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Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

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A Post-Humanist Moralist
Robert Sinnerbrink
a a

Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, North Ryde, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia Available online: 04 Jan 2012

To cite this article: Robert Sinnerbrink (2011): A Post-Humanist Moralist, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 16:4, 115-129 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.641350

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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities volume 16 number 4 December 2011

In all of my films, I always strive to be a humanist. In my view, if you are seriously interested in art, there just isnt any other way . . . An art form devoid of humanism is a contradiction, it does not exist.

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Michael Haneke, Interview with Serge Toubiana, Time of the Wolf, DVD (Madman Films, 2003)

successful bourgeois family decides to destroy all of their material possessions and then to kill themselves; an alienated fifteen-yearold boy, obsessed with violent video imagery, kills a shy girl he has just befriended in order to see what it was like; a quiet young student, interested in philosophy and a keen table tennis player, opens fire in a bank after failing to obtain cash from a nearby ATM; a wealthy family holidaying in their summer home is terrorised by two polite, preppy killers, whose senseless cruelty has no other aim than confronting spectators with their own consumption of violence. These four scenarios by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke from his films The Seventh Continent [Der siebente Kontinent] (1989), Bennys Video (1992), 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance [71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls] (1994) and Funny Games (1997/2007) might suggest to some the work of a cinematic nihilist or cynical provocateur. Given their disturbing subject-matter, alienating aesthetic, and lack of moral resolution, his films, so some critics argue, lack humanity from a moral point of view, and so fail as humanistic works of art from an aesthetic point of view.1 For others, they exploit the nihilism of a media-saturated culture, indulging in a dubious manipulation of audience expectations and our fascination with violence;2 or else they present a resignatory pseudo-political treatment

robert sinnerbrink A POST-HUMANIST MORALIST michael hanekes cine matic critique

of contemporary social and political issues transfigured through an anachronistic modernist aesthetic.3 Such criticisms, so I wish to show, are interesting more for the assumptions they reveal than for any insight they might afford. At the very least they tend to misunderstand or distort the complex moral, political, and aesthetic purpose of Hanekes work. Indeed, his films are better understood, I argue, as examining the socially disorienting and subjectively disintegrating effects of our post-humanist world of massmediatised experience. At the same time, they are highly reflexive cinematic works that question the nature of our relationship with screened images, forcing us to reflect both morally and aesthetically upon our relationship with

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/1 1/0401 15^15 201 Taylor & Francis 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.201 1.641350

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cinematic and media images more generally. These two strands of Hanekes work the critical dissection of the pernicious effects of massmediatised experience, and the reflexive critique of the viewers complicity in, and uncritical consumption of, audiovisual images comprise a sustained meditation on what we might call the post-humanist condition: a cinematic critique of the disintegration and fragmentation of affect and subjectivity, the paralysing of our capacity for experiential reflection within affluent liberal democracies, a disintegration closely linked with contemporary forms of mediatised spectacle and the cynical consumption of images of violence. The question that Haneke confronts in his recent films can be stated as follows: how can one make a critical, questioning film when the modernist techniques of self-reflection have lost much of the critical meaning they earlier possessed? Put differently, how can one still be a humanistic artist when humanism no longer carries the moral or aesthetic authority or conviction that it once did? How can film respond to the nihilism of the age without itself succumbing to nihilism? These are some of the questions that I wish to explore in Hanekes work, which might be described as posthumanist in that it traverses and retrieves the aesthetic and moral tropes of humanism while also questioning the latters uncritical assumptions and dubious implications. Hanekes response to this problem how to both retrieve and criticise aesthetic and moral humanism is to dissolve the distinction between the socio-cultural critique of various aspects of globalised neoliberal societies, and the cinematic critique of our consumption of highly mediatised images of violence. Given the mediatised nature of contemporary social experience, the only effective way to engage us in the performance of a cinematic critique is by means of the very images that capture and captivate us. The difficulty, however, is how to do this when the moral and ideological justifications of the past no longer carry conviction. To this end, Haneke has adopted a number of strategies, including confronting the viewer with his or her own complicity in the consumption of images, while also using such images to perform a cinematic critique of contemporary social and cultural experience. At the same time, however, Haneke attempts to move beyond the kind of selfreferential deadlock evident in some of his recent films, notably the American remake of Funny Games (2007), which confronts us with our (complacent) consumption of media and cinematic images of violence but at the cost of evacuating such images of any socio-cultural reference. This shift is evident, I suggest, not only in Hanekes most explicitly post-humanist, and least commented upon, film Time of the Wolf [Le temps du loup] (2003) but also in his most recent historical drama, The White Ribbon [Das weie Band] (2009). These two films are notable for their eschewal of the explicitly modernist techniques of distantiation evident in his other films in favour of a more subtle integration of socio-cultural and cinematic critique within conventional narrative form. In what follows, I shall explore some of Hanekes films as instances of post-humanist cinematic critique, films that both stage and deploy the techniques and tropes of aesthetic modernism and liberal humanism, while also submitting these to the same kind of critical scrutiny as his films direct towards contemporary consumer society.

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haneke as modernist
Haneke has often been described as one of the heirs to the European modernist tradition of filmmakers such as Bresson, Antonioni, and Pasolini; but if so, he is an heir who seeks not to reproduce so much as to traverse and transform this tradition. As a recent voluminous study has it, Hanekes cinema, with its explicitly modernist heritage, difficult subjectmatter, and challenging narrative style, comprises an oeuvre that verges on anachronistic (Grundmann 13). Indeed, some critics have identified Haneke as a latter-day cinematic moralist (Wheatley 14), which others have assumed implies a crypto-conservative orientation towards the restoration of traditional humanistic values (Speck 10). What I shall argue, however, is that Hanekes cinematic critique in the sense of a cinematic depiction and cultural-critical

