A Bavarian Sunday in late summer: warm, wet, and thunderstruck. A small crowd gathered in the Promenadeplatz, at the heart of Munich, around a stone plinth to which cards and posters had been stuck: “Michael: I miss and love you so much.” “We will love you forever.” Close by was the entrance to the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, the grandest hideaway in town, where the film director Michael Haneke was receiving visitors. How did the fans know he was here? And was it not bizarre that this most unyielding of creative intellects, the dean of unsmiling cinema, should be stalked in such a way? Haneke is admired, and even revered, but lapped in these waves of love?
As a frail warbling rose around the plinth, all became clear: Wrong Michael. These were Jackson fans, drawn to the hotel where their beloved, now deceased, had stayed for his last German appearance. Whether they would, at this juncture, be prepared to switch Michaels was open to question, Haneke not being the first man you go to in a bid to heal the world and make it a better place. On the other hand, what poise he radiates: the kind of calm, in bearing and garb, of which twitchy superstars can only dream. His long, serene features could have been borrowed from an icon of the Orthodox church. He has a white beard, rimless spectacles, and a full head of silvery hair, parted at the center and sweeping down to his collar at the back; his tall frame tends to be draped in a soft dark suit, often matched with a black shirt, as if to thicken the hint of the ecclesiastical. The real surprise, when you meet the man, is the rich, ripened bass of the voice, and the even deeper wealth of the laugh—a generous thrum, welling, you might suppose, from an instinctive wish to savor the pleasures of life, not merely to snort at the iniquities. Haneke, who has a wife, Susanne, and four children, is sixty-seven, but he could pass for a decade less. Strange to say, but the guy who made “Hidden” and “The Piano Teacher” looks ready to burst into song.
Just once, I saw him do so. Not for the Jacksonites, but downstairs, in one of the hotel restaurants, on the succeeding night. Underneath the arches of a cellar, we were ushered to a private room: a facsimile of a drinkers’ snug at the back of a hunting lodge, all rough-hewn wood and darkly panelled walls. Haneke took the whole thing in his stride, ducking through the threshold, singing, “Yo-de-laay-eee-oh!,” and settling down to feast. As someone who splits his time between Vienna and Paris, he likes to trim his dining to his location, so Nürnberger Schweinwürstl—the cigar-shaped sausage of the region—it had to be. Offered a clutch of six, eight, or ten, he took the last, cast mild aspersions on the hill of sauerkraut in which they sat, and washed them down with tall doses of the local Pils, diverting smoothly, as night wore on, to glasses of Chianti. He was a bon vivant at work, and therefore at play. Though an Austrian, Haneke was born here, in Munich, in 1942. In a sense, he was at home.
As I bade farewell, I couldn’t help remembering another meal: A full-on blowout, buoyed by champagne, the table stacked with cheeses, cured meats, and other bonnes bouches. The diners—a married couple and their young daughter—help themselves to one tidbit after another, as if this were their last meal on earth. And so it is. Fortified by foodstuffs, the family set about destroying their house, the father burying a hatchet in the furniture, the mother ripping up shirts and splitting LPs in half like crackers. A tropical fish flaps and gasps beside its smashed aquarium. The phone is muffled. The daughter looks on. Later, she is given a sleeping draught, and then a lethal injection. The mother is next to go, gulping down her overdose; the father is last, lying down beside his wife and child on the bed, amid the ruins of their home, lit only by the fizzy glow of the TV.
There endeth “The Seventh Continent,” a Michael Haneke film from 1989. Based on a real case of familial suicide, it was his first feature film, after seven works for television. It is also his first masterpiece; nobody could mistake it for entertainment, but the director could easily be mistaken for a tragedian of long standing, so expert is his pacing of the horrors. The question to be put, therefore, on viewing everything from “The Seventh Continent” to Haneke’s latest film, “The White Ribbon,” in which the expertise has risen to a tranquil mastery, is as follows: What is the tie that binds the man with the big guffaw to this compendium of terror and dismay? What’s a nice guy like him doing in films like this?
