Traces of love in the films of Michael Haneke

Until now, no one would have claimed that Michael Haneke makes “love films. Not even the cooled-down, bourgeois-reasonable version of the “relationship drama” can be found in a central place in his films, not to mention other forms of cinematographic couple formation. Instead, rather: emotional atrophy, inner “glaciation.” The illiteracy of feelings. The prison and oppression system of the bourgeois nuclear family. The outbreak and inbreak of violence. The pain of dependence. And the futile question of the culpability of socially and medially reduced people. Haneke’s cinema of precision, it seems, is not made for such a vague and fleeting feeling as love. And yet. Nothing is as palpable as the absent. What should and can man live with without the help of the gods? What use are law and order, responsibility and freedom, wealth and culture, if love does not exist? The fact that love remains so distant in the world of Haneke’s films does not mean that the people in them do not long for it. We recognize how they have lost it, and we sense, in their suffering and in their anger, what they are missing. In Michael Haneke’s cinema, love emerges so clearly in its absence that every gesture, every look, every word speaks of it.

The basic melodramatic equation seems otherwise simple: the greater a person’s need for love, the stronger the destructive potential they unleash. The solution in the emotional mainstream is: modesty. The melodramatist’s solution, on the other hand, can only be violence. The solution of feel-good cinema is the small miracle. The solution of the autobiographical artist is exposure. The solution in transcendental cinema is grace. The solution of mythic cinema is sacrifice. It is certainly not that simple in Michael Haneke’s films, because love there is not just one sensation, but many sensations mixed up.

When one speaks of love in film, it is not only about the love between the protagonists, but also about the love between the author and his characters, as well as the love of the spectator for the projections on the screen. It seems to me that the best way to understand Michael Haneke’s films, even before any “interpretation,” is to approach them through the love of the author and director for his characters. The camera in Michael Haneke’s work is distanced and unyielding, but it is not a cold, not a “neutral” instrument (as it is with directors like Peter Greenaway). Through this gaze of defiant humanity, the viewer is able to ask about his or her own co-suffering.

This question can be answered very technically at first: one is very close to these people on the screen, if only because they do not explain themselves, so far removed from the usual dramaturgy of the “problem film,” but because they behave. Michael Haneke says this clearly when he always explains to his actors that he himself knows no more about his characters than what is written in the script. People we get very close to and who are at the same time not fully explained to us demand an emotional involvement; it’s no different in real life. Whether this emotional tension turns into “love” or “friendship” or even a heartfelt dislike, perhaps even hatred, depends on other factors. In any case, nothing can develop without this tension.

But is love possible without injury? In ancient mythology, it was not for nothing that an arrow had to hit you, and an arrow leaves a wound, however cute modern times wanted to make Cupid. Let’s take the detour via art once again. “If you weren’t wounded, you wouldn’t bother with art,” says Michael Haneke. And what if art were nothing but a form of love, or love nothing but a form of art? So the second tension after that between closeness and understanding arises, the tension between injury and love. Whoever approaches people’s injuries also approaches love, and vice versa.

Accordingly, love is not absent in Haneke’s world, as the gods might be, but it is expelled, sacrificed, banished, buried under guilt. In Michael Haneke’s films, love is never present in language. But it is present in gestures, in decisions, and not least in music. “The most beautiful communication,” says Haneke, “is making music together. It’s a form of breathing together and incredibly gratifying. Making music together is more beautiful than any conversation because it happens in a nonverbal, nonconceptual way.” That loss plays a greater role in many Haneke films than any gain, that we find ourselves in a world where extenuating circumstances are lost, is something the filmmaker is well aware of. The radical nature of this negative inventory is a direct reflection of the media and entertainment industry’s relentless work on mitigating circumstances. Haneke’s plots are first and foremost concerned with blocking the emergency exits, with obstructing the well-subtle possibilities of escape. The emotional escape routes common in cinema include, in addition to the depictions of extenuating circumstances, the simple distancing mechanisms used in everyday life: rationalizing, psychologizing, and moralizing.

Haneke’s films are moral films, not moralizing ones! They reach deep into the psyche, but they do not psychologize. And they (also) appeal to reason without rationalizing. Michael Haneke, very close to Robert Bresson, for example, is one of those filmmakers who have accepted the legacy of the bourgeois tragedy, without, of course, completely abandoning its lost relationship to tragedy. Thus the two extremes come together: man abandoned by the gods and the bourgeois subject failing against itself.

This very question of whether we are dealing with people abandoned by all the gods or with bourgeois subjects failing against themselves and their own kind remains open in Haneke’s films. Therefore, the question of love also remains open in two respects. And in love as the final piece of a bourgeois tragedy, in Liebe, this only comes out all the more clearly. Does man, possibly precisely when he loves, do that which distances him most from the gods, because he fails as a subject, or does it behave exactly the other way around? Both are conceivable, but not both at the same time.

Undoubtedly, this path to death is observed by Michael Haneke with a tenderness and respect that gives us comfort in form, as it were: This look contradicts the “bagatelle”, the trivialization of dying (in love, in spite of love, by love or even in its absence). To listen attentively to a bagatelle is like watching a film closely. We see two people who have been abandoned by all the gods and who fundamentally fail as subjects. Neither from their fellow men nor from “the society” help and consolation can be expected. A path has to be followed “to the bitter end”. And it was a real life. What can love be but the acceptance of mortality, the ability to mourn? This is precisely the tragedy - of love, which is not a solution, but all we have.

“Interpretation,” Susan Sontag has said, “is the intellectual’s revenge on art.” That may be, more often than not. But often enough, too, interpretation is nothing more than a somewhat twisted declaration of love by the intellectual for art.

Georg Seeßlen, born in 1948, studied painting, art history and semiology in Munich. He is considered one of the most renowned film and cultural critics and writes for Die Zeit, Frankfurter Rundschau, taz, epd-Film and Freitag, among others. He has been a lecturer at various universities in Germany and abroad and has published numerous books on fantastic and comic film, crime and thriller, as well as biographies on Stephen Spielberg, among others. In addition, he edited widely acclaimed volumes of material on Alfred Hitchcock, Joel & Ethan Coen and Quentin Tarantino, for example.