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diagnosis of the maladies of our age is better understood as a post-humanist moralism: an ethico-political critique that has traversed humanism both historically and philosophically, yet found it wanting, in need of transformation and renewal. This post-humanism can be understood in two related senses: first, in relation to the historical experiences of Nazism and post-war forms of violence and trauma, which have rendered traditional forms of humanism subject to sceptical doubt; and second, in relation to the rise of a post-war Debordian society of the spectacle that increasingly captures attention and consciousness by means of a system of commodified images (and images of commodities). Indeed, from Hanekes perspective, the moral meaning of the human and of the related creed of humanism have been shattered and reconfigured thanks to the experience of trauma, violence, and the technological transformation of socio-historical experience (notably through our consumption of images). At the same time, however, Hanekes post-humanism is concerned to retrieve what was valuable in the humanist tradition of modernist cinema, rescuing and extending but also questioning and criticising its aesthetic and moral-political dimensions. This dual strategy thus allows Haneke to engage in a cinematic form of critique that is at once cultural-political and aesthetic-cinematic. In other words, it is not just the violence depicted in or by cinematic and other audiovisual images but the violence of conventional cinematic representation that Hanekes films diagnose and criticise. To elaborate this thesis I shall consider some of Hanekes early and later works, arguing that his post-humanist cinematic critique no longer assumes the emancipatory effect of modernist interruption, but nonetheless deploys modernist techniques in order to pursue an ethical questioning of both the violence of the image and of globalised neoliberal societies. Hanekes critique of violence, in other words, questions the deforming and dehumanising dimensions of modern life, while at the same time challenging any complacent humanism safely insulated from criticism. The problem, in short, is that of belief: how to maintain a critical practice of cinema, one that not only engages in socio-cultural but also in a selfreflexive cinematic critique, without assuming that we can still have recourse to the same kinds of humanist values that legitimated an earlier generation of cinematic auteurs.

the emotional glaciation trilogy

Hanekes first three feature films The Seventh Continent [Die siebente Kontinent] (1989), Bennys Video (1992), and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance [71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls] (1994) comprise what many critics have called, much to Hanekes chagrin, his emotional glaciation trilogy or Austrian cycle.4 These films all share an austere cinematic aesthetic and fragmentary narrative style, and deal with confronting mediatised events based upon contemporary news stories drawn from his native Austria.5 In a manner recalling Bresson and Antonioni, while also challenging towering German maverick Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Speck 6162, 103), Die siebente Kontinent (Hanekes first feature film6) tells the story of an affluent Austrian family who killed themselves for no apparent reason, systematically destroying all of their property and disposing of their wealth by flushing it down the toilet. The familys selfdestructive statement is left unexplained save for a chilling line in the fathers familial suicide note: I believe that looking at the life we have lived straight in the eye makes any notion of the end easy to accept. Hanekes next feature, Bennys Video (1992), is based on the case of an alienated teenage boy living a life dominated by the recording and consumption of video imagery, who for no apparent reason kills a girl he has just befriended, capturing her murder on videotape. His crime is then covered up by his bourgeois parents, whom the boy eventually turns over to the police. 71 Fragmente (1994), a film that introduces Hanekes now familiar technique of weaving together loosely connected narrative threads across disparate locations, presents the stories of an illegal immigrant boy trying to survive in a European city, a security guard undergoing a

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personal crisis, a middle-class couple trying to adopt a child, and a young students daily university routine. These narrative strands all culminate in the apparently random and senseless murder of a number of bank customers by the student, who then kills himself across the road from the bank while seated in his car. This tragic act of violence, moreover, was apparently triggered in the most arbitrary fashion, namely by his failure to obtain cash from the bank in order to pay for petrol he had just purchased at a filling station.7 In what has since become a signature gesture, Haneke presents the elaboration and unfolding of these events, which culminate in acts of senseless violence, without offering speculative psychological conjectures or crude sociological explanations. As Speck observes, unlike conventional narrative cinema, which strives to make any acts of (self-)aggression immediately intelligible within the narrative, Hanekes films eschew such narrative justifications, forcing the viewer to reflect on why they are being subjected to these random and meaningless depictions of violence (1014). Indeed, these minute and exacting descriptions of violence, without the release offered by narrative justification, are presented in order to elicit an intellectual and visceral shock to thought with a pedagogical and critical intent. Despite their shocking subject-matter, all three films share an austere modernist aesthetic recalling among others, Bresson, Antonioni, and Pasolini that aims to disrupt our expectations concerning conventional narrative film, and to interrupt our moral and humanistic assumptions concerning the psychological motivation of its characters. The stories are rendered in carefully structured but fragmentary form, rich in detailed descriptions of the characters mundane actions and daily rituals but avoiding any didactic explanation of their possible motivations or explicit reflection on the deeper meaning of their actions. Hanekes aesthetic strategy is thus to withhold explanatory devices as far as possible precisely in order to allow the spectator space for his or her own response, reflection, and interpretation. As Haneke describes, in an oft-repeated remark, his role as a filmmaker is that of constructing an elaborate ski-jump; but it is up to viewers to take up the experiential and hermeneutic challenge of jumping for themselves.8

socio-cultural or cinematic critique?

From his earliest feature films, Haneke was recognised as an heir to the modernist auteur cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, a provocateur dealing with the relationship between alienated subjects and the consumerist world of images. As Catherine Wheatley points out, Bennys Video, the second film in his so-called emotional glaciation trilogy, functions at a narrative level as a critique of how the cinematic conventions of mainstream film and television can contribute to the Debordian Society of the Spectacle (63). Indeed, this intent is signalled formally via the films explicit blurring of the boundary between the ongoing diegetic video and the so-called reality of the film narrative (Wheatley 63). The film often presents images from Bennys video recordings, for example, as though these were part of the film narrative world, a move which we only become aware of retrospectively a gesture that Haneke repeats and refines in subsequent films (for example, in the famous opening sequence of Cache [Hidden] (2005)). A good example of this blurring of the boundary between (narrative) reality and its recording via (video) images what Speck calls Hanekes reframing of the image (28) occurs near the end of Bennys Video, when we hear a repetition of a conversation between Bennys parents from earlier in the film, discussing how best to cover up Bennys crime. It soon becomes apparent, however, that what we are watching is actually a video recording that Benny made of this conversation on the night he confessed to his parents, a recording that he subsequently hands over to the police, with images that now become evidence (for the police) to indict his parents (and us) for their (and our) complicity in his crime. For Wheatley, Haneke thus explicitly begins developing with this film a project of ethical spectatorship by engaging in an explicit critique of the cinematic medium, one that also implicates the spectator in the depicted violence that he or she willingly consumes (911).