As a rough rule, cinema can be sundered into two halves: six-o’clock films and nine-o’clock films. Most movies are nine-o’clock affairs, and none the worse for it. You get home from work, grab something to eat, head to the theatre, and enjoy the show. And so to bed—alone or entwined, but, either way, with dreams whose sweetness will not be crumbled or soured by what you saw onscreen. A six-o’clock movie requires more organization: prebooked tickets, a restaurant table, the right friends. You’re going to need them, because if all runs according to plan you will spend the second half of the evening tossing the movie—the impact and the substance of it—back and forth. So “Persona” is a six-o’clock movie, though it won’t leave you with much of an appetite. As is “The Deer Hunter,” whereas “Platoon,” for all its sound and fury, works fine for nine o’clock. “The Reader” is a nine-o’clock movie that thinks it’s a six-o’clock. “Groundhog Day” is the opposite. And “The White Ribbon”? A six-o’clock movie, if ever I saw one.
Until now, it has breathed little but the rarefied air of festivals, among them Cannes (where it won the Palme d’Or), Moscow, Toronto, and the always popular Espoo. Here it will show on October 7th and 8th, as part of the New York Film Festival. Come December, it will go into general release, though the chances of its landing in your local multiplex are slim—no great loss, in the eyes of the director, for whom the modern movie theatre is a pullulating mosh pit. “I hate the smell of popcorn,” he told me, adding, “I rarely go to the cinema. I went to see the new Jonathan Demme film, ‘Rachel Getting Married,’ pas mal, and there was this couple behind us who talked the whole time. They got up. They snacked. The spectators seem to have lost respect for the film.”
But what if the movie is a blast? Don’t viewers have a right to respond in kind? “To see a comedy, it’s good to be in a community,” Haneke said. “But for anything else . . .” He shrugged. As for the togetherness of moviegoing, the glue that has held together a million Saturday nights, “Je m’en fous.” (Politely translated, “Screw that.”) Every cinéaste is also a nostalgist—however primed for the next big thing, you cannot help but compare it with the Arcadia of your early days beneath the projector’s beam, and to the mistier glories of cinema’s own youth—and Haneke is no exception. When he was growing up, he says, and seeking out the new Godard, people went to see “serious movies in a serious way.”
I guess you could try going into “The White Ribbon” with a bucket of popcorn, but after a few minutes you would leave it at your feet and let the movie lock you tight, a willing captive, inside its extraordinary world. The dimensions of that world are exact: A village in northern Germany, viewed over the course of the seasons from 1913 to 1914. The countryside is flat but fertile, with the villagers joined in celebration of the harvest, and the social geology retains—perhaps for the last time, given the looming war—the feudal strata laid down by the encrustations of time, with a haughty baron presiding over the district, and a subsidiary layer of educated professionals. It is these people, and their families, who really interest Haneke: the pastor, the schoolteacher, and the Chekhovian doctor, with his trim beard, his cowed housekeeper, and the amused, languid cynicism of one who has seen too much of life to be gratified by this backwater, or its meagre trickle of thrills.
“The White Ribbon” is Haneke’s most approachable film, though you approach it at your peril, as you would a sleeping animal, or a hot stove. It is also his longest, his most beautiful—the only one in black-and-white—and his best. His broadest, too, in the confidence with which it ranges up and down the social scale. Something pestilential is at large: a rash of misdemeanors, some trivial, others twisted and grave. An estate worker is found hanging in his shed, but the life of his master, too, seems weighed down, with his young son kidnapped and suspended upside down in a barn, and his wife, the graceful baroness, leaving him for less oppressive climes. Some of the transgressions remain unfathomable, as if the motives behind them were mysterious even to the perpetrators: a wire stretched between trees to snag a horse, or a pet bird laid on the minister’s desk, a pair of scissors plunged into its neck to create a makeshift cross. If these are symbols, they are not easy to read; if they are grievances, you wonder what triggered them; and if they have the calculated look of early performance art—a surreal notion, in this provincial setting—then who are the performers?
