All language subtitles for 2018 interview with film historian Alexander Horwath

The total comes to 478,000.60 schillings.

I can't include interest
due to the five-year waiting period.

It doesn't matter.

May I ask why you need the money
so urgently?

Perhaps you'd be better off with a loan.

You could borrow against the business.

We're emigrating to Australia.

I knew Michael Haneke's name

from newspaper articles
about his TV movies.

I was somewhat familiar with his name.

But growing up,
I had never watched his TV movies

from the '70s or '80s.

The first time I saw one of his films
is when he became a feature film director.

That was in 1989,
The Seventh Continent, in Cannes.

I was in Cannes as a journalist.

They were showing
three Austrian films that year,

and The Seventh Continent was
by far the most outstanding of them.

It was one of the two or three best films
that year in Cannes, period.

As a young critic, I was writing
for the newspaper Der Standard,

and I dared to go up to him
and introduce myself

at the booth
of the Austrian Film Commission.

He had already read
my first reports from the festival,

in which I had written about his film
in a somewhat exaggerated

but sincerely enthusiastic way.

That was, of course,
a good starting point for a meeting

and then a closer friendship,
which still lasts today.

I did a big interview with him in 1989.

The film debuted in theaters
in the fall of 1989,

and it was not long after that we...

that I approached him
about writing a book.

And people agreed that

the screenplay of his feature film debut
should be published,

as the movie had made a big impression
in the Austrian film scene,

and not only in Austria
but internationally.

From Vincent Can by
at the New York Times to Le Monde,

the film was considered
a spectacular debut,

when it was shown at
the Director's Fortnight in Cannes.

The reaction in Austria
was of course particularly strong.

Hence the idea of writing a book

about his work up to that date,

together with the screenplay
for The Seventh Continent.

That book was published
exactly two years later, in fall 1991 :

The Seventh Continent..
Michael Haneke and His films.

Since then, we have been involved
in an ongoing dialogue about his work,

sometimes with a bit of time in between.

And I really enjoy the talks with him

and his thoughts about the world,

and to experience it in parallel
to his cinematographic expression,

to sometimes sense contradictions
between the two,

to sometimes feel the close unity

between the person and their films.

So all of that started
when I was 24 and he was already 47.

Look at me.

Tell me. Did you pretend to be blind?

Come on. Tell me.

I just want to know the truth.

Come on.

Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you.

Is it true?

Did you pretend to be blind?

Yes.

It may seem paradoxical

to write a book about someone
who just made his feature film debut,

but it's really not when you realize

that this so-called debut was preceded
by a more than 20-year career

as a script editor and especially
as a director in other media.

Meaning that someone makes
a late debut in feature films

20 years after he already ventured
into this field of work.

He had already directed eight TV movies,

including adaptations of other writers
and some based on his own screenplays.

And this occurrence of a certain shift,
of a certain delay,

was fascinating to me.

Then I realized that Haneke
is part of a generation -

and that's something that may be clearer
now, after some time has passed -

Haneke is part of a generation
of European art-house directors,

auteurs, filmmakers
that we associate with names like -

a generation three, four years older,
three, four years younger than him.

If we want to name that generation,

then we don't only have Werner Herzog,

who was actually born the same year,

but we also have Bertolucci,

Fassbinder, Bellocchio,

Jean Eustache, Wim Wenders.

All those names belong to his generation.

All these filmmakers debuted

with their first feature films
between 1966 and 1969.

Feature films for theater release.

For Haneke, this doesn't happen
until 20 or more than 20 years later.

Because he -

He chose a different career path,
went a different way.

But maybe also
because he wasn't the typical child

of a cinephile environment,
an environment fueled by popular culture,

he wasn't from this kind of milieu

or this kind of social stratum,

contrary to some of the others.

Meaning he does not come genuinely,
originally, from the love for film,

the enthusiasm for the cinema,
the cinema fetishism.

He comes from a bourgeois culture,
a bourgeois family,

a family of theater people,
actors, directors, etc.

