Hidden

09/09/2011

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Questions of Ambiguity

Thinking of Hidden specifically, and Michael Haneke's work more generally, this Austrian filmmaker, who was born in 1942 and worked for many years in television, before debuting in 1989 witt The Seventh Continent, became around the turn of the century an important chronicler of Europe. Initially the focus was on Austria, in films like Benny's Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronicle of Chance, before he began frequently working out of France, in films like Code Inconnu, Hidden and Amour, or working in Austria but in French, with The Piano Teacher. Often using long-takes and eschewing non-diegetic music, Haneke's films are deemed demanding in several ways. This rests not just on the difficulty of the form, but also on the moral complexity of the subject matter and the representative explicitness of the imagery. It may be the school teen in Benny's Video who kills a classmate, or the two killers who torture and murder a family in Funny Games. Or it might be the ageing death of the central female character in Amour, or Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher, given to acts of self-harm. Like many millennial directors, Haneke is happy with controversy, insisting on confrontation, and determined to find in the shocks he creates a value that is more than the exploitation such strong cinema often suggests.
Hidden is perhaps seen as his masterpiece, a work that includes moments of shock, a play with form, and a social critique. One day, a TV presenter finds a package with a video in it, plays it and wonders who might have sent it. The video shows the outside of the family home being watched over and, in time, the family receives more packages and the father, Georges (Daniel Auteuil), wonders if somehow the packages might be linked to the boy who, when George was young, stayed with Georges’ family. Georges didn’t like this Algerian boy coming into the family home and engineered his removal. Now, many years later, Georges finds Majid in a small council flat on the outskirts of the city and confronts him.
This is the gist of the story, even though it doesn’t begin to describe how the film conveys that information. It opens with what seems like an establishing shot of the family apartment, only for the viewer to hear a voice offscreen and the footage rewound. We aren’t just watching the beginning of the film; we are watching the footage that Georges has received and is now watching. On several occasions through the film, we are watching what we assume is footage that is the film we are watching, only to discover it is footage Georges is watching that has been recorded by someone else. It means that by the film’s conclusion, not only are we unsure what to make of the events within the film (who sent the tapes?), but also the status of the footage we have been viewing.
In a shot near the end, we once again see the outside of the house and Georges pulling up and getting out of the car. We may wonder what we should make of this shot; wonder if someone is filming it, and whether, as with the opening, the footage will be rewound. It isn’t, as Georges goes into the house. We can say with some confidence that this is what Georges does because we see him going up to the front door, and the next shot shows George going into the apartment. Most films take these shots for granted, but Hidden has consistently forced us to question that confidence. Usually, the filmmaker establishes the shot, and cuts again to a character inside the building it has shown us. Most of the time, there is no reason to wonder whether the shots follow each other, and the viewer assumes they do so unless given a good enough reason to doubt their association. It is what a cinema of continuity and cohesion insists upon; the viewer allows their mind to accept the connections, even if that link between an exterior shot of a building and an interior shot of someone in a sitting room, needn’t be linked at all.
In this instance, Handke makes the link strong indeed: the viewer sees Georges in long-shot getting out of his car, going to his front door, and we hear the turning of the lock before it cuts to a reverse shot of Georges entering his home. There is great coherence between one image and the next, but at the same time, let us ponder for a moment on the establishing shot in this scene. Why is it held for so long? It would be enough to show Georges getting out of the car and going to his door, but Handke holds this initial shot for a minute when only a few seconds would have been required. Handke clearly wants us to recall the opening scene, and leaves us musing over whether this is taped footage too. Part of the trick it plays with us is that it isn’t, or at least isn’t revealed to be. Haneke has retrained our perceptual faculties, allowing us to assume that the shot needs to be called into question rather than safely assumed. The director owes a debt clearly to Godard, Resnais, Bergman and Antonioni, who often insisted that the image needs to viewed with some vigilance, and also to Brecht, of course, as Haneke expects emotion at the same time this emotion is contested by the form. The viewer will be shocked when Majid (Maurice Banichou) commits suicide, and shocked by various murders in Benny’s Video and Funny Games. But there must be, within the shock in Handke’s work, a thought that tempers it, or a technique that questions it. It makes potentially for a greater unease than that generated by the sixties masters who resisted the manipulation Handke is willing to practice, because the Austrian director combines the vividly violent with the aesthetically aloof. We don’t expect the graphic partly because we have been concentrating on the form, assuming this is chiefly where the unease will reside. But, no Haneke says, it can come in the form and the content: the viewer isn’t only shocked by Majid’s death; we also come to wonder how Majid’s apartment could have been filmed.