Nobody schooled in Haneke will be amazed to learn that the puzzle goes unsolved. If Hercule Poirot had happened to drop by the village, he would have fumed with uncertainty and left with a drooping mustache. Haneke is not setting problems for what Poirot used to call our little gray cells; he is more concerned with inserting the worm of unease into our guts, and asking how much we can trust our big red hearts. His 2005 hit, “Hidden,” was marketed as a thriller, and pulses duly throbbed at the tale of a Parisian couple, played by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, who receive videotapes of the outside of their house, and at the husband’s efforts to track down whoever is sending them—a path that winds back to his own treacherous past. But, though both he and the audience believe that he gets his man, is it the right man? No one confesses, and we are left with the famous final shot, showing the exterior of the school attended by the couple’s child: somebody—a person unknown and unapprehended—could be keeping the school under surveillance, and gearing up for the next level of threat. You find yourself searching every face among the pupils, like an anxious parent looking for your own lost child.
More than anything, this paying of attention—simple but scrupulous, onscreen and off—is what melds Haneke to his work. “It was like he was scanning me.” So says Juliette Binoche, who starred for Haneke not just in “Hidden” but in the exemplary “Code Unknown,” five years earlier. Speaking of their first collaboration, she told me, “He saw exactly where I was, and he could see inside.” Wasn’t that intrusive, or unnerving? “No, it feels funny, wonderful,” she replied, then added, “But it’s like there’s no escape.” Binoche’s praise of Haneke comes close to the nub of the complaint that has been voiced against him, by some critics and many outraged viewers: that, even as he shows human beings forcing themselves on one another, he is visiting the same cruelty, and the same slow squeezes of control, on performers and spectators alike. Binoche recalls the sequence in “Code Unknown” when she had to strike a child: “It was very hard to slap the little boy. Michael didn’t want to involve himself too closely. He told me, ‘It’s O.K.’ But I could see in the little boy’s eyes that it was a kind of humiliation. I asked him to slap me first, but he wouldn’t.”
Put like that, it is a damning account: perfect ammunition for Haneke’s detractors and foes. But Binoche is a good friend of his, and she understands the reserve that others read as froideur. “He needs that uncomfortable place,” she told me, adding, “He likes to provoke. Film for him is an active medium, not sedative. He wants to wake you up.” Something about the slapping scene, however, resounds with a deeper hurt. As Haneke said to me, “You can show all the shortcomings of a society through its children, because they are always on the bottom rung. So are animals. They are those who can’t defend themselves. They are predestined victims.” And then he told me a story: “Once, I bawled out a lady in a train. She was with her child, who was a bit stressed, and she took him out of the compartment to hit him, because she didn’t dare to do it inside. And even though I had no right to do so, I went and bawled her out, because that is something I just cannot stand.”
The odd thing is that he told the tale again, the next day. Haneke is fluent and diverse in conversation—we spoke in a mixed Euro-salad of French, English, and German—and this was the only anecdote to which he returned, as though unable to shake off a persistent ache. If he failed to interfere in the scene with Binoche and the boy, it was not because he didn’t care. On the contrary, it was precisely because, like a surgeon, he was delving so close to the source of the malady—to the worst habits of a wicked world—that he had no option other than to stay cool. Some of us meet our fears in dreams, others in therapy, or by shutting our eyes and praying that they won’t come true; whereas Haneke, in Binoche’s words, “is working with fear, like a brush.”
