![]() The avoidance of faces in favor of objects and actions is reminiscent of the films of Robert Bresson, who’s considered a highly spiritual filmmaker. The opening shots in 1987, taken by a static camera, don’t even show the family’s faces, only disembodied hands or backs performing daily routines for the thousandth time in closeup: fixing breakfast, going to school, going to work, etc. The scenes are like impassive snapshots adding up to the routine of days. The Seventh Continent‘s story occurs on one day in 1987, one day in 1988, and a few days in 1989. The spectacle will cause Anna to burst into tears. They will drive through the wash more than once and drive through pouring rain by a highway accident where several covered corpses lie on the ground. Therefore, the idea that the family is headed there feels less like an escape, never mind a mere relocation, than something more unsettling. The titular continent seems to be imaginary, a state of mind. Is Australia the seventh continent? If we don’t count Antarctica, it’s no more than the sixth. The billboard must be an ad encouraging emigration from Austria because that’s where the family lives. After their enclosed world has been washed clean, though perhaps with iniquities intact, they drive by an alluringly colored billboard announcing, “Welcome to Australia”. During the credits, Georg (Dieter Berner), accompanied by his wife Anna (Birgit Doll) and young daughter Eva (Leni Tanzer), drives through a car wash. The opening scene in The Seventh Continent is symbolic. At that time, he had no intention of making a trilogy, but the success of the first film led to two more features exploring similar themes. The main circumstance: the network didn’t like his approach to the material. In fact, Haneke established himself in a long television career and made a string of television movies before circumstances encouraged him to think his latest project should head for theatres. “Trilogy of Death Served Cold” might work.Īnother important point, as film scholar Alexander Horwath observes in an interview, is that even though Haneke seemed to emerge on the world stage in the 1990s, he belongs to the same generation as Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Calling it a trilogy of existential ennui or anomie sounds no tastier. Perhaps out of respect for his feelings, or just because it’s a lousy title, Criterion doesn’t call it that. That term hung around his neck like an albatross. In one of several bonus interviews, Haneke expresses regret that he once called these films a “trilogy of glaciation” to explore the emotional coldness of Austrian life. Haneke’s films partly alienate viewers by demonstrating that his characters feel alienated from their lives, cultures, and really from themselves, so one form of alienation breeds another.Īll that sounds mighty intellectual, and it is, but Haneke’s films emotionally impact the viewer because they still work as thrillers despite the air of a lab experiment. He wanted to make us think about social realities as opposed to just enjoying a show and forgetting it. Brecht used self-conscious devices to short-circuit our emotions and force us to realize we’re watching artificial constructions. ![]() The trilogy combines the qualities of being aesthetically formal and intellectual while analyzing the kind of morbid subject matter that other film glory in: various forms of murder and psychosis.īy this approach, Haneke generates a kind of cold horror while alienating the viewer from events in a manner similar to Bertolt Brecht’s theories of dramatic distancing. Recently on Blu-ray from Criterion is Michael Haneke Trilogy, showcasing the Austrian director’s first three theatrical features.
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