Benny's Video (1992)

Benny's video is yet another early Michael Haneke. Benny digs video. Benny digs watching a pig being slaughtered. Benny brings a girl home. The girl has been standing outside the video rental shop. Benny shows the girl his video camera equipment. The camera is rolling. He kills her. Benny goes clubbing with a friend. Benny eats fast food. His well-to-do family find out about his deed. They want to cover up the murder. Mom takes Benny abroad. Benny gets burned by the sun. Benny goes home and talks to the police... As a backdrop of all this, there is the TV; sports events, news, wars, music shows.

Haneke sticks with his themes: images; violence; the emotional desert. I did have some complaints about The Seventh Continent. The social critique in that movie was, I thought, not entirely convincing. It's hard not to be shocked by Benny's video. It is a brutal movie. It tells about brutal things. It's aim is to depict a brutal society. The style might be slightly less eccentric than the experiments of The Seventh Continent. That does not mean this is a conventional film. It isn't. For example; Benny's brutal act of murder is something we almost do not see; the only thing we see is a small section of Benny's room being shown on his screen. Apart from a haunting Bach motet, Benny's video offers no consolation. Haneke does not say: technology makes us violent. He says: we live in a world in which genuine emotions are impossible; technology is only an expression of that state. In film after film, Haneke turns seeing/watching/imagining inside-out. He explores the technology of the eye, and the moral dimension of attention.

Benny's video is one of the most disturbing takes on violence I've ever seen. Why? Haneke does not see violence as the misbehavior of a few rotten eggs. Haneke pans the camera across a range of scenes we'd rather not want to see. If there's anything this film tells us, it is that there is a huge difference between watching the world with our own eyes (being a full-blown witness to what goes on around us) and using our eyes like external devices, like a tv screen, that we can shut on and off, flicking among the channels - at will. The characters in the film do somehow react to what they see, but it is as if nothing could really get through to them, shake them.