* (Halloween countdown post #2)

 

‘Kathe Koja’s work has always wrestled with complex issues: the limits of agonistic art, performance/performativity, and expressions of embodiment. From her groundbreaking debut novel, The Cipher (1991), to her 1997 collection Extremities, the author often evaluates these topics through the porous boundaries of horror. Of course, it is not only Koja’s compelling thematic engagements that set her writing apart, but also her crackling, inimitable, urgent prose style.

‘Koja’s career-long fixations persist in her new collection, Velocities, one of the most vital, haunting, and commanding genre releases in recent years. Particularly noteworthy is the book’s interest in art (especially performance art) as a catalyst for negotiations with trauma. Two stand-out examples are “Velocity,” which sees its performance artist reliving a horrific event through his work, and “Pas de Deux,” which depicts a woman grappling with the interior catharsis of dance versus exterior demands on her body. Indeed, this tension between desires of interiority and those of embodied, physical reality (central to novels like Skin [1993] and Strange Angels [1994]) shows up repeatedly throughout this collection.

‘When dealing with Koja, one of the twentieth century’s major American horror novelists, it seems impossible to avoid the question of genre. Is Velocities a “genre” collection? Undoubtedly Koja lays bare her expertise on genre forms and modes (“The Marble Lily” might be the most convincing contemporary imitation of nineteenth-century Gothic I’ve read), but this book circumvents categorical structures at nearly every turn. Within the first couple stories, it dawned on me that Koja’s fiction is simply a genre unto itself; hers is a body of work defined by singular style. Truly, Koja’s voice is among the most distinctive and invigorating I have encountered.

‘Koja maximizes on that which is specific to the written medium; her wildly unique prose style delivers affective experiences that I cannot imagine transmitting fully to any other artistic form. At the same time, though, this author draws often on the tactility of performance and dance, imagining the many ways in which artistic modes can either mirror or contend with each other.

‘Suffice to say that Velocities is, like any other Koja book, a major event. This writer’s work has had more impact on me and my work than I can express. Time and again, her fiction has reinvigorated me and helped me to imagine the boundless literary potential of genre. It is no exaggeration to say that she is among the most important writers in horror, and a major figure in contemporary American fiction more broadly.’ — Mike Thorn

 

____
Further

Kathe Koja Site
Kathe Koja @ goodreads
Kathe Koja @ Twitter
The Exchange: Kathe Koja @ The New Yorker
Podcast: What the Fish Went Through with Kathe Koja
AN INTERVIEW WITH KATHE KOJA
Velocities: Stories by Kathe Koja – weird from the inside out
Hi Kathe! Thanks for stopping by to do this interview!
Kathe Koja is creating Immersive fiction
A new voice in historical fiction
The Horror! The Horror! – Kathe Koja
Exclusive Interview: Velocities Author Kathe Koja
Hash it out with Kathe Koja in Episode 98 of Eating the Fantastic
Happy Sunday, Witches!
Dancing in the dark at Kathe Koja’s DARK FACTORY
This Is What Kathe Koja’s THE CIPHER would be if it was a fun little short sci-fi film…
Women in Horror – Interview with Kathe Koja
‘Queen of Angels’, by Kathe Koja
Kathe Koja on Godmothers of Horror: Emily Brontë & Mary Shelley
Kathe Koja Visits Minuteman
Buy ‘Velocities’

 

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Extras

NVF Films Interview with Kathe Koja

Virtual Memories #373 – Kathe Koja

Kathe Koja Reads from The Marble Lily

Kathe Koja presents #Velocities in 60 seconds

Lovecraft eZine: Guest: Kathe Koja

 

____
Interview

 

Weirdfictionreview.com: What writers were your introduction to “the weird,” whether the Weird Tales kind of weird or something even stranger?

Kathe Koja: Growing up, I read a ton of poetry and ghost stories, but the ones who made a lasting impression were M.R. James, Poe, Stoker; Shirley Jackson came later, as did Angela Carter and Flannery O’Connor. And Wuthering Heights made a *huge* impression on me, too … I gravitate toward intensity.

