THE PIANO TEACHER SCREENING

"There is an old saying:  Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it. THE PIANO TEACHER has a more ominous lesson:  Be especially careful with someone who has asked for you."
-Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN TIMES

"Once one expereinces Mr. Haneke's own sadistic tendencies toward his audience, one is left with a sour taste in one's mouth, and little else."
-Andrew Sarris, NEW YORK OBSERVER

"Retraint is this movie's mystery and its miracle. No matter how gruesom it is, mercifully, it's always holding back."
-Wesley Morris, BOSTON GLOBE

Suggested Secondary Screenings:  BELLE DU JOUR (Luis Bunuel, 1967) and THE NIGHT PORTER (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

HANEKE SHORT -- LUMIERE AND COMPANY

Here is a selection from the omnibus film LUMIERE AND COMPANY (Multiple Directors, 1995) from Michael Haneke.  The film celebrates the centennial anniversary of the Lumiere Brothers' first film by asking 40 internationally renowned directors, such as David Lynch (BLUE VELVET, MULHOLLAND DR.), Spike Lee (CLOCKERS, INSIDE MAN), Zhang Yimou (HERO, RAISE THE RED LANTERN), and Michael Haneke (FUNNY GAMES, CACHE), to make a short film using the Lumieres' first camera.  Each film could not exceed 52 seconds, use synchronized sound, utilize more than three takes.  The process and result yields some interesting comments on the nature of cinema and the parallels between the Lumiere Brothers and contemporary filmmakers.  Haneke manages to touch on many of his own interests involving media, violence, and spectatorship in a much more condensed version.

CACHE ASSIGNMENT

"CACHE encourages us to look -- and then to look harder."

-Robert Denerstein, DENVER ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

"Contraian that he is, Haneke does a much finer job forcing questions than providing an answer."

-Lisa Kennedy, DENVER POST

"I pity the French Cinema because it has no money.  I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas." 

-Jean-Luc Godard

The lack of resolution in CACHE can be maddening and exhilarating in equal doses.  Either way, it would be difficult to argue that its lack of resolution is not premeditated and appropriate for the subject matter.  This is a two part assignment developed from the above quotes.  The first part:  after watching the movie determine who you think is sending the videos with your reasoning.  The second part comes from the purposed remake of CACHE, once rumored to be directed by Ron Howard.  Just write a short paragraph explaining what changes you think might be made to make CACHE a Hollywood film or a Ron Howard film.  Feel free to to take this in whatever direction you would like, you could even write out a description of a scene you think might be added or comment on what you think would be removed from the film.  This is just an opportunity to creatively explore some of the specifics and ambiguities of the film.  DUE 2.10.11-THURSDAY.

CACHE SCREENING

"But that word, 'fear' -- a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess -- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer.  Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate:  the abject."

-Julia Kristeva, POWERS OF HORROR

Before remaking his own FUNNY GAMES, Michael Haneke made CACHE, his masterful French thriller about repression, memory, and guilt.  The Laurents, a bourgeois family, become terrorized by anonymous surveillance videos of their home.  Operating both inside and outside the genre of the thriller, Haneke creates an aura of suspense and hanging dread by constantly playing against audience expectations.  Metaphorical and meta-cinema, CACHE avoids easy answers and provides spectators numerous avenues of exploration and investigation. 

Suggested Supplemental Screenings:  BENNY'S VIDEO (Haneke, 1992), LOST HIGHWAY (David Lynch, 1997), and HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (Alain Resnais, 1959).

FUNNY GAMES SCREENING

The secondary screening will be Michael Haneke's FUNNY GAMES US (2007).  Considered by some to be a brilliant treatise on violence, media, and entertainment and others as intolerable cruelty, FUNNY GAMES is shocking and cerebral.  The film delves into the inherent blood lust of the cinema and reflects the spectators own perverse desires to see violence.  In many ways Haneke's film has been seen as a critique of violence in American cinema, which is ironic considering this a shot for shot remake of his original FUNNY GAMES (1997).  An interesting possibility for analysis might be too look at the FUNNY GAMES as a European Art Film and THE STRANGERS (Bertino, 2008) as both have similar content, yet remarkably different form.  As far as remaking his own film, Haneke is in good company.  Alfred Hitchcock remade himself in THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934 and 1956).  Evoking numerous films and stories of violence Haneke touches on everything from Tom and Jerry cartoons to the famous Leopold and Loeb case.

Suggested Supplemental Screenings:  ROPE (Hitchcock, 1948), COMPULSION (Fleischer, 1959), SWOON (Kalin, 1992).  All based on the media sensation and murders of the Leopold and Loeb case.  These films, like FUNNY GAMES, perhaps link sexual desires, especially repressed desires, to violent and destructive behavior.