Visar inlägg med etikett Austria. Visa alla inlägg
Visar inlägg med etikett Austria. Visa alla inlägg
fredag 18 november 2011
Nachtschichten (2010)
I once saw a documentary about Copenhagen at night. Maybe I've seen a similar one depicting the activities of Stockholm after dark. I remember I thought these films catered too generously to our expectations of what a film about the urban night should be like. Last week, I headed to Anthology film center to see whether Ivette Löcker's Night shifts, which follows some Berliners at night, would be any better than the similarly-themed films. It was. Maybe it says something about Löcker as a film maker, that she has the skill to make a seamless combination of images, sounds and music that conjures up those peculiar feelings of being awake late at night. Maybe its her finding interesting people to talk to, so that these people talk about just anything. Two social workers drive around looking for homeless people in need of shelter. A helicopter driver floats above the city, looking for shady activities on the ground. A grafitti tagger goes through town, leaving his traces. A security guard walks around with a fluffy dog. A guy talks about loneliness and how his life lacks meaning. A homeless persons looks for places to spend the night. A dj talks about her father, among other things. Löcke keeps things simple. There are few instances of embarrassing "poetic" generalizations about Urban Night, fear and freedom (yet there are a few, and they are out of place, I think). Instead, Löcker has a good eye for how to make wintry Berlin visible, how to turn snow, cold weather and darkness into unique situation. A good feel for atmospheres. In other words - she is a gifted documentarist and I hope we will hear more from her soon.
lördag 18 september 2010
71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994)
Watching too many Michael Haneke movies: TV makes me queasy in the stomach. 71 fragments have lots of queasy TV moments. Repeated images from the news, dead bodies & Michael Jackson's ghostly face; a TV is blaring in a room, a TV is streaming images but noboby is watching.
It's not the first time I watch 71 Fragmente. It doesn't hit me the way it did. I cannot resist comparing it to other films. I find the fragmented technique too heavy-handed. The emphasis on chance doesn't really work. I don't know what bearing "chance" is supposed to have on my viewing of the film. Ok, ok, get it, the film fucks up the notion of "chronology". So; I'm getting used to how Haneke is messing around with cutting techniques. I'm getting used to the black screen in between scenes. I'm getting used to detachment/alienation/viewer nausea. It doesn't surprise me the way it did when I watched this film without having seen the earlier ones (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video). Last time I watched it, I saw some depth in 71 fragments. Now, I find too many cheap solutions, too many empty spots, a few clichés.
The most aggravating question that pops up in my mind is: should I take Haneke's social critique seriously? Haneke's films are cluttered with metaphors about seeing. But the essential question is how his films affect the viewer and what picture of human relations Haneke's films express.
This said, the scene in which a young man is playing ping pong by himself is still superbly multi-faceted. Haneke manages to throw in an entire world of relations/concepts/associations into that seemingly static and uneventful scene.
It's not the first time I watch 71 Fragmente. It doesn't hit me the way it did. I cannot resist comparing it to other films. I find the fragmented technique too heavy-handed. The emphasis on chance doesn't really work. I don't know what bearing "chance" is supposed to have on my viewing of the film. Ok, ok, get it, the film fucks up the notion of "chronology". So; I'm getting used to how Haneke is messing around with cutting techniques. I'm getting used to the black screen in between scenes. I'm getting used to detachment/alienation/viewer nausea. It doesn't surprise me the way it did when I watched this film without having seen the earlier ones (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video). Last time I watched it, I saw some depth in 71 fragments. Now, I find too many cheap solutions, too many empty spots, a few clichés.
The most aggravating question that pops up in my mind is: should I take Haneke's social critique seriously? Haneke's films are cluttered with metaphors about seeing. But the essential question is how his films affect the viewer and what picture of human relations Haneke's films express.
