I'm unsure about how terminally online many members of the board are but Benny's Video feels entirely more prescient to me right now at thirty one than it did when I saw it over ten years ago. The downright appalling level of interest in gore and the spectacle that comes from it feels increasingly relevant in a day and age where certain groups will openly use videos of violence against people in general as a source of pleasure. This of course goes alongside the grotesque live streaming of things like suicide that Colin mentioned up-thread.
domino harvey wrote:I think I may need to be specific, but I’m going to put it in spoiler tags because porn (NSFW language, no actual porn within)
Spoiler
Your example of incest is a good one if arguing attitudes, but I’m specifically talking about pornographic acts that have no sexual value beyond the presentational for third party visual stimulus: things like the male actor taking his penis out mid-intercourse and slapping it against the mons pubis a few times before re-entering. Google search this (if you dare!) and you’ll find hundreds of young women talking with somewhat perplexed amusement about how men think this is something women like or get any pleasure from because they see it in porn. This is a specific behavior learned by media.
I don’t think intent of audience reaction becoming action (“getting people to perform specific behaviors”) is a meaningful distinction, as yes, people tend to see through and resent instructive directives or lessons unless they are coming to the media object for that purpose (I’m thinking of those early Jordan Peterson videos, sadly in the same post as talking about dick-slapping). But most reactions/responses genuinely imparted in media are broadly unintentional, for better or worse. Sometimes artists (also regret using this word in the same post as Jordan Peterson) subconsciously lock onto something that resonates in the zeitgeist and it manifests in mirroring what’s on screen, but often the impact (attitude or behavioral, and I’m not convinced a distinction matters as much between these two functionally for the result, either…) comes as a surprise to everyone involved
Anyways, back to talking about three movies I’m never going to watch…
The fault is mine, really, as I’m trying to talk about complex issues by quickly typing things on my phone on vacation while I wait for someone to get dressed. Dumb.
My point would be: it’s not that media cannot or has never influenced human behaviour, but that in general it’s not great at actually getting people act in certain ways. It’s much better at influencing our values and attitudes. So there are certainly examples of people altering behaviour because of x media, but if you’re ever hoping to design a piece of media in order to get a section of the population to do x behaviour—good luck.
In some ways the desensitisation (and more importantly distancing mediation through a screen) is the big theme of Benny's Video, where people examine real images of death with safe detachment and some try and apply their interest to their sterile real world environment, revealing some of the hollowness within themselves and their society in the process. You can see Haneke doing the same things in Funny Games (which kind of melds the family unit critique of The Seventh Continent with the outside force of an inexplicably cruel tormentor of Benny's Video) and in The Piano Teacher, which for me is the one that focuses most intensely on the issues discussed above regarding sexuality, pornography and how that provides ideas of how to change their behaviours to people again stuck in otherwise stiflingly sterile and circumscribed sex-less lives that has in some ways twisted their attitude towards the subject, but without the guarantee that they will ever achieve the kind of sex they want in the way that they are fascinated with, but know little about in practice. Like playing the piano professionally but without passion. As with Benny and death, Erika in that film wants to control every element of a notoriously wild and impossible to fully tame human experience, and ends up sullying (or corrupting) an essential aspect of life.
In some ways the bourgeoisie delusion of safe control of wild, disruptive extremes of behaviour is one of the key Haneke themes. Where even the nebulous apocalypse (and death of the patriarch) in Time of the Wolf can eventually seemingly be managed after the sudden upheaval. In Amour death isn't the horror, it is the extremity of the behaviour leading up to that death which prevents life from being 'normal'. The brawl in the street at the opening of Code Unknown is the beyond the pale act that ruptures the placid surface of daily life (bookended by the public humiliation in the Metro scene at the end of the film), even though the lower key scenes that occur for all the various characters following on from that are more personally impactful.