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For all this self-reflexivity, however, it is difficult not to see Hanekes films as also engaging in a critical reflection on the destructive dimensions of modern experience in affluent Western societies. Although set in Austria and later in various parts of Europe one could transpose Hanekes films without difficulty to any major Western city. They describe the problems besetting affluent consumer societies, and take as their starting point the premise that we exist today within a decayed version of Debords society of the spectacle where the spectacular image the most visible and seductive dimension of commodification has become all-encompassing, even banal. Hanekes cinema thus poses the following question: given the distractible state of the spectator in societies of the spectacle, spectators whose powers of decoding and assimilating visual information have become more acute, but whose ability to understand, reflect upon, and assign emotional significance to this visual information has become more attenuated, how can film force us to engage with the image, to arrest the information flow and force critical thought in response to what we see, to deepen the emotional and intellectual impact of the images that surround us, while at the same time forcing us to reflect upon our desire for, and fascination with, images of violence, cruelty, and suffering, now consumed as entertainment? It is in response to this question that I wish to characterise Haneke as a post-humanist moralist. Indeed, Hanekes cinema can be understood as engaging in both an ethico-political critique of the loss of affect, desensitisation, and alienation engendered by the post-humanist society of the spectacle; and in a reflexive cinematic-aesthetic critique of the corrupting image economy of televisual culture (including cinema), an indictment of our complicity with the consumption of images that contribute to, rather than force reflection on, the nihilism of our age. Indeed, Haneke attempts to retrieve the modernist tradition affirming the autonomy of the work of art, championing the critical potential of the cinema, while at the same time questioning any uncritical belief in the powers of the medium or acknowledging its potential for manipulation and abuse within a generalised consumer culture of pathological spectacle. What to do when the modernist techniques of self-reflexive distantiation have been appropriated by the dominant audiovisual culture and hence begin to lose their erstwhile critical effect?

haneke as socio-cultural critic

Here we might point to two distinct schools of thought that have emerged with regard to Hanekes work: the socio-cultural critique reading (Adam Bingham, Matthias Frey, and Robin Wood) and the cinematic reflexivity approach to his work (Catherine Wheatley, Oliver Speck, and David Sorfa). For the former, Hanekes films develop a social critique of contemporary European/Western culture; for the latter, his films are concerned principally with a cinematic critique of the spectators relationship with the image. Both perspectives, I want to suggest, are correct but limited if taken independently without reference to the other: the challenge is to think these perspectives together in relation to Hanekes work as a whole, and hence to see that his films engage in socio-cultural critique precisely by means of a cinematic critique. The contemporary society of the spectacle is such that it demands a cinematic intervention via audiovisually mediated forms of critical reflection. This dual-aspect approach to his work that the cinematic critique is a socio-cultural critique, one that self-critically extends and questions the thematic concerns of his films is necessitated by two related premises: (1) that social experience today is increasingly mediatised by various forms of audiovisual media, including film, television, the Internet, computer games, and so on; and (2) that the effect of this all-encompassing mediatisation of social experience, through the narcissistic or compulsive consumption of spectacular media images, is to arrest or retard our capacity for critical reflection and emotional engagement with the televisual information flow. The aim of Hanekes work, therefore, is to force us to reflect upon our consumption of cinematic and televisual images, indeed our complicity with their desensitising effects, and to find a specifically cinematic way of provoking thought

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on, and thus ethical responsibility for, why we desire and consume such images. Indeed, his films force us to reflect upon what our response to them should be, and to question what kind of culture makes such images the primary way through which individuals orient, engage, and entertain themselves. As I should stress, however, this does not mean that Haneke is engaged in nothing more than a standard modernist form of reflection upon the cinematic image and our complex relationship with it (consumption, enjoyment, desensitisation, critical self-reflection, and so on). To be sure, most commentators on Haneke rightly emphasise the socio-ideological dimensions of his work. A quick survey of the narrative and thematic concerns of his films more than bears this out: we find narrative presentations of the irrational outbursts of anomic violence that have become disturbingly commonplace in Western societies, a meditation on the thoroughgoing commodification of everyday life, including the world of the image, a questioning of bourgeois moral complacency, a depiction of the loss of affect and sense of reality among many individuals, an inquiry into the fragmentation of social relations within modern mediatised experience, reflections on consumerism, the plight of illegal immigrants, on the discontents afflicting European liberal democracies, on the traumatic legacy of colonialist conflicts, and so on. At the same time, the socio-cultural critique reading tends to assume a transparent and unproblematic relationship between spectator and image; as though there could be a neutral space of critical reflection regarding such cinematic explorations of violence, anomie, fragmentation, alienation, and so on. Such a neutral space of reflection, however, is precisely what Hanekes films refuse. Indeed, it is this complex dialectic between modernist self-reflection and a posthumanist critical questioning of the aesthetic autonomy underpinning modernism that makes Haneke a humanist filmmaker in motivation and sensibility but a post-humanist in philosophical orientation. On the one hand, Haneke reclaims the title of humanist filmmaker, even humanist moralist; on the other, there is no shared form of cultural normativity (humanism) or nostalgic return to values that could serve as an unquestioned background to Hanekes critique of our complicity with the society of the spectacle. On the contrary, it is precisely the nihilism of our contemporary cultural-normative situation the loss of belief or conviction, particularly since the historical experiences of Nazism, totalitarianism, and the economic miracle of post-war society, in the sustaining myths of bourgeois humanism and the promises of Western progress that becomes a major focus of his work. What does this mean? It means, for one thing, that there can be no unproblematic appeal to art, to high culture, or even to modernist film as a way of gaining critical distance from the kind of disintegration of social experience that Hanekes films attempt to critique. Indeed, there are few filmmakers working today more conscious of Benjamins dictum that every document of culture is at the same time a record of barbarism: a theme made explicit in La pianiste (2001) but also signalled (notably through the pointed use of diegetic and extradiegetic music) in Bennys Video, 71 Fragmente, Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys [Code inconnu: Recit incomplet de divers voyages] (2000), Funny Games (both versions), and Cache [Hidden]. Moreover, there can be no reassuring recourse to an unquestioned critical standpoint that would diagnose, critique, and point the way to overcoming the alienating effects of consumer capitalism (as assumed by both liberals and post-Marxist humanists). On the contrary, Hanekes films assume that the kind of social disorientation and normative sense of crisis within which we exist today, whether consciously or complacently, must be acknowledged, questioned, and described; and that the filmmaker, given the mediatised nature of our social experience, is well placed, even obliged, to force our attention towards this experience. Put differently, for all their moral or pedagogical intent, in Hanekes films there is no god who can save us, or any obvious revolutionary transformation or utopian community to come.9 At the same time, however, Haneke insists on the necessity of engaging in cinematic-philosophical critique; in reclaiming our belief in the

