"It's important to always try to tell a story in a way where there are several credible possible explanations. Explanations that can be totally contradictory!"
-- Michael Haneke
(This is a follow-up to a previous post: What is hidden in Caché?)
Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com asks Michael Haneke about the surface mysteries -- the MacGuffins, as I like to think of them -- in "Caché" and "The White Ribbon":
AO: You spoke earlier about using the black-and-white photography and the narration as a distancing mechanism, a way to remind the viewer that the film is an artifact. There's another sense in which you are challenging the audience. As you did in "Caché," you lead us part of the way toward a solution of the central mystery: Who is committing these violent acts, and why? And then you seem to suggest that solving the mystery is not actually important.
MH: Those are the least important questions. In my previous film, "Caché," the question of who sent the videotapes isn't important at all. What's important is the sense of guilt felt by the character played by Daniel Auteuil in the film. But these superficial questions are the glue that holds the spectator in place, and they allow me to raise underlying questions that they have to grapple with. It's relatively unimportant who sent the tapes, but by engaging with that the viewer must engage questions that are far less banal.
There are so many different things that take place in "The White Ribbon" that there are any number of possible explanations. It may not be that the acts have been committed by someone intentionally. For example, when the barn burns down, it's possible that was simply caused by an accidental spark. Perhaps the hay had been stored when it was too wet, and spontaneous combustion happened. Perhaps the farmer's wife who died simply fell. It was an accident, and she was not murdered. The explanations, in fact, are so unimportant. In real life, there are any number of events that take place that we don't understand. It's only in mainstream cinema that films explain everything, and claim to have answers for anything that happens. In reality, we know so little about what happens. It's far more productive for me to confront the audience with a complex reality that mirrors the contradictory nature of human experience.
There are open-ended films and there are closed ones, and Haneke prefers the former. He wants the audience to actively participate in watching and interpreting the film -- and to be conscious that they are doing so. Both "Caché" and "The White Ribbon" are explicitly about (as I like to say) what goes through your head while you watch them. We humans like to tie together cause and effect, to affix blame (even for natural phenomena like, say, earthquakes). Scapegoating is one of the ways we comfort ourselves with the illusion of explanations. If we can find someone to blame, it makes us feel that we are somewhat in control, that things happen for reasons we can understand (usually because someone else is actively doing "evil").
AO: It strikes me that in "Caché," and perhaps in this film as well, there literally is no answer that explains what is happening.
MH: [In English.] There could be an answer!
AO: Well, we can point back at you, the director of the film. Who is making those videotapes and sending them to the family? You are!
[Laughter.] Every interpretation is right.
[In German.] I always say that a film is like a ski jump. The film constructs the jump and enables the spectator to jump. It's up to each member of the audience to jump, and they're all going to jump differently. I create tension. I raise certain questions. That's my intention, but it's to give the audience a chance to respond.
[In English.] The film ends in the head of the viewer, not on the screen.
AO: On the simplest level, you want to leave us asking: What happens next? What will the events we have seen lead to, and how do we think about them?
MH: [In English.] Yes, and why? Why do things happen like this? Everybody has to find his own explanation.
And your explanations (see The Funny Games Experiment) should tell you as much about how your own mind works as they do about how the film works.
Is this a cop-out on Haneke's part? That's one explanation. And even if there's some truth to it, the careful construction of the films suggests it's not the whole truth: "Caché" encourages you (requires you) to engage with what you're seeing and question it shot by shot. And "The White Ribbon" (which I've only seen once) is less didactic and more dialectical than its critics give it credit for: The less they notice, the more simplistic the interpretations...
UPDATE (01/23/10): From another good interview with Hanekewith Sam Adams at The Onion A.V. Club:
MH: "Funny Games" was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are, or respond to them as provocation, then that's quite different. "Funny Games" is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience. [...]
MH: I always seek to mobilize, to call on the imagination of the spectator. It's well-known that the images that are created by one's imagination are far stronger than any that I can show. In fact, it's an error, a widespread error in mainstream cinema, to always want to show things and to depict things. Because as you say, we're overwhelmed by it, because there are so many of these images, and in fact we become inured to it through overuse. It seems ridiculous. To me, it's far more efficient to mobilize the imagination. It's far more efficient to hear a creaking step, for example, than to see the face of a monster, which usually looks ridiculous, and where you know that the blood is ketchup.
AVC: That goes not just for images, but for plot as well. In this movie and in Caché, for example, you don't connect all the dots. We never know exactly who did what to whom. In the same way that you're not showing everything that happened, you don't tell us everything that happened, either.
MH: First of all, in real life, we don't know--there's so much that we don't understand. If someone's lying to us, then it's rare that we know that they're lying to us. It's only in bad films that you recognize immediately that an actor's playing in such a way that you can see that he's lying, and that's simply dumb. But to reach that, it requires that you make a film in such a way that a spectator feels compelled to find his own explanation. You want to lead the spectator to find his own interpretation. To ask questions rather than provide all of the answers. Doing that leads to open endings and open dramaturgy.