Few movies of recent years, for example, have been more violent—or have seemed more violent, for little overt brutality is shown—than the two versions of “Funny Games,” in which a pair of white devils in tennis gear invade and torment one well-to-do family after another, on the shores of a quiet lake. Yet these almost unwatchable works were made by a man who, as he admitted to me, is gripped by “a horror of all violence.” Even student unrest put Haneke in a funk. “In 1968, I was on the streets, and at the first sight of the police I was off like a shot,” he recalled. “There was this police phalanx, with shields and batons, and I ran like a madman.”
“Where was this?” I asked.
“Baden-Baden,” he replied. Oh, that hellhole.
Haneke then reached for a more distant incident from his youth. “There was a moment with my uncle, who was this huge man. I thought he was going to hit me, so I pushed him”—he mimed the action—“and he fell over.” Haneke mimed that, too; it looked like a tree being felled. I couldn’t decide whether he was mortified at the memory of the Goliath whom he slew or whether, decades on, he still felt the secret surge of that power, and I started, like a teacher, to take a roll call of all the kids in his work. I thought of the adolescents, ignored by their elders, in “Lemmings,” a two-part film for TV, made in 1979; of the doomed daughter in “The Seventh Continent”; of the title character in “Benny’s Video” (1992), who murders a fellow teen-ager and tapes the deed; of the young girl befriended by the pathetic hero of “The Rebellion” (1992), whose face he conjures up in his prison cell; of the illegal Romanian refugee in “71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance” (1994), chewing on leftover food from Viennese garbage bins; of the boy whose demise, in “Funny Games” (1997) and its remake, “Funny Games U.S.” (2007), is no less unspeakable for being unseen; of the brother and sister shepherded through a twilit land by their mother in “Time of the Wolf” (2003); of the son whose school we see in “Hidden,” and who shoves his mother away when she attempts too close an embrace; and of the ominous troupe of youth in “The White Ribbon,” who become much more than victims. And then I thought of the young Michael Haneke, maturing in the wake of the Second World War, and wondered what he must have witnessed and endured.
“I grew up with three women: my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt. It was great.” Haneke gives his heartiest laugh to date, and you can’t blame him. He appears to have been born into a Fellini movie. “I had a very spoiled childhood. I didn’t have to fight with a man—it was super-agréable,” he says. “I was never beaten.” It was his grandmother who took him to his first film, Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet.” Haneke remembers, “I was crying so much after five minutes that I had to leave.” Sitting in the hotel, sixty years or so after the event, he drops into a droning, haunting ghost moan: a highly convincing impersonation of Hamlet’s dead father on the battlements.
Fritz Haneke, Michael’s father, was an actor and theatre director, and a Protestant. His mother, Beatrix von Degenschild, was an actress, and a Catholic. Only someone from a mixed-faith background, perhaps, can combine such a pointed interest in the lure of religion with such a sturdy refusal to commit to either side, although if I were Catholic I might take a furtive satisfaction in the way that “The White Ribbon” puts the moral sternness of the northern church through the wringer. (The film, Haneke says, “is not against religion, and yet the rigorousness in Protestantism is very much a part of how it can lead to radicalism.”) Fritz left when Michael was still young, and he was taken across the border and raised in his aunt’s home in Wiener Neustadt, a suburb of Vienna. His mother performed in the Burgtheater in the capital. “They were putting on ‘The Prodigal,’ and there was this fairy,” he told me. It was his mother. “She was brought down through the air, onto the stage, and I saw her, and I screamed out loud, ‘Das ist Mama!,’ and the whole theatre started to laugh.”
This is the second time in one afternoon that Haneke has referred to his mother in such terms. Earlier, he had said that, as a treasured visitor, she would descend on weekends, “like a fairy.” When I point out the coincidence, Haneke is much amused. “She was a very, very good-looking woman,” he says, a sublime explanation. It is almost as if he were summoning the memory of a picture book, or a scrap of folklore, instead of a true event. The vanished father, the winged mother appearing from on high to bestow her blessing, and then the curious aftermath, in which the infant grows to manhood and presents us with a bestiary of the monstrous and the icily indifferent: even the Brothers Grimm might have balked at such a plot.