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critical and emancipatory power of cinema as a mass medium that is capable of questioning, examining, and reflecting on complex and contradictory facets of modern experience. Haneke thus attempts at once to retrieve the modernist stance concerning the autonomy of art and its critical vocation, and to question the possibility of art in particular, film laying claim to this critical power in a dogmatic manner. Such a stance, at once cinematically and socio-culturally selfquestioning, is undoubtedly a difficult one to maintain. Indeed, this complex dialectic between cinematic and socio-cultural dimensions of Hanekes critical artistic practice is what makes his films so unnerving, disorienting, and difficult for viewers and critics alike. Just when we appear to have grasped his films as withering humanist critiques of alienation, fragmentation, and the lack of communication and affect in modernity, we are then confronted with the films undermining of just these received frameworks of humanistic moral-aesthetic value. The difficulty, therefore, with the sociocultural critique reading of Hanekes work is that it fails to acknowledge the importance of the complex interplay between Hanekes key premises: that in modern techno-capitalist democracies we exist within a decadent version of Debords society of the spectacle, without, however, any reassuring redemptive social project or utopian political vision (whether of a neo-Marxist or neoliberalist variety); and that our shared social-historical experience is both intensely socio-culturally mediated and at the same time fragmented psychologically by the frenetic consumption of spectacular televisual images and decontextualised information flows. The sociocultural critique reading of Hanekes work thus tends to focus on his films thematic and narrative content, contextualising them within the crises and malaises of contemporary Europe, while at the same time downplaying their modernist elements, confronting the spectator with his/her psychological-affective investment in screen violence. The implication of such a position is that one can engage in this cinematic critique of contemporary Western culture from a safely distanced vantage point that remains uncompromised by its pernicious image economy, trying to avoid complicity in the very thing one is denouncing by means of cinematic images.

haneke as critic of the cinematic image

The alternative approach, persuasively argued in Catherine Wheatleys recent study (Michael Hanekes Cinema), is what we might call the cinematic critique or, in Wheatleys terms, ethics of the image reading of his work. This approach emphasises precisely the modernist, reflexive aspect of Hanekes films that is neglected in the socio-cultural critique reading. Wheatley analyses admirably, for example, Hanekes shift from first-generation or benign modernism, which foregrounds the constructed nature of the cinematic image through various cinematic alienation techniques and an austere modernist style (The Seventh Continent and Bennys Video), to what she calls his use of second-generation or aggressive modernism, which confronts the spectator more directly with their role as complicitous consumer of the cine-televisual image (Funny Games, Cache). This shift from benign to aggressive modernism or from the cultural constructedness of the image to our complicitous consumption of it is overlaid by a third element: Hanekes reflexive use (and abuse) of cinematic genre conventions (thriller, sci-fi, ultra-violent horror) as well as recognisable international stars (Juliette Binoche, Daniel Arteuil, Naomi Watts, and Tim Roth). It is in the brilliant use of all three strategies benign modernism, aggressive modernism, and subversion of generic conventions that Haneke succeeds in developing a cinematic ethics that confronts us with our own investment in the image, precisely in order to encourage a more critical, reflexive, and autonomous relationship with it a space for ethical reflection and autonomous reorientation (Wheatley 113). Wheatleys emphasis on the reflexive modernist elements of Hanekes ethics of the image is salutary, explaining elegantly how Hanekes cinematic style and aesthetic practice prompt a peculiarly reflexive kind of unease and displeasure in the spectator. At the same time, however, her approach runs the risk of downplaying his

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films socio-cultural and ideologico-critical content, without which there would seem to be little to distinguish them from those of his predecessors (such as Bresson or Antonioni). Indeed, Wheatley dismisses the socio-cultural critique reading of Hanekes work as overly narrative or content-based, hence as ignoring the crucial reflexive dimensions of his cinematic ethics of the image; for Wheatley, such approaches ignore the way his films are primarily concerned, from a formal point of view, with rendering problematic the spectatorimage relationship (156). Wheatleys point is well taken, since the spectatorimage relationship is principally a pedagogical one, according to the socio-cultural reading (namely that the spectator stands to be educated, even violated into self-awareness by the narrative content and stylistic presentation of Hanekes films).10 At the same time, however, Wheatleys nuanced account of Hanekes two modernisms and reflexively ethical approach to our consumption of images risks downplaying his films visceral, emotional, and affective shock value, hence blunting the force of their cinematic critique of contemporary mediatised culture. For all its hermeneutic sensitivity, ethical reflection on our consumption of images (of violence) might end up serving as a kind of theoretical prophylactic against the more traumatic aspects of Hanekes cinema an intellectual version of the detached consumption of images that these films surely aim to subvert. cinematic reflexivity and disturbing ideologically charged narrative content work together to engage us in a distinctively cinematic form of critique. Hanekes work thus posits a strong link between the alienating experience of a consumerist society of the spectacle and the kinds of irrational violence, social disorientation, and affective desensitisation that comprise the narrative focus and thematic subject-matter of his films. For these reasons, there is no genuine opposition here between interpretative perspectives: Hanekes reflexive cinematic critique of our complicity as spectators with the narcissistic consumerism and anomic violence of contemporary film, TV, and gaming culture is of a piece with his socio-cultural critique of the fragmentation, disorientation, and latent violence characterising affluent Western societies. Having said this, however, Hanekes more recent films suggest that his recourse to modernist techniques (whether benign or aggressive modernism, to use Wheatleys terms) can no longer be relied upon to have the kind of alienating pedagogical or emancipatory effect that worked for an earlier generation of modernist cinema. The endpoint in this dialectic between socio-cultural and cinematic critique is surely the American remake of Funny Games (2007) (featuring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth), which stages this dialectic in its most extreme, explicit, but also self-negating manner. The paradox of Hanekes cinema of cruelty (notably in the two Funny Games films) is that it shocks those already predisposed towards this kind of modernist critique, the already ethically disposed and socio-culturally aware viewer of art cinema, while remaining an intriguing, perhaps exotic, entertainment for their putative target audience, whose pleasure in sexualised or instrumentalised violence is perversely satisfied, rather shortcircuited, by such films. The problem, in other words, is how to avoid preaching to the ethically converted for it is the self-satisfied liberal consumer of Art House films, as Sorfa remarks, that is perhaps most discomfited by Hanekes films (96) while also refusing to entertain precisely those viewers most in need of Hanekes violent ethico-pedagogical intervention. This negative dialectic between engaging viewers