There are those who see Haneke’s work as too assertive, too controlling and too condemnatory. In reviewing Code Inconnu very favourably, Adam Nayman says, “One critic whom I respect very much likened Code Unknown… to the handiwork of a misanthropic Zeus, hurtling accusatory thunderbolts without offering any hint as to how change might be properly catalyzed.” (Reverse Shot) Haneke’s work can appear not just doubly impressive in that it utilises shock in both form and content, but all the more manipulative as a consequence. But perhaps we can distinguish between conventional manipulation and the manipulation of convention. An important aspect of millennial cinema, in work by Haneke and von Trier, especially, but also in Lynch’s films and in different ways in Claire Denis’s and Pedro Almodovar’s, is a desire to manipulate on their own terms. The point with conventional manipulation is that is plays into expectation: that the viewer knows when a filmmaker racks focus, we can expect the villain to appear; that when a heroine has gone missing, the building we are shown will likely lead to an interior shot of her being held against her will. There are many, many conventions and, whether they are formal or narrational, one knows what to expect even if there may be a twist in the expectation, and often involves both the style and the story. A person is alone in their room, and we know a killer is on the loose. The film racks focus, but it is only her boyfriend who has arrived back early from a trip.
But what if the filmmaker accepts the importance of controlling the viewer’s perceptions yet feels obliged not just to twist the expectation but counter it, to insist that the viewer isn’t only disturbed by the events shown and wise to the style adopted, but perturbed by it as an aesthetic experience? “I think that film is par excellence the medium of manipulation for spectators, so as a result, it is your obligation as a filmmaker to use that power responsibly. It’s necessary to take the spectator as seriously as you take yourself. Of course”, Haneke says, “mainstream cinema doesn’t do that. Mainstream cinema robs the spectator of the responsibility while fulfilling the desires that they purportedly have.” (Reverse Shot) Some might see in Haneke’s proclamation a high-minded belief that his manipulation is just better than that practised by commercial cinema. However, such a claim would need to admit that Haneke, Von Trier and others are doing something quite different if we return to the quoted scene late in the film where Georges gets out of the car and goes into the house. Surely there is a difference between the expectation the viewer has here and the expectation a viewer has when they assume the rack focus will reveal the villain. In the latter example, the filmmaker assumes the viewer expects the villain and instead gets the boyfriend. The twist is small. Haneke, while actually offering the convention (man gets out of car and enters his house), has created such a distrust in the image that we might find the use of the norm uncanny. This may reside partly in the minute Haneke gives over to the initial shot, but it rests much more on the counter-expectation Haneke has created, where we don’t trust the very status of the image. The image’s status is still intact in our conventional example; only the subject of the shot is a surprise. Haneke, though, has led us to be sceptical about the nature of the very shot itself because a number of earlier moments have been viewed by George as he finds out he has been watched. Is he being watched again? We will assume so, especially when the film’s opening shot resembles this one, and on that occasion, the footage was rewound as George watches to see what is on it.
Imagine if that racked focus made us wonder if the film we are watching also made every other image equally troubling, if that focus-pull became a question about the film’s motives and not just the characters. While the viewer will have little difficulty in saying that the film wanted to tease us with the possibility of the villain’s presence all the better to defuse the threat by showing the boyfriend (who may of course later turn out to be the villain in another rack focus twist near the film’s conclusion), Haneke’s teasing, if this is what it happens to be, is much harder to discern. So difficult in fact that journalist Jason Solomons asked, a while after the film’s release, for some clues, asking the director to alleviate some of the bafflement the viewer was feeling. When asked about the film’s ending where Georges’ son and Majid’s meet, the director said: “Although this scene happens in silence, I did actually write dialogue for it. The actors are actually speaking it, and it might stand as an explanation for some. In any case, that dialogue will never be written in the published screenplay for the film, and I told the actors never to reveal it to anyone.’ Haneke adds, “They are bound to silence forever, and I hope they will have forgotten it by now, because they didn't know when they were shooting it what the significance of the scene might be.” To have offered the dialogue would have revealed the story but removed the enigma, and Hidden’s purpose is to leave the enigma intact, all the better to force the viewer to think about what the story means and what the form is doing.
It is a frustrating principle, perhaps, but one all the better at countering the mainstream, and not simply creating contortions in the narrative offered. How happy one may be with such a cinema will depend partly on how much one sees cinema as about producing narrative answers or asking symptomatic questions. In the complexities of form and content, it doesn’t so much find meaning; it demands we search for it while being traumatised by the content. That may be a directorial insistence some might baulk at. It is also centrally what makes Haneke’s work vitally new.
