Michael Haneke is, I would say, one of the most interesting contemporary film makers. I hadn't seen Der Siebente Kontinent before. Unsurprisingly, it is a very bleak film. Also, this early Haneke film brings up several themes recurring in his later work; seeing/watching, violence, existential dystopia, alienation. Here, as elsewhere, these themes are dealt with in a a very conscious, yet direct, style. You might say that it is impossible to understand what Haneke is getting at if you don't pay attention to how he works. If you have seen Der Siebente Kontinent, you will know that a large part of the film is filmed in close-ups that usually don't focus on faces, but other parts of the human body/the setting. In conveying the repetition of everyday life, Haneke shows daily routines such as taking the car to a car wash, the stale figures of the alarm clock & clock radio's discrete hum, a child's hand moving around a bowl of cereal. In several scenes in this film, very short scenes chronicle some sort of everyday action from a slightly off-putting visual angle. Haneke is not, it seems, interested in individual characters. Rather, he explores a form of life-world. In this sense, the film is a sibling to Fassbinder's Warum läuft Herr R Amok?
A normal family goes through everyday existence with no unusual expressions of emotion. Actually, we see very few expressions of emotions. A child tries to convince her teacher that she can no longer see. It turns out she lied. Haneke is not explaining why she lied. Instead, this can be understood as a thematic opening of the fillm, that revolves around perception, in the most existential sense of the world. We see a family getting up in the morning. A man is doing ordinary things at the office. A woman prepares a family dinner. Her brother asks her what spices she used, and she enumerates them pensively. Gradually, there is talk about "emigrating to Australia". In the last segment of the film, we understand that this means that the family members will committ suicide.
I have ambiguous feelings about this film. It is a cinematic masterpiece. Haneke knows what he is doing. Haneke works with unusual cinematic techniques. Pacing is one example. Unlike most other directors, Haneke uses the time span - short and long - of the scenes as a device to let us into the world of the characters: a world of repetitive drudgery, but very little personal expression. In many scenes, we only see glimpses of what is going on; the scenes are, as it were, punctuated in the middle (with a short pause with a black screen) which often places a completely mundande train of actions into an eerie light (Haneke, of course, has read his critical theory about Verfremdung effekts).
It is the content of the film that raises a few questions. Haneke, undoubtedly, attempts to analyze a contemporary form of dread. But unlike Elfriede Jelinek (whose work he later transformed onto the big screen) and Fassbinder's Herr R, this early film tends to place dread as a reaction to the ordinary and mundane as such. But what kind of point is that? Of course, it is easy to trail it to a certain strand in the history of philosophy. And actually it is tempting to think about certain existentialist philosophers (H-h-h-eidegger), rather than politics, here. Haneke works with our perception of time, so as to confuse us about the time span within which things are happening. The film is divided into three chapters, three years. But there is no "development" as such. I kept asking myself: I am invited to view their lives as meaningless and empty, but why is this? Because they go to the car wash several times? Because their lives consist of routines? Yes, but we are given no clue whatsoever of why we should think of them as empty routines. Don't think I am asking for some quasi-causal explanation of why the family committed suicide. It just seems to me that Haneke's perspective builds on intellectualization of life. It is not that I refuse the idea that life can become empty because what one does no longer means anything. But that lack of meaning does not, I would say, unfold from the sheer repetition of things, as we are perhaps led to believe in this film.
It is NOT enough to say that "modern life" (whatever that is?) is "meaningless" and boring because "we" go to work every day, do the grocery shopping, prepare dinners, etc. Fassbinder's film is good because he shows the conventionality of a certain societal class. Jelinek also takes that angle, and widens it to paint a picture of how life becomes meaningless because it is made so. In the present film, the characters seem overwhelmed by an uncanny sense of passivity and loneliness, the origin and surrounding of which is very uncertain. What I would have liked here is a sharpere, more penetrating analysis of emotional vacuity: why is it that "escape" seems to unattainable? This film is cintematically ingenious, but intellectually it goes only half the way.
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