WFR: What kinds of things did you read and think “this is not for me”?

Koja: To be honest, I can’t remember: that stuff made no lasting impression. Extrapolating backward, I’d imagine it was anything that was too “nice,” too sure of itself, too ready to proffer an explanation for life. Certainly I read my share of crap, which is a good thing — it’s what helps develop your shit detector.

WFR: Was weird fiction welcome in your household growing up? Can you give a sense of your childhood as it relates to your writing?

Koja: The single greatest contribution to my sense of the mysterious as a matter-of-fact was being brought up Catholic. Cheek-by-jowl since infancy with the spirit world, with miracles and blood.

WFR: Can you give us a sense of what that’s like for a child? Was there a time as a child where you took that all literally to some extent?

Koja: Sure, every day. Grown-ups tell you that the stovetop is hot, you touch it: the stovetop is hot. Grown-ups tell you that a vial of blood liquefies on a certain saint’s day every year; why shouldn’t that be true, too?

I can’t speak to what growing up in a religiously observant household is like to a child, but I can say that for me as a child, Catholicism offered an entry into a repertoire almost unmatched of the grisly, radiant, and strange, a world both within and enclosing the everyday world one glimpsed, well, every day. And so much of the iconography was pretty fucking punk rock, as the late Jim Carroll once observed.

WFR: Do you see a difference between “horror” and “the weird” and “the gothic,” and does it matter to you as either a writer or reader?

Koja: Second question first: No, because I don’t read by genre, I read by voice; and when I’m writing, my own voice is always my own: weird stuff, YA stuff, historical, whatever the genre may be.

And first question, yes, there are striations between those genres, or subgenres, but I don’t know that it’s meaningful to me as a reader to parse them. Like the working definition/recognition of art and pornography, I know what I like when I see it, and if I don’t like it I put it away.

WFR: What do you think is the appeal of weird fiction generally? The scare? Catharsis? Something else?

Koja: Perhaps the frisson of confirmation: knowing that other eyes have seen that, yes, all is not what we think it is, all is not as it appears, and is stranger than we can imagine, no matter what the culture at large might pretend. Reading history is good for this too, but you have to be careful about your sources.

WFR: How mysterious can a story remain by the end and keep your attention? If “very mysterious,” what is it you’re enjoying that substitutes for explanation?

Koja: I enjoy the mystery itself: it exercises the sense of awe and the problem-solving beaver that is the brain, both at the same time. And it respects my intelligence, my own ability as a reader to fathom and puzzle stuff out.

WFR: What influences do you think readers might be surprised by?

Koja: Depends on the reader, but maybe Thomas Merton and Louisa May Alcott (not just Little Women, but Eight Cousins, Rose In Bloom, all of it). And Jack London!

WFR: When the weird in weird fiction fails for you, what’s usually the reason?

Koja: Trying too hard. It’s like laughter or desire: the more you try to force it, the less possible it becomes.

WFR: What constitutes “trying too hard”?

Koja: When you can feel the hot breath of the writer on your neck. When capital‑E Effects are forced upon you. When it feels like the guy in the next-to-last booth at Shoney’s trying to explain his dreams, with napkin drawings.

WFR: Is there such a thing as “too weird”? What does “too weird” mean to you when someone says it about your own work?

Koja: It means my stuff is probably not for them. And yes, sure, there’s the “too weird” threshold for any- and everybody. I don’t know that I’ve crossed mine yet as a reader/listener/art-and-movie viewer; the frontier looms ahead.

That said, there is a real difference to me between “weird” and “ugly.” Cruelty to the helpless is irredeemably ugly and I can’t stomach it.

WFR: You mean cruelty to the helpless in fiction? What other things turn you off in fiction?

Koja: In the real world double, triple, a million times yes: the human race’s force majeure vis-à-vis every other species on the planet is ugly to see.

In fiction, if you strip cruelty of its meaning, and use it as a casual effect, I don’t want to read your stuff.