 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Hidden

Questions of Ambiguity

Thinking of Hidden specifically, and Michael Haneke's work more generally, this Austrian filmmaker, who was born in 1942 and worked for many years in television, before debuting in 1989 witt The Seventh Continent, became around the turn of the century an important chronicler of Europe. Initially the focus was on Austria, in films like Benny's Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronicle of Chance, before he began frequently working out of France, in films like Code Inconnu, Hidden and Amour, or working in Austria but in French, with The Piano Teacher. Often using long-takes and eschewing non-diegetic music, Haneke's films are deemed demanding in several ways. This rests not just on the difficulty of the form, but also on the moral complexity of the subject matter and the representative explicitness of the imagery. It may be the school teen in Benny's Video who kills a classmate, or the two killers who torture and murder a family in Funny Games. Or it might be the ageing death of the central female character in Amour, or Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher, given to acts of self-harm. Like many millennial directors, Haneke is happy with controversy, insisting on confrontation, and determined to find in the shocks he creates a value that is more than the exploitation such strong cinema often suggests.
Hidden is perhaps seen as his masterpiece, a work that includes moments of shock, a play with form, and a social critique. One day, a TV presenter finds a package with a video in it, plays it and wonders who might have sent it. The video shows the outside of the family home being watched over and, in time, the family receives more packages and the father, Georges (Daniel Auteuil), wonders if somehow the packages might be linked to the boy who, when George was young, stayed with Georges’ family. Georges didn’t like this Algerian boy coming into the family home and engineered his removal. Now, many years later, Georges finds Majid in a small council flat on the outskirts of the city and confronts him.
This is the gist of the story, even though it doesn’t begin to describe how the film conveys that information. It opens with what seems like an establishing shot of the family apartment, only for the viewer to hear a voice offscreen and the footage rewound. We aren’t just watching the beginning of the film; we are watching the footage that Georges has received and is now watching. On several occasions through the film, we are watching what we assume is footage that is the film we are watching, only to discover it is footage Georges is watching that has been recorded by someone else. It means that by the film’s conclusion, not only are we unsure what to make of the events within the film (who sent the tapes?), but also the status of the footage we have been viewing.
In a shot near the end, we once again see the outside of the house and Georges pulling up and getting out of the car. We may wonder what we should make of this shot; wonder if someone is filming it, and whether, as with the opening, the footage will be rewound. It isn’t, as Georges goes into the house. We can say with some confidence that this is what Georges does because we see him going up to the front door, and the next shot shows George going into the apartment. Most films take these shots for granted, but Hidden has consistently forced us to question that confidence. Usually, the filmmaker establishes the shot, and cuts again to a character inside the building it has shown us. Most of the time, there is no reason to wonder whether the shots follow each other, and the viewer assumes they do so unless given a good enough reason to doubt their association. It is what a cinema of continuity and cohesion insists upon; the viewer allows their mind to accept the connections, even if that link between an exterior shot of a building and an interior shot of someone in a sitting room, needn’t be linked at all.
In this instance, Handke makes the link strong indeed: the viewer sees Georges in long-shot getting out of his car, going to his front door, and we hear the turning of the lock before it cuts to a reverse shot of Georges entering his home. There is great coherence between one image and the next, but at the same time, let us ponder for a moment on the establishing shot in this scene. Why is it held for so long? It would be enough to show Georges getting out of the car and going to his door, but Handke holds this initial shot for a minute when only a few seconds would have been required. Handke clearly wants us to recall the opening scene, and leaves us musing over whether this is taped footage too. Part of the trick it plays with us is that it isn’t, or at least isn’t revealed to be. Haneke has retrained our perceptual faculties, allowing us to assume that the shot needs to be called into question rather than safely assumed. The director owes a debt clearly to Godard, Resnais, Bergman and Antonioni, who often insisted that the image needs to viewed with some vigilance, and also to Brecht, of course, as Haneke expects emotion at the same time this emotion is contested by the form. The viewer will be shocked when Majid (Maurice Banichou) commits suicide, and shocked by various murders in Benny’s Video and Funny Games. But there must be, within the shock in Handke’s work, a thought that tempers it, or a technique that questions it. It makes potentially for a greater unease than that generated by the sixties masters who resisted the manipulation Handke is willing to practice, because the Austrian director combines the vividly violent with the aesthetically aloof. We don’t expect the graphic partly because we have been concentrating on the form, assuming this is chiefly where the unease will reside. But, no Haneke says, it can come in the form and the content: the viewer isn’t only shocked by Majid’s death; we also come to wonder how Majid’s apartment could have been filmed.