I’ve always found The Piano Teacher frustrating because I can’t understand the main character’s behaviours. The scene in the bathroom shows her trying to manipulate someone else into an S&M relationship in which she is the Dom and the sadist, gaining sexual satisfaction from denying him release. Ok, fine. But then the next scene with him shows her trying to set up an S&M relationship in which she is the Sub and the masochist, including the tell-tale stuff like contracts and other details out of Sacher-Masoch. A lot of other scenes also show her engaging in humiliation, cutting, and other masochistic behaviour, but then there’ll be random moments of (non-consensual) sadism and even cruelty, like putting the broken glass in the girl’s pocket. This set of behaviours is incoherent. It makes me suspect she only behaves these ways because Haneke likes their shock value, not because this is how human beings actually behave.
As for that 90s argument about the media and desensitization…I don’t know. It seems to me that argument only holds weight if you use it to claim it’ll produce certain kinds of behaviour. Like, media desensitizes us to violence, therefore we’ll be more likely to be violent. But no such connection has ever been proven. On top of that, there are segments of the populace that we know to be desensitized to violence: ER doctors and nurses, aid-workers, journalists, etc., whom we expect no violence from and in general feel safe with. So there’s an element of hysteria when it comes to fears about media desensitization to violence. A lot of parents were afraid they’d be unable to control their own children.
It has been a while since I last saw the film and this might be better for the dedicated Piano Teacher thread but I think the sub-dom sexual situation is being intertwined in disturbing ways with the student-teacher one (and parent-child relationship, which is the reason for that one scene of Erika impulsively climbing on top of and trying to kiss her mother in bed. I don't really take from that moment that Erika is 'revealing' that she is gay in particular, or even particularly has incestuous lusts towards her mother, but more is desperately looking for love and affection in all the wrong places in a more insistent and ever more tragically revealing of herself to others manner).
I think that Erika's 'problem' is imposter syndrome writ large and expressed in terms of her confused approach to sexuality. She is inhabiting a societal role of a cool and brusquely aloof teacher for whom nothing a pupil does is entirely correct whilst simultaneously being subjugated by her controllingly dominant and constantly belittling mother in her home situation, which is leading to that situation of being intensely repressed in her personal life but also having to maintain an unapproachably cold attitude for the majority of the time in her professional capacity. Which makes those moments of cutting loose (sometimes literally!) all the more extreme. This central issue is then compounded by Erika letting her personal feelings invade her teacher role (which is perhaps inadvisable, though what other avenues do we see for Erika to express herself outside of her intensely repressive home life and that initial trip to the sex shop/drive-in?), as she is approaching her situation of propositioning the younger man initially from the situation of a position of power and dominance over her students.
Then in that central turning point scene (which I find quite moving) when she ushers Walter into the private sanctum of her bedroom, produces the box with letters and items from under her bed and sits opposite him as he reads everything she wants him to do to her with those items (as she watches with a mixture of expectation, nervousness and shame) she reveals that she herself wants to be dominated but only within the terms that she has outlined and no further. If we think back to that initial encounter in the bathroom, Erika keeps pushing Walter away whenever he stops doing things to her that she has told him to do to her and starts impulsively taking control of the situation himself as a somewhat equal partner in the act. In that semi-public bathroom scene she is in two worlds, having announced her interest but still maintaining the impossible to please, 'get on your knees and do it properly this time' teacher-facade and not wanting any out of place displays of emotion, but does not seem to have realised that the simple act of revealing a mutual interest has changed the nature of her relationship with Walter into something else already. Eventually in the second half of the film, having exposed her hidden desires to Walter (presumably the only other person she has ever revealed her inner self to), she is the one chasing after him whilst he is shrugging her off as a clinging annoyance, himself long over any interest in continuing a one-sided relationship with her.
Erika seems to have built up a 'safe fantasy' where she wants to be submissive but within the dominant boundaries that she sets, and that impossible situation of trying to be both things simultaneously (and with the delusion of control over another being into doing what she wants them to do, and no more. Like they are living sex toy rather than another human being, which like the self-cutting scene is another Benny's Video-style example of someone used to more abstract and distanciated interactions with their desires trying to actualise their desires into reality in unorthodox ways) is what frustrates and eventually annoys Walter so much that he performs the assault that shows her what domination and submission in its rawest form is, destroying the fantasy world she has built and simultaneously fracturing the facade of the mother-daughter relationship by exposing the sham of the situation that they are living under. But what else is there, and so the open wound that event leaves callouses back over into a deeper emotional numbness at the end, but with the unspoken (arguably self-inflicted) scar left behind of that situation to forever leave its mark.
