Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Since the late 1980s, Michael Haneke's theatrical features have alternately thrilled, frustrated, and infuriated international art cinema audiences. It is illuminating to compare these films and the reactions they provoke to Haneke's early made-for-TV films, which have rarely been screened since their original airing in Germany and Austria and are completely unknown to American viewers. As this essay will argue, some crucial aesthetic differences exist between Haneke's TV work and his theatrical features, yet many of his overarching themes remain the same. What I want to focus on here is perhaps his most accomplished work of this period, the two-part made-for-television film (both parts are full-length films), completed in 1979, entitled Lemmings ( Lemminge ). Part One, called, with that familiar, bitter irony that Haneke aficionados know so well, Arcadia ( Arkadien ), is set twenty years earlier, in 1959. Part Two, Injuries ( Verletzungen ), is set in the present day, that is, in 1979. Tellingly, both parts of this frequently difficult film are precisely and unflinchingly labeled “Ein Film von Michael Haneke,” an unmistakable proclamation of the auteurist aesthetic underpinning them, quite unlike the directorial anonymity that accompanies made-for-TV films in most other countries, as well as the bulk of TV fare in Germany and Austria. The two parts add up to a single, often ... log in or subscribe to read full text