This said, the scene in which a young man is playing ping pong by himself is still superbly multi-faceted. Haneke manages to throw in an entire world of relations/concepts/associations into that seemingly static and uneventful scene.
tisdag 7 september 2010
Benny's Video (1992)
Benny's video is yet another early Michael Haneke. Benny digs video. Benny digs watching a pig being slaughtered. Benny brings a girl home. The girl has been standing outside the video rental shop. Benny shows the girl his video camera equipment. The camera is rolling. He kills her. Benny goes clubbing with a friend. Benny eats fast food. His well-to-do family find out about his deed. They want to cover up the murder. Mom takes Benny abroad. Benny gets burned by the sun. Benny goes home and talks to the police... As a backdrop of all this, there is the TV; sports events, news, wars, music shows.
Haneke sticks with his themes: images; violence; the emotional desert. I did have some complaints about The Seventh Continent. The social critique in that movie was, I thought, not entirely convincing. It's hard not to be shocked by Benny's video. It is a brutal movie. It tells about brutal things. It's aim is to depict a brutal society. The style might be slightly less eccentric than the experiments of The Seventh Continent. That does not mean this is a conventional film. It isn't. For example; Benny's brutal act of murder is something we almost do not see; the only thing we see is a small section of Benny's room being shown on his screen. Apart from a haunting Bach motet, Benny's video offers no consolation. Haneke does not say: technology makes us violent. He says: we live in a world in which genuine emotions are impossible; technology is only an expression of that state. In film after film, Haneke turns seeing/watching/imagining inside-out. He explores the technology of the eye, and the moral dimension of attention.
Benny's video is one of the most disturbing takes on violence I've ever seen. Why? Haneke does not see violence as the misbehavior of a few rotten eggs. Haneke pans the camera across a range of scenes we'd rather not want to see. If there's anything this film tells us, it is that there is a huge difference between watching the world with our own eyes (being a full-blown witness to what goes on around us) and using our eyes like external devices, like a tv screen, that we can shut on and off, flicking among the channels - at will. The characters in the film do somehow react to what they see, but it is as if nothing could really get through to them, shake them.
Haneke sticks with his themes: images; violence; the emotional desert. I did have some complaints about The Seventh Continent. The social critique in that movie was, I thought, not entirely convincing. It's hard not to be shocked by Benny's video. It is a brutal movie. It tells about brutal things. It's aim is to depict a brutal society. The style might be slightly less eccentric than the experiments of The Seventh Continent. That does not mean this is a conventional film. It isn't. For example; Benny's brutal act of murder is something we almost do not see; the only thing we see is a small section of Benny's room being shown on his screen. Apart from a haunting Bach motet, Benny's video offers no consolation. Haneke does not say: technology makes us violent. He says: we live in a world in which genuine emotions are impossible; technology is only an expression of that state. In film after film, Haneke turns seeing/watching/imagining inside-out. He explores the technology of the eye, and the moral dimension of attention.
Benny's video is one of the most disturbing takes on violence I've ever seen. Why? Haneke does not see violence as the misbehavior of a few rotten eggs. Haneke pans the camera across a range of scenes we'd rather not want to see. If there's anything this film tells us, it is that there is a huge difference between watching the world with our own eyes (being a full-blown witness to what goes on around us) and using our eyes like external devices, like a tv screen, that we can shut on and off, flicking among the channels - at will. The characters in the film do somehow react to what they see, but it is as if nothing could really get through to them, shake them.
lördag 4 september 2010
Der Siebente Kontinent (1989)
Michael Haneke is, I would say, one of the most interesting contemporary film makers. I hadn't seen Der Siebente Kontinent before. Unsurprisingly, it is a very bleak film. Also, this early Haneke film brings up several themes recurring in his later work; seeing/watching, violence, existential dystopia, alienation. Here, as elsewhere, these themes are dealt with in a a very conscious, yet direct, style. You might say that it is impossible to understand what Haneke is getting at if you don't pay attention to how he works. If you have seen Der Siebente Kontinent, you will know that a large part of the film is filmed in close-ups that usually don't focus on faces, but other parts of the human body/the setting. In conveying the repetition of everyday life, Haneke shows daily routines such as taking the car to a car wash, the stale figures of the alarm clock & clock radio's discrete hum, a child's hand moving around a bowl of cereal. In several scenes in this film, very short scenes chronicle some sort of everyday action from a slightly off-putting visual angle. Haneke is not, it seems, interested in individual characters. Rather, he explores a form of life-world. In this sense, the film is a sibling to Fassbinder's Warum läuft Herr R Amok?
