The Museum of Modern Art presents a full retrospective of the feature films of Michael Haneke, one of contemporary cinema's most provocative and incisive filmmakers. Michael Haneke, the most comprehensive exhibition of his work ever screened in North America, is presented October 3 through 15, 2007, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1.
The series includes eight of Haneke's celebrated theatrical features, several of which have won top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including The Piano Teacher (2001) and Caché (2005), both triple award-winners at Cannes, and the North American premieres of eight of Haneke's Austrian-German television productions from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s. The retrospective precedes Warner Independent Pictures' October 26 release of the director's 2007 remake of Funny Games, starring Naomi Watts and Michael Pitt. Haneke will be present to introduce the screenings of Code Unknown (2000) on Saturday, October 13, at 8:30 p.m., and the original Funny Games (1997) on Monday, October 15, at 7:00 p.m., both of which are followed by question-and-answer sessions with the director.
The exhibition is organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. It is based on the originating exhibition Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation, curated by Roy Grundmann, Film Studies professor at Boston University, with additional assistance from Karin Oehlenschläger of the Goethe-Institut Boston, and Brigitte Bouvier from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Boston. That exhibition will be presented at Harvard Film Archive and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from October 11 through November 3, 2007.
Born in 1942 in Germany, and raised in his current home of Austria, Haneke studied philosophy, psychology, and drama at the University of Vienna before becoming a screenwriter and director of opera, theater, and film. Much of his early work in television was based on his own writing, or adapted from modernist and postmodern literature by Franz Kafka (The Castle, 1997), Joseph Roth (The Rebellion, 1993), Ingeborg Bachmann (Three Paths to the Lake, 1976), Peter Rosei (Who Was Edgar Allan?, 1984), and others. These revelatory works anticipate Haneke's later work for the cinema, centering on the historical amnesia of Old Europe and its wartime past, and on the loss of identity and individuality, whether during the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (The Rebellion, 1993), in the decade following World War II (Lemmings – Part 1 – Arcadia, 1979, and Fraulein, 1986), or in the present day (Three Paths to the Lake, 1976; Lemmings – Part Two – Injuries, 1979; Variation, 1983; and Who Was Edgar Allan?, 1984).
More recent feature films, including his masterful collaborations with Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher, 2001, and The Time of the Wolf, 2003), and Juliette Binoche (Code Unknown, 2000 and Caché, 2005) are elliptical, Rashomon-like narratives, told with exquisite precision and in riveting detail, that shock audiences out of their indifference to the suffering of others and challenge their unquestioning acceptance of mediated reality. With a style at once musical and mathematical, Haneke's films can collectively be regarded as atonal variations on themes of alienation and social collapse; the exploitation and consumption of violence; the bourgeois family as an incubator of fascistic impulse; the nature of individual responsibility and collective guilt; and the ethics of the photographic image.
Although his films have been critically acclaimed for their fierce intelligence, sophistication, and formal beauty, Haneke is a polarizing and controversial figure. His treatment of his characters and his audience, and his refusal to provide falsely comforting "Hollywood" endings, have led many critics to describe him as morbidly detached, coldly calculating, and misanthropic. To this, Haneke has countered, "Once Robert Bresson was asked about his supposed pessimism and he responded: 'You get pessimism mixed up with clarity.' Little can be added to this statement."
Michael Haneke is supported by the Elysée Treaty Fund for Franco-German Cultural Events in Third Countries, and by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. Special thanks to Juliane Wanckel, Alexander Horwath, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Martin Rauchbauer, and, for their generous loan of prints, Kino Entertainment (Gary Palmucci, Jessica Rosner), Leisure Time Features (Bruce Pavlow), Palm Pictures (Ed Arentz), and Sony Pictures Classics (Michael Barker, Michael Piaker, Tom Prassis). -- www.moma.org
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