The Cinema of Michael Haneke

November - December 2009

When Michael Haneke turned from directing television to directing feature films in 1989 with The Seventh Continent it was clear that Alfred Hitchock’s legacy would be continued…with a sinister twist. While Hitchcock’s gauntlet was immediately picked up by Claude Chabrol, who has dedicated himself to using the master’s skill at controlling his viewers’ experiences in the theater to skewer the bourgeois audience his films are intended for, Haneke has taken Hitchcock’s blueprint of tension-racked manipulation to an even further extent.

Beginning with his early films made in Austria — starting with The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video (1992), 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), the little-seen Kafka adaptation The Castle (1997), and concluding with the notorious epitome of Haneke’s art, Funny Games (1997) — and continuing through the French co-productions Haneke made once he ascended to the international spotlight — including Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000), starring Juliette Binoche, and Time of the Wolf (2003), starring Isabelle Huppert — the auteur has made his filmmaking career of exacting cinematic precision carefully tuned and pressurized to investigate, dissect, and expose the hypocrisies of bourgeoisie life in the postmodern world.

To celebrate the theatrical release of Haneke’s Palm d’Or-winning new film The White Ribbon in the UK and Ireland on 13 November and the release of a special 10-disc box set entitled The Essential Michael Haneke, The Auteurs and Artificial Eye is proud to present a retrospective of Haneke’s work.