sinner brink, r (2011) a post-human moralist

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A Post-Humanist MoralistRobert Sinnerbrink aa Department of Phil osophy, Macquari e Universit y, Nort h Ryde,

Sydney, NSW 2109, Aust raliaAvailable online: 04 Jan 2012

To cit e thi s art icle: Robert Sinnerbrink (20 11): A Post-Humanist Moralist, Angelaki: Journal of t heTheoretical Humanit ies, 16:4, 115-129

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ANGELAKIjournalof the theoretical humanitiesvolume 16 number 4 December 2011

In all of my films, I always strive to be ahumanist. In my view, if you are seriouslyinterested in art, there just isnt any other way. . . An art form devoid of humanism isa contradiction, it does not exist.

Michael Haneke, Interview with SergeToubiana , Time of the Wolf, DVD(Madman Films, 2003)

A successful bourgeois family decides todestroy all of their material possessions andthen to kill themselves; an alienated fifteen-year-old boy, obsessed with violent video imagery,kills a shy girl he has just befriended in orderto see what it was like; a quiet young student,interested in philosophy and a keen tabletennis player, opens fire in a bank after failingto obtain cash from a nearby ATM; a wealthy

family holidaying in their summer home isterrorised by two polite, preppy killers,whose senseless cruelty has no other aim thanconfronting spectators with their own consump-tion of violence. These four scenarios by Austrianfilmmaker Michael Haneke from his films TheSeventh Continent [Der siebente Kontinent ](1989), Bennys Video (1992), 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance [71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls ] (1994) and FunnyGames (1997/2007) might suggest to some thework of a cinematic nihilist or cynical provoca-teur. Given their disturbing subject-matter,alienating aesthetic, and lack of moral resolution,his films, so some critics argue, lack humanityfrom a moral point of view, and so fail ashumanistic works of art from an aesthetic pointof view.1 For others, they exploit the nihilismof a media-saturated culture, indulging in adubious manipulation of audience expectationsand our fascination with violence;2 or else they

present a resignatory pseudo-political treatment

of contemporary social and political issuestransfigured through an anachronistic modernistaesthetic. 3

Such criticisms, so I wish to show, areinteresting more for the assumptions they revealthan for any insight they might afford. At thevery least they tend to misunderstand or distortthe complex moral, political, and aestheticpurpose of Hanekes work. Indeed, his filmsare better understood, I argue, as examining thesocially disorienting and subjectively disintegrat-ing effects of our post-humanist world of mass-mediatised experience. At the same time, theyare highly reflexive cinematic works that questionthe nature of our relationship with screenedimages, forcing us to reflect both morally

and aesthetically upon our relationship with

robert sinnerbrink

A POST-HUMANISTMORALIST

michael hanekes cine -matic critique

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/11/040115^15 2011Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.641350

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cinematic and media images more generally.These two strands of Hanekes work the criticaldissection of the pernicious effects of mass-mediatised experience, and the reflexive critiqueof the viewers complicity in, and uncriticalconsumption of, audiovisual images comprisea sustained meditation on what we might call thepost-humanist condition: a cinematic critiqueof the disintegration and fragmentation of affectand subjectivity, the paralysing of our capacityfor experiential reflection within affluent liberaldemocracies, a disintegration closely linked withcontemporary forms of mediatised spectacle andthe cynical consumption of images of violence.

The question that Haneke confronts in his

recent films can be stated as follows: how canone make a critical, questioning film when themodernist techniques of self-reflection havelost much of the critical meaning they earlierpossessed? Put differently, how can one still bea humanistic artist when humanism no longercarries the moral or aesthetic authority orconviction that it once did? How can film respondto the nihilism of the age without itself succumbing to nihilism? These are some of the

questions that I wish to explore in Hanekeswork, which might be described as post-humanist in that it traverses and retrievesthe aesthetic and moral tropes of humanismwhile also questioning the latters uncriticalassumptions and dubious implications.

