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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810134591 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2017 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
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Michael Haneke
The Intermedial Void
By Christopher Rowe
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3460-7
CHAPTER 1
The Non-Image:
Der siebente Kontinent
In his monograph Michael Haneke, Peter Brunette refers to Der siebente Kontinent as the director's "first feature-length film made for theatrical distribution." This ungainly description underscores the fact that Haneke had already been a writer and director of television movies for over fifteen years before releasing his remarkably assured cinematic debut. In fact, there is no clear demarcation between Haneke's career as a director for television and as a cineast, as he continued to make movies for Austrian television after the release of Der siebente Kontinent, writing and directing three feature-length television productions in the 1990s — Nachruf für einen Mörder (Obituary for a Murderer; 1991), Die Rebellion (The Rebellion; 1993), and Das Schloß (The Castle; 1997) — as well as a television production of his theatrical staging of Mozart's Cosí fan tutti (2013). In all, if one counts his two-part TV movie Lemminge (Lemmings; 1979) as a single work, Haneke directed twenty-two features between 1974 and 2014: eleven of them for television and eleven for the cinema. Of the television works only Das Schloß, the adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel, was subsequently released theatrically and purportedly against Haneke's wishes. Thus, even if I had limited the scope of my study of the director's work to include only his theatrical releases — which would be akin to omitting most of Dekalog from a study of Krzysztof Kieslowski or Twin Peaks from a study of David Lynch — I would have faced a problem specific to Haneke. Many of the director's films implicitly or explicitly invoke a critique of television, a medium that, in his words, contributes to a widespread social "crisis" centered around "our collective loss of reality and social disorientation." Yet Haneke's early development as a filmmaker is inextricably tied to his television productions. While there is no reason to consider Haneke's televisual works as substantially different from his films in a narrative or thematic sense, at issue is the aesthetic orientation and technical disposition of television as opposed to film and the perceptual intersections and deviations the director has derived from these oppositions. It is this fundamental aesthetic divergence that Haneke alludes to when he clearly characterizes cinema as a veritable potential art form and television (as well as its ally, commercial cinema) as a tool of distraction and distortion of reality. Haneke frequently makes comments to this effect in interviews: "[C]inema still has the capacity, I think, to let us experience the world anew"; "What you see on the [television] screen is enough to make you very depressed!"; "TV films ... can never really do what a theatrical movie can do."
Haneke's shift toward cinema may have been motivated by considerations other than aesthetic preference, though. In his 2007 New York Times profile of Haneke, John Wray notes that Der siebente Kontinent was developed as a theatrical feature "only after having been rejected by a German television station." Wray goes on to speculate that this rejection was likely due to the film's depressing story line, which chronicles the daily lives of a family of three — father, mother, and young daughter — who in the film's final act systematically destroy all of their material possessions and commit group suicide. Whatever the reason for the switch to a different medium, the origins of the production are telling with regard to the film's unique style, which combines visual tropes and accelerated editing derived from television programs and commercials with decidedly cinematic techniques such as long takes and the minimization of dialogue. Television, however, also takes root in the image system of the film itself as an entity that informs the means through which the viewer engages with the film, and as an entity that defines the interactions between the characters and their narrative milieu. This reading of Der siebente Kontinent — which runs somewhat counter to Haneke's statement that the film is less concerned with "the phenomenon of television" than later films like Benny's Video and Funny Games — posits a deep internal disjunction wherein the film image and television's audiovisual output actively undermine each other's primacy as signaletic material. In other words, from the outset of his career as a filmmaker, Haneke incorporated the intermedial difference between television and film into his very mode of expression at a fundamental level. The incommensurability between these two media additionally contributes to one of the most overt thematic concerns in Der siebente Kontinent and in Haneke's later films; one that Roy Grundmann aptly refers to as "a pervasive crisis of vision" that manifests itself through both the relationships between the characters and their presentation to the viewer. The TV signal, in its opposition to the film image, represents both a source of this crisis and its external manifestation, a perceptual black hole indexing the intermedial void between televisual and cinematic regimes of representation.
