Michael Haneke (1992)
Michael Haneke wants the audiences of his films to be aware of ourselves as viewers or voyeurs. It’s less clear how he sees himself but Flaubert’s dictum comes to mind:
‘L’auteur, dans son oeuvre, doit être, comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout et visible nulle part.’
This is not least because Haneke’s stern loftiness can suggest a God’s-eye view. You’re so conscious of Haneke’s moral severity and scrupulous composition – and he sometimes allows so little human detail to intervene – that he can be by far the strongest presence in a movie. This isn’t the case with Hidden or The White Ribbon or Amour. It isn’t continuously the case with Funny Games (or the original at any rate: I’ve not seen the English language remake), where the power of Ulrich Mühe’s and Susanne Lothar’s acting drew us into the horrific situation of the people they were playing. But Haneke upstages everyone else involved in Benny’s Video (his second feature). The main character, the eponymous Benny, is played by Arno Frisch (seventeen when the film was made). His acting is more natural here than it is as the psychopathic killer in Funny Games but Benny is intentionally an empty vessel: Frisch’s affectless quality is what Haneke is after. Benny’s Video describes the soul-destroying effects of multi-channel television. The linkage – which verges on merging – of what’s playing on TV screens with what Benny shoots on his video camera and plays back on tape is established so quickly and with such cold condemnation on Haneke’s part that the film from this point onwards is essentially repetitive. Haneke made TV films for fifteen years before his first cinema feature (The Seventh Continent (1989)) and has returned to televsion since (most recently with an adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle in 1997, with Ulrich Mühe as K). But he evidently doesn’t approve of the medium. I see now that my suspicion that the old couple’s ordeal in Amour might have been alleviated by some light entertainment on the box was an impure thought.
The beginning of Benny’s Video is startling and the replay of this opening sequence certainly sharpens your awareness of your own reactions to it. Even though I knew this was how the film began and Catherine Wheatley, in her very good introduction to the BFI screening, explained it in some detail, I was still shocked to watch at normal speed a pig being slaughtered – shocked as much by the terrified sounds of the animal as by the captive bolt pistol that renders it senseless before it is killed. When this was revealed to be a video recording – the tape is wound backwards before being replayed in slow motion – there was a momentary sense of relief. Because the images were manipulable I somehow felt that what had happened to the pig was alterable. During the replay, I noticed the textures of its body and was briefly uneasy that I could have an aesthetic response to what I was seeing. Then I was struck by the pricking of the animal’s ears as the pistol is discharged: in that moment, the pig seems more alive than it did when the sequence was played at normal speed and the effect is poignant. The opening sequence is by some way the best one in the whole of Benny’s Video but even this scene feels a little less strong by the end of the film. When it’s replayed again, you notice that a man in the yard where the pig is to be slaughtered and who waves the camera away is Benny’s father (Ulrich Mühe). This is the same man who, later on, secretly disposes of the corpse of the teenage girl (Ingrid Stassner) whom his son – while the parents are away for the weekend – brings home and kills, using the same weapon as was used to dispatch the pig.
Benny is unpleasantly different from his contemporaries to a degree that makes it hard to see him as exemplary. His (only?) school friend Ricci, whom Benny treats like shit, has a reality that Arno Frisch lacks: it would be more shocking if Ricci (Stefan Polasek) did what Benny does (also because Ricci seems younger too). Benny doesn’t, however, stand out within his gloomy family. (Literally gloomy – I don’t recall seeing Mühe’s face in daylight until the final scenes of the film.) The silence over breakfast after Benny’s parents have found out that he’s killed the girl is hard to distinguish atmospherically from the one that reigned at dinner before they saw the video. Haneke’s killjoy tendencies mean that, once they’ve seen it, the father Georg seems just a bit more pissed off than before and the mother Anna (Angela Winkler) a bit weirder. (Georg and Anna are, of course, Haneke’s standard names for a married couple – or Georges and Anne in the Paris-set Hidden and Amour.) There’s no connection between this husband and wife – rather more between mother and son, who share a bedroom on the holiday in Egypt to which they escape after the killing, while the father gets rid of the body and does a proper job of cleaning up the scene of the crime. This Oedipal flavouring isn’t uninteresting but it seems disconnected from the main themes. As Anne, Angela Winkler gives a too self-aware performance; Ulrich Mühe is frustratingly constrained by what Haneke wants from him. When Georg tells Benny that he loves him he does so quite emotionlessly.
Haneke is not at all interested in making any of the human reactions realistic: the parents appear shocked by what Benny has done only to the extent that a crime now has to be concealed. Georg, carefully analysing what’s happened and what, as a result, needs to happen, at one point reaches the puzzling conclusion that because the dead girl didn’t go to Benny’s school then his son should be in the clear. Eventually, Benny goes to the police with his video. The sound recording on it is of remarkably high quality – so that the parents’ whispers from the other side of Benny’s slightly open bedroom door supply clearly audible incriminating evidence. Haneke leaves open the question of why Benny goes to the police. Is he feeling guilty or does he just want to know how it feels to make a confession of murder and get his parents charged too (as he wanted to know how it would feel to kill the girl)? This ambiguity makes for an effective last scene to go with the strong opening one. Between these bookends, the film is often surprisingly boring.
Catherine Wheatley explained that, for much of its life, Benny’s Video had been available only on French and German videotapes: although seeing it now for the first time on 35mm would be a ‘treat’ for her, Wheatley implied that the film, because of its theme, might be most effective watched on a television screen – or, at least, on one the size of 1990s TV screens – with the medium of transmission of Benny’s video having the same dimensions as the screen on which it’s played in Benny’s Video. It may well be that watching on television increases the power of the film, makes it harder to escape from. But the added layer of objectivity that a cinema viewing allows reinforces the piece’s studiedness: you look at the screen and see open doors which reveal Benny writing at a desk in front of the TV screen on which we see the images he has filmed. When Benny gets a skinhead haircut, you’re watching the barber and his customers looking into mirrors; the clever composition isn’t anything more than that. Haneke creates a glum, desensitised world – there are any number of gleaming, clinical surfaces and bleak corridors in evidence as well as the anti-Americanism which was reprised in Funny Games. Benny’s moral shortcomings include going regularly to McDonald’s (and ordering the same meal) and a mild interest in rock music. A potentially redeeming feature is his membership of a school choir preparing for a concert performance of a Bach motet Trotz dem alten Drachen (‘Despite the ancient dragon’). During choir practice, however, Benny is collecting money for a pyramid scheme (his elder sister, who lives away from home, and his parents are into pyramid selling too). Benny’s absence in Egypt immediately before the concert surprisingly doesn’t prevent his taking part in it and his mother goes to watch, smiling her weird smile. The choir sings: ‘Despite the ancient dragon, despite the gaping jaws of death, despite the constant fear, let the world rage and toss. I stand here and sing in perfect calm’. We get the message. In fact, we get it over and over again in Benny’s Video.
6 February 2013