Hanekes response to this problem how toboth retrieve and criticise aesthetic and moralhumanism is to dissolve the distinction betweenthe socio-cultural critique of various aspects of globalised neoliberal societies, and the cinematic critique of our consumption of highly mediatisedimages of violence. Given the mediatised natureof contemporary social experience, the onlyeffective way to engage us in the performanceof a cinematic critique is by means of thevery images that capture and captivate us. Thedifficulty, however, is how to do this when themoral and ideological justifications of the pastno longer carry conviction. To this end, Hanekehas adopted a number of strategies, includingconfronting the viewer with his or her owncomplicity in the consumption of images, whilealso using such images to perform a cinematic

critique of contemporary social and culturalexperience. At the same time, however, Hanekeattempts to move beyond the kind of self-referential deadlock evident in some of hisrecent films, notably the American remake of Funny Games (2007), which confronts us withour (complacent) consumption of media andcinematic images of violence but at the cost of evacuating such images of any socio-culturalreference. This shift is evident, I suggest, notonly in Hanekes most explicitly post-huma-nist, and least commented upon, film Time of the Wolf [Le temps du loup] (2003) but also inhis most recent historical drama, The WhiteRibbon [Das weie Band ] (2009). These two

films are notable for their eschewal of theexplicitly modernist techniques of distantiationevident in his other films in favour of a moresubtle integration of socio-cultural and cinematiccritique within conventional narrative form.In what follows, I shall explore some of Hanekes films as instances of post-humanistcinematic critique, films that both stage anddeploy the techniques and tropes of aestheticmodernism and liberal humanism, while also

submitting these to the same kind of criticalscrutiny as his films direct towards contemporaryconsumer society.

haneke as modernistHaneke has often been described as one of theheirs to the European modernist traditionof filmmakers such as Bresson, Antonioni, andPasolini; but if so, he is an heir who seeks not toreproduce so much as to traverse and transformthis tradition. As a recent voluminous studyhas it, Hanekes cinema, with its explicitlymodernist heritage, difficult subject-matter, and challenging narrative style, comprisesan oeuvre that verges on anachronistic(Grundmann 13). Indeed, some critics haveidentified Haneke as a latter-day cinematicmoralist (Wheatley 14), which others haveassumed implies a crypto-conservative orientationtowards the restoration of traditional humanisticvalues (Speck 10). What I shall argue, however,is that Hanekes cinematic critique in the senseof a cinematic depiction and cultural-critical

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diagnosis of the maladies of our age is betterunderstood as a post-humanist moralism: anethico-political critique that has traversedhumanism both historically and philosophically,yet found it wanting, in need of transformationand renewal.

This post-humanism can be understood in tworelated senses: first, in relation to the historicalexperiences of Nazism and post-war forms of violence and trauma, which have renderedtraditional forms of humanism subject to scep-tical doubt; and second, in relation to the rise of a post-war Debordian society of the spectaclethat increasingly captures attention and con-sciousness by means of a system of commodified

images (and images of commodities). Indeed,from Hanekes perspective, the moral meaningof the human and of the related creed of humanism have been shattered and reconfi-gured thanks to the experience of trauma,violence, and the technological transformationof socio-historical experience (notably throughour consumption of images). At the same time,however, Hanekes post-humanism is concernedto retrieve what was valuable in the humanist

tradition of modernist cinema, rescuing andextending but also questioning and criticisingits aesthetic and moral-political dimensions.This dual strategy thus allows Haneke to engagein a cinematic form of critique that is at oncecultural-political and aesthetic-cinematic.

In other words, it is not just the violencedepicted in or by cinematic and other audiovisualimages but the violence of conventional cinematicrepresentation that Hanekes films diagnose andcriticise. To elaborate this thesis I shall considersome of Hanekes early and later works, arguingthat his post-humanist cinematic critique nolonger assumes the emancipatory effect of modernist interruption, but nonetheless deploysmodernist techniques in order to pursue anethical questioning of both the violence of theimage and of globalised neoliberal societies.Hanekes critique of violence, in other words,questions the deforming and dehumanisingdimensions of modern life, while at the sametime challenging any complacent humanismsafely insulated from criticism. The problem,in short, is that of belief : how to maintain

a critical practice of cinema, one that notonly engages in socio-cultural but also in a self-reflexive cinematic critique, without assumingthat we can still have recourse to the same kindsof humanist values that legitimated an earliergeneration of cinematic auteurs .

