Why Michael Haneke calls Steven Spielberg “unspeakable”
Michael Haneke once said that a “film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or the service of the attempt to find truth.” With that mantra in mind, the Austrian film director is always going to find war films particularly contentious. These conflicts are so heinous that the white lies of cinema seem incongruous when it comes to a truth that you can’t afford to miss.
For Haneke, this came to the fore in an upsetting way with Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Despite the project being carefully researched, the filmmaker took issue with Spielberg trying to extract a level of entertainment, in some guise, from the extremity of human depravity. In his very fair view, that is something that should not be met with ‘cinematic’ tropes.
Haneke condemned the picture, commenting: “The idea of creating entertainment of this […] The mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question whether out of the shower head, gas is going to come or water, to me is unspeakable.”
He continued to tell The Hollywood Reporter: “The only film about the Holocaust that, for me, is responsible as a filmmaker is Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog. Alain Resnais, in the film, asks the spectator, ‘what do you think about this, what is your position, what does this mean to you?’ That’s what it’s about. Anything that treats such a subject as entertainment is, for me, unspeakable.”
Resnais’ 1956 depiction is widely credited as not only one of the most vivid depictions of the horrors of the concentration camps but also of man’s brutal inhumanity. This expression is done in a voyeuristic way featuring newsreels and footage captured by the liberating allies. As such it separates the viewer from the action itself and allows for objective interpretation. While Spielberg puts you within the emotive ties of ‘storytelling’.
The argument for Spielberg would, of course, be that a movie should not be informing your view on this matter and that nay cinematic flourishes are merely there to engage an audience in garnering a great understanding of the horrors. In essence, the adage that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” comes to the fore, so he created a film that proves memorable in its impactful sentiment and could educate the masses.
“History is history,” Spielberg told NBC, “And I felt that if I’m going to make a story that represents the survivors and represents the six million who were murdered, then I have to be as close to the reality of the people that we had interviewed that told us what it was like for them.” Thus, the director argues that the film is, in fact, as true to life as cinema can come.