WFR: Is the “reveal” of the other-worldly element in a supernatural story the toughest part for the writer to get right? How do you know how much to reveal and how much to hold back?

Koja: You have to let the story itself guide you, or I do, anyway. I never plan or outline, I follow the text, because the text is always right. The text also sometimes says, “This story is not for you to write, try again later, or never,” so in sorrow I have to obey that, too.

WFR: Once you finish writing a draft of a story, then, to what extent do you “test” your instincts in revision?

Koja: I do very little rewriting. Mostly it’s at the behest of my three first readers: Rick Lieder, Christopher Schelling, and Carter Scholz. Their insights are invaluable to me and I respect what they say. If any or all of them find something unclear in a narrative, or call me out on word usage, or think something is Just No Good, then I listen and go back and look. Sometimes I disagree. Sometimes I change it.

WFR: How often does the real world give you something seemingly inexplicable, something weird, that becomes a spark for a story or novel?

Koja: All the time. A story is an interaction between a being or beings and the surrounding environment, whether that environment is spiritual, internal, emotional, set in the Pleistocene, a haunted house, Marie Antoinette’s last levee, whatever. It’s the playground, the pantry, the backdrop, the dictionary of what story can and does do: it’s the World, however that’s defined for the moment of the narrative.

WFR: Can a story appear to be haunted beyond the intent of the writer?

Koja: Best case scenario!

WFR: What’s the weirdest piece of fiction, story or novel, that you’ve ever read? Why?

Koja: M.R. James and that toothed, bearded mouth under the mundane nighttime pillow. “Casting the Runes” — read at your own risk.

WFR: Not the white blob in the slideshow?!

Koja: That was very bad, too. Actually I just saw a puppet performance in which one of the actors dressed as La Llorona and moved amongst the kids in the audience, scaring the shit out of several. Reminded me fondly of that magic lantern slideshow.

WFR: Finally, if you had to pick one weird writer who is overlooked and needs to be resurrected and better appreciated, who would it be and why?

Koja: Angela Carter, Angela Carter, Angela Carter! Because she is brilliant; because her fairy tales casually gut everything else and lesser; because she can do it all in a compact and elegant space and leave you thinking it over for days at a time, and remembering it forever. Because she could write so much so effortlessly; get her essays, too, while you’re assembling the oeuvre.

 

__
Book

Kathe Koja Velocities
Meerkat Press

‘These tales have an estimable provenance: “Fireflies” first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction (2002), “Road Trip” in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 16 (2002), and other stories in similarly respected books. In “Velocity,” an artist creates his art by running bicycles into trees. This act may be his unorthodox way of understanding his famous architect father’s suicide, which likewise entailed driving into a tree. Some of the characters in these generally grim stories come to terms with a tragedy they don’t want to face: The man in “Road Trip” has intermittent flashes of a car accident (or moments before), and he not only mourns losing a loved one, but his responsibility for the fatality. Other characters, like Anne in “Coyote Pass,” have trouble simply moving on. Anne had cared for her ailing art-collector mother, Susan, for years. Now that Susan has died, Anne wants to adopt a dog, which her mother had never allowed—but getting a puppy from the kennel takes a bizarre, unsettling turn. Koja tackles a handful of genres, including SF, somber drama, and sublimely understated horror. Nevertheless, the highlight of this impressive collection is the Poe-esque “The Marble Lily,” one of two stories herein that hasn’t been previously published. In it, a morgue janitor in Paris closely observes a female cadaver that he believes holds some sort of mystery. Koja’s prose throughout the book provides a bevy of indelible passages: “He pressed her leg, the bare skin below the edge of her cutoffs; his hand was warm, with long strong workman’s fingers, small hard spots like rivets on the palm, his skin a topographic map of his days: cut wood, carry water, name and number and know all the plants in the world.”’ — Kirkus Reviews

______
Excerpts

from Baby

It’s hot in here, and the air smells sweet, all sweet and burned, like incense. I love incense, but I can never have any; my allergies, right? Allergic to incense, to cigarette smoke, to weed smoke, to smoke in general, the smoke from the grill at Rob’s Ribs, too, so goodbye to that, and no loss either, I hate this job. The butcher’s aprons are like circus tents, like 3X, and those pointy paper hats we have to wear—“Smokin’ Specialist,” god. They look like big white dunce caps, even Rico looks stupid wearing one and Rico is hot. I’ve never seen anyone as hot as he is.