the emotional glaciation trilogyHanekes first three feature films The SeventhContinent [Die siebente Kontinent ] (1989),Bennys Video (1992), and 71 Fragments of aChronology of Chance [71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls ] (1994) comprisewhat many critics have called, much to

Hanekes chagrin, his emotional glaciationtrilogy or Austrian cycle.4 These films allshare an austere cinematic aesthetic and fragmen-tary narrative style, and deal with confrontingmediatised events based upon contemporarynews stories drawn from his native Austria.5

In a manner recalling Bresson and Antonioni,while also challenging towering German maverickRainer Werner Fassbinder (Speck 6162, 103),Die siebente Kontinent (Hanekes first feature

film6

) tells the story of an affluent Austrianfamily who killed themselves for no apparentreason, systematically destroying all of theirproperty and disposing of their wealth byflushing it down the toilet. The familys self-destructive statement is left unexplained savefor a chilling line in the fathers familial suicidenote: I believe that looking at the life we havelived straight in the eye makes any notion of theend easy to accept.

Hanekes next feature, Bennys Video (1992),is based on the case of an alienated teenageboy living a life dominated by the recordingand consumption of video imagery, who for noapparent reason kills a girl he has just befriended,capturing her murder on videotape. His crime isthen covered up by his bourgeois parents, whomthe boy eventually turns over to the police.71 Fragmente (1994), a film that introducesHanekes now familiar technique of weavingtogether loosely connected narrative threadsacross disparate locations, presents the storiesof an illegal immigrant boy trying to survive ina European city, a security guard undergoing a

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personal crisis, a middle-class couple trying toadopt a child, and a young students dailyuniversity routine. These narrative strands allculminate in the apparently random and senselessmurder of a number of bank customers by thestudent, who then kills himself across the roadfrom the bank while seated in his car. This tragicact of violence, moreover, was apparentlytriggered in the most arbitrary fashion, namelyby his failure to obtain cash from the bankin order to pay for petrol he had just purchasedat a filling station.7 In what has since become asignature gesture, Haneke presents the elabora-tion and unfolding of these events, whichculminate in acts of senseless violence, without

offering speculative psychological conjectures orcrude sociological explanations. As Speckobserves, unlike conventional narrative cinema,which strives to make any acts of (self-)aggressionimmediately intelligible within the narrative,Hanekes films eschew such narrative justifica-tions, forcing the viewer to reflect on why theyare being subjected to these random and mean-ingless depictions of violence (1014). Indeed,these minute and exacting descriptions of

violence, without the release offered by narrative justification, are presented in order to elicitan intellectual and visceral shock to thoughtwith a pedagogical and critical intent.

Despite their shocking subject-matter, all threefilms share an austere modernist aesthetic recalling among others, Bresson, Antonioni, andPasolini that aims to disrupt our expectationsconcerning conventional narrative film, and tointerrupt our moral and humanistic assumptionsconcerning the psychological motivation of itscharacters. The stories are rendered in carefullystructured but fragmentary form, rich in detaileddescriptions of the characters mundane actionsand daily rituals but avoiding any didacticexplanation of their possible motivations orexplicit reflection on the deeper meaning of their actions. Hanekes aesthetic strategy is thusto withhold explanatory devices as far aspossible precisely in order to allow the spectatorspace for his or her own response, reflection,and interpretation. As Haneke describes, in anoft-repeated remark, his role as a filmmakeris that of constructing an elaborate ski-jump;

but it is up to viewers to take up theexperiential and hermeneutic challenge of jump-ing for themselves.8

socio-cultural or cinematic critique?From his earliest feature films, Haneke wasrecognised as an heir to the modernist auteurcinema of the 1960s and 1970s, a provocateurdealing with the relationship between alienatedsubjects and the consumerist world of images.As Catherine Wheatley points out, BennysVideo , the second film in his so-called emotionalglaciation trilogy, functions at a narrative levelas a critique of how the cinematic conventions of