And he has a very strong background
in literature and music.

These are his primary art forms
or his strongest drivers

when it comes to artistic endeavors.

He has an education in film,

but contrary to what we know about
Fassbinder, Wenders and others,

or those who were film critics themselves,

he never dove that deep
into film fetishism,

into a complete cinema fetishism.

And coming from Austria,

where there was no real film sector
in 1966, 1967,

let alone a proper film industry,

there was a very strong, very influential

avant-garde, experimental film scene,

but there wouldn't have been
anything for him

in terms of regular film making.

The Austrian broadcasting company ORF
couldn't accommodate him,

so he went to Germany and worked
for a German broadcasting company.

He established himself in the field

adapting literature for TV,

and he knew that to become a director,
which is what he wanted,

he first had to learn working with actors,
so he switched to theater,

risked his secure job,

to become a theater director.

He practiced there,
and when the broadcasting company saw

that he was doing well, his first
successes in the theater in the early '70s

led to him making his first TV movie,
which came out in 1974.

And for 12 years, from 1974 to 1986,

he kept moving forward,
step by step, with each work.

Maybe not immediately towards the cinema,

but he refined his range,
his skills and his possibilities

with regard to his artistic tools,
so to speak.

His first cinematic TV movie in his eyes

is Ingeborg Bachmann's Three Paths
To the Lake, which I respect very much.

It is still very much in the context

of the dignified, precious Austrian
or Austrian-German TV movie,

but it shows how many creative ideas
were already there

that go beyond
the convention of television,

how much of that was already there.

Then he did the two-parter Lemmings,
an autobiographic piece,

which also shows him to be
a diagnostic for his own generation,

and of the fatal aspects
or disappointments

or the illness or pain of his generation,

maybe a certain suicidal tendency,

which he attributes to his generation.

And he proves himself in that role,

even though those were
controversial issues.

There were already critics back then
who said he has a determinist worldview,

something that accompanies him
still today.

Then he made a light,
almost comedic TV film in Berlin,

which he sees himself to be
close to Cassavetes, Variation,

with Hilmar Thate,
Elfriede Irrall, Monica Bleibtreu.

It ends with a scene
where Hilmar Thate goes to the movies

and watches Annie Hall, by Woody Allen.

Maybe that was the direction
he was trying to take.

The following year,
he made Who Was Edgar Allan?

That's a film where he clearly shows,
contrary to what was said later,

that he was not all about reduction,
minimalism, absolute simplicity,

but that he was just as interested
in the fantastic, the phantasmagoric,

and thus also
the more indulgent possibilities

that the cinema had to offer.

Once you see The White Ribbon
and other films of his, you can feel it.

Who Was Edgar Allan?, shot in Venice,

is a film on very unsafe grounds.

What is real, what is not real?

What is the identity or the identities
of the main characters? Who are they?

A film that,

in the broadest sense,
already offers a postmodern access

to image and identity.

So again, a new field, a new area.

And, lastly, there was the film Fraulein,

for the Saarland Broadcasting Company,

which was for him
sort of an answer to Fassbinder,

to Fassbinder's films about women
in postwar Germany.

It's a topic
that I like to argue with him about.

He thinks he made the anti-Fassbinder,
which is what he wanted.

He was against him,

saying Fassbinder mythologized
the postwar German woman,

and he, Haneke, had to take
an opposing standpoint and show the truth.

I always thought
it was more logical to see the film

in the tradition
of Fassbinder's great films

about women from around 1980

and that they have more in common
than even Haneke sees.

That Fassbinder, on the other hand,
was not mythologizing

but rather deconstructing
these types of female characters

and also types of male characters.

So we don't agree.

On the other hand,
Fraulein is a very convincing film,

shot in black-and-white, which already
shows how he handles this medium,

and also a film that went
in terms of budget and production

much further than the films
he made previously.

So you could see all these steps,
all these TV movies,

in a kind of genealogy, in a line,

that is continuously moving
towards the cinema.