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hanekes post-humanist critique

My response to this conflict of interpretations is to suggest that we are dealing here with a false dichotomy: the socio-cultural critique in Hanekes films is dependent upon the cinematic critique, while the cinematic critique is itself a performative form of socio-cultural critique, given the mediatised image-culture or reified society of the spectacle in which we now live. Indeed, Hanekes cinema is concerned with diagnosing and responding to this situation of moral, cultural and political disorientation, in which our access to such phenomena is thoroughly mediated by our consumption of audiovisual images. Formal aesthetic and

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ethically while also confronting them with their consumption of images of suffering does not yield to ready resolution. Indeed, within some of Hanekes films it remains caught at the level of an (almost mythic) traumatic repetition and eternal return (the end of Funny Games, for example, is simply a resetting of the violent Funny Game we have endured during the film, which can now begin again with a new cast of Players, including the soon-to-be-traumatised audience, without any apparent conclusion or resolution).11 It is a strategy that ends in an aporetic repetition, a logic of self-deconstruction beyond which it is neither desirable nor possible to go. younger daughter, volatile older brother Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), long-suffering mother, and taxidriving father); and a Romanian woman, Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), who begs in Paris in order to support her family building a new house back home (and who becomes the cause of a dispute between Amadou and Georges kid brother, Jean). Like similar network narratives Alejandro Inarritus Babel (2006), for example Code Unknown weaves together these disparate narrative lines through chance encounters within diverse urban spaces; bodies and beliefs, classes and ethnicities coexist and clash in the absence of any common code, save for the duplicity and ubiquity of manipulated media images (to which both Anne and Georges contribute professionally). Code Unknown also brings to perfection the fragmentary network narrative style that Haneke used to great effect in 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. It goes a step further, however, in its reflexive presentation of images, altering subtly the black film interruptions punctuating the various sequences in 71 Fragments, as well as in Hanekes earlier films The Seventh Continent and Bennys Video. Instead of a brief pause between segments during which the screen goes black, Code Unknown uses what we might call a channel surfing device to create the impression of interruptions in transmission (of code): the various sequences begin abruptly, often middialogue or during the middle of an action, as though we or, for that matter, the film itself were switching TV channels once our curiosity has been aroused, if not satisfied. In contrast to the channel-surfing motif, the film then presents its discrete sequences via the conspicuous use of long takes, emphasising not so much the Bazinian unmediated character of experience as its thoroughly mediatised and ambiguous quality (a case in point is the films virtuoso opening sequence, an eight-minute continuous shot of Anne in conversation with young Jean as she walks to work, buys a pastry, departs, followed by his encounter with the beggar woman, Maria, throwing his empty pastry bag instead of money into her lap, thus triggering a dispute with the young Malian man, Amadou, that leads to

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mediatised suffering: code unknown

How to overcome this dialectical deadlock between an ethically engaged spectator who witnesses and reflects upon his or her consumption of cinematic representations of violence, and the unethical spectator who simply enjoys such imagery without any correlative ethical reflection? Two films that respond explicitly to this deadlock, thereby elucidating Hanekes cinematic post-humanism, are Code Unknown (2000) and Time of the Wolf (2003). Hanekes first French or pan-European film, Code Unknown is set mainly in Paris (but also in Romania) and stars Juliette Binoche, the Art-house actress for a generation (qtd in Wheatley 126). In a reflexive ploy, Binoche plays an actress (who shares the name Anne Laurent with several other women characters in various Haneke films) making a movie what appears to be a remake of Wylers The Collector while having relationship difficulties with her photojournalist partner, Georges (Thierry Neuvic) (a characters name that also recurs in various Haneke films), who has recently returned to Paris after covering war atrocities in Serbia and Kosovo. Interwoven with this main narrative are complementary narrative lines concerning the familial conflicts between the photojournalists father (Josef Bierbichler), a gruff farmer, and his younger brother Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), who has come to Paris wishing to escape from his fathers farm; the travails of a struggling African family (deaf