Haneke’s mother remarried. Her son didn’t know what to do with himself. “I wanted to be a pianist. I wasn’t very good in school because I was practicing piano,” Haneke told me. “My stepfather was a composer and a conductor, and, thank God, he realized early on that I wasn’t talented enough. There is nothing more depressing than a mediocre musician.” Next came acting. He went for an audition in Vienna: “They didn’t take me, and I was furious.” The insult was all the worse because he had tried the piece out on his mother: “She found it fabulous, and I was so sure that everybody would find it fabulous that I couldn’t believe they didn’t take me.” At college, in Vienna, he studied theatre, but dropped it after a semester, on the ground of boredom, and switched to philosophy. There was a distinguished Hegelian on the faculty: “I thought he would explain the world to me, but I understood it’s not the case.” Anyway, Haneke had better things to do: like Truffaut, he was going to the movies three times a day. “All my stock of films is from this time,” he says.
Here, as recounted in the magazine Sight & Sound in 2002, are Haneke’s favorite movies: “Au Hasard, Balthazar” (Bresson), “Salò” (Pasolini), “The Gold Rush” (Chaplin), “Mirror” (Tarkovsky), “A Woman Under the Influence” (Cassavetes), “The Exterminating Angel” (Buñuel), “Germany, Year Zero” (Rossellini), “Lancelot du Lac” (Bresson), “L’Eclisse” (Antonioni), “Psycho” (Hitchcock). It’s quite a list, and hard to quarrel with: the best Tarkovsky, the best Buñuel, and Antonioni at his most uncompromising, with a climax that could be Haneke. I would prefer a more fair-weather Hitchcock, and would trade the second Bresson for another, probably “A Man Escaped,” but these rosters are designed for quibbling. (Haneke himself now says that he would swap the Antonioni for “The Mouth Agape,” Maurice Pialat’s fearsome film about a mother dying of cancer.) The Pasolini is less of a movie, more of a guide to the filthier circles of Hell, but that, presumably, is what attracted Haneke:* “I was completely destroyed. I was sick, destabilized for two weeks.” That is not what most people want from the movies. It is, however, what most people get from their love affairs, or from the wrenching end of them, and the lesson learned from Haneke’s scarifying Top Ten—needless to say, the Chaplin he picks is the one with attempted cannibalism—is that a movie that leaves you unchallenged, or unbruised, is somehow neglecting its duty. “If ‘Funny Games’ leaves a viewer uncomfortable, that’s because I respect him,” he said.
For a while, it was the viewers of theatre, not cinema, to whom Haneke attended. He began directing plays in the early nineteen-seventies, working largely in Germany. (In recent years, he has returned to live drama, this time in the field of opera, staging “Don Giovanni” in Paris in 2006 and accepting an invitation to direct “Così Fan Tutte” in Madrid in 2012. The mind reels.) Meanwhile, he had reëstablished contact with his father. “I engaged him for a theatre play. I was directing and he was acting. It was very funny,” Haneke recalls, adding, “My father was very strong in classical parts, and he showed me two or three times how to play it, just to bring me pleasure.” There is something weirdly charmed, as in late Shakespeare, about this frictionless tale of filial restoration.
In 1973, Haneke was asked by Südwestrundfunk Television to direct his first film for television, initiating a small-screen career that would last until “The Castle,” of 1997. In 1979 came “Lemmings,” a study of the rifts that can open up between the generations, and a bone of contention for the Hanekes. “My father was really shocked when he saw this, and he said, ‘From where is coming this hate against parents?’ ” Haneke laughed, and went on: “I said, ‘There is no hate. I am regarding the world around me and I have a precise eye for pain.’ ” Hence the precision of the shocks that “Lemmings” delivered to the system—less to the political system than to the systematic assurance with which we construct a comfortable life for ourselves and expect it to hold. We think it’s a wall, but it’s a bubble, and Haneke pricks it within minutes of the story’s second part, when a policeman’s wife opens the front door in the morning and an aggressive stranger jams his stick into the apartment, wedging the door open. Just another day in Hanekeland.