A normal family goes through everyday existence with no unusual expressions of emotion. Actually, we see very few expressions of emotions. A child tries to convince her teacher that she can no longer see. It turns out she lied. Haneke is not explaining why she lied. Instead, this can be understood as a thematic opening of the fillm, that revolves around perception, in the most existential sense of the world. We see a family getting up in the morning. A man is doing ordinary things at the office. A woman prepares a family dinner. Her brother asks her what spices she used, and she enumerates them pensively. Gradually, there is talk about "emigrating to Australia". In the last segment of the film, we understand that this means that the family members will committ suicide.
I have ambiguous feelings about this film. It is a cinematic masterpiece. Haneke knows what he is doing. Haneke works with unusual cinematic techniques. Pacing is one example. Unlike most other directors, Haneke uses the time span - short and long - of the scenes as a device to let us into the world of the characters: a world of repetitive drudgery, but very little personal expression. In many scenes, we only see glimpses of what is going on; the scenes are, as it were, punctuated in the middle (with a short pause with a black screen) which often places a completely mundande train of actions into an eerie light (Haneke, of course, has read his critical theory about Verfremdung effekts).
It is the content of the film that raises a few questions. Haneke, undoubtedly, attempts to analyze a contemporary form of dread. But unlike Elfriede Jelinek (whose work he later transformed onto the big screen) and Fassbinder's Herr R, this early film tends to place dread as a reaction to the ordinary and mundane as such. But what kind of point is that? Of course, it is easy to trail it to a certain strand in the history of philosophy. And actually it is tempting to think about certain existentialist philosophers (H-h-h-eidegger), rather than politics, here. Haneke works with our perception of time, so as to confuse us about the time span within which things are happening. The film is divided into three chapters, three years. But there is no "development" as such. I kept asking myself: I am invited to view their lives as meaningless and empty, but why is this? Because they go to the car wash several times? Because their lives consist of routines? Yes, but we are given no clue whatsoever of why we should think of them as empty routines. Don't think I am asking for some quasi-causal explanation of why the family committed suicide. It just seems to me that Haneke's perspective builds on intellectualization of life. It is not that I refuse the idea that life can become empty because what one does no longer means anything. But that lack of meaning does not, I would say, unfold from the sheer repetition of things, as we are perhaps led to believe in this film.
It is NOT enough to say that "modern life" (whatever that is?) is "meaningless" and boring because "we" go to work every day, do the grocery shopping, prepare dinners, etc. Fassbinder's film is good because he shows the conventionality of a certain societal class. Jelinek also takes that angle, and widens it to paint a picture of how life becomes meaningless because it is made so. In the present film, the characters seem overwhelmed by an uncanny sense of passivity and loneliness, the origin and surrounding of which is very uncertain. What I would have liked here is a sharpere, more penetrating analysis of emotional vacuity: why is it that "escape" seems to unattainable? This film is cintematically ingenious, but intellectually it goes only half the way.
A normal family goes through everyday existence with no unusual expressions of emotion. Actually, we see very few expressions of emotions. A child tries to convince her teacher that she can no longer see. It turns out she lied. Haneke is not explaining why she lied. Instead, this can be understood as a thematic opening of the fillm, that revolves around perception, in the most existential sense of the world. We see a family getting up in the morning. A man is doing ordinary things at the office. A woman prepares a family dinner. Her brother asks her what spices she used, and she enumerates them pensively. Gradually, there is talk about "emigrating to Australia". In the last segment of the film, we understand that this means that the family members will committ suicide.
I have ambiguous feelings about this film. It is a cinematic masterpiece. Haneke knows what he is doing. Haneke works with unusual cinematic techniques. Pacing is one example. Unlike most other directors, Haneke uses the time span - short and long - of the scenes as a device to let us into the world of the characters: a world of repetitive drudgery, but very little personal expression. In many scenes, we only see glimpses of what is going on; the scenes are, as it were, punctuated in the middle (with a short pause with a black screen) which often places a completely mundande train of actions into an eerie light (Haneke, of course, has read his critical theory about Verfremdung effekts).