You can see it that way,
but you don't have to.

Of course, he proved step by step -

and he proved to himself
what he is capable of doing -

and that he...

that he can meet his own standards
with regard to a feature film.

At the same time,

he fulfilled the needs
of the broadcasting companies,

at least on the minimal level
where they had to be met.

But always
in some kind of conflict or dispute.

And The Seventh Continent
is the case of a work

where he was originally planning
to also make a TV movie.

He had read a story in the Stern
about a family that annihilated itself.

He wanted to adapt it for TV,

but the dramatization
and narration styles available

were no longer satisfying for him.

In the correspondence
with the broadcasting company,

he also saw that the way

that they would have allowed
or facilitated it

wasn't the way
he wanted to tell the story.

Because at this time, the Austrian
film subsidy program had been launched,

and multiple people suggested

he try his hand in feature films,

he finally took that step
at the end of the '80s

and used this material
to create his first cinematic release.

And then, without any compromise,

he told the story exclusively
in his extremely reduced way,

following the chronological order
of the events

using an anti-psychological
character treatment.

"And then there's our little Eva.

We thought long and hard
about whether to take her with us

or leave her behind with you.

As you can imagine, Mom,

and certainly you too, dear Father,

making this decision has caused us
many sleep less nights.

Because while we're certain
we're doing the right thing for ourselves,

it's an entirely different matter
to decide the fate of someone else,

someone you love
more than anything in the world."

The film was accepted
at the Cannes Film Festival.

It was a pretty quick breakthrough.

And as I said, he was already older.

That's how a form of film making

that had developed
for more than 20 years in his head -

a way of thinking about cinema
and film making,

an idea of what it could be,
of what it should be

if I, Michael Haneke,
become a feature film director -

It was basically brewing for a long time.

And this kind of film making,

which is fed by his experiences
with directors

like Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bresson,
Antonioni, Godard, etcetera -

Straub-Huillet, whose films he loved -

which was basically the art-house cinema
of the '60s and '70s.

This kind of cinema comes back with him
in another form

in the late 1980s, early '90s,

which is why I always counted him -

And I don't mean that negatively or...

or as a restriction of his films' quality.

But for me, it is the classic example
for a delayed artist

who enters into another era

with things, with thoughts,
with ideas, with aesthetics,

with convictions,

and also with a certain knowledge
of social analysis,

or in terms of...

in terms of the examination of
different circumstances around the world,

which you would usually attribute
to an earlier generation.

And around 1990,

we already had people like,
for instance, Quentin Tarantino,

who in a certain way
is a lifelong counterpart of his.

The young people back then, like myself,
were already searching

for filmmakers
who were working differently

or who had a different relationship
with the world.

And Haneke burst into
the middle of it like a foreign object,

but a foreign object that was very much
needed or that was very productive.

So that someone who is making films

really knows what kind of responsibility
goes hand in hand with it.

In order to take yourself seriously

and be able to look yourself
in the mirror,

you need this seriousness.

That set him apart
from most of his peers in that era

and today as well, I think.

To realize that you can't just say,

"There's this generation,

then this one is done,
then there's the next one,"

but that history and also art history
and film history develop in way

that a lot is only expressed later on,
even though it stems from earlier.

Or that something is recognized
only much later for what it was and is

and wasn't even perceived when it was new.

That there are these accelerations
and decelerations,

and that they are so exciting
in film history.

I think you can really see that
in Michael Haneke.

And back then,
I just had a feeling about it.

It is still one of the main access points
to his work.

No!

His feature film debut,
The Seventh Continent, in 1989

was spectacular,

and not in a small way.

In Austria, anyway,
but also internationally.

Nonetheless, it is important
to think about the fact

that while it was sold to many countries
and ran in theaters there,

it did not become a commercial success
in Austria,

nor in Germany or anywhere else.

Just based on this alone,

you would think that such a continuous
and expanding career

like the one of Michael Haneke,
the way we know it today,

did not actually seem that logical.