The only good thing about working here—besides Rico—is hanging out after shift, up on the rooftop while Rob and whoever swabs out the patio, and everyone jokes and flirts, and, if Rob isn’t paying too much attention, me and Rico shotgun a couple of cans of Tecate or something. Then I lean as far over the railing as I can, my hands gripping tight, the metal pressing cold through my shirt; sometimes I let my feet leave the patio, just a few inches, just balancing there on the railing, in thin air . . . Andy always flips when I do it, he’s all like Oh Jani don’t do that Jani you could really hurt yourself! You could fall!

Oh Andy, I always say; Andy’s like a mom or something. Calm down, it’s only gravity, only six floors up but still, if you fell, you’d be a plate of Rob’s Tuesday night special, all bones and red sauce; smush, gross, right? But I love doing it. You can feel the wind rush up between the buildings like invisible water, stealing your breath, filling you right up to the top. It’s so weird, and so choice . . . Like the feeling I always got from you, Baby.

It’s kind of funny that I never called you anything else, just Baby; funny that I even found you, up there in Grammy’s storage space, or crawl space, or whatever it’s called when it’s not really an attic, but it’s just big enough to stand up in. Boxes were piled up everywhere, but mostly all I’d found were old china cup-and-saucer sets, and a bunch of games with missing pieces—Stratego, and Monopoly, and Clue; I already had Clue at home; I used to totally love Clue, even though I cheated when I played, sometimes. Well, all the time. I wanted to win. There were boxes and boxes of Grampy’s old books, doctor books; one was called Surgical Procedures and Facial Deformities and believe me, you did not want to look at that. I flipped it open on one picture where this guy’s mouth was all grown sideways, and his eyes—his eye— Anyway. After that I stayed away from the boxes of books.

And then I found you, Baby, stuffed down in a big box of clothes, chiffon scarves and unraveling lace, the cut-down skirts of fancy dresses, and old shirts like Army uniforms, with steel buttons and appliqués. At the bottom of the box were all kinds of shoes, spike heels, and a couple of satin evening bags with broken clasps. At first I thought you were a kind of purse, too, or a bag, all small and yellow and leathery. But then I turned you over, and I saw that you had a face.

*

 

from Pas De Deux

She liked them young, young men; princes. She liked them young when she could like them at all because by now, by this particular minute in time, she had had it with older men, clever men, men who always knew what to say, who smiled a certain kind of smile when she talked about passion, about the difference between hunger and love. The young ones didn’t smile, or if they did it was with a touching puzzlement because they didn’t quite see, weren’t sure, didn’t fully understand: knowing best what they did not know, that there was still so much to learn.

“Learn what?” Edward’s voice from the cage of memory, deep voice, “what’s left to learn?” Reaching for the bottle and the glass, pouring for himself. “And who’ll do the teaching? You?” That smile like an insect’s, like the blank button eyes of a doll made of metal, made from a weapon, born from a knife and see him there, pale sheets crushed careless at the foot of the bed, big canopied bed like a galleon inherited from his first wife—the sheets, too, custom-made sheets—all of it given them as a wedding present by his first wife’s mother: Adele, her name was and he liked to say it, liked to pretend—was it pretense?—that he had fucked her, too, going from mother to daughter in a night, a suite of nights, spreading the seed past four spread legs, and prim Alice could never compare, said Edward, with the grand Adele, Adele the former ballet dancer, Adele who had been everywhere, lived in Paris and Hong Kong, written a biography of Balanchine, Adele who wore nothing but black from the day she turned twenty-one, and “I don’t understand,” he would say, head back, knee bent, his short fat cock like some half-eaten sausage, “what you think you can teach me, aren’t you being just a little bit absurd?”

