9 good things about '10: #6 - old Michael Haneke movies
Dear Werner Herzog,
Let me start this by saying: I still love you. Your bizarre, nihilistic films have been the highlights of plenty of previous years, especially Grizzly Man which remains one of my favourite pieces of cinema. You did really well this year too. The Bad Lieutenant was enormous fun and My Son My Son What Have Ye Done was… well, it was very interesting.
What I’m saying is that you’ll always been my favourite insane, visionary German auteur. But… I don’t know how to say this… I’ve met someone else.
His name is Michael. He’s not quite German (he’s Austrian, but historically that’s not always been an issue). He has a nice beard. He’s been making films for a long time too, but somehow I’ve managed to miss them all. I didn’t think that I would like them much because they all sounded like the kind of unnecessarily bleak European artcore that I really can’t be bothered with. Also his English-language remake of his own Funny Games sounded pretty awful.
But then one night, I found myself home alone one night. You weren’t there, I was a little bored, it was late. I put on Haneke’s 2005 movie Caché. It was just a movie, it didn’t mean anything. At least that’s what I kept telling myself. But as the days went by, I realised that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The way the story was told was something that I had never seen before. Blurring the lines between film and CCTV, between dream and reality. So simple yet so ingenious. He makes the audience part of the movie. To observe a Haneke movie is to be part of it, in a way that no other director can achieve.
And I know I wasn’t the only one haunted by the maddeningly enigmatic ending of Caché: 2010 started with Roger Ebert breathlessly announcing that he had finally cracked the riddle, only to later admit that he was still as baffled as the rest of us. I came out of Inception saying, “it was okay, but the ending wasn’t quite as annoying as Caché”.
Maybe nothing would have come of this if it hadn’t been for The White Ribbon. God, Werner, It’s s pretty. It’s beautiful and yet so horrible. He’s like a coroner performing an autopsy, slowly slicing and dissecting his subject until he finds the diseased part of it. The White Ribbon is one of the finest examinations of evil ever made. And at the end of it, I knew Michael Haneke was the one for me.
You’ll always be in my heart, Werner, and I hope that we can stay close. Why don’t you spend more time with your new friend Nicholas Cage? You seem to be the only person who can help him right now.
Love always,
Bernard
Let me start this by saying: I still love you. Your bizarre, nihilistic films have been the highlights of plenty of previous years, especially Grizzly Man which remains one of my favourite pieces of cinema. You did really well this year too. The Bad Lieutenant was enormous fun and My Son My Son What Have Ye Done was… well, it was very interesting.
What I’m saying is that you’ll always been my favourite insane, visionary German auteur. But… I don’t know how to say this… I’ve met someone else.
His name is Michael. He’s not quite German (he’s Austrian, but historically that’s not always been an issue). He has a nice beard. He’s been making films for a long time too, but somehow I’ve managed to miss them all. I didn’t think that I would like them much because they all sounded like the kind of unnecessarily bleak European artcore that I really can’t be bothered with. Also his English-language remake of his own Funny Games sounded pretty awful.
But then one night, I found myself home alone one night. You weren’t there, I was a little bored, it was late. I put on Haneke’s 2005 movie Caché. It was just a movie, it didn’t mean anything. At least that’s what I kept telling myself. But as the days went by, I realised that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The way the story was told was something that I had never seen before. Blurring the lines between film and CCTV, between dream and reality. So simple yet so ingenious. He makes the audience part of the movie. To observe a Haneke movie is to be part of it, in a way that no other director can achieve.
And I know I wasn’t the only one haunted by the maddeningly enigmatic ending of Caché: 2010 started with Roger Ebert breathlessly announcing that he had finally cracked the riddle, only to later admit that he was still as baffled as the rest of us. I came out of Inception saying, “it was okay, but the ending wasn’t quite as annoying as Caché”.
Maybe nothing would have come of this if it hadn’t been for The White Ribbon. God, Werner, It’s s pretty. It’s beautiful and yet so horrible. He’s like a coroner performing an autopsy, slowly slicing and dissecting his subject until he finds the diseased part of it. The White Ribbon is one of the finest examinations of evil ever made. And at the end of it, I knew Michael Haneke was the one for me.
You’ll always be in my heart, Werner, and I hope that we can stay close. Why don’t you spend more time with your new friend Nicholas Cage? You seem to be the only person who can help him right now.
Love always,
Bernard