It has a lot to do
with the film subsidy system,

especially in Austria,

because, since the reaction of the critics

was so very clear, so very strong,

he was granted regularly
the possibility to keep going

with his particular vision
of film and cinema

and to drive it forward.

Meaning, despite the lack
of a broad audience response,

he was able to make what is often called
The Glaciation Trilogy,

his first three films,
on a fairly regular basis.

And in between,
even a few more late TV movies.

He shot an adaptation
of Joseph Roth's Rebellion.

He made a very experimental work for ORF:

Obituary for a Murderer,

which was also about a fait divers,
a soldier running amok.

And he focused entirely on TV material
for this work,

what was broadcast in these 24 hours,
when this incident occurred.

So even though it is not yet
the main focus in Seventh Continent,

the relationship between
our Western reality

and the mass media, especially television,

became very quickly
one of the main topics of his later work.

And even though I don't think
that when he shot The Seventh Continent

he was already planning a trilogy

when he was developing the next film,
Benny's Video,

which is also based on a real incident,

from which he takes something
that he can generalize,

in which he recognizes something.

In a one-column
or three-column report on a crime,

he recognizes something

that he deems generally significant
for the society in which he lives

and in which his audience lives,

and based on this isolated case,
this so-called isolated case,

he creates something that goes far beyond.

I think that when he was working
on the second film, Benny's Video,

he was already thinking about

possibly making this a trilogy,

that this could become
a three-piece vessel

with a related approach,

that the third film would fit into
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.

Even though he knew
that he would tell it differently,

that he would tell it via
many characters, like a choir.

Not via one case, like the family
committing suicide in Seventh Continent,

or the case of young Benny
and his crime and his family,

even though there is one crime
that is the focus of the third film,

but based on it or going back from it,
he opens up a much larger space

and really does work in fragments.

The title is very true, because that is
how the film is structured.

I think he realized

that with regard to the similarity...

of the three approaches

as well as the relative difference
in artistic access,

that he has something here which -

I don't want to say it is a good sell,
because he doesn't care about selling.

But in order to create a kind of signature
as auteur in the world,

as a film auteur,

this was an extremely suitable format.

I don't want to accuse him

of making this
a strategic career consideration

or allege anything like that,

but he is someone who wants to
expand his playing field.

Meaning that he does things in a way

that will make it foreseeable or expected

or at least creates the hope

of having a bigger playing field
next time.

So I do think that he was aware
of setting the scene with this trilogy -

all three films were shown in Cannes -

so he would make a name for himself
in Europe, allowing him to go further.

Or maybe it was a consideration
of the production, the budget,

partnerships with companies

that have public funding
in other countries,

so he could broaden his opportunities
and create a greater potential.

And this trilogy, this trilogy statement,

was clearly the right approach to do that.

And I think it defined him
in terms of content as an artist

for those who were skeptics
regarding his work,

who accused him of holding on
to an outdated point of view

in his social critique
or his existential philosophy

or in his media critique,

a perspective that was believed

to have already been overcome.

It was already the early '90s,

and people thought
Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers,

based on a screenplay
by Quentin Tarantino,

offered a much more
contemporary access to the issue

of a media-generated dissolution
of society.

And if you judge by the success
with the public

or the first reception,

then it is of course true that movies
like Natural Born Killers

or Pulp Fiction or Tarantino's early films

were much more talked about
all over the world,

and that a lot more people saw them.

But I'm wondering if now,

20, 25 years later,

when we look back at the early '90s
and this entire era,

whether we wouldn't conclude

if the approach of Natural Born Killers,
for instance,

which seemed very modern

and which used the stylistic tools
of MTV and music television

and current aesthetic forms,

so-called current aesthetic forms,

if that film didn't get old faster,
became dated faster

than those films
that were not as contemporary

or were more aligned with the European
art films from the '50s to the '80s,

like the artistic access
that Haneke was offering -

if the latter didn't age better

or have proven more durable

or sustainable or resilient

than some of those, back then,
much more popular films

addressing similar issues.