As for the broken glass in the girl's pocket situation, I have always taken that as a kind of Salieri-style jealousy that Erika has of a pupil simply being more accomplished than her, eventually potentially surpassing her and therefore negating her existence as the teacher (as well an expression of hatred towards the girl's nervily ambitious for her daughter mother, contrasting against Erika's entirely disinterested own mother, who is played wonderfully by Susanne Lothar, who here and in Funny Games always captures that perfect haunted look of someone going through a harrowing experience!). So she has to take out the competition before they reveal her own flaws. Which of course thematically ties into the main situation with Walter, but in that situation she meets her match and has the tables turned somewhat. It perhaps is not a coincidence that their final meeting takes place in the lobby of a theatre, with Walter entering and sweeping through the lobby as if he as at home and fully belongs in the place whilst Erika ends up turning around and leaving after performing her final symbolic gesture.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Sep 18, 2022 8:04 pm, edited 9 times in total.
This might seem somewhat off-brand, but I think you’re both overanalyzing Erika’s specific psychology and/or looking for behavioral logic in The Piano Teacher when the film’s purpose is to obstruct such tactics for engagement. I don’t love the film, but the thing that does work for me about it (so much so that I like the film almost solely for it) is how it accurately presents an idiosyncratic case of someone who has been developmentally stunted. Erika doesn’t abide by any consistent behavioral logic because her internal drives/IFS parts are all so immature. So she’s experimenting with different forms of social contact that might spell love or connection or anger or even higher functions like morality of right or wrong, without a pulse on deciphering an outcome to necessitate catharsis. Everything is in its early emotional stage, and she does not possess the skills to grasp what her internal parts demand in order to achieve harmony. One could go through each behavioral response and dig into Why, but Erika herself doesn’t know- she’s antisocial and depressingly inept. It’s a character study of someone who feels like we do, only without an awareness of what that means or how to ascribe a logic to these feelings to get any predictable sense of relief. So she issues control left and right and pivots without any consistent internal logic.
The film reminds me a lot of my experience working with kids who were victims of sexual abuse at a very young age. Many of them initiate inconsistent behaviors that might indicate love- a range from aggression to appropriate affection, coming from the same person, without any consistency to trigger, emotional state, etc. Their brains have been affected by confusing contradictions, so sometimes a part of them influenced by a good parent or counselor might engage in an age-appropriate gesture, and other times they might move to molest their peers, experimenting with behaviors without any clear pattern, trying to demonstrate tangible acts of what their stunted emotions are vying for. I’ve always admired Haneke’s restraint on this one, preventing any unfairly-streamlined diagnosis by keeping ‘explanations’ in the elisions. I suppose I just went on a tangent overanalyzing the film myself- but it's just a long way of saying that Haneke is presenting us with a broad presentation of someone who has no dependable handle on her own psyche, distributing behaviors she's peripherally gleaned without rational consciousness.
Haneke is a sometimes very clever filmmaker (there are a few moments in his films of superbly engineered shock) but there's something annoyingly complacent about his brand of epater le bourgeois. So much in his work maps tidily onto overfamiliar tropes or "themes" in cultural criticism that interpretation (not to mention enjoyment) seems almost beside the point. I usually feel like Haneke is seated all too comfortably in a position of high contemplation, like his films are illustrations of theses rather than genuinely inhabiting or exploring real contradictions and confusions.
I don't know if I would agree with that, as I usually find Haneke is surprisingly funny in the interviews I have seen with him. He strikes me as having the same kind of impishly black humour about some of the absurdities of life (but with a core of deadly seriousness about the essential themes) as Lars von Trier. But since von Tier can be a controversial figure with some of the same criticisms leveled at them, that may not be a comparison that would help my case!