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a police intervention ending, predictably enough, with Amadou being hauled off to the station).12 It is via this striking contrast between communication and disconnection, indifference and interaction, contingency and conflict that the film enacts its simultaneous social-cultural and cinematic critique. While Code Unknown deals with the familiar modernist and humanist themes of alienation, misrecognition, social fragmentation, and the scrambling of codes defining disparate communities, it also weaves these arthouse topoi together with critical reflection on the ambiguous relationship between subjectivity, social experience, and televisualcinematic images (social reality increasingly perceived as though it were an extension of the mediatised image-world, and the mediatised image-world increasingly dominating our experience of social reality). The film is thus a remarkable instance of the combination of socio-cultural and cinematic critique, showing how the critical appraisal of contemporary cultural and political themes must be combined with reflection on our consumption of ubiquitous media images (including the critical, selfreflexive film that we are watching).13 The paradox that Hanekes Code Unknown encounters here might be compared with the more general cultural and ethico-political problem of how to respond to mass-mediatised images of suffering. How is the contemporary media viewer to respond whether via television, documentary cinema, newspaper reports, Internet sites, and so on when confronted by images of distant suffering: disturbing images to which we respond affectively or emotionally, but over which we have little control or a diminished capacity to act? Luc Boltanski has argued that this is an important contemporary phenomenon assuming a particular urgency in the televisual age of mass-mediated experience (see Distant Suffering). Drawing on Hannah Arendts discussion of the politics of pity and on historical discourse going back to the Enlightenment, Boltanski identifies three paradigmatic cultural-historical responses to representations of suffering: the topic of indignation (addressed, for example, in eighteenth-century political tracts), the topic of sentiment (articulated most in the nineteenth-century novel), and the aesthetic topic (expressed in nineteenthand twentieth-century painting). The latter in particular raises the question of how a visual medium like cinema, which enacts the spectatorial situation of seeing without being seen, of witnessing the suffering of others without the possibility of acting upon what we see, complicates the question of an appropriate ethicopolitical response to mediated images of suffering. Indeed, Hanekes films engage explicitly with this problem, reflecting upon and questioning how we consume images of violence. The ethical viewer of art cinema serves as an educated witness of spectacular suffering, which paradoxically underlines our concernful passivity in the face of, while enjoying ambivalent aesthetic-moral reactions to, images of violence and cruelty. A remarkable instance of this phenomenon, subtly pervasive within Hanekes cinema, can be found in Code Unknown [Code inconnu] (2000). Watching television while doing her ironing, Anne (Juliette Binoche) hears the awful sounds of a child being beaten nearby. She listens for a moment, wonders what to do, torn by the poor girls cries, before returning to watching television, refraining from responding to what might (or might not) have been a serious incident. Later, a neighbour leaves an anonymous note for Anne, alerting her to the threat to the childs safety, the domestic violence behind closed doors. Anne and her partner Georges (Thierry Neuvic) argue over what to do, Anne wondering whether she should report it, wanting Georges to support her, and Georges washing his hands of responsibility, saying she should decide for herself. He is, as he later remarks, not cut out for life in peace, preferring the clarity and decisiveness of life in a war zone, as distinct from the ambiguity and complexity of life in a superficially peaceful society, both of which he experiences and depicts via the medium of images. Tragically, as we later discover, the child does indeed die, Anne and her elderly neighbour attending the poor girls funeral, walking in stunned silence through the cemetery. Well-meaning and concerned neighbours like Anne and her elderly

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witness were aware of the violence, sympathetic to the suffering victim, yet unable to prevent the childs death. The profound difficulty of knowing how to respond to (mediatised) images of violence and suffering also figures in the conflict between the actress and her photojournalist husband. Georges (Thierry Neuvic) wants to make the distant suffering of war present and proximate through powerful photographic media images, whereas Anne acts out or performs her suffering, portraying it on film (in the film-within-a-film sequences interpolated into Code Unknown). We are also witnesses to this domestic, political, and cinematic violence, privy to Annes hesitation, confusion, and paralysis, as well as to Georges compulsive need to render his experience both of life in war and everyday banality in images. How should we situate ourselves in relation to these narrative scenarios and the confronting images we have absorbed, whether in complicity or in contemplation? The reflexivity of such scenes underlines the films explicit engagement with the problematic of representing and responding to images of mediatised suffering. As bourgeois arthouse film viewers, concerned or ethical witnesses in the age of spectacular compassion, Hanekes films both address and confront us with our distracted consumption of images of violence. archetypical Laurents, wife Anne (Isabelle Huppert), husband Georges (Daniel Duval), and children Eva (Anas Demoustier) and Benny (Lucas Biscombe) arrive at their country holiday cabin only to find a family already occupying it. Before the father can begin negotiating a resolution of their dispute he is abruptly shot by the shotgun-wielding occupier. The sudden and shocking death of Georges leaves Anne alone with her children struggling to survive in a devastated countryside devoid of electricity, water, food supplies, and dotted with the burning carcasses of horses and livestock. Makeshift camps have been established near the almost abandoned railway lines in the hope that the trains will eventually arrive with fresh supplies and that life will soon return to normal. Self-appointed leaders promising shelter and protection in exchange for supplies, food, and sexual favours govern small community groups, exchanging goods with other groups in a primitive barter system and engaging in all the bargaining and manipulation typical of the marketplace. Anne and her children, Eva, a gifted social mediator, and Ben, a shy, traumatised seer, are shown in their everyday activity in the camp, dealing with low-level conflicts over space, supplies, and the challenge to maintain hope. The conflict between those abiding by the social contract, and the individual free rider who refuses to co-operate, is also enacted dramatically in the figure of a teenage runaway (Hakim Taleb) whom Eva has befriended, and tries to persuade to return to the camp after he is expelled for stealing. Their relationship is handled deftly, combining curiosity, nascent sensuality, companionship and care with a moral backdrop that articulates the ongoing conflict over the runaways self-interested egoism and Evas communal pragmatism. Against the opaque background of this unspecified social and ecological disaster some individuals talk in secret of a religious cult of a chosen few The Just whose mission is to redeem humankind from its suffering plight and ensure the survival of humanity into an uncertain future. Resonating with the post-apocalyptic mood and political declaration of a permanent state of exception following 11 September 2001, Time of the Wolf

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apocalypse now: time ofthe wolf

Instead of a reflexive examination of the image economy of highly mediatised societies, Time of the Wolf [Le temps du loup] explores the reverse scenario: what would everyday life look like were the contemporary society of the spectacle to collapse? Aptly described as a post-apocalyptic survivalist film, Time of the Wolf is set in a contemporary France that has undergone an unspecified disaster (whether biological, ecological, or technological is left unclear). It presents a powerful portrait of everyday life following the collapse of technologically developed civilisation, a disaster that has not taken place in a conveniently foreign location but rather in the heart of a prosperous Western European democracy. Hanekes typical bourgeois family unit the