mainstream film and television can contributeto the Debordian Society of the Spectacle (63).Indeed, this intent is signalled formally via thefilms explicit blurring of the boundary betweenthe ongoing diegetic video and the so-calledreality of the film narrative (Wheatley 63).The film often presents images from Bennysvideo recordings, for example, as though thesewere part of the film narrative world, a movewhich we only become aware of retrospectively

a gesture that Haneke repeats and refines insubsequent films (for example, in the famousopening sequence of Cache [Hidden ] (2005)).A good example of this blurring of the boundarybetween (narrative) reality and its recording via(video) images what Speck calls Hanekesreframing of the image (28) occurs near theend of Bennys Video, when we hear a repetitionof a conversation between Bennys parents fromearlier in the film, discussing how best to coverup Bennys crime. It soon becomes apparent,however, that what we are watching is actuallya video recording that Benny made of thisconversation on the night he confessed to hisparents, a recording that he subsequently handsover to the police, with images that now becomeevidence (for the police) to indict his parents(and us) for their (and our) complicity in hiscrime. For Wheatley, Haneke thus explicitlybegins developing with this film a project of ethical spectatorship by engaging in an explicitcritique of the cinematic medium, one that alsoimplicates the spectator in the depicted violencethat he or she willingly consumes (911).


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For all this self-reflexivity, however, it isdifficult not to see Hanekes films as alsoengaging in a critical reflection on the destructivedimensions of modern experience in affluentWestern societies. Although set in Austria andlater in various parts of Europe one couldtranspose Hanekes films without difficulty to anymajor Western city. They describe the problemsbesetting affluent consumer societies, and takeas their starting point the premise that we existtoday within a decayed version of Debordssociety of the spectacle where the spectacularimage the most visible and seductive dimensionof commodification has become all-encompass-ing, even banal. Hanekes cinema thus poses the

following question: given the distractible stateof the spectator in societies of the spectacle,spectators whose powers of decoding and assim-ilating visual information have become moreacute, but whose ability to understand, reflectupon, and assign emotional significance to thisvisual information has become more attenuated,how can film force us to engage with the image,to arrest the information flow and force criticalthought in response to what we see, to deepen the

emotional and intellectual impact of the imagesthat surround us, while at the same time forcingus to reflect upon our desire for, and fascinationwith, images of violence, cruelty, and suffering,now consumed as entertainment?

It is in response to this question that I wish tocharacterise Haneke as a post-humanist moralist.Indeed, Hanekes cinema can be understood asengaging in both an ethico-political critique of the loss of affect, desensitisation, and alienationengendered by the post-humanist society of thespectacle; and in a reflexive cinematic-aestheticcritique of the corrupting image economy of televisual culture (including cinema), an indict-ment of our complicity with the consumption of images that contribute to, rather than forcereflection on, the nihilism of our age. Indeed,Haneke attempts to retrieve the modernisttradition affirming the autonomy of the work of art, championing the critical potential of thecinema, while at the same time questioning anyuncritical belief in the powers of the medium oracknowledging its potential for manipulationand abuse within a generalised consumer culture

of pathological spectacle. What to do when themodernist techniques of self-reflexive distantia-tion have been appropriated by the dominantaudiovisual culture and hence begin to lose theirerstwhile critical effect?

haneke as socio-cultural criticHere we might point to two distinct schools of thought that have emerged with regard toHanekes work: the socio-cultural critiquereading (Adam Bingham, Matthias Frey, andRobin Wood) and the cinematic reflexivityapproach to his work (Catherine Wheatley, OliverSpeck, and David Sorfa). For the former,

Hanekes films develop a social critique of contemporary European/Western culture; forthe latter, his films are concerned principallywith a cinematic critique of the spectatorsrelationship with the image. Both perspectives,I want to suggest, are correct but limited if takenindependently without reference to the other:the challenge is to think these perspectivestogether in relation to Hanekes work as awhole, and hence to see that his films engage

in socio-cultural critique precisely by means of a cinematic critique . The contemporary societyof the spectacle is such that it demands acinematic intervention via audiovisually mediatedforms of critical reflection.

