Interview: Michael Haneke - Asking the questions

Published on Tuesday 10 November 2009 17:58

ASK Michael Haneke what he wants to say with his films and he will tell you he has no message.

Admit to him that they invariably leave you with more questions than answers, and his grey beard parts into a smile. "This is quite normal," says the Austrian auteur, during a visit to London with his acclaimed Palme d'Or winner, The White Ribbon. "As an artist, I try to present questions, and a world and a situation, but I'm certainly not setting out to give answers. That would be stupid, or even dangerous."

But it is not just the unanswered questions that can prove problematic. Haneke is also highly adept at creating psychological and emotional disturbance. His terrifying home invasion thriller, Funny Games, premiered in Cannes 12 years ago but it is hard to forget the ashen faces of some reporters as they stumbled, visibly shaken, out of the screening room.

Haneke's previous shocker Benny's Video – which explored the desensitising effects of our media-saturated culture through the story of a boy who videos himself killing a girl – was just as tough.

And The Piano Teacher, his second French-language film after Code Unknown, was hardly a joyride either. Starring Isabelle Huppert in one of her most demanding roles, the film caused controversy in Cannes in 2001, with its mix of sadomasochism and female genital self-mutilation. The film was no trite stunt, however, but a serious-minded drama about alienation and repression.

Haneke is unapologetic about the violence coursing through his oeuvre, arguing: "I deal with the subject of violence in all my films because when you live in a modern society, it's impossible to avoid this problem."

Some pundits have accused his films of being as exploitative as the violent Hollywood movies he was explicitly targeting in Funny Games. However, while that particular film is itself excruciatingly brutal, the worst atrocities happen off screen. It is the gut-twisting threat of violence, and Haneke's focus on its agonising aftermath, that makes watching Funny Games such an ordeal. The director, moreover, makes the viewer complicit with the victimisers, raising uncomfortable questions about the spectator's role.

"I treat (the audience] more intellectually than the mainstream cinema does," Haneke argues. "What the mainstream cinema does is take away the responsibility of the spectator. It doesn't take them seriously. When I go to the cinema, I want to be taken seriously."

Haneke says that Funny Games was intended to be a kind of "counter-programme" to movies such as Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, which claim to be anti-violence but, Haneke says, end up being the opposite. His issue is that their aesthetics arguably make the violence "alluring", and leave no room for the audience to consider what it is they are consuming. "You can't make an anti-fascist statement using fascist methods," he has said.

Instead, Haneke creates distance between the object (ie, the film) and the spectator, opening a space for us to think about what we're watching, about our relationship to what is happening on screen, and about our reactions.

His methods are in part a counter to what he regards as the deadening effect of the mainstream media in general, and television in particular. Instead of manipulating an audience, he wants to "force (them] to think independently".

There are different ways of doing this, he says. "Above all, you ask the questions rather than offer the answers. If you do that, you're never going to get it wrong." The ideal situation would be "if a film could make somebody more sensitive for a couple of hours," he says. "That's what all art should be doing. You have to provoke creativity in people."

Haneke was born in Munich in 1942 and has lived in Austria his whole life. Is his approach in any way a reaction to how film was used by the Nazis, and the likes of documentary maker Leni Reifensthal? "Certainly, but not exclusively," he says. "It's not only the Nazis who manipulated cinema – they did it very effectively – but, of course, also Stalinism."

And Hollywood too. Haneke describes Air Force One, a 1997 action thriller in which Harrison Ford's US president demonstrates America's zero tolerance policy towards terrorists by personally taking on a group of hijackers on the presidential plane, as "another example of political manipulation".

"The US propaganda was, of course, a particular case," Haneke says. "It's so efficient because the audience didn't perceive it as propaganda."

With his new film The White Ribbon, Haneke looks at the roots of fascism through the generation of children who grew up to become Nazis. The story takes place on the eve of the First World War, in a small Protestant village in Northern Germany that is suddenly disrupted by a series of unexplained "accidents" and attacks.

Typically, nothing is clear cut. The culprits are never unmasked, although the implication is that it is the children who are committing the crimes, and the film ends ambiguously and unresolved. Clearly, though, the seeds have been planted for the barbarism that would produce the Holocaust.

"I was interested in presenting a group of children who are taught absolutist values, and the way they internalise this absolutism," says Haneke. "My point was to show the consequences – that is, all sorts of terrorism.

"If absolutism is applied to an ideal," he continues, "then that ideal, either political or religious, becomes inhuman." For a time he considered calling the film The Right Hand of God. "These children have understood the laws and the ideals, and they follow them to the letter. This makes them become the punishers of the others who do not obey the same ideals."

While it can hardly be coincidence that the top Nazi leadership was comprised of people who were raised in conservative Protestant and Roman Catholic households, Haneke wants The White Ribbon to be viewed as more than just a comment on Germany.

"One can see this happening in religious fanaticism and political fanaticism, whether it be on the Left or on the Right," he says. "I hope, above all, that in other countries this won't be seen as a film dealing only with a German question. That would be a way of spectators from other countries protecting themselves against its impact."

Technically, The White Ribbon is one of the director's finest achievements to date. It was filmed in colour and then converted into black and white, and looks gorgeous. As with all of his films, there is no musical soundtrack. This, presumably, is partly to do with Haneke's distrust of emotional manipulation. Mainly, he says, it is because "music is far too important for me to use it simply to mask my other mistakes". Haneke once dreamed of becoming a professional pianist, and still has fond memories of playing with a chamber orchestra. "Making music is one of the most sublime pleasures in life, it's the most intense thing there is; it's like making love in a way."

Yet it is strange, I say, how a country that gave us Beethoven and Bach – and Wagner, admittedly – also perpetuated some of the worst crimes of the 20th Century.

"It is true that it is the greatest human mystery of them all that the people who are capable of producing such sublime works of art are also capable of doing such awful things," Haneke sighs. "Unfortunately the fact that German culture is capable of such sublime works of art doesn't protect people and doesn't mean that those same people aren't capable of such monstrosities. This is the paradox of the human mystery."

And therein, perhaps, lies the mystery at the heart of much of Haneke's work. The potential for evil is in all of us; the question is, how do we stop it flourishing? And what role, The White Ribbon seems to ask, does education play?

"Of course it's better not to beat children (the way they do in the film], but what we've got today is also not the best of all possible worlds," says Haneke.

"So the fundamental question's always been there in humankind: how to educate? In some ways it's an insoluble problem." But what were you expecting from him? Answers?

• The White Ribbon is on release from Friday.