Michael Haneke

Haneke was born in Munich, Germany, the son of German actor and director Fritz Haneke and Austrian actress Beatrix von Degenschild. His stepfather, the composer Alexander Steinbrecher, had later married the mother of actor Christoph Waltz.[3] Haneke was raised in the city of Wiener Neustadt, Austria.

Haneke showed a strong interest in Literature and Music, but as an adolescent developed a "downright contempt for any form of school".[4] During this period of his life, he has later described himself as a "rebel". He had ambitions of becoming an actor in his youth, later abandoning these plans after failing an entrance examination at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna.[5] He later attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy, psychology and drama. Not a committed student, he would spend most of his time attending local movie theatres.[6] After leaving university, he began working odd jobs, before working as an editor and dramaturge at the southwestern German television station Südwestfunk from 1967 to 1970. A time, during which he also worked as a film critic. He made his debut as a television director in 1974.

Haneke's feature film debut was 1989's The Seventh Continent, which served to trace out the violent and bold style that would bloom in later years. Three years later, the controversial Benny's Video put Haneke's name on the map. Haneke achieved great success in 2001 with the critically successful French film The Piano Teacher. It won the prestigious Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and also won its stars, Benoît Magimel and Isabelle Huppert, the Best Actor and Actress awards. He has worked with Juliette Binoche (Code Unknown in 2000 and Caché in 2005), after she expressed interest in working with him.[7] Haneke frequently worked with real-life couple Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar – thrice each.

His film, The White Ribbon, premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and won the Palme d'Or. The film is set in 1913 and deals with strange incidents in a small town in Northern Germany, depicting an authoritarian, fascist-like atmosphere, where children are subjected to rigid rules and suffer harsh punishments, and where strange deaths occur. In 2012, his film Amour also won the Palme d'Or.

Haneke says that films should offer viewers more space for imagination and self-reflection. Films that have too much detail and moral clarity, Haneke says, are used for mindless consumption by their viewers.[8]

His 2012 film Amour won the Best Foreign Language Oscar and was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards.[9] In 2013, he was the subject of the documentary film Michael H – Profession: Director.[10][11] That year, Haneke won the Prince of Asturias Award for the arts.

In 2017, his twelfth film, Happy End, was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 70th Cannes Film Festival.

"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 false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus."

—From "Film as catharsis".[14]

"Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking."[15]

"Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth."[16]

"My favourite film-maker of the decade is Abbas Kiarostami. He achieves a simplicity that's so difficult to attain."[17]

"I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable."[18]

"Consider the pigeon just a pigeon...There are lots of pigeons in Paris."

—On the meaning of pigeons in his movies[19]

• Catherine Wheatley: Michael Haneke's Cinema: The Ethic of the Image, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009, ISBN 1-84545-722-6 review
• Michael Haneke. Special Issue of Modern Austrian Literature. 43.2, 2010.
• Alexander D. Ornella / Stefanie Knauss (ed.): Fascinatingly Disturbing. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Michael Haneke's Cinema, Eugene, Pickwick, 2010, ISBN 978-1-606-08624-7.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Michael Haneke

• Media related to Michael Haneke at Wikimedia Commons
• Michael Haneke at IMDb
• Luisa Zielinski (Winter 2014). "Michael Haneke, The Art of Screenwriting No. 5". Paris Review.