This dual-aspect approach to his work thatthe cinematic critique is a socio-cultural critique,one that self-critically extends and questions thethematic concerns of his films is necessitated bytwo related premises: (1) that social experiencetoday is increasingly mediatised by various formsof audiovisual media, including film, television,the Internet, computer games, and so on; and(2) that the effect of this all-encompassingmediatisation of social experience, throughthe narcissistic or compulsive consumption of spectacular media images, is to arrest or retardour capacity for critical reflection and emotionalengagement with the televisual information flow.The aim of Hanekes work, therefore, is to forceus to reflect upon our consumption of cinematicand televisual images, indeed our complicitywith their desensitising effects, and to find aspecifically cinematic way of provoking thought

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on, and thus ethical responsibility for, whywe desire and consume such images. Indeed, hisfilms force us to reflect upon what our responseto them should be, and to question what kindof culture makes such images the primary waythrough which individuals orient, engage, andentertain themselves.

As I should stress, however, this does notmean that Haneke is engaged in nothing morethan a standard modernist form of reflectionupon the cinematic image and our complexrelationship with it (consumption, enjoyment,desensitisation, critical self-reflection, and so on).To be sure, most commentators on Hanekerightly emphasise the socio-ideological dimen-

sions of his work. A quick survey of the narrativeand thematic concerns of his films more thanbears this out: we find narrative presentationsof the irrational outbursts of anomic violencethat have become disturbingly commonplace inWestern societies, a meditation on the thorough-going commodification of everyday life, includingthe world of the image, a questioning of bourgeois moral complacency, a depiction of the loss of affect and sense of reality among many

individuals, an inquiry into the fragmentationof social relations within modern mediatisedexperience, reflections on consumerism, theplight of illegal immigrants, on the discontentsafflicting European liberal democracies, onthe traumatic legacy of colonialist conflicts,and so on.

At the same time, the socio-cultural critiquereading tends to assume a transparent andunproblematic relationship between spectatorand image; as though there could be a neutralspace of critical reflection regarding such cine-matic explorations of violence, anomie, fragmen-tation, alienation, and so on. Such a neutral spaceof reflection, however, is precisely what Hanekesfilms refuse. Indeed, it is this complex dialecticbetween modernist self-reflection and a post-humanist critical questioning of the aestheticautonomy underpinning modernism that makesHaneke a humanist filmmaker in motivation andsensibility but a post-humanist in philosophicalorientation. On the one hand, Haneke reclaimsthe title of humanist filmmaker, even humanistmoralist; on the other, there is no shared form

of cultural normativity (humanism) or nostal-gic return to values that could serve as anunquestioned background to Hanekes critique of our complicity with the society of the spectacle.On the contrary, it is precisely the nihilism of our contemporary cultural-normative situation the loss of belief or conviction, particularly sincethe historical experiences of Nazism, totalitarian-ism, and the economic miracle of post-warsociety, in the sustaining myths of bourgeoishumanism and the promises of Western pro-gress that becomes a major focus of his work.

What does this mean? It means, for one thing,that there can be no unproblematic appeal to art,to high culture, or even to modernist film as

a way of gaining critical distance from the kindof disintegration of social experience thatHanekes films attempt to critique. Indeed,there are few filmmakers working today moreconscious of Benjamins dictum that everydocument of culture is at the same time arecord of barbarism: a theme made explicit inLa pianiste (2001) but also signalled (notablythrough the pointed use of diegetic and extra-diegetic music) in Bennys Video, 71 Fragmente ,

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys [Code inconnu: Re cit incomplet dedivers voyages] (2000), Funny Games (bothversions), and Cache [Hidden ]. Moreover, therecan be no reassuring recourse to an unquestionedcritical standpoint that would diagnose, critique,and point the way to overcoming the alienatingeffects of consumer capitalism (as assumed byboth liberals and post-Marxist humanists). On thecontrary, Hanekes films assume that the kindof social disorientation and normative sense of crisis within which we exist today, whetherconsciously or complacently, must be acknowl-edged, questioned, and described; and that thefilmmaker, given the mediatised nature of oursocial experience, is well placed, even obliged,to force our attention towards this experience.Put differently, for all their moral or pedagogicalintent, in Hanekes films there is no god whocan save us, or any obvious revolutionarytransformation or utopian community to come. 9

