Companion to Michael Haneke

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 multi-volume Blackwell History of American Film.

“This makes the arrival of A Companion to Michael Haneke all the more welcome—for supporters like me, who will find ample evidence of Haneke’s intelligence and enterprise, and for open-minded skeptics willing to risk a change of heart by perusing 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 firstrate scholar of against-the-grain cinema...This gives some idea of the breadth, creativity, and intelligence that distinguish this fine collection of essays on a filmmaker I still stand by as one of the most artfully audacious of our day.”  (Film Quarterly, 1 April 2012)

• Notes on Contributors viiiAcknowledgments xivIntroduction: Haneke’s Anachronism 1Roy GrundmannPart I Critical and Topical Approaches to Haneke’s Cinema 511 Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games 53Thomas Elsaesser2 Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Michael Haneke’s Caché 75Thomas Y. Levin3 Infectious Images: Haneke, Cameron, Egoyan, and the Dueling Epistemologies of Video and Film 91Vinzenz Hediger4 Tracking Code Unknown 113Tom Conley Copyrighted Material5 Michael Haneke and the New Subjectivity: Architecture and Film 124Peter Eisenman6 Games Haneke Plays: Reality and Performance 130Brigitte Peucker7 Figures of Disgust 147Christa Blümlinger8 Without Music: On Caché 161Michel Chion9 Fighting the Melodramatic Condition: Haneke’s Polemics 168Jörg Metelmann10 “Mourning for the Gods Who Have Died”: The Role of Religion in Michael Haneke’s Glaciation Trilogy 187Gregor ThuswaldnerPart II The Television Films 20311 A Melancholy Labor of Love, or Film Adaptation as Translation: Three Paths to the Lake 205Fatima Naqvi12 Michael Haneke and the Television Years: A Reading of Lemmings 227Peter Brunette13 Variations on Themes: Spheres and Space in Haneke’s Variation 243Monica Filimon and Fatima Naqvi14 Projecting Desire, Rewriting Cinematic Memory: Gender and German Reconstruction in Michael Haneke’s Fraulein 263Tobias Nagl15 (Don’t) Look Now: Hallucinatory Art History in Who Was Edgar Allan? 279Janelle Blankenship16 Bureaucracy and Visual Style 301Brian PricePart III The German-Language Theatrical Features 32117 Structures of Glaciation: Gaze, Perspective, and Gestus in the Films of Michael Haneke 323Georg Seeßlen18 The Void at the Center of Things: Figures of Identity in Michael Haneke’s Glaciation Trilogy 337Peter J. Schwartz19 How to Do Things with Violences 354Eugenie Brinkema20 Between Adorno and Lyotard: Michael Haneke’s Aesthetic of Fragmentation 371Roy Grundmann21 Hollywood Endgames 420Leland MonkPart IV The French-Language Theatrical Features 43922 Class Conflict and Urban Public Space: Haneke and Mass Transit 441Barton Byg23 Multicultural Encounters in Haneke’s French-Language Cinema 455Alex Lykidis24 Haneke’s Secession: Perspectivism and Anti-Nihilism in Code Unknown and Caché 477Kevin L. Stoehr25 The Unknown Piano Teacher 495Charles Warren26 Discordant Desires, Violent Refrains: La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) 511Jean Ma27 Civilization’s Endless Shadow: Haneke’s Time of the Wolf 532Evan Torner28 The Intertextual and Discursive Origins of Terror in Michael Haneke’s Caché 551T. Jefferson KlinePart V Michael Haneke Speaks 56329 Terror and Utopia of Form: Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar 565Michael Haneke30 Violence and the Media 575Michael Haneke31 The World That Is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke 580Christopher Sharrett32 Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke 591Roy GrundmannFilmography 607Index 619