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I haven't seen his work. Austria's Michael Haneke ("Funny Games") shows in his first dramatic effort a real skill in searching out the most frightening of situations and then exploiting them, unmercifully.
A rather boring couple with a typical young daughter go about their quotidian, monotonous routines until one day hardly different from all the others an unimaginable tragedy occurs.
This film is highly disturbing, though it has no gore or torture or any of those blood-soaked scenes which today are all too common. Haneke creates fear and dread in the viewer long before anything shocking transpires. When finally it does, the horror is magnified by the ordinariness surrounding it.
Be warned that Haneke's style is highly idiosyncratic with scenes ending in abrupt cuts to black. He also wastes no time in attempting to explain or having his characters provide reasons for their behavior.
The film is based on a true story, which makes it all the more terrible.
Follow Ups:
Benny's Video. A devastating examination of emotional detachment. Not a trace of irony. This one with a quiet, highly surprising denouement.I sat for two hours with my heart thumping doubletime in my throat.
Haneke is among the best.
For creepier watch Gaspar Noe. His "I Stand Alone" is perverse but worthy. For the tough-minded only. A bit of a different butcher than Chabrol's.
Edits: 12/03/08
shock, alone. I really can't intellectualize it, my emotional reaction was negative. Too much so to find reasons to praise any part of it. Haneke doesn't seem to hate humanity but rather to be examining it like some scientist. Noe seems sadistic, to make films purposefully to disturb for that sake alone. There, I contradicted myself.......
No question, it's awfully difficult for a "sane" person to appreciate. Who, then, is he making them for, the "insane"? That thinking has nowhere to go.
Noe is an artist of the absurd, absent humor and sympathy, his work showing scant love except in the sheer making of it. Perversity is laid out perversely, yet honorably.
I think his aim is the same as Haneke's. To shine light on something deeply personal. One can certainly argue relative success.
Noe's butcher is little different from Benny, he's just more stupid and crude. Less able to be creative. They're both natives (and prisoners) of that realm of evil not chosen (actually aren't we all, to some extent). Both are mad but only in the eyes of the fit observer. Inside their world there is a normalcy of one. They live.
How is it that one is so repelled by some particular behavior of another? It's because we recognize our own capacity for it. If that weren't the case, the objectionable behavior would pass unseen.
The degree of revulsion or rejection one feels for the acts (or depictions) of another is a measure of..............what? Normalcy, morality, goodness?
Noe is difficult but, he too, lives.
it's just that it is beyond mine.
I don't know about your explanation for revulsion. I really cannot picture myself taking part in the Holocaust or other such acts.
It's not that they shock me it's that they're so deliberative, purposeful, vindictive, and pointless.
Like all people, I have my horrific personal thoughts but I think the explanation for disliking Noe is simpler than that.
Not particularly. And I prefer Haneke of the two.I was saying I am open to expanding my understanding of art as a reflection of personal nature, even deeper perversity. I don't run away from it because it is difficult. I take Noe at his word that he is seriously exploring, in his own way, the same territory as Haneke - contemporary human condition.
Is Noe's butcher any more repellent than the monster in Vampyr, which I've seen you praise here? What is your standard of sympathy/antipathy for film? Mine is: Is the tale well told? I don't avoid art/film because I fear it will reduce me by raising problematic emotions. Quite the contrary.
Your Holocaust remarks notwithstanding, of course you know there is ample legitimate evidence to support a contention that you have it in you to perform the most heinous acts given conducive personal circumstances. That is precisely the case that both Noe and Haneke are making.
Edits: 12/04/08 12/04/08
to give a reason whereas Noe just depicts incredible violence and hatred. We sit and watch, like some spectator outside numbly watching and not interceding in some prolonged violent assault.
We all know the depths of human behavior, we have seen it. Merely to show it, therefore, isn't intellectually rigorous, demanding. It is easy. I'd argue art never can be. Noe's films don't challenge the viewer, unless it is to sit still for the visual assault. We are victimized as much as the character and I, frankly, don' like the feeling.
"Vamypr" is highly stylized and the violence serves the purpose of the story. All crimes are different and, yet, the same. Noe only shows the latter fact.
... for no apparent reason, no easily understood reason. In real life.
How will the observer ever understand seeming meaningless acts of destruction if the protagonist himself doesn't? Somewhere there is that germ of motivation, that intersection of action and "reason" however demented it may be.
The film artist, as imaginative thinker/creator is as capable, maybe even more so, as the scientist in plumbing unknown depths of human behavior. In the simple showing of it, in exposing it in honest, cinematic ways the filmmaker gives opportunity for the viewer to expand on the original imagination.
It may be that the artist who produces easily accessible work is the one doing the greater disservice to his most ambitious viewer. His ideal viewer?
Noe has discipline. He shows so much and no more. What is HIS standard for sympathy/antipathy? Is he gauging his work with viewer tolerances in mind or is he just masturbating.
Giving him credit for artistic restraint/management in any degree requires one to take him seriously. Not only a masturbator, a shockmeister. One must then ask where is the artistic relationship between violence and service to story, not if it exists at all.
Who is the more meaningful artist? The one who produces the piece with readymade reasoning or the one who provokes broader opportunities for insight not otherwise available if the showing were never made, however perverse?
I doubt Noe is so crude an artist that he wants simply to shock. What about someone like Damien Hirst?
preserve them for viewing. ;-)
It's hard to explain why Noe is exploitive and Haneke isn't. It's like pornography and the old definition: you know it when you see it.
it really lets you into the mind of a mad man, and could not watch Noe's Irreversable it was too terrible
thanks
Phil
Irreversible was just too much for me, as well. I watched a good deal of it on fast forward.
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