European Film Master Says Keep It Contradictory

Austrian film director Michael Haneke, famous for making his audiences uncomfortable, made BU students feel privileged last Wednesday when he led two master classes at the College of Communication. The director of such disturbing films as Caché, The Piano Teacher, and The Castle warned his audience about the dangers of believing the media, argued that film cannot claim to show reality, and insisted that he is not a pessimist. “If I were a pessimist,” Haneke said, “I would be making comedies. A true pessimist would not put his finger on the wound.” 

Haneke, who has never hesitated to put his finger on the wound, has been described by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis as a “German-born provocateur, who polarizes critics far more than does any other filmmaker of comparable stature working today.” He is visiting Boston University as the guest of honor at Michael Haneke — Cinema of Provocation, a major retrospective of his work, which runs through November 3.

Roy Grundmann, curator of the retrospective and director of the film studies program at COM, says Haneke is one of the great filmmakers of the past 40 years. “Haneke is one of a handful of living filmmakers who use film as an art that can evoke the complex and contradictory nature of life,” says Grundmann, who organized the retrospective with help from the Goethe-Institut Boston, the French consulate, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Harvard Film Archive.

Speaking to students at COM last week, Haneke was quick to distance his work from mainstream cinema, which he believes simplifies life for mass audience appeal. “It is the well-paid lie of mainstream cinema that you can depict the world in its entirety,” he said. “Even in cinema, people realize that the world cannot be depicted in any way other than in fragments.”

Haneke said his work, unlike mainstream film, was intended to make his audience question any effort that pretends to present reality. In films like Caché, for example, the story of a couple who receives mysterious and threatening videotapes of their own lives, the identity of villain is never clearly revealed.

“It is healthy to question reality,” he said, “both the reality presented by the media and the reality presented in film. These are questions that every director should be asking. It’s part of the great power we have as directors. One should think of that power and consider how it should be used.”

Haneke also advised his audience to be particularly skeptical of the media. “I always try to nourish people’s distrust in the media,” he said. “Because of the media, today we are under the illusion that we know something about the world, but we really don’t know any more than someone living a hundred years ago. We really only know what we know firsthand, but thanks to the media, we believe we know much more than that. That is dangerous, because it makes us the victims of those who control the media.”

The centerpiece of the Haneke retrospective, which features screenings of 16 films at the Harvard Film Archive and at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and includes made-for-TV films that have never been seen in the United States, is a three-day international conference that starts tomorrow at the BU School of Management. To learn more about the conference, click here.

“By subtitling Haneke’s TV films and combining them with his theatrical features in this first American retrospective,” says Grundmann, “we have instantly doubled his body of work for American audiences. Universities are usually not involved in such high-level curatorial projects, but BU is breaking new ground here. We’ve demonstrated the viability of a film school’s triple mission — film production, film curating, and academic and theoretical analysis of film.”

Asked by a student at one of last Wednesday’s master classes if his films were intended to make political statements, Haneke insisted they were not. “If there is a political element to my films,” he said, “it’s because I make films about things that anger me. I never make a deliberately political film.”

The director encouraged his audience, made up largely of film students, to present life in complex and contradictory terms. “No matter what level of society you describe, you have to describe it in contradictory terms,” he said. “Otherwise, it becomes a cliché. If you take films that were made in Germany 20 to 25 years after the war, you had nothing but noble Jews. I believe that is the worst kind of racism. A film director should always confront the contradictory terms of life. That is where the art is.”

Finally, said Haneke, a filmmaker should always consider the viewer to be at least as intelligent as he is. “That’s something that films in general do not do,” he said. “And they don’t do it in order to make money.”

Art Jahnke can be reached at jahnke@bu.edu.