Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)
And speaking of films that are both radical in subject and format.......Michael Haneke is a godsend to radical cinema. I've only become a Haneke admirer in the last 6 months or so, but I'm thrilled that I finally got around to discovering him. Now I'm playing catch-up.
Funny Games is a treatise on the uses off cinematic violence. There is no plot in the traditional sense, and the characters are more like archetypes than fleshed-out attempts at charaterization. The entire film is set up to force the audience to confront our own role and complicity in screen depictions of violence and how we as an audio-visual culture crave and demand acts of violence. Not an easy thing to realize, much less make a film about.
Considering that the theme of the film is cinematic violence, it is relatively free of violent acts. The nature of the film itself is violent and disturbing, but in an act of sheer genius, the only straight depiction of the kind of movie violence that we're so used to seeing is given to the audience as an example of how much we crave it and how easily we are manipulated into rooting for more violence.
Nevertheless, the whole time I watched the film, my entire body was gripped by tension. My muscles were tight and I was quite uncomfortable as both I and the characters in the film were subjected to "funny games," both by the on-screen tormentors and by Haneke himself as chief tormentor/manipulator.
Amazing film, check it out. Just don't pick it up when you're in the mood for some light viewing with a bowl of popcorn on a Friday night or what-have-you.
Funny Games is a treatise on the uses off cinematic violence. There is no plot in the traditional sense, and the characters are more like archetypes than fleshed-out attempts at charaterization. The entire film is set up to force the audience to confront our own role and complicity in screen depictions of violence and how we as an audio-visual culture crave and demand acts of violence. Not an easy thing to realize, much less make a film about.
Considering that the theme of the film is cinematic violence, it is relatively free of violent acts. The nature of the film itself is violent and disturbing, but in an act of sheer genius, the only straight depiction of the kind of movie violence that we're so used to seeing is given to the audience as an example of how much we crave it and how easily we are manipulated into rooting for more violence.
Nevertheless, the whole time I watched the film, my entire body was gripped by tension. My muscles were tight and I was quite uncomfortable as both I and the characters in the film were subjected to "funny games," both by the on-screen tormentors and by Haneke himself as chief tormentor/manipulator.
Amazing film, check it out. Just don't pick it up when you're in the mood for some light viewing with a bowl of popcorn on a Friday night or what-have-you.