The term "non-image" is employed in this chapter to describe essential aspects of Der siebente Kontinent's image system, including its depictions of television. This word choice is not meant to imply that the "animated poster" of the Australian beach, the television screen, or the black-screen "spacers" that punctuate the film lack affective or signifying power. On the contrary, even when filled with total blackness and silence the screen continues to signify, to command attention and invite affective suture, and to retain the pressure of preceding and anticipated image percepts. However, it is ultimately impossible to situate the spacers, the poster image, and television itself within the parameters of the film's mimesis. Each remains, albeit in a different way, unaccountable as an element of cinematic representation. Yet the designation "non-image" is also not meant to suggest a specifically dialectical relation between two distinct forms of image production. The term is instead intended to highlight Haneke's staging of profoundly different audiovisual phenomena that introduce gaps or voids into the film's perceptual field. These gaps arise from the absolute incongruency of image and non-image — the fact that, despite their exhibition on a single screen in a common time frame, they seem to belong not just to different films but also to completely different systems, or media, of expression. The employment of these antonyms will index the degree to which Haneke's use of intermediality reflects a profound absence that is unrepresentable via conventional cinematic imagery alone. In a thematic sense, then, the non-image indicates the pervasive sense of loss, particularly loss of vision, with which the lives of the characters are imbued and the acts of destruction and suicide that constitute the characters' final (and perhaps only possible) actualization of this loss. The perceptual and affective crisis initiated by the intermedial void in Der siebente Kontinent, which culminates in the use of television during the film's final scene, thus denotes a state of affairs that impinges upon — and ultimately comes to define — the audiovisual fields of the characters and spectators alike.
Non-Image One: Long Cuts
In Michael Haneke's Cinema: The Ethic of the Image, Catherine Wheatley refers to "a binary image system operating within [Der siebente Kontinent], a system linked to questions of time." She identifies the two parts of this binary as "episodes" and "moments": the former are the longer and more developed sequences that retain a sense of narrative coherence, though they remain largely hermetic with respect to one another; the latter are the fragmentary shots that "are without explanation, often without dialogue, and which seemingly have no internal narrative structure." While Wheatley's attention to narrative leads her to focus on the temporal aspects of this image system, another clear differentiating characteristic emerges in the spatial dimensions of each type of scene. The "episodes" offer somewhat conventional framing, while the "moments" tend to depict objects in close-up, typically when they are being used to perform rote or repetitive actions, without including establishing shots of the situations or countershots of the faces of those performing these actions. Along with recalling a mode of framing used by Robert Bresson, most notably in Pickpocket (1959), the accelerated cutting and the close-ups of hands, feet, and objects that characterize these "moments" are intended to evoke televisual montage and framing, particularly that of TV advertising. Haneke himself makes this association clear:
From an aesthetic standpoint, much of the film could be said to resemble television advertising. I have many reservations about television, but saw a use for its style here. If The Seventh Continent had been made for television it would have failed totally in my view. But in the cinematic setting, a close-up of shoes or a doorknob takes on a far different sense than a similar shot in TV, where that style is the norm. This was a very conscious choice, since I wanted to convey not just images of objects but the objectification of life.
This comment regarding the presumable failure of the film's aesthetic impact had it been produced for television is telling: it identifies the stylistic mode of such "moments" as one of high irony, the use of such televisual tropes highlighting the very disparity between the spatiotemporal dimensions of television and those of the film image. The influence of the accelerated rhythms of television on popular film (including that of the hyperaccelerated rhythms of music videos) has long and often been acknowledged. In The Medium is the Massage (1967), for instance, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore point out that then-recent films such as A Hard Day's Night (1964) and What's New Pussycat? (1965) "would [have] prove[d] unacceptable as mass audience films if the audience had not been preconditioned by television commericals to abrupt zooms, elliptical editing, no story lines, flash cuts." Der siebente Kontinent, however, only relays such televisual tropes in order to estrange them internally through their juxtaposition to profoundly anti-televisual techniques: namely the long take and the "long cut."