I actually sorta-liked 71 Fragments, which is, as expected, Cold Unknown with a more pronounced, sleek ambition. It wasn't as impactful as Haneke's run after this film, but it does create a bridge between those first two icy, clinically introverted exercises and the more intrusive, expansively rich, sobering work to follow. There's a more perceptive, dare I say humanistic approach to the people within these fragments- a humanism I actually think Haneke plays with quite a bit in contrast to the power dynamic he himself coerces us into as the artist holding the cards. For instance, Haneke's focus on a little girl's troubled disposition demands us to shed cognition for compassion, even if we're limited in how to execute it. The urgency is manipulated, but only in favor of exposing us to details we'd otherwise miss in following a conventional structure where the narrative isolates us from the peripheral value. With this film, Haneke may be posturing at nihilism, but he's also seeing the milieu as comprehensive and full of grey situations susceptible to multiple variables outside of our control, and not for an anthropologically dismissive endgame.
One could read the high concept of collaged arcs-as-red herrings to be unfairly deterministic, with Haneke formulating that any of them would be doomed to commit the climactic murder we know is coming, which would be decidedly cynical and devaluing of humanity. However, I think he's toying with us on fair terms. We know the endgame, so we empathize supremely with each storyline, hypervigilant of the pathos of these individuals intersecting with a cruel world of oppressive vehicles in people, systems, ideologies, etc. Haneke walks a fine line between chastising and taunting his audience and characters with pessimistic fatalism, and shining a light on our alienating existences in a manner that promotes attention and unconditional dignity, but this feels more like the latter. I don't think the former is 'bad' in a vacuum though- there's something important about Funny Games' use of suture that ventures far deeper than its shallow mockery gleaned on the surface. The best Haneke engages with both ends of the spectrum and makes room for the details in between. This is a middling start, but it's Code Unknown where he actualizes his ethos to its ceiling, and I don't think he's ever replicated that level of success since.
Code Unknown feels like the culmination of this period of experimenting with formal methods of distancing (particularly thinking of the abrupt endings of shots and scenes and the denial of any hand-holding exposition or narrative framing), with the following period focusing more on character and situation. Or maybe that's just what gets funding and the interest of major French actors. But then there's The White Ribbon which I think is a very oblique and cold film in every respect.
I recently watched a new "horror" film on Shudder called Speak No Evil, which I think is deliberately derivative of Funny Games (and of Ruben Ostlund's Force Majeure. It plays things very straight but still manages to be a clear condemnation of White European Politeness and still manages to rub the audience's faces into their appetite for violence and bad things happening to "good" people. I recommend it to folks who enjoy exploring the bleak terrain of Haneke's films.
As for Haneke's personal manner vs. his filmmaking, he generally seems like an avuncular, introspective, good-humored person who is nevertheless not afraid to examine the worst parts of his own nature. I find Claire Denis to be a much more combative and intimidating figure than (most of) her films might suggest.
A BR.com user emailed Criterion about the masters and this is what they responded back with:
Jon Mulvaney wrote:The HD masters for the HANEKE TRILOGY release are from 2019. Here are full details, which will also appear in the booklet for the release, in case this is helpful:
The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance are presented in their original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. Supervised by director Michael Haneke, these digital masters were created in high-definition resolution from the 35mm original camera negatives (Benny’s Video and 71 Fragments) and a 35mm interpositive (The Seventh Continent) and restored at LISTO laboratory in Vienna and Hiventy in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. The color grading was supervised by Haneke.
Interesting that the masters being utilized are much newer than I expected but even more interesting that they decided to go with a HD restoration instead of a 2K or 4K restorations. I wonder if it had to do with the budget or if that's simply what Michael Haneke wanted.
I’ve just watched these for the first time.
Is the duplicated news reports at the end of 71 Fragments supposed to happen?
We get three stories told twice, all are the same as far as I can tell, except the Michael Jackson story is longer the send time.
