March 23 - Michael Haneke

Happy 78th Birthday, Michael Haneke! Born today in 1942, this Austrian screenwriter and film director's work often examines social issues and depicts the feelings of estrangement experienced by individuals in modern society.  

  

Haneke has made films in French, German, and English and has worked in television‚ theatre, and cinema. 

  

A master provocateur with mordant wit and forensic rigor, the Munich-born Austrian has been pranking audiences for three decades in ways that reveal their complicity in violence.  

Favoring the long take, he encourages dispassionate distance.  

  

In retort to the easy consumption and consolatory escapism offered by blockbuster entertainment, he employs Brechtian tricks to remind viewers of the constructedness of his films so that they question critically, rather than become manipulated emotionally.  

  

Haneke leads us to contemplate the darker recesses of the human psyche and the volatile forces simmering below the surface of polite societal routine while favoring ambiguity, frustrating our desire for a resolution to mysteries. 

  

A transnationalist working mainly in German and French, Haneke collaborates often with the same actors (Isabelle Huppert is a favorite). 

Many of his central protagonists are named variations on George and Anne, true to his penchant for intertextual jokiness. It’s impossible not to feel ambushed by Haneke’s sly set-ups, but their clever and sinister scenarios bring such a shake-up of assumptions, it’s worth it. 

  

Whether one considers Haneke an ice-cold cynic that gets his kicks out of playing God or a radical humanist whose moral correctives are a bracing antidote to the casual cruelty of the privileged, his austere, psychologically extreme films are the very essence of “challenging” European arthouse cinema. 

  

Haneke has been active from 1974–present. 

  

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