As Raymond Williams asserts in his influential study Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), television is best conceived of not as a medium for the ordered transmission of discrete units of text but rather as a "planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence [advertisements], so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real 'broadcasting.'" In other words, the program one is viewing — whether news, sports, sitcom, or soap opera — is inseparable from the commercial advertising blocks interspersed throughout the transmission in a supplemental flow, and the interruption of either flow is anathema to the medium. Haneke's use of the art-cinematic aesthetic of long takes, which linger on scenes of little or no movement or rote repetitive action, is thus overtly oppositional to the rhythms and temporalities typical of television even as it references other aspects of the medium. Taken together, these different series — "episodes" and "moments" — constitute an arrhythmic internal flow as well as a seemingly self-divided aesthetic, both of which challenge the expectations of viewers accustomed to such modes of expression only as independent phenomena. Even before the television screen itself enters the picture, then, Der siebente Kontinent has admitted the televisual into its image system, if only to establish a mutual subversion of the modes of spatiotemporal and spectatorial engagement proper to each medium.
Even more profoundly oppositional to televisual flow (and to the continuity of cinematic montage as well), however, is the director's use of "spacers" — moments in which the screen cuts to black and the audio goes silent. Along with being the most obviously identifiable non-images proffered by the film — Libby Saxton, for instance, uses the specific term "non-images" in reference to these blackout shots — the recurrent spacers further complexify the film's audiovisual field, utilizing black screens and silence not simply as gaps or bridges between sounds and pictures but as productive signaletic material with specific thematic implications. While Haneke would go on to use such spacers in his later films 71 Fragmente and Code inconnu as well, they serve a distinctly different function in Der siebente Kontinent. To begin with, 71 Fragmente and Code inconnu both use spacers of a uniform duration, two seconds each, suggesting that they follow a definable rhythm that is largely independent from the scenes they separate. The black screen time in the former film demarcates the titular fragments and enforces their disconnectedness; this effect of fragmentation applies to the latter film as well, though in Code inconnu the spacers also function to draw attention to the single-take presentation of most of its scenes by making each cut palpable. In Der siebente Kontinent, however, the spacers are employed not only between but also within scenes, and their durations are variable — from less than one second to several seconds in length. Wheatley assumes that "the spacers in Der siebente Kontinent were cut in proportion to the length of each 'scene' ... so the spacer is longer at the end of a longer episode, very short at the end of a brief moment," but this is not correct. A very short scene is at times followed by a spacer of several seconds, while longer scenes are often followed by brief spacers. Rather than transitioning between the film's narrative-temporal blocks, then, the spacers seem to institute gaps within the film's audiovisual field itself. What, then, do these gaps signify, and what is the purpose of their variation?
Haneke himself states that the duration of each of the spacers — which he refers to as "black shots" — "corresponded to the depth of the preceding scene. If there was a lot to think about in the sequence, I made the black last longer." In this consideration, the suspension of the audiovisual assumes the potential to negotiate a temporary space for spectatorial self-reflection. Haneke's comment suggests that the black screens are fields for the mental afterimages of the preceding scenes, the absence of on-screen images forcing an introspective component into the film's reception that mitigates the unceasing flow of image-percepts experienced in the act of film viewership. This interpretation bears a close resemblance to the model proposed by Raymond Bellour in "The Pensive Spectator" (1984), though Bellour applies this mode of reception to still photographic images inserted into film, the insertions thereby achieving "effects of suspension, freezing, reflexivity, effects which enable the spectator to reflect on what he/she is seeing." In Bellour's view, still images serve to activate in the spectator an awareness of filmic temporality by halting its expression through movement: "[The photographs'] relative stillness tempers the 'hysteria' of the film. ... Though drawn more deeply into the flow of the film, the spectator is simultaneously able to reflect on it with a maximum of intensity." The spacers, however, do not simply suspend movement within the film image through the insertion of a materially and temporally different medium (the photograph) but rather temporarily negate the presence of the imagery itself. Libby Saxton thus goes a step further in her analysis of the function of the spacers, seeing them less as fields for reflexive spectatorship than as means for the temporary disavowal of film's audiovisuality; in effect they are almost an antimedium: "The temporarily empty, dark screen implies an ethical gesture of refusal, a withdrawal from the ubiquitous 'visuel' and its regime of permanent visibility. Like the televisual snow which terminates the flow of images in Der siebente Kontinent, the repeated interruption of the image chain in Code inconnu disrupts those processes of bodily sense-making on which cinema habitually relies." The connection made by Saxton between the static-filled television screen and the spacers is significant, as both function as a sort of representational negative space or vacuum in relation to the film image, imposing themselves directly on the image system at a fundamental perceptual level.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Michael Haneke by Christopher Rowe. Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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