It is the content of the film that raises a few questions. Haneke, undoubtedly, attempts to analyze a contemporary form of dread. But unlike Elfriede Jelinek (whose work he later transformed onto the big screen) and Fassbinder's Herr R, this early film tends to place dread as a reaction to the ordinary and mundane as such. But what kind of point is that? Of course, it is easy to trail it to a certain strand in the history of philosophy. And actually it is tempting to think about certain existentialist philosophers (H-h-h-eidegger), rather than politics, here. Haneke works with our perception of time, so as to confuse us about the time span within which things are happening. The film is divided into three chapters, three years. But there is no "development" as such. I kept asking myself: I am invited to view their lives as meaningless and empty, but why is this? Because they go to the car wash several times? Because their lives consist of routines? Yes, but we are given no clue whatsoever of why we should think of them as empty routines. Don't think I am asking for some quasi-causal explanation of why the family committed suicide. It just seems to me that Haneke's perspective builds on intellectualization of life. It is not that I refuse the idea that life can become empty because what one does no longer means anything. But that lack of meaning does not, I would say, unfold from the sheer repetition of things, as we are perhaps led to believe in this film.
It is NOT enough to say that "modern life" (whatever that is?) is "meaningless" and boring because "we" go to work every day, do the grocery shopping, prepare dinners, etc. Fassbinder's film is good because he shows the conventionality of a certain societal class. Jelinek also takes that angle, and widens it to paint a picture of how life becomes meaningless because it is made so. In the present film, the characters seem overwhelmed by an uncanny sense of passivity and loneliness, the origin and surrounding of which is very uncertain. What I would have liked here is a sharpere, more penetrating analysis of emotional vacuity: why is it that "escape" seems to unattainable? This film is cintematically ingenious, but intellectually it goes only half the way.
torsdag 15 april 2010
Caché (2005)
Caché, directed by Michael Haneke, is a deeply unsettling movie that gives rise to many questions but provides few answers. But what would a Haneke film be, if it wasn't unsettling?
The very first images of the movie make us question what it is we see, and from whose perspective the images are shot. The camera is static. Nothing seems to happen. We see a back yard. It turns out we watch a video tape sent to a French married couple (played by Daniel Auteuil & Juliette Binoche, big names). The house on the images is their house. He works as a TV journalist, she works (I think) in a publishing company. The tape is an enigma to its receivers. What is the intention? More "gifts" are sent. Threatening drawings, more tapes. One tape shows the house where the man, Georges, grew up. The next tape contains an unknown urban landscape, and a drab corridor. Another person is drawn into the story. Georges' parents intended to adopt a boy, Majid, whose Algerian parents worked for them (before they were killed). We learn that there is something fishy about George's childhood memories. He thinks that this person send him the tapes.
If the script for this film were handled by another director, this could have become a run-of-the-mill thriller. This is not to say that Haneke dispenses with mystery & shock. On the contrary; there are a few scenes that have the force and suddenness to throw you out of your chair. But this is, as always, also a film about ideas. And what ideas you see expressed in the movie will not be self-evident.
I don't really want to say anything about what is the final verdict as to the mystery of the tapes. Caché connects different themes. Guilt (collective guilt, even), colonialism, paranoia, trust/distrust and the tensions of a relationship. Most of all, it is a self-conscious movie about images that writes the viewer into the story. Everything hangs on what you see (what you think you see) in these images. Right from the start, we are challenged to re-think and re-value the images we just saw. In this sense, it is just as much a film about the viewer as it is about the trust, distrust and paranoia of its characters.
Caché starts with the disquieting realization of the main characters that they are watched. This seemingly anonymous gaze, represented by the static camera (that seems to be the gaze of nobody), poses a mysterious threat to their lives. But Haneke is not satisfied with this point about being watched. He goes on to explore the other part of the relation: what it is to see, to witness, to peep, to notice something, to react to what one sees. Haneke's film does not revolve around one form of watching; it discusses variations of seeing, showing in what ways the various forms of seeing & watching are connected with actions, confessions, secrets, responsibility, memories, trust, distrust etc..