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is one of the most powerful explorations of the post-humanist condition in recent cinema. It resists the temptation, moreover, to present this kind of narrative as an individualist tale of familial survival in the absence of any viable human community (as in John Hillcoats The Road (2009)), presenting it instead as a thoughtful exploration of the biopolitical bases of everyday forms of social, economic, and political community. Both Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf deal, in different ways, with the discontents of contemporary Western culture, in particular the cultural conflicts and social frictions afflicting the New Europe, while at the same time questioning the limits of our received moral and ideological discourses, the plausibility of our shared normative codes to comprehend this situation. Both films tackle, moreover, the question of moral-aesthetic humanism and its limits, albeit from different perspectives: Code Unknown by staging a reflexive investigation of the relationship between image and social reality by means of a fragmentary but interconnected network narrative; and Time of the Wolf by exploring a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the contemporary society of the spectacle has collapsed, revealing the subterranean anxieties over resources, power, community, and identity that haunt contemporary liberal democratic societies. Code Unknown does not offer or presume to reveal a new shared code of cultural or moral meaning that would unify the fragmented world of its protagonists; nor does its cinematic critique of our thoroughly mediatised social existence offer any reassuring political or ideological resolution of its fractured narrative lines and social communities. Time of the Wolf, for its part, eschews overt reflection on our consumption of images, opting for a depiction of the aftermath of a collapsed social reality, everyday survival unfolding in the absence of any mediatised imagery, leaving open and ambiguous the significance of both its religious undertones (young Bennys attempted self-sacrifice, emulating The Just he has heard described by storytellers in the camp) and its final denouement (the film concludes with a scene showing the landscape as viewed from the window of a moving train, which may or may not belong to the diegetic world of the film). In a more subtle manner than Code Unknown, Time of the Wolf engages in a social-cultural critique that leaves open the status of the images we are watching (does the image of a sunny landscape viewed from a moving train signify the end of the disaster, a hopeful ending to the catastrophe, or mark an alternative present in which such a disaster has not [yet] occurred?). Code Unknown, by contrast, fuses together the social-cultural and cinematic critique through a network narrative linked together by ambivalent images whose interpretative code remains enigmatic; it thereby refuses to offer any unifying or consolatory myth or conclusion that would resolve the multiple layers of social-cultural, hermeneutic, and existential disorientation it depicts (the film opens and closes with the images of a deaf girl miming actions that her classmates and viewers try in vain to decipher). The larger ethical question posed by both Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf resonates with Hanekes other films: what to do when the world is mediated by images that have become all-encompassing but in which we no longer really believe? This question suggests that the under lying problematique throughout Hanekes work is that of nihilism: an attempt to retrieve but also to question the kinds of humanist tropes that have defined modernist cinema, but which are now no longer naively available as a bulwark against the deadening effects of image fetishism and information saturation. How can we make an ethico-aesthetic intervention via cinema when the images it produces and deploys are themselves implicated in that which such films seek to critique? Such questions would require further reflection on the question of belief: belief in the world, as Deleuze would say, or a reflection on the nihilism of the post-humanist condition (we are no longer able to believe in the promises of aesthetic or moral humanism, let alone liberal democracy, yet are unable to offer or find any plausible alternative system of belief to take their place). And it is precisely such a reflection that we find in the simultaneous socio-cultural and cinematic critique performed in Hanekes films.

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sinnerbrink a cinema of insistent questions

For these reasons it is important to recognise that Haneke develops a questioning rather than a didactic cinema; films that question or explore rather than posit or argue a position regarding contemporary social, cultural, or political issues. Indeed, his films thereby thwart the critical humanist tendency to over-allegorise narrative scenarios, as though these depicted unambiguous theses being proposed as diagnostic or critical claims (regarding, for example, immigration, multiculturalism, colonialism, social fragmentation, alienation and anomie, and so on). Rather, the viewer is implicated in the construction, interpretation, and consumption of his films in a manner that undermines any neat separation between socio-cultural and cinematic critique. We are implicated, forced to confront and work through, the paradox of being at once ethical, reflexive, and complicitous consumers of images of mediatised suffering. At the same time, Hanekes films also question the legitimacy or plausibility of any reassuring humanist moral, political, or ideological frameworks upon which an earlier generation of modernist filmmakers could still rely.14 Confronting the nihilism of a cynical mediatised age, which no longer believes in its own images or mythic narratives, is the driving force behind Hanekes post-humanist moralism. Thanks to their insistent questioning and ethicoaesthetic provocation, his films remain a slap in the face for the complacent consumer of liberal humanist culture.
and wondered why anyone would wish to continue to endure watching such an unendurable film ^ let alone its shot-for-shot American remake (see Kermode). 2 As Frey remarks, quoting eminent German critic Wolfram Schutte,no other director ^ with the possible exception of the Straubs ^ has been so persistently persecuted by German critics with more hate and spite than Michael Haneke (qtd in Frey,Michael Haneke n. pag.). 3 See Gilroy for a scathing criticism of Hanekes Cache along these lines. 4 The first version of Funny Games (1997) would also belong to this Austrian cycle of films, though it marks a departure from the thematic concerns of the first three films. The standing of Funny Games is further complicated by Hanekes 2007 remake of an American version of Funny Games starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. 5 By mediatised events I mean events that are mediated via the mass media, events whose intelligibility, interpretation, circulation, and consumption are dominated by their status as images belonging to the ubiquitous audiovisual stream rather than any straightforward, unmediated reference to social reality. 6 Neglected until recently is Hanekes important background in theatre and TV production, which includes a sophisticated series of films made for Austrian television (Speck 63^75). 7 As Speck remarks, Hanekes films do not only depict violence and aggression towards others; they also examine the phenomenon of selfaggression, notably the phenomenon of suicide that features in a number of his films (for example, in The Seventh Continent, Cache, and The White Ribbon) (Speck 160 ^73). 8 I believe that the purpose of drama is not to let you go home feeling reassured. That was never its purpose, even as far back as the Greek tragedies. Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer? I try to rape him into being reflective, and into being intellectually independent and seeing his role in the game of manipulation. I believe in his intelligence. At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option

