
Still from
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.
I finally got around to watching two films that have been sitting here for weeks from Netflix. Both films are from
Michael Haneke--
The Seventh Continent (1989) and
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994).
Haneke has always been interested in the creation of violence, usually depicting the banality of life through slow, haunting movements, or slow, alienating movements, or slow, moving movements, or (you get the drift). Almost always, someone in his films will descend into violence, which is not unusual in and of itself. What is unusual is how coldly he goes about showing it, drawing direct links between the numbness of televised violence, the numbness of emotional repression, and the numbness of isolation. What I tend to enjoy--if one can enjoy Haneke's worlds--are the long takes of seemingly harmless activities and what these long takes generate emotionally in a viewer/me. I'm reminded of the scene in
71 Fragments of a man practicing hitting balls on a table tennis board. The man obviously is "playing" with a machine that shoots out the balls to him, and quite rapidly, to the point where the man doesn't have more than a second between ball hits. It's just repetitive motion. The length of the fragment goes on and on, with the camera never moving. We are forced to watch this same activity, which results eventually in a hollowed-out feeling taking place in the viewer, or at least in this viewer. The feeling, like in so much of Haneke's work, is a mixture of a larger, existential sadness (what is this man really hoping to gain for himself by playing table tennis), isolation (he's alone), and undertowing violence (we see that this is a sport, but the incessant hitting of the ball reminds one of different hittings).
Haneke himself, in the special features, can come off pretty consistently as a person who thinks of himself a little too highly. The philosophical framings of the works are really not as novel and ground-breaking as he thinks they are, but this is a pretty common problem among artists. Still, he is adept at revealing versions of the present world and the present ennui very successfully. I have myself resisted watching his films, even while I'm drawn to them, because of how acutely he presents this ennui, this inherently violent, messy world that lies just barely beneath the surface.