Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective

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Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective

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Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective

If you’ve seen a Michael Haneke film, I’d hazard a guess that you remember your first dalliance with this director. I recall taking a seat in an uncomfortable, small lecture hall, as Funny Games rolled on screen. A family of holidaymakers drives through the countryside, cheerfully testing each other to identify the classical compositions of Mascagni and Handel. Without notice, the unwelcome grind jazz of a track called “Bonehead", along with the film’s title in red and all caps, interrupts the peace - a horrific holiday home invasion plotline unfolds, forcefully oscillating between the family’s unbearable psychological horror, and the biting satire offered by the film’s beguiling villains, whom Haneke dares you to befriend. In terms of comfort, the rigidity of my seat was the least of my concern.

In this selection of Haneke’s oeuvre, we are presented with provocations, centering themes of violence, cruelty, alienation, class, and death, as well as deep love and its responsibilities. Pitched between heartfelt and remote, often wrapped up in deep irony and fourth wall-breaking reminders of artifice, Haneke’s films are presented with cinematic beauty, slyly drawing us to confront our own complacency and complicity, as we try to turn our faces from harmful societal norms - in doing so, unwittingly upholding them.

Written by Jessie Moroney, Filmhouse Programme Officer

Content warning - The films in this season feature themes of sexual violence, incest, suicide, harm to children, assisted dying and graphic violence. For specific content warnings, please visit the individual film pages.

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