Haneke, Michael

The early years

Michael Haneke was born March 23, 1942 in Munich , Germany . He is the son of the German director and actor Fritz Haneke and the Austrian actress Beatrice von Degenschild . His stepfather, composer Alexander Steinbreher, subsequently married the mother of actor Christoph Waltz . Haneke grew up in the city of Wiener Neustadt , Austria .

Soon he entered the University of Vienna , where he studied philosophy, psychology and theater, after he failed to succeed in his early attempts at acting and musical activity. After graduation, he became a film critic, and from 1967 to 1970 he worked as an editor and playwright at the Südwestfunk Southwest German television station. In 1973 he debuted as a television director.

Career

Haneke’s full-length debut took place in 1989 with the movie The Seventh Continent ”Who received a prize at the Locarno festival . Already in this early film the characteristic features of the director’s style, which were developed in his next films ^{[12], appeared} . The shocking picture “ Benny 's Videotapes ” ( 1992 ) about the threat of popularizing violence in popular culture was nominated for the “ European Film Awards ” in the category “Best Film”.

" Funny games " were presented at the 50th Cannes Film Festival , and the film program contained a warning about the presence of shocking scenes. The film, which film critic Andrei Plakhov called the most memorable in the program of that festival ^[12] , did not receive, however, not a single award. Subsequently, in 2008 , Haneke performed an auto-remake of the Funny Games under the same name in the USA . For television in the same 1997, the director directed the adaptation of Franz Kafka ’s novel “ The Castle ”.

Success was expected in the French-made film “The Pianist, ” which in 2001 brought to Cannes the director of the Grand Prix (the second most important award), and the leading actors Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Majimelle received the actor's awards of the festival. The Hidden Tape ( 2005 ), another French-language film by Haneke, confirmed his reputation as a major European director, and the black and white philosophical film The White Tape on the nature of human violence in 2009 brought him the Golden Palm Branch , the main prize of the Cannes Film Festival . Haneke award was presented by the chairman of the festival jury - Isabelle Huppert. Haneke was also nominated for the Academy Award for the first time in her career.

In 2012, the painting “ Love ”, one of the most chamber in the filmography of Haneke, repeated the success of his previous work, taking the main prize of the movie screening. ^[13] She also became the main triumph of the European Academy Award , having brought Haneke a third record statuette for best directorial work ^[14] . The director was awarded the Oscar for the best foreign language film, and was also nominated for awards for directing and writing the original script.

In 2017, the drama “ Happy End ” was released. The tape was selected to participate in the main competition program of the 70th Cannes International Film Festival (2017) in the competition for the Golden Palm Branch ^{[15] [16]} .

The film received mostly positive reviews from critics ^[17] . After the first screening of the film at the Cannes Film Festival , many critics accepted the film well, while others “complained about the monotonous and boring style” ^[18] . In his review for Guardian magazine, Peter Bradshaw called the film “as bright, brilliant, and inexorable as halogen light,” praising Haneke’s visual composition and noting how the narrative “sometimes makes insidious little leaps forward, allowing us to respond to terrible things that were missed ” ^[19] .

Haneke's favorite director is Abbas Kiarostami , he explained why: “He achieves simplicity, which is so difficult to achieve” ^[20] .

My films are conceived as polemic statements against the American “barrel-shaped” cinema and its discrediting the viewer. This is a call to cinema of persistent questions instead of false and too quick answers, to clarify the distance instead of violating intimacy, to provoke and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus ^[21] .

Original text

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.

Michael Haneke directed several productions in German, including productions by Strindberg , Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist , in Berlin , Munich and Vienna . In 2006, he made his debut as an opera director, staging Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni at the Opera Garnier Theater, when Gerard Mortier was the theater’s general director.

In 2012, he was supposed to lead the production of the opera “ Everybody Does It ”, in the New York City Opera ^[22] . This production was originally commissioned by Jürgen Flimm for the Salzburg Festival in 2009, but Haneke had to resign due to an illness preventing him from preparing his work. Haneke performed this production at the Royal Theater of Madrid in 2013 ^[23] .

A complete list of awards and nominations on the site IMDb.com ^[24] .

Sources

Literature

• Catherine Wheatley: Michael Haneke's Cinema: The Ethic of the Image , New York: Berghahn Books, 2009, ISBN 1-84545-722-6 review
• Michael Haneke . Special Issue of Modern Austrian Literature . 43.2, 2010.
• Alexander D. Ornella / Stefanie Knauss (ed.): Fascinatingly Disturbing. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Michael Haneke's Cinema , Eugene, Pickwick, 2010, ISBN 978-1-606-08624-7 .

• Haneke, Michael on the Internet Movie Database
• Michael Haneke: film as catharsis
• Articles about Michael Hanek in the Session Magazine
• Interview with Michael Haneke to the magazine "Spark", dedicated to the release of the film "Love"