A Companion to Michael Haneke

Grundmann, Roy (Editor)

WBCF - Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors

1. Edition April 2014
656 Pages, Softcover
Practical Approach Book

ISBN: 978-1-118-72348-7

John Wiley & Sons

Short Description

Now available at a special price, this is the definitive collection of essays exploring Haneke's work in its entirety--from his early work, prodigious cinematic output, through to his 2009 triumph at Cannes. The Companion brings together essays by some of the foremost scholars in film studies, as well as exclusive interviews with the director himself. Considering the themes central to Haneke's work--pornography, alienation, citizenship, colonialism, the fate of European cinema, Hollywood, and the gaze of surveillance, the Companion showcases this enigmatic and complicated director with unprecedented depth and breadth.

Further versions

A Companion to Michael Haneke is a definitive collection of newly-commissioned work that covers Haneke's body of work in its entirety, catering to students and scholars of Haneke at a time when interest in the director and his work is soaring.
* Introduces one of the most important directors to have emerged on the global cinema scene in the past fifteen years
* Includes exclusive interviews with Michael Haneke, including an interview discussion of The White Ribbon
* Considers themes, topics, and subjects that have formed the nucleus of the director's life's work: the fate of European cinema, Haneke in Hollywood, pornography, alienation, citizenship, colonialism, and the gaze of surveillance
* Features critical examinations of La Pianiste, Time of the Wolf, Three Paths to the Lake and Caché, amongst others

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgments xiv

Introduction: Haneke's Anachronism 1
Roy Grundmann

Part I Critical and Topical Approaches to Haneke's Cinema 51

1 Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke's Mind Games 53
Thomas Elsaesser

2 Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Michael Haneke's Caché 75
Thomas Y. Levin

3 Infectious Images: Haneke, Cameron, Egoyan, and the Dueling Epistemologies of Video and Film 91
Vinzenz Hediger

4 Tracking Code Unknown 113
Tom Conley

5 Michael Haneke and the New Subjectivity: Architecture and Film 124
Peter Eisenman

6 Games Haneke Plays: Reality and Performance 130
Brigitte Peucker

7 Figures of Disgust 147
Christa Blümlinger

8 Without Music: On Caché 161
Michel Chion

9 Fighting the Melodramatic Condition: Haneke's Polemics 168
Jörg Metelmann

10 "Mourning for the Gods Who Have Died": The Role of Religion in Michael Haneke's Glaciation Trilogy 187
Gregor Thuswaldner

Part II The Television Films 203

11 A Melancholy Labor of Love, or Film Adaptation as Translation: Three Paths to the Lake 205
Fatima Naqvi

12 Michael Haneke and the Television Years: A Reading of Lemmings 227
Peter Brunette

13 Variations on Themes: Spheres and Space in Haneke's Variation 243
Monica Filimon and Fatima Naqvi

14 Projecting Desire, Rewriting Cinematic Memory: Gender and German Reconstruction in Michael Haneke's Fraulein 263
Tobias Nagl

15 (Don't) Look Now: Hallucinatory Art History in Who Was Edgar Allan? 279
Janelle Blankenship

16 Bureaucracy and Visual Style 301
Brian Price

Part III The German-Language Theatrical Features 321

17 Structures of Glaciation: Gaze, Perspective, and Gestus in the Films of Michael Haneke 323
Georg Seeßlen

18 The Void at the Center of Things: Figures of Identity in Michael Haneke's Glaciation Trilogy 337
Peter J. Schwartz

19 How to Do Things with Violences 354
Eugenie Brinkema

20 Between Adorno and Lyotard: Michael Haneke's Aesthetic of Fragmentation 371
Roy Grundmann

21 Hollywood Endgames 420
Leland Monk

Part IV The French-Language Theatrical Features 439

22 Class Conflict and Urban Public Space: Haneke and Mass Transit 441
Barton Byg

23 Multicultural Encounters in Haneke's French-Language Cinema 455
Alex Lykidis

24 Haneke's Secession: Perspectivism and Anti-Nihilism in Code Unknown and Caché 477
Kevin L. Stoehr

25 The Unknown Piano Teacher 495
Charles Warren

26 Discordant Desires, Violent Refrains: La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) 511
Jean Ma

27 Civilization's Endless Shadow: Haneke's Time of the Wolf 532
Evan Torner

28 The Intertextual and Discursive Origins of Terror in Michael Haneke's Caché 551
T. Jefferson Kline

Part V Michael Haneke Speaks 563

29 Terror and Utopia of Form: Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar 565
Michael Haneke

30 Violence and the Media 575
Michael Haneke

31 The World That Is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke 580
Christopher Sharrett

32 Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke 591
Roy Grundmann

Filmography 607

Index 619

"The largest body of critical, theoretical, and historical work on Haneke so far assembled in one volume. The book's thirty-two essays have been judiciously chosen and edited by Roy Grundmann, a first-rate scholar of against-the-grain cinema." - Film Quarterly

Roy Grundmann is Associate Professor of Film Studies, and Film Studies Program Director in the Department of Film and Television, Boston University. He is co-editor of the four-volume Blackwell History of American Film.

R. Grundmann, Boston University, USA