A Conversation with Michael Haneke
Friday, October 19, 7:30pm, Harvard Film Archive

Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation
Ongoing, Harvard Film Archive and Museum of Fine Arts

Austrian director Michael Haneke, best known for his spare and chilling 2001 adaptation of The Piano Teacher, will discuss his thirty year career in television and the movies tomorrow at Harvard Film Archive. The talk will be followed by a screening of Haneke's latest: his shot-by-shot U.S. remake of his 1997 film Funny Games, a movie that both anticipated and satirized Hollywood's "torture porn."

Haneke's appearance is the keynote for his ongoing retrospective, hosted jointly by HFA and the Museum of Fine Arts. Between the two of them, HFA and MFA will give Bostonians a thorough overview of Haneke's career including, for the first time in the U.S., his work for television. (Haneke made eight features for Austrian television including an adaptation of Kafka, an adultery melodrama, and a two-parter called "Lemmings" exploring the suicidal dislocation of his postwar generation -- not exactly Hallmark Movie of the Week material.)

The retrospective comes at a time when Haneke's career is at its apogee. Three of his last four films -- Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, and Caché -- enjoyed international acclaim. (Haneke's 2003 post-apocalyptic thriller Time of the Wolf never found its audience.) He was the subject of a lengthy critical essay in this month's Harper's. And, beginning October 25, he is getting his own conference, at Boston University, complete with abstruse academic papers.

Luckily, you don't need a quiver of trendy jargon to appreciate Haneke's films. But you do need an attention span. Haneke is a master of the long shot -- think Cassavetes or Peckinpah, without the former's theatricality or the latter's quick cuts -- which gives his films an unnerving rhythm, a rhythm many critics mistake for coldness. Haneke's films rarely offer resolutions to the problems that they introduce -- and he doesn't come out and tell you why so-and-so did what. The result is a film that sticks with you, forcing you to ponder the indelible difficulty of living amid violence, senselessness, and injustice.

Director's photo taken from Harvard Film Archive's event announcement.