The image of home in the films of Michael Haneke
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Probably, none of the world’s directors has such a clear idea of \u200b\u200bhouse as the Austrian Michael Haneke. For him, home is the only place where strangers can be.
Construction material
In almost all his films there is some George or some Anna, some Eve or some Ben. Prosperous bourgeois families in his films politely act out their apathy, go to an imaginary Australia, kill themselves or each other, find themselves in police custody or under terrorist bullets, wander along the roads or look into the eyes of uninvited guests. “Of course it’s the same family,” explains Haneke. “It’s always the same family, they’re the only people I know.”
Almost every film of his has a plot with a house – you can lose the house, sell it, start destroying it, see it on film, let strangers into it. Actually, in all of his films, Haneke literally dismantles, brick by brick, the “home sweet home” that European bourgeois culture builds with such care. No, says Haneke. A home is not a fortress. Home is not nice. Home is scary.
Haneke admits that he makes unique thrillers, but says that in general genre films tire him: in them, he says, “reality loses its realism.” Ordinary thrillers are built according to a certain genre model, but he claims that he builds his films “according to the model of the world.” It’s not his fault that this world is cramped, uncomfortable, and that all the most important things happen somewhere else: behind the scenes, on the staircase, in the imagination of the heroes. Or it doesn’t happen at all, but will only happen in thirty years.
He doesn’t like violence and claims that it really makes him angry, but the only thing you can do to get people to wake up is to “slow them down a little.” In all his films, without exception, in his harmonious, thoughtful, cold films, there are continuous smooth surfaces, white tiles, shiny pieces of iron, strict scales, moral laws, white vintage teapots, the morning rustle of bread under the knife, the crackling of a night fire – in all of his films tell us that chaos is on the threshold and is about to enter.
No not like this. All his films say that order is impossible, that the world moves only in chaos. The more perfect the order, the more chaos lies ahead; the more evenly lined up the toothbrushes in the glasses, the more will have to be destroyed to achieve balance. Chaos does not stand on the threshold: the threshold is made of it. This is a building material. The building that Haneke describes has a foundation of violence, walls of cruelty, carpets of gentle coercion, and in the midst of it all, the corpse of pride, love, human dignity is slowly decomposing.
Body
The body is your only honest home, and it will betray you at the first opportunity. As in “Love,” Haneke’s penultimate film to date, where the old woman at first cannot hold the teapot, and then gradually – this lasts unbearably long, this happens unbearably quickly – ceases to hold herself in the world. Stops speaking, moving, understanding.
The body is a house that you can destroy, as does the heroine Huppert in The Pianist or Majid in The Hidden. In “Hidden,” Haneke, as usual, harshly experiments with audience perception: the film begins with a long static shot where you can see a street, sometimes someone passes along it. Then suddenly stripes pass across the screen – that is, across the house, which is in the center of the frame – and the image runs backwards. It turns out that we are watching an image from a videotape that an unknown person sent to the main character, and so the hero rewinds it to the beginning. Later, after many tens of minutes, after awkward discussions and attempts to turn away from his own past, the hero, Georges, will meet with Majid – the man he would like to forget. Majid will slash himself with a razor and blood will flow. The stripe that runs down the throat rhymes with the stripe that cuts the image of the house on rewind. But this film is not only about the hero’s childhood trauma, but also about the trauma of the entire country: the Paris pogrom of 1961, during which the police brutally suppressed Algerian protest rallies. The country would like to forget about it, erase violence from its past, drown its memory, rewind the film.
For Haneke, the body is the final argument in the debate about violence, cruelty, and love. The half-decomposed body of the heroine of “Love”, the screaming body of the girl from “Benny’s Video”, the body cutting itself in “The Pianist”, the body under which a pool of blood is growing in “71 fragments of the chronology of accidents”, the body tied to the bed in “White Ribbon”. Pathetic arguments. The body is a place where only fools feel safe.
Room, apartment
An apartment is a place where only rich fools feel safe. The viewer of “Love” is imprisoned in the apartment, as if in a prison – here almost all the action takes place in the apartment of an elderly couple, of course, Georges and Anne. A wall-sized library, landscapes, portraits, dusty memories, carpets, forced vintage. Anne is slowly dehumanized and is partially paralyzed. Becomes part of the bed, part of the apartment. Haneke views this space—including the characters—with a cool, calm gaze: the way a real estate agent or a great director might look. Old age, bodily malfunctions, agony, love – everything is transitory. The walls remain. Perhaps the smell of decay is ingrained in them. Of course, the smell of decay eats into them.
All his films are claustrophobic, but in Love and The 7th Continent the claustrophobia is deadly. Here the house is suffocating, depriving of air, depriving of life. In The Seventh Continent, an apartment is an ideal space, which seems to be the backdrop for an ideal life. Something is bothering the heroes, but Haneke, as always, does not consider it necessary to tell what. Instead, he shows a white, clear, orderly world, so dazzling that you just want to go blind in it. Or drop everything and go to Australia. In the finale, the heroes begin methodically destroying the apartment: tearing up magazines, breaking an aquarium with fish, flushing money down the toilet, stirring pills in a glass of water. Haneke said that even the suicide of the characters did not cause such a sharp reaction from the audience as the episode with the money in the toilet. Fish and people – that’s where they belong, but what’s the money for?
