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Discussion: The Films of Michael Haneke
On this episode of the podcast, we're talking about the films of Michael Haneke. He sometimes seems to be remaking the same film over and over with intriguing variations.
Other Recent Episodes
Béla Tarr's Speed Racer from London
I skipped last week's "Now Showing" because of the San Francisco International Film Festival, although I filed reviews of David Mamet's jiu-jitsu movie, Redbelt, and the British comedy Son of Rambow over at Paste. Opening in theaters this week is the garish, retro, futuristic, earnest, campy, swift, turgid, and exceedingly contradictory Speed Racer. I'm delighted that Paste no longer requires reviewers to assign a star rating to a movie or album; this one might have been tricky.
By delivering important information in aggressively brief bursts, Speed Racer seems to test the limits of human perception, and it's doing this to tell a dumb, insincere story and tickle the neurons of 8-year-olds. How best to boil that disjunction into a number? Don't know, not my problem. The negative reviews are the most fun to read (Hoberman, Edelstein, Lane), but Scott Tobias's torn reaction is closer to my own feeling. He gives Speed Racer a C.
My own review is one of four or five that could have been whittled from my post-screening notes. Here's an also-ran: I happened to see the film within a couple of days of watching Béla Tarr's The Man from London at the SFIFF.
Someone walking the Caminito del Rey.
No, really, you go on without me. I'll hang back at the camp with a good book.
On this episode of the podcast, we're talking about the films of Michael Haneke. He sometimes seems to be making the same film over and over with intriguing variations. His latest, Funny Games — the story of a family that is tormented for a few hours by a couple of white-gloved hooligans — has even fewer of those variations than usual, but the obvious repetition certainly fits among his usual obsessions.
0:00 Intro
2:58 Clip: Funny Games (2007)
3:47 Funny Games Remade
9:07 Caché (2005), Serge Daney on Perspective
17:37 Benny's Video (1992)
19:35 The Seventh Continent (1998)
21:03 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
23:18 Time of the Wolf (2003)
32:30 Time of the Wolf and Funny Games
36:16 Funny Games as a Loop
39:41 Examples of Rigor
44:05 A Different Kind of Watching
49:47 The Piano Teacher (2001)
50:17 Code Unknown (2000)
52:58 Places to Start
54:06 Revisiting Funny Games
56:52 Misremembering Movies
58:37 Revisiting Benny's Video
1:02:38 Absorbing Violence
1:06:13 Cleaning Up
1:08:42 What are we really like?
1:11:07 Outro
Coming Up: A discussion of Errol Morris's new film, Standard Operating Procedure and an interview with the filmmaker.
Of the films opening in theaters this week, Deception is the latest high concept disappointment. More worthy of examination and discussion is the new film from Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure, which examines the infamous photographs taken at Abu Ghraib. It only opens on two screens, so we'll have our podcast discussion next week. The film is a valuable appendix to the other Iraq documentaries — notably Taxi to the Dark Side — but it's a series of footnotes instead of a clear argument, stirred together with questionable use of the scandal's iconography and an interview technique that builds up and tears down its subjects in equal measure, adding more mud to an already dark puddle.
See below for a list of films currently in theaters, conveniently organized with the cream at the top.
The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival opens Thursday night and runs for two weeks. It's a strong lineup this year, but just six weeks ago I was still a little uncertain.
On March 10 the Film Society announced the name of the film that would be the "centerpiece" of this year's festival and injected a little worry into the pit of my stomach, a sheep shank in my galley, you might say, especially if you're a fake seaman. In a city that prides itself on varied and voluminous film screenings all year long, the SFIFF is still the flagship. It's a large festival — the first on this continent, actually — and although it suffered a bout of acute melancholia at the turn of the century, it seems to have been set aright by festival director Graham Leggat. It's the standard bearer for the city's culture of cinema. San Franciscans who care about movies guard it jealously.
Which is all the more reason for a local cinephile to worry that the festival will somehow compromise its programming whenever the economy hits rough waters, perhaps by resorting to big, dumb Hollywood movies in a desperate need to sell tickets.
Asia Argento in Boarding Gate (Assayas)
UPDATE: I've also filed Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed below.