That sense of irruption into the placid is nothing new—as Haneke, the admirer of “Psycho,” would be the first to admit. But he does not make thrillers, whatever the marketing for “Hidden” may have suggested; he makes movies that sport the trappings of the conventional thriller but proffer none of the usual satisfactions. Thus, a minivan crunches down a woodland track. Inside is a nuclear family: two adults, two kids, off to their place in the country. Inside the house, however, is an explosion ready to happen: two adults, two kids, and a shotgun. Before we have a chance to get our bearings, the movie—Haneke’s “Time of the Wolf”—is one man down, and what ensues is a free fall into primitivism, not the catharsis of revenge. To anyone who saw “Fatal Attraction,” for instance, where the menace from outside was acknowledged, met head on, and slain, allowing domestic peace to reign once more, this lack of payoff is not just a disappointment; it’s a cheat and a con, depriving us of our basic right to melodrama. Haneke is trying to keep the customers dissatisfied.
Likewise, for lovers of “Intermezzo,” in which Leslie Howard mooned and swooned over his daughter’s piano teacher against a handful of European settings (he is reminded of “the days when Vienna was a happy city”), Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher,” based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek, will come as a nasty surprise. Again, we get the interruption: a knock on the teacher’s door at the conservatory as she listens to a singer and accompanist rehearse Schubert’s “Winterreise.” A prospective student, Walter, puts his head around to inquire about admissions. She sends him away, but he will destroy her life as surely as he has broken the cycle of the songs. Listen to the words of the singer: “Wie hat der Sturm zerrissen / Des Himmels graues Kleid”—“How the storm has torn apart the gray mantle of the sky.”
That is pure Haneke: tempests of feeling are starting to brew. Decorum is preserved, though at a terrible cost. Desire will find resolution, but in the key of madness. And the face of the teacher, Professor Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), gives us everything because it gives away so little. (Later, as part of a judging panel, she listens to Walter play, and the camera lingers on her expression, porcelain-calm yet, far beneath the surface, swept away. “We shot it quite quickly, one of the quickest,” Huppert said of the scene. “It’s the moment when she realizes that the way he plays, he performs, is the way he’s going to love her: seductive. It’s the moment she falls in love.”) Haneke, Huppert told me, is “the best person to work with—so pragmatic, no sentimental bullshit. That’s a key word when he works: ‘Too sentimental,’ he’ll say. Not no emotions—no sentimentality.” He had offered her the lead in “Funny Games,” which she declined, saying it was “terribly harsh for the actress.” She bided her time, and along came “The Piano Teacher”—“more open, more romantic,” as Huppert described it. She added, “I stayed blind to the hardest part of the script, so as not to be discouraged. Finally I read it on the plane to Vienna, and I thought, Oh God.”
Many viewers had the same response. You find yourself dreading the next Haneke film as you would an examination (an internal examination, in some cases), and, looking back on it, you squirm. But you know you have not been taken for a ride, or palmed off with a moist wad of fantasy. You have been through something—ripped open like Schubert’s sky.