Because money is a fiction. Bourgeois values are a fiction. Home is a fiction. What else can a man who was born in 1942 in Germany, studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, and after university went to work as a film critic, say about the house?
Country, world
In his early films, Haneke looked at the Austrian bourgeoisie, prone to unmotivated violence, unmotivated obedience, unmotivated confusion. When his camera took a slightly more general shot, it turned out that Europe was all structured in much the same way. In one of his best films, Code Unknown, Anna (played by Juliette Binoche) rushes around Paris, turning away from the small tragedies of others – some refugees, some Kosovo, some girl next door, some black man a guy with a keen sense of justice. It all starts with the fact that Anna doesn’t want to tell her boyfriend’s brother the code for the front door – and this decision has consequences, rolls on and on, involving new characters in the film. “Code Unknown” is a story about bourgeois Europe, which does not want to let unknown people into its home and does not want to think about the consequences of its fear. Haneke, an Austrian, a stranger in Paris, made a film about xenophobia, such a strong fear of the stranger that here, as film maniac Mark Cousins noted, “even the frames do not communicate with each other”: every long frame of this film goes into darkness, and only then the next one appears.
Europe is doomed; All you have to do is place the camera a little further, and everything will be clear with the world. Haneke deals with the world in “The Time of the Wolves,” a post-apocalyptic anti-thriller in which Isabelle Huppert, having lost her home and husband, wanders through a dark open space where there is no longer shelter, no water, no rules. Home here is a fiction, a foreign place that no longer promises security. Anyone can enter it, now no invitation is required.
“The Time of Wolves” is considered Haneke’s weakest film – there is too much metaphor in it, starting with the title, taken from the Elder Edda. The strength of his other films lies precisely in the fact that he dispassionately destroys some small house, a small family, a small village – and the viewer himself comes up with a picture of global destruction, releasing chaos into the big world. Here Haneke changes the scale – and it turns out that the viewer does not care about the apocalypse that has already occurred. What’s the point of worrying if he, the viewer, cannot become a co-author of this apocalypse?
Camera, film
Haneke always talks about “constructing” a film, but for him making a film is not building a house, but a ski jump: the jump, he says, must be made by the audience. In his best films, the viewer realizes that he has jumped at the moment when the ground begins to approach too quickly. How does Haneke achieve this?
His main saga is about the house – the house as a fortress, the house as a refuge, the house as a false construction of politeness, ethics, mutual concessions – two versions of “Funny Games”. Haneke filmed the first in 1997 in Austria, the second in 2007 in the USA. Both talk about the same thing, the second is a frame-by-frame repetition of the first: two very nice guys, seemingly neighbors, come to an ordinary bourgeois family, ask for a loan of four eggs, and then, word for word, they brutally kill the whole family. For no reason, just like that.
Oddly enough, these are two completely different films – not only because one tells about a European family, and the second about an American one, and not only because in one there are little-known actors, and in the second almost everyone is a star, so in the first case, the killers work with unknown people, in the second – with people whom viewers have seen dozens of times and are ready to empathize with. The main thing is that between the first and second films the world changed irreparably, the 9/11 disaster took place on all screens of the world live, the shock of what a film or video camera could capture was greatly dulled. The “funny games” of the 2000s are not nearly as funny, not as dangerous, and not as unmotivating as the games of the 1990s.
Some critics wrote that Haneke makes the viewer “unnecessarily suffer” by deliberately treating the audience “with exorbitant cruelty.” The director, by his own admission, is trying to show the viewer that cruelty is meaningless. More precisely, he tries to return cruelty to its meaninglessness and thereby stir up the viewer. His villains are pure evil, or rather, pure entertainment. They invade the home of the heroes in the same way that Haneke’s films invade the world of honest thrillers and predictable horrors, they do what they want with the audience, moreover, they warn the viewer that his home will never again be his fortress.
Haneke’s films are the basis for endless conversations about Derrida, Pascal and Guy Debord, about a world where the domestic and private no longer exist, about the psychology of hospitality and the psychology of violence, about the viewer and violence against him. And about the audience’s pleasure in violence. In what is probably Haneke’s most famous episode, somewhere in the middle of Funny Games, the villains use a remote control to rewind themselves, that is, rewind the movie that the audience is watching, in order to prevent their victims and the audience from Not the slightest chance. This cannot be called the destruction of the “fourth wall”, it is the construction of a new wall between the viewer and the characters, a wall like the one installed in the interrogation room. On one side the wall is mirrored, on the other it is transparent. The audience looks into the mirror surface.
In his films, Michael Haneke says again and again: you cannot see anything until it is in front of you. The house appears only when guests enter it, uninvited or expected. Love, compassion, peace – you see all this only when it comes to an end.
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