“We all have something to learn,” she said, and he laughed, left the room to return with a book, Balanchine & Me: Balanchine in color on the cover, a wee black-and-white of Adele on the back. “Read this,” putting the book into her hands. “Find out how much you don’t know.” Whiskey breath and settling back into bed, glass on his chest, big hairy chest like an animal’s, he liked to lie naked with the windows open, lie there and look at her, and “Are you cold?” he would say, knowing she was freezing, that her muscles were cramping. “Do you feel a draft?”

No, she could have said, or yes or fuck you or a million other responses, but in the end she had made none of them, said nothing, got out. Left him there in his canopied bed and found her own place, her own space, living above her studio: dance studio, she had been away for a long time but now she was back and soon, another month or two, she would have enough money maybe to keep the heat on all the time, keep the lights on, keep going. Keep on going: that was her word now, her world, motion at any cost. She was too old to be a dancer? had been away too long, forgotten too much, lost the fascistic grace of the body in torment, the body as a tool of motion, of the will? No. As long as she had legs, arms, a back to bend or twist, as long as she could move she could dance.

Alone.
In the cold.
In the dark.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Armando, Thanks. Happy that the post hit your zeitgeist. Well, let’s just completely agree to completely disagree on Noe then. Simple enough. Yes, I got your email. Hugs back, sir. ** Misanthrope, Excellent! About the work-related satisfaction. Surely that trouble maker formerly known as LPS can find something in Halloween to sink his teeth into. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Ooh, that does sound fun and interesting. The assignment. Be twisty. ** G, Hi, G! Very happy the post set off fireworks inside mighty you. I have read the novel, and I liked it very much. She’s an excellent scribe. If I had come across a jpeg or gif of that scene/moment in question, you can bet it would have been at the top of the stack or even acting as the post’s crown. Strange I didn’t (come across one). Oh, no, I found the Haneke interview somewhere online. Never met the man, unfortunately, so far. Of course the crappy aspect of the teaching comes from the top. You know me and power structures, but what can you do, you know? I’m glad it’s mostly an upper and promising. Cool about the lecture watchers liking ‘3:45 AM’. That’s not a given these days, goodness knows. Thank you for including it. Same goes to you for the constant inspiration, my friend. Have a swell Friday. It’s deluging rain here today, but no problem. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian! A very warm welcome to here, sir! I’m, of course, pleased that the post aligned with your interest in Haneke. Interesting about ‘… the most ethically minded … ‘. I can see that, and I think I would agree. I do really like ‘The White Ribbon’. It’s among my favourites of his. ‘Cache’ is very good. They’re all very worth seeing. There is this kind of vibe about Russia where you can believe there are cannibal cults there. Its charisma is very roomy. Yes, QAnon latched onto the blog for about 48 hours a couple of months ago, briefly deciding it was a portal for child trafficking and snuff or something. But then I think realising that the other posts here are about amusement parks and brainiac film/art/writing confused them, and they moved on. Or, oh, I hope so. Scary times are the words. Thanks again for talking with me. Please do so again at the drop of a hat. How are you, apart from the scariness buffeting. What are you up to? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Mm, I don’t think Haneke’s work is sadistic. I don’t think it intends to humiliate or cause harm, etc. and take pleasure in that. I think it’s manipulative, sometimes too overtly and/or ambitiously, but that’s very different. Good luck isolating that clipping sound. Nice idea. ** Dominik, Hi, Dom! Yeah, if you watch ‘Funny Games’, watch the original, not the English remake, or that’s my advice anyway. Unless you really, really like Michael Pitt. Ah, you know, you’ve seen one boner, you’ve seen ’em all, ha ha. I get a huge amount of ‘rescued animal’ videos on Facebook. Constantly. And I guess I do pause occasionally to watch them. And I guess they know I do. Technology is so weird. Thank you for the promise of funding our film if you get super wealthy! Cheap Trick! You must know I passionately love Cheap Trick! Thank you, thank you. Love that transforms that super tall column in Hősök tere into a giant boner belonging to the boy of your choice and turns Archangel Gabriel into a voluminous spurt of his cum, Dennis. ** Bill, Hi, Bill! I liked ‘Happy End’. It seemed to divide a lot of people I know, and I wouldn’t put it at the top of his oeuvre necessarily, but it’s odd and sharp, I think. The last time I’d heard/seen the words ‘tea lights’ was out of the mouth of my late grandmother many decades ago, so good question. Oh, no, the return of the skyward diceyness. Good luck, pal. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I’ve heard that too about Haneke personally. Not a surprise really, maybe surprisingly. ** Nick Toti, Hi there, Nick. Good to see you, bud! I do know the work of David Shields, yes. I don’t know him personally. He’s very good. That’s a fantastic idea/possibility: you adapting him. My esteem for him just went further up based his taste in adapters. Cool, man. All luck on that working out if you need luck. If Parc Asterix didn’t have a Halloween makeover with four haunted houses for me to visit soon, I might indeed be a basket case. Take care. ** Okay. I thought I would take the occasion of Halloween to throw some light on one of the books by horror (and more) auteur/author Kathe Koja. Give it your shot. See you tomorrow.