Although the characters in “The Piano Teacher” converse in French, the film is set in Vienna. It does not come across as a happy city, and we are left to wonder, despite the claims of Leslie Howard, whether it ever was. Haneke is not the only white-bearded, much honored citizen of the place to investigate, at length, “the hostility to civilization which is produced by the pressure that civilization exercises, the renunciations of instinct which it demands.” That is Sigmund Freud, in “The Future of an Illusion,” but it also encapsulates the plight of Professor Kohut, a prim and censorious figure in a head scarf who likes to inhale the used tissues at a pornographic peepshow (and does so in rapture, with eyes half shut, like Baudelaire sniffing the perfume on his mistress’s hair). The legacy of Freud, in Haneke’s work, comprises not just the levelheaded logic of his pessimism—we must be unhappy if we are to survive as a functioning society—but also the conception of childhood as a hothouse, wherein our beliefs bloom most vividly and our stuntings begin. Freud wrote a short paper titled “Two Lies Told by Children,” which concluded:
The paper, first published with contributions from other authors under the heading of “Infantile Mental Life,” dates from the summer of 1913: the time, in other words, at which “The White Ribbon” begins. You want later eventualities? Try watching the two blond boys, the offspring of the oxlike steward on the baron’s estate, who sit with his pampered, non-swimming son beside a pond and push him in. Then do the math: come 1933, when Hitler becomes Chancellor, these boys will be little more than thirty, and we know—we cannot prove as much, and Haneke is too subtle to elbow us, but we know—the cause that they will join. By the end of “The White Ribbon,” there is almost no sin that we cannot, however hesitantly, lay at the door of the village juniors, and thus, by implication, at the door of their elders’ conduct. This out-of-the-way spot, with its fields of cabbages, is one of the thousand crucibles where history is being forged.
The director himself is at pains not to label his movie with too specific a tag. He told me, “It’s important for me that, even in America, I will not be happy if the film is seen as a film about a German problem, about the Nazi time. That is an example, but it means more than this. It’s a film about the roots of evil. It’s about a group of kids who are preached certain ideals,” he said, “and become the judges of others—of those who have pushed this ideology onto them. If you build an idea into an absolute, it becomes an ideology. And it helps those who have absolutely no possibility of defending themselves to follow this ideology in order to escape their misery. And that’s not a question of the fascism of the right. It also counts for left-wing fascism and for religious fascism. You could make the same film—in a completely different form, of course—about the Islamists of today. There is always someone in a wretched situation who seizes the opportunity, through ideology, to avenge himself, to emerge from his misery and to rectify his life. In the name of a beautiful idea you can become a murderer.”
Could he have become a murderer? It’s hard to picture this gentle spirit taking up arms against the weak. Haneke was perfectly clear on this point, more so than most of us would dare to be. “There is no crime I couldn’t have committed,” he said. “It’s so easy to say, ‘Oh no, I would never do that,’ but that’s dishonest. We are capable of everything.” He added, “It’s so easy to be ‘human’ when you come from a privileged background.” None of us can say how, under less favorable circumstances, we might have turned out. In Haneke’s case, he said, “The only reason that I couldn’t have been a Nazi is that I can’t stand crowds. I dread crowds—crowds aren’t people.” As for soccer matches, “I went once when I was eleven or twelve, and it was my first and last time in a stadium. I was so frightened, so terrorized by the howling crowds, that I ran out and I never went back.”
It is impossible to know what lies behind that fright, but it is tempting to ask: how does a sensitive child, born in 1942, begin to deal with what a German-speaking crowd had bayed for, and portended, in the recent past? It is common knowledge, and a source of some pride, that Germany made a concerted attempt, in the aftermath of the war, at the moral reëducation of its people, both to shame them into a sense of responsibility and to forestall any return of collective extremism. Yet the East German writer Stephan Hermlin recalled that when documentary films on the concentration camps were shown to postwar cinemagoers in Frankfurt, “in the half-light of the projector, I could see that most people turned their faces away after the beginning of the film and stayed that way until the film was over.”
If much of the German nation, as Hermlin argues, “was not interested in being shaken by events, in any ‘know thyself,’ ” the Austrian experience was, if anything, more occluding still. Haneke told me that when he was at school in Wiener Neustadt “the teaching of history ended with the First World War. There was not one word about the time afterwards.” Did he talk of that time with his stepfather? “He didn’t speak with me about this. Maybe he spoke with my mother about this time, but never with me.” In that respect, they were a family of typical Austrians: “I always say we are the world champions at sweeping things under the carpet.”
