The World That Is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke

Abstract

Austrian tional Grand prominence filmmaker Prize and two Michael with best The Haneke acting Piano awards has Teacher, achieved at the major which Cannes internawon Film a tional prominence with The Piano Teacher, which won a G and Prize and two b st acting awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, became both a bete noire and cause celebre for critics , and remained in urban art cinemas through much of 2002. With this film , Haneke fulfilled considerably the expectations produced by all of his early work which has remained predictably marginal to current film culture by provoking the viewer with an intelligence of extraordinary seriousness and significance. That many journalistic reviewers focused solely on The Piano Teacher's graphic portrayal of masochism and other sexual acts , ignoring its complex analysis of the family and the politics of repression, is an emblem of the current media's reaction and intellectual bankruptcy. Fortunately , the Cannes awards and a few perceptive critical remarks sustained the film long enough for many to take notice. With extraordinary performances by Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel ( both of whom took best acting honors at Cannes ), The Piano Teacher, based on a renowned novel by Elfriede Jelinek , achieves unusual power in its meditation on the interconnections of art and the forces of repression. A middle-aged Viennese pianist and piano instructor (Huppert) lives with her hopelessly possessive mother , able to connect with the sexual/social world only through voyeurism and masochism. Her encounter with a young prodigy (Magimel) of unusual artistic sensibility seem . to offer the prospect of romance , until the very notion is exploded as the film explores the assumptions of heterosexual relations and the culture with which it is associated. The questions raised by the film seem very much part of the legacy of artistic modernism and, as handled by Haneke, demonstrate their power to provoke in the postmodern moment. Erika Kohut, Hupperťs character rendered by the actor with devastating authority, manages to suggest both the precarious mental health of Western civilization at the end of the millennium and the hopeless state of women in a still-unrealized struggle for sexual liberation at the end of the twentieth century. Born in 1942, Haneke entered filmmaking rather late in his career, after distinguished work in Austrian theater complemented by seriously engaged, ongoing study of philosophy and psychology. Haneke has established a position as one of the cinema's important provocateurs, a concept lost in an era where cultural/political subversion is often seen as passe, or conceived with jaundiced, antihu manist cynicism. His first feature, The Seventh Continent (1989), is a staggering work based on a news story about a family opting for collective suicide rather than continu-