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notes
My thanks go to the editors and reviewers as well as to Joanne Faulkner, Magdalena Zolkos, Jessica Whyte, and Eric Santner for their helpful questions and comments on an earlier version of this essay. 1 The 1997 Cannes screening of Funny Games created a storm of protest, with many audience members ^ including Wim Wenders ^ leaving the theatre in disgust. Mark Kermode, for example, complained that Funny Games demonstrated Hanekes unbridled contempt for his audience,

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of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him. (Haneke, Spiegel Interview) 9 Celik, for example, criticises Hanekes Cache for its lack of a progressive political agenda and asks why Cache fails to propose a path to progressive political solutions (78), as though it were incumbent on the filmmaker to solve contemporary political problems of racism, xenophobia, and the legacy of colonialist oppression. Gilroy expresses a similar disappointment over Hanekes eschewal of overt political agendas (Shooting Crabs in a Barrel 233^35). Bennys Video. Dir. Michael Haneke. Austria/ Switzerland: Bernard Lang and Wega Film, 1992. DVD. Bingham, Adam. Life, Or Something Like It. Kinoeye 4.1 (8 Mar. 2004): n. pag. Web. 24 Aug. 2009. Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality Media, and , Politics. Trans. Graham Burchell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1999. Print. Cache [Hidden]. Dir. Michael Haneke. France/ Austria/Germany: Les Films du Losange and Wega Film, 2005. Film/DVD. Celik, Ipek A.I Wanted Y to Be Present: Guilt ou and the History of Violence in Michael Hanekes Cache. Cinema Journal 50.1 (2010): 59^ 80. Print. Code inconnu: Recit incomplet de divers voyages [Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys]. Dir. Michael Haneke. France/Germany/Romania: Bavarian Film, Canal , Filmex, 2000. DVD. Das weie Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte [TheWhite Ribbon]. Dir. Michael Haneke. Germany/ Austria: X-Filme Creative Pool, Les Films du Losange, Wega Film, Lucky Red, 2009. Film. Die siebente Kontinent [The Seventh Continent]. Dir. Michael Haneke. Austria: Wega Film, 1989. DVD. Frey, Matthias. Bennys Video, Cache, and the Desubstantiated Image. Framework 47 (2006): .2 30 ^36. Print. Frey, Matthias. A Cinema of Disturbance: The Films of Michael Haneke in Context. Senses of Cinema (Sept.^ Oct. 2003): n. pag. Web. 24 Aug. 2009. Frey, Matthias. The Message and the Medium: Hanekes Film Theory and Digital Praxis. On Haneke. Ed. Brian Price and John David Rhodes. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010.153^ 65. Print. Frey, Matthias. Michael Haneke. Senses of Cinema, Great Directors 28 (2010): n. pag. Web. 28 Feb. 2010. Funny Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. Austria: Austrian Film Institute, Wega Film, Wiener Filmfinanzierungsfonds, ORF,1997 DVD. . Funny Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. USA/France/ UK: Celluloid Dreams, Halcyon Pictures, Tartan Films, 2007 Film/DVD. .

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10 Haneke described his two versions of Funny Games, for example, as a slap in the face for global consumers of cinematic violence (Haneke, Spiegel Interview). 11 See Laine for an excellent discussion of the relationship between Funny Games and the spectator. 12 See Rhodes The Spectacle of Skepticism for an interesting discussion of Hanekes postBazinian use of long takes. 13 This is presumably why the film incorporates a deceptive sequence which shows a scene from the film that Anne (Binoche) is shooting, which is presented as though it were part of the diegetic world of the film we are watching. 14 [My films] are intended as polemical statements against the American barrel-down cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of quick (because false) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for concentration rather than distraction, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus. (Haneke, Film as Catharsis qtd in Frey, The Message and the Medium 155)

bibliography
71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls [71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance]. Dir. Michael Haneke. Austria/Germany: Wega Film, ZDF, arte Geie,1994. DVD.

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Gilroy, Paul. Shooting Crabs in a Barrel. Screen 48.2 (2007): 233^35. Print. Grundmann, Roy. Introduction. Hanekes Anachronism. A Companion to Michael Haneke. Ed. Roy Grundmann. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010. 1^50. Print. Haneke, Michael. Every Film Rapes the Viewer: Spiegel Interview with Director Michael Haneke. Spiegel Online International 21 Oct. 2009: n. pag. Web. 28 Feb. 2010. Kermode, Mark.Scare Us, Repulse Us, Just Dont Ever Lecture Us. The Observer 30 Mar. 2008: n. pag.Web. 24 Aug. 2009. Laine, Tarja. Hanekes Funny Games with the Audience (Revisited). On Haneke. Ed. Brian Price and John David Rhodes. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010. 51^ 60. Print. La pianiste [The PianoTeacher]. Dir. Michael Haneke. Austria/France/Germany: Les Films Alain Sarde, MK2 Productions, Wega Film, arte France Cinema, 2001. Film/DVD. Rhodes, John David.The Spectacle of Skepticism: Hanekes Long Takes. On Haneke. Ed. Brian Price and John David Rhodes. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010. 87^102. Print. Sorfa, David.Uneasy Domesticity in the Films of Michael Haneke. Studies in European Cinema 3.2 (2006): 93^104. Print. Speck, Oliver C. Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke. New Y ork and London: Continuum, 2010. Print. Les temps du loups [Time of the Wolf ]. Dir. Michael Haneke. France/Austria/Germany: Bavaria Film, Canal , Les Films du Losange, 2003. Film/DVD. Wheatley, Catherine. Michael Hanekes Cinema: The Ethic of the Image. New Y ork and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009. Print. Wood, Robin. Michael Haneke: Beyond Compromise. Cineaction 73^74 (2008): 44 ^55. Print.

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Robert Sinnerbrink Department of Philosophy Macquarie University North Ryde Sydney, NSW 2109 Australia E-mail: [email protected]