And there, you might say, Haneke’s job begins. He is, as Isabelle Huppert said to me, “very stubborn in his desires.” He wants the carpet to ride up; he wants us to be shaken; he wants us not to turn away from the screen but to gaze upon what it displays; he wants us not to forget. Such a wish, as he insists, does not mean that “The White Ribbon,” or any of his other works, should be construed as a parable of Nazism. Nonetheless, it seems fair to say that without so drastic a template of savagery and amnesia his films would not be as ruthless as they are. When it comes to improvements in human understanding, as opposed to technological leaps, “we’re still in the Stone Age,” he said. “We’re still pigs in the way we bear ourselves.”
No wonder his films are so unpiggish and plain, with no lurching motions of the camera. At the Vienna Film Academy, where Haneke teaches directing for part of the year, he customarily runs a quartet of screenings—“Battleship Potemkin,” Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” Costa-Gavras’s “Z,” and “Air Force One,” with Harrison Ford—to show the students how films of different persuasions can impose themselves equally, through a bullying use of sound and editing, on the viewer’s consciousness. “I like the politics of ‘Z’ more, but the manner is all the same,” Haneke said. In his own manner, he tries to avoid any trace of the overbearing, and that includes a score. Plenty of music is played within a Haneke drama, most obviously in “The Piano Teacher,” but none is overlaid so as to whip the action forward. “If the story is good, if the construction is good, you don’t need it,” Haneke said to me. “I am a big fan of David Lynch, but the only thing I don’t like in his films is the score. Why? The film is so strong. The music is not fair, it’s not honest—it’s easy.” Meanwhile, all is arranged on storyboards before the shooting. “One tries to re-create the complexity of life, but in a completely orderly way. I don’t believe in chance during shooting. Chance is a gift of the moment, if that exists, but it’s an exception. You have to prepare a chance for an actor, for instance, and push him into a certain situation. But I don’t at all believe in the improvisational method.”
That is one reason for the aversion to Haneke’s work. It feels hard—not just tricky to elucidate but as clean and resistant as a kitchen counter, or a marble slab. He reminds me of Flaubert, another classicist in a sentimental age, who wrote to a friend on Christmas Day, 1876, “Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.” That is not what we have come to expect of Hollywood, say, which feeds on legends of excess—one way for the industry to flatter itself with the illusion that, rather than merely grinding out a product, it is gallantly allowing private demons to be summoned and exorcised. Haneke is less bent on self-expression. “My work is not personal in the sense that it comes from my own wounds,” he said, and then searched around, in various languages, for the right word: “Kränkung . . . la vie est une grande, une permanente . . . hurting. I have always felt that. It’s not a private disappointment. There are wounds in every kind of life. I have no reason to complain—I’m highly spoiled by success—but, if you ask me if I’m happy, that’s another matter. If you look at the suffering around you, you can’t be happy.”
He seemed contented enough, as we worked our way through the wurst, in the hunters’ retreat. He even vouchsafed that his next film would be about old age, with all its vexations. “This is the problem for everyone, all the time: how to live with another person, right to the end,” he said. I asked what had happened to his family in later life, and he answered, “My aunt killed herself at the age of ninety-three.” This was the aunt who had raised him, idyllically, outside Vienna. I offered condolences, but none were required. “I found her in time, and saved her. And the first time I saw her, when she woke up in the ward, she said to me, ‘Why did you do that?’ So she waited until I went abroad for a festival or something, and then she tried again, successfully.”
“How did you feel when you heard about it?” I asked him.
Haneke smiled—either in relief that her sufferings were over at last or in rueful envy, because ours never cease.
“I was very happy,” he said. ♦
*Correction, December 1, 2009: Haneke did not first see “Salò” at the age of twenty, as originally stated.