It's a good film because of it's openness, I would say. There are relatively few grand statements here. As I see it, Haneke is not a cynic director with a simple, sceptic message ("I fooled ya all, fuckaz, you thought you knew, but you didn't! Ha!"). His intention(s) seem deeper than that. He makes us realize what it means that we makes mistakes, or what it means that I come to distrust my eyes, or what it means to be confronted with an image that changes everything what one has seen before.
As I tried to say: it is a film that can be read on many levels. It's not a film that you finish with a sigh of relief. But that is a strenght of the film. One reason why it is fun to read reviews of this film, and films similar to it, is that the reviewer's description will reveal what expectations s/he has about the film (even films in general) and what role she assigns to herself as a viewer. Read this blog post by Roger Ebert, for example.
There is no soundtrack music in Caché. This is yet another example of why a film DOES NOT NEED to be puffed up with glossy strings or the latest indie hit.
The very first images of the movie make us question what it is we see, and from whose perspective the images are shot. The camera is static. Nothing seems to happen. We see a back yard. It turns out we watch a video tape sent to a French married couple (played by Daniel Auteuil & Juliette Binoche, big names). The house on the images is their house. He works as a TV journalist, she works (I think) in a publishing company. The tape is an enigma to its receivers. What is the intention? More "gifts" are sent. Threatening drawings, more tapes. One tape shows the house where the man, Georges, grew up. The next tape contains an unknown urban landscape, and a drab corridor. Another person is drawn into the story. Georges' parents intended to adopt a boy, Majid, whose Algerian parents worked for them (before they were killed). We learn that there is something fishy about George's childhood memories. He thinks that this person send him the tapes.
If the script for this film were handled by another director, this could have become a run-of-the-mill thriller. This is not to say that Haneke dispenses with mystery & shock. On the contrary; there are a few scenes that have the force and suddenness to throw you out of your chair. But this is, as always, also a film about ideas. And what ideas you see expressed in the movie will not be self-evident.
I don't really want to say anything about what is the final verdict as to the mystery of the tapes. Caché connects different themes. Guilt (collective guilt, even), colonialism, paranoia, trust/distrust and the tensions of a relationship. Most of all, it is a self-conscious movie about images that writes the viewer into the story. Everything hangs on what you see (what you think you see) in these images. Right from the start, we are challenged to re-think and re-value the images we just saw. In this sense, it is just as much a film about the viewer as it is about the trust, distrust and paranoia of its characters.
Caché starts with the disquieting realization of the main characters that they are watched. This seemingly anonymous gaze, represented by the static camera (that seems to be the gaze of nobody), poses a mysterious threat to their lives. But Haneke is not satisfied with this point about being watched. He goes on to explore the other part of the relation: what it is to see, to witness, to peep, to notice something, to react to what one sees. Haneke's film does not revolve around one form of watching; it discusses variations of seeing, showing in what ways the various forms of seeing & watching are connected with actions, confessions, secrets, responsibility, memories, trust, distrust etc..
It's a good film because of it's openness, I would say. There are relatively few grand statements here. As I see it, Haneke is not a cynic director with a simple, sceptic message ("I fooled ya all, fuckaz, you thought you knew, but you didn't! Ha!"). His intention(s) seem deeper than that. He makes us realize what it means that we makes mistakes, or what it means that I come to distrust my eyes, or what it means to be confronted with an image that changes everything what one has seen before.
As I tried to say: it is a film that can be read on many levels. It's not a film that you finish with a sigh of relief. But that is a strenght of the film. One reason why it is fun to read reviews of this film, and films similar to it, is that the reviewer's description will reveal what expectations s/he has about the film (even films in general) and what role she assigns to herself as a viewer. Read this blog post by Roger Ebert, for example.
There is no soundtrack music in Caché. This is yet another example of why a film DOES NOT NEED to be puffed up with glossy strings or the latest indie hit.
Prenumerera på:
Inlägg (Atom)