Haneke's Take on Inner Violence

Seems we’re not the only ones without the appetite for Haneke.

An interview between Lawrence Chua and Michael Haneke starts with the sentence: “After seeing my first Michael Haneke film, I left the theater sick to my stomach.”



The violence in his films, La Pianiste at the forefront of my mind here, stands out the most. Violence against others, violence against the self, violence as an expression of love, of confusion, of feeling lost – violence as the only true form of expression.

One of his other films, Benny’s Video, contains themes of violent imagery obsession and a disconnect from any moral sense of reality. I found this, also, to be true in La Pianiste. The main character had long since been dreaming of being beaten up, and was a self-proclaimed personage of no emotions. This disconnect from her emotions probably is what drove her to such lengths as cutting herself (which was a horrendously greusome scene, I might add), and eventually stabbing herself in the heart.
Quite the literal metaphor.
I obviously haven’t checked out the majority of Haneke’s films. But if this turns out to be a frequently recurrent set of themes (as I have a hankering it is), it makes me wonder if Haneke himself was in a similar state of mind.

He brings up a German expression, “destroy the things that have destroyed you,” even though it turns out that they have built those things themselves. This German tendency to self destruction is personified in the character of Erika, the piano teacher. Through her, Haneke is exposing a darker part of the German character than just the collective propensity to fascism –he is exposing the darkness within the individual.

Side note for Ashley: Haneke mentions in this interview that he thinks that the piano is often used to hide the flaws in a film.