There are those who see Haneke’s work as too assertive, too controlling and too condemnatory. In reviewing Code Inconnu very favourably, Adam Nayman says, “One critic whom I respect very much likened Code Unknown… to the handiwork of a misanthropic Zeus, hurtling accusatory thunderbolts without offering any hint as to how change might be properly catalyzed.” (Reverse Shot) Haneke’s work can appear not just doubly impressive in that it utilises shock in both form and content, but all the more manipulative as a consequence. But perhaps we can distinguish between conventional manipulation and the manipulation of convention. An important aspect of millennial cinema, in work by Haneke and von Trier, especially, but also in Lynch’s films and in different ways in Claire Denis’s and Pedro Almodovar’s, is a desire to manipulate on their own terms. The point with conventional manipulation is that is plays into expectation: that the viewer knows when a filmmaker racks focus, we can expect the villain to appear; that when a heroine has gone missing, the building we are shown will likely lead to an interior shot of her being held against her will. There are many, many conventions and, whether they are formal or narrational, one knows what to expect even if there may be a twist in the expectation, and often involves both the style and the story. A person is alone in their room, and we know a killer is on the loose. The film racks focus, but it is only her boyfriend who has arrived back early from a trip.
But what if the filmmaker accepts the importance of controlling the viewer’s perceptions yet feels obliged not just to twist the expectation but counter it, to insist that the viewer isn’t only disturbed by the events shown and wise to the style adopted, but perturbed by it as an aesthetic experience? “I think that film is par excellence the medium of manipulation for spectators, so as a result, it is your obligation as a filmmaker to use that power responsibly. It’s necessary to take the spectator as seriously as you take yourself. Of course”, Haneke says, “mainstream cinema doesn’t do that. Mainstream cinema robs the spectator of the responsibility while fulfilling the desires that they purportedly have.” (Reverse Shot) Some might see in Haneke’s proclamation a high-minded belief that his manipulation is just better than that practised by commercial cinema. However, such a claim would need to admit that Haneke, Von Trier and others are doing something quite different if we return to the quoted scene late in the film where Georges gets out of the car and goes into the house. Surely there is a difference between the expectation the viewer has here and the expectation a viewer has when they assume the rack focus will reveal the villain. In the latter example, the filmmaker assumes the viewer expects the villain and instead gets the boyfriend. The twist is small. Haneke, while actually offering the convention (man gets out of car and enters his house), has created such a distrust in the image that we might find the use of the norm uncanny. This may reside partly in the minute Haneke gives over to the initial shot, but it rests much more on the counter-expectation Haneke has created, where we don’t trust the very status of the image. The image’s status is still intact in our conventional example; only the subject of the shot is a surprise. Haneke, though, has led us to be sceptical about the nature of the very shot itself because a number of earlier moments have been viewed by George as he finds out he has been watched. Is he being watched again? We will assume so, especially when the film’s opening shot resembles this one, and on that occasion, the footage was rewound as George watches to see what is on it.
Imagine if that racked focus made us wonder if the film we are watching also made every other image equally troubling, if that focus-pull became a question about the film’s motives and not just the characters. While the viewer will have little difficulty in saying that the film wanted to tease us with the possibility of the villain’s presence all the better to defuse the threat by showing the boyfriend (who may of course later turn out to be the villain in another rack focus twist near the film’s conclusion), Haneke’s teasing, if this is what it happens to be, is much harder to discern. So difficult in fact that journalist Jason Solomons asked, a while after the film’s release, for some clues, asking the director to alleviate some of the bafflement the viewer was feeling. When asked about the film’s ending where Georges’ son and Majid’s meet, the director said: “Although this scene happens in silence, I did actually write dialogue for it. The actors are actually speaking it, and it might stand as an explanation for some. In any case, that dialogue will never be written in the published screenplay for the film, and I told the actors never to reveal it to anyone.’ Haneke adds, “They are bound to silence forever, and I hope they will have forgotten it by now, because they didn't know when they were shooting it what the significance of the scene might be.” To have offered the dialogue would have revealed the story but removed the enigma, and Hidden’s purpose is to leave the enigma intact, all the better to force the viewer to think about what the story means and what the form is doing.
It is a frustrating principle, perhaps, but one all the better at countering the mainstream, and not simply creating contortions in the narrative offered. How happy one may be with such a cinema will depend partly on how much one sees cinema as about producing narrative answers or asking symptomatic questions. In the complexities of form and content, it doesn’t so much find meaning; it demands we search for it while being traumatised by the content. That may be a directorial insistence some might baulk at. It is also centrally what makes Haneke’s work vitally new.
 

© Tony McKibbin