At the same time, however, Haneke insists onthe necessity of engaging in cinematic-philoso-phical critique; in reclaiming our belief in the


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critical and emancipatory power of cinema as amass medium that is capable of questioning,examining, and reflecting on complex and contra-dictory facets of modern experience. Haneke thusattempts at once to retrieve the modernist stanceconcerning the autonomy of art and its criticalvocation, and to question the possibility of art in particular, film laying claim to this criticalpower in a dogmatic manner. Such a stance,at once cinematically and socio-culturally self-questioning, is undoubtedly a difficult one tomaintain. Indeed, this complex dialectic betweencinematic and socio-cultural dimensions of Hanekes critical artistic practice is whatmakes his films so unnerving, disorienting, and

difficult for viewers and critics alike. Just whenwe appear to have grasped his films as witheringhumanist critiques of alienation, fragmentation,and the lack of communication and affectin modernity, we are then confronted with thefilms undermining of just these received frame-works of humanistic moral-aesthetic value.

The difficulty, therefore, with the socio-cultural critique reading of Hanekes work isthat it fails to acknowledge the importance of the

complex interplay between Hanekes key pre-mises: that in modern techno-capitalist democ-racies we exist within a decadent version of Debords society of the spectacle, without,however, any reassuring redemptive socialproject or utopian political vision (whether of aneo-Marxist or neoliberalist variety); and that ourshared social-historical experience is both inten-sely socio-culturally mediated and at the sametime fragmented psychologically by the freneticconsumption of spectacular televisual images anddecontextualised information flows. The socio-cultural critique reading of Hanekes work thustends to focus on his films thematic andnarrative content, contextualising them withinthe crises and malaises of contemporaryEurope, while at the same time downplayingtheir modernist elements, confronting thespectator with his/her psychological-affectiveinvestment in screen violence. The implicationof such a position is that one can engage in thiscinematic critique of contemporary Westernculture from a safely distanced vantage pointthat remains uncompromised by its pernicious

image economy, trying to avoid complicityin the very thing one is denouncing by meansof cinematic images.

haneke as critic of the cinematic imageThe alternative approach, persuasively arguedin Catherine Wheatleys recent study (Michael Hanekes Cinema), is what we might call thecinematic critique or, in Wheatleys terms,ethics of the image reading of his work. Thisapproach emphasises precisely the modernist,reflexive aspect of Hanekes films that isneglected in the socio-cultural critique reading.Wheatley analyses admirably, for example,

Hanekes shift from first-generation or benignmodernism, which foregrounds the constructed nature of the cinematic image through variouscinematic alienation techniques and an austeremodernist style (The Seventh Continent andBennys Video), to what she calls his use of second-generation or aggressive modernism,which confronts the spectator more directlywith their role as complicitous consumer of thecine-televisual image (Funny Games, Cache ).

This shift from benign to aggressive modernism or from the cultural constructedness of theimage to our complicitous consumption of it isoverlaid by a third element: Hanekes reflexiveuse (and abuse) of cinematic genre conventions(thriller, sci-fi, ultra-violent horror) as well asrecognisable international stars (Juliette Binoche,Daniel Arteuil, Naomi Watts, and Tim Roth).It is in the brilliant use of all three strategies benign modernism, aggressive modernism, andsubversion of generic conventions that Hanekesucceeds in developing a cinematic ethicsthat confronts us with our own investmentin the image, precisely in order to encouragea more critical, reflexive, and autonomousrelationship with it a space for ethical reflectionand autonomous reorientation (Wheatley 113).