4 Comments
I've rewatched "Cache" recently following Roger Ebert's "Great Movie" review of the film. I enjoyed it the first time I saw it, before letting it fall off my radar for about a year or so. Seeing it again--with all the new discussion following Ebert's new comments--I enjoyed it immensely.
Haneke deliberately confuses, toys with and subverts audience expectations throughout the film. Once the film is over and we go back to view it all over again, we go back with the rules changed: the first time through, the less perceptive members of the audience allow general conventions to guide them through the movie. Those with no patience won't watch it again--or even finish it, in some cases--but those who insist on knowing will watch it again.
Haneke knows exactly how many people watch movies, and he uses that against the audience as much as possible. Ebert's "smoking gun" is key evidence of this: we see the alleyway outside the Laurent home through a window. We aren't sure if it's a perspective shot or another video recording--the only hint is the faint sound of breathing in the background, directing us to the former conclusion. Then we have a shot panning through the room, to a window, and we see a child (Majid) sitting there, coughing up blood, before turning to the camera--obviously, this is a perspective shot. The first time through, many will believe that this child was the one looking out the window--the scene is sequenced in such a way that we draw the conclusion because the shots are paired together to suggest it. It isn't until we watch the movie again when we realize that it is Majid as a child, in Georges' childhood home, and that the only connection between this shot and the previous is a mental one: arguably, it is Georges standing at the window, staring into the alleyway, thoughts of Majid clouding his mind. This "smoking gun" does not specifically point to the perpetrator of these videotapes; instead, it shows us the effect the tapes and drawings are having on Georges' psyche.
And because it's hidden in the movie, we don't realize it until we work to dig it out. I like to think that, somehow, Georges' is sending himself the tapes, perhaps in some obsessive-compulsive manner. And since this is a Haneke movie, all interpretations are valid, even if we cannot agree on them, as Haneke clearly said.
Hi Jim, I have no doubts that it was Walid who perpetrated the matter. However, I say this not as a direct statement but as a confirmation of the guilt that director Michael Haneke was referring to in the Andrew O'Hehir interview The Haneke MacGuffins. Reading that article now has confirmed my suspicions on the tensility of the film's psychological layer. When did it snap? It snapped with the poor, unexpected death of Majid, who is an innocent victim in these matters. Up until that point, all the film was about are decpetive devices to confuse viewers, setups like the incident where Georges nearly had a fight with the man on the bicycle, and MacGuffins such as the videotapes. The film's landscape (if to compare) leading up to the afore-mentioned suicide was pretty much featureless. If the same thing had gone on even after Majid's suicide, I would have resigned myself with the idea that the culprit was indeed outside the circle of main characters: you know, like the elusive dwarf in red coat that Donald Sutherland was chasing in Don't Look Now. The thought that it was Michael Haneke himself perpretrating the videos also occurred to me.
But true to form, the film did give us a payoff. It followed the conventional structure of a psychological thriller. With the unfortunate death of the father, tactics had to change. What transpired between Walid and Georges inside the Men's Room actually reveals a newfound guilt in Walid. It confirms his hand in the matters. All guilts are hidden, and the film is all about the Domino Effect of guilt; first Georges, then Anne's, and then Walid's. I wish I have the transcript of the conversation inside the Men's Room here, but I don't. Play it out again, Jim, on your DVD, and tell me if Walid's words are those of an innocent man. His outright denial of his involvemment sounds phony, in line with somebody else's statement, "it depends on what you mean by_____." Had Georges given in to the taunts (ulterior motives) of the upstart, he would have landed a horrible fate in jail, given the context of Majid's recent death and his involvement in it, however innocent he was at the scene. Which is why I refer to the earlier incident with the bicycle man as a setup because it adds substance (what little there is) to Georges character. He may be impatient, but he's no fool.
This film is a study of its characters. All of them acted true to their natures, as they are slowly revealed; except for Walid, who was an ambiguous character before his father's suicide. He came out in the end, though, and I thought that was the genius of the film. Even to the end of the film, the surface reveals only loose ends, but the undercurrents shed definite light on the matter. This is one of the joys that can be derived from an intelligent film.
Btw, your preview button is not working.
P.S. A complementary entry of mine appears in Roger's blog on Cache.
The Ebert essay on Cache, his review of The White Ribbon, and the various back-and-forth here about Haneke's work put me in mind of three of my favorite books. One, a work of literary criticism called The Book of God by Gabriel Josipovici, in part makes the argument that one of the ways by which The Bible does what it does is by putting events, or similar phrasings, along side one another with no or minimal commentary and letting the reader figure out what, if anything, the connection between them is and what, if anything, the connection means.
The other two are very similar to one another, and are novels by Stanislaw Lem: The Chain of Chance, and The Investigation. In both novels, the conventions of detective novels are used to subvert readers' expectations about what is going on. Apparently solid clues are found to be irreconcilable, or maybe not, and the patterns that emerge leading to the resolution of the novels' plots don't necessarily solve the central mystery.
I've often wondered if these Lem novels would make good movies. Looks like I'll have to watch some Haneke for a bit of that sort of flavor.
This Michael is the Antonioni of the 21st century. Not a compliment. He'll be a footnote in 25 years.
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