Wheatleys emphasis on the reflexive moder-nist elements of Hanekes ethics of the image issalutary, explaining elegantly how Hanekescinematic style and aesthetic practice prompt apeculiarly reflexive kind of unease and displea-sure in the spectator. At the same time, however,her approach runs the risk of downplaying his

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films socio-cultural and ideologico-critical con-tent, without which there would seem to be littleto distinguish them from those of his predeces-sors (such as Bresson or Antonioni). Indeed,Wheatley dismisses the socio-cultural critiquereading of Hanekes work as overly narrative orcontent-based, hence as ignoring the crucialreflexive dimensions of his cinematic ethics of the image; for Wheatley, such approaches ignorethe way his films are primarily concerned, froma formal point of view, with rendering proble-matic the spectatorimage relationship (156).Wheatleys point is well taken, since thespectatorimage relationship is principally apedagogical one, according to the socio-cultural

reading (namely that the spectator stands to beeducated, even violated into self-awarenessby the narrative content and stylistic presentationof Hanekes films).10 At the same time, however,Wheatleys nuanced account of Hanekes twomodernisms and reflexively ethical approach toour consumption of images risks downplaying hisfilms visceral, emotional, and affective shockvalue, hence blunting the force of their cinematiccritique of contemporary mediatised culture.

For all its hermeneutic sensitivity, ethical reflec-tion on our consumption of images (of violence)might end up serving as a kind of theoreticalprophylactic against the more traumatic aspectsof Hanekes cinema an intellectual version of the detached consumption of images that thesefilms surely aim to subvert.

hanekes post-humanist critiqueMy response to this conflict of interpretationsis to suggest that we are dealing here with afalse dichotomy: the socio-cultural critique inHanekes films is dependent upon the cinematiccritique, while the cinematic critique is itself a performative form of socio-cultural critique,given the mediatised image-culture or reifiedsociety of the spectacle in which we now live.Indeed, Hanekes cinema is concerned withdiagnosing and responding to this situation of moral, cultural and political disorientation,in which our access to such phenomena isthoroughly mediated by our consumptionof audiovisual images. Formal aesthetic and

cinematic reflexivity and disturbing ideologicallycharged narrative content work together toengage us in a distinctively cinematic form of critique. Hanekes work thus posits a strong linkbetween the alienating experience of a consumer-ist society of the spectacle and the kinds of irrational violence, social disorientation, andaffective desensitisation that comprise the narra-tive focus and thematic subject-matter of hisfilms. For these reasons, there is no genuineopposition here between interpretative perspec-tives: Hanekes reflexive cinematic critique of ourcomplicity as spectators with the narcissisticconsumerism and anomic violence of contempor-ary film, TV, and gaming culture is of a piece

with his socio-cultural critique of the fragmenta-tion, disorientation, and latent violence charac-terising affluent Western societies.

Having said this, however, Hanekes morerecent films suggest that his recourse to moder-nist techniques (whether benign or aggressivemodernism, to use Wheatleys terms) can nolonger be relied upon to have the kind of alienating pedagogical or emancipatory effectthat worked for an earlier generation of modernist

cinema. The endpoint in this dialectic betweensocio-cultural and cinematic critique is surelythe American remake of Funny Games (2007)(featuring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth), whichstages this dialectic in its most extreme, explicit,but also self-negating manner. The paradox of Hanekes cinema of cruelty (notably in the twoFunny Games films) is that it shocks thosealready predisposed towards this kind of moder-nist critique, the already ethically disposedand socio-culturally aware viewer of art cinema,while remaining an intriguing, perhaps exotic,entertainment for their putative target audience,whose pleasure in sexualised or instrumentalisedviolence is perversely satisfied, rather short-circuited, by such films. The problem, in otherwords, is how to avoid preaching to the ethicallyconverted for it is the self-satisfied liberalconsumer of Art House films, as Sorfa remarks,that is perhaps most discomfited by Hanekesfilms (96) while also refusing to entertainprecisely those viewers most in need of Hanekesviolent ethico-pedagogical intervention. Thisnegative dialectic between engaging viewers


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ethically while also confronting them with theirconsumption of images of suffering does notyield to ready resolution. Indeed, within someof Hanekes films it remains caught at the level of an (almost mythic) traumatic repetition andeternal return (the end of Funny Games, forexample, is simply a resetting of the violentFunny Game we have endured during the film,which can now begin again with a new castof Players, including the soon-to-be-traumatisedaudience, without any apparent conclusionor resolution). 11 It is a strategy that ends in anaporetic repetition, a logic of self-deconstructionbeyond which it is neither desirable nor possibleto go.

mediatised suffering: code unknownHow to overcome this dialectical deadlockbetween an ethically engaged spectator whowitnesses and reflects upon his or her consump-tion of cinematic representations of violence, andthe unethical spectator who simply enjoys suchimagery without any correlative ethical reflec-tion? Two films that respond explicitly to this

deadlock, thereby elucidating Hanekes cinematicpost-humanism, are Code Unknown (2000)and Time of the Wolf (2003). Hanekes firstFrench or pan-European film, Code Unknownis set mainly in Paris (but also in Romania) andstars Juliette Binoche, the Art-house actress fora generation (qtd in Wheatley 126). In areflexive ploy, Binoche plays an actress (whoshares the name Anne Laurent with severalother women characters in various Haneke films)making a movie what appears to be a remake of Wylers The Collector while having relationshipdifficulties with her photojournalist partner,Georges (Thierry Neuvic) (a characters namethat also recurs in various Haneke films), who hasrecently returned to Paris after covering waratrocities in Serbia and Kosovo. Interwoven withthis main narrative are complementary narra-tive lines concerning the familial conflictsbetween the photojournalists father (Josef Bierbichler), a gruff farmer, and his youngerbrother Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), who has cometo Paris wishing to escape from his fathers farm;the travails of a struggling African family (deaf

younger daughter, volatile older brother Amadou(Ona Lu Yenke), long-suffering mother, and taxi-driving father); and a Romanian woman,Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), who begs in Parisin order to support her family building a newhouse back home (and who becomes the causeof a dispute between Amadou and Georges kidbrother, Jean). Like similar network narratives Alejandro In arritus Babel (2006), for example Code Unknown weaves together these disparatenarrative lines through chance encounters withindiverse urban spaces; bodies and beliefs, classesand ethnicities coexist and clash in the absenceof any common code, save for the duplicityand ubiquity of manipulated media images

(to which both Anne and Georges contributeprofessionally).

Code Unknown also brings to perfection thefragmentary network narrative style that Hanekeused to great effect in 71 Fragments of aChronology of Chance. It goes a step further,however, in its reflexive presentation of images,altering subtly the black film interruptionspunctuating the various sequences in 71Fragments , as well as in Hanekes earlier films

The Seventh Continent and Bennys Video.Instead of a brief pause between segmentsduring which the screen goes black, CodeUnknown uses what we might call a channelsurfing device to create the impression of interruptions in transmission (of code): thevarious sequences begin abruptly, often mid-dialogue or during the middle of an action, asthough we or, for that matter, the film itself were switching TV channels once our curiosityhas been aroused, if not satisfied. In contrast tothe channel-surfing motif, the film then presentsits discrete sequences via the conspicuous use of long takes, emphasising not so much the Bazinianunmediated character of experience as its thor-oughly mediatised and ambiguous quality (a casein point is the films virtuoso opening sequence,an eight-minute continuous shot of Anne inconversation with young Jean as she walksto work, buys a pastry, departs, followed byhis encounter with the beggar woman, Maria,throwing his empty pastry bag instead of moneyinto her lap, thus triggering a dispute withthe young Malian man, Amadou, that leads to

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a police intervention ending, predictablyenough, with Amadou being hauled off to thestation). 12

It is via this striking contrast betweencommunication and disconnection, indifferenceand interaction, contingency and conflict thatthe film enacts its simultaneous social-culturaland cinematic critique. While Code Unknowndeals with the familiar modernist and humanistthemes of alienation, misrecognition, socialfragmentation, and the scrambling of codesdefining disparate communities, it also weavesthese arthouse topoi together with critical reflec-tion on the ambiguous relationship betweensubjectivity, social experience, and televisual-

cinematic images

sinner brink, r (2011) a post-human moralist

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