 

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus. -– Michael Haneke, “Film as Catharsis”

‘Michael Haneke is arguably Europe’s most esteemed and most controversial filmmaker. After twenty years of directing for the cinema, he has earned a place in the pantheon of the most acclaimed active auteurs. His feature Benny’s Video (1992) shocked crowds with its restrained, antipsychological portrait of a teenager who kills a young girl “to see how it is”. Funny Games (1997) inspired a fierce debate on how one can interrogate violence in film. On the whole, Haneke’s polemical programme attempts to lay bare the coldness of Western society and challenge Hollywood’s blithe treatment of violence. With acknowledged influences including Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Marie Straub, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jon Jost, Abbas Kiarostami and above all Robert Bresson, his recent work has garnered a host of accolades and arthouse success. Caché (Hidden, 2005) won the Palme d’or and was voted by The Times as the “film of the decade”. Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) earned Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Foreign-Language Film.

‘Born in 1942 in Munich, Michael Haneke grew up in the Lower Austrian city of Wiener Neustadt. He studied psychology, philosophy and theatre at the University of Vienna and wrote film and literature reviews on the side. From 1967 to 1970 he worked as editor and dramaturge at the southern German television station Südwestfunk. It was in 1970 that Haneke began writing and directing films and (similar to most Austrian directors of his generation) his initial experiences behind the camera were projects for television. Haneke has also directed a number of stage productions (including Strindberg, Goethe, Bruckner, and Kleist) in Berlin, Munich, Vienna and Paris. His first film intended for cinematic release, Der siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent), premiered in 1989.

‘Writers retrospectively plot a director’s career as a teleological historical narrative with a familiar literary pattern, in this way circumscribing his or her works for the sake of a neat (if contrived) principle of organisation. Examining a living, very much active filmmaker is problematic and, I would argue, assessing Haneke is particularly challenging. No sooner has a commentator made a “definitive” pronouncement on what does or does not characterise Haneke’s oeuvre, than the director defies all expectations. After being initially positioned in the context of Austria’s television and film (cottage) industries and cultural politics, for example, he moved his operations to Paris and began making French-language “European” films with high-profile arthouse stars and multinational funding. Over the years, Haneke has regularly issued devastating squibs denouncing the manipulative American cinema (see the epigraph to this essay)—and then proceeded to make a picture with Hollywood money. After years of nostalgic recuperations of celluloid materiality and cinematic spectatorship, he began to make films that depend on digital technology and demand DVD viewing.

‘In spite of my own admonition against trying to pin down a moving target, I will attempt to work out a few characteristics of Haneke’s cinema and the experience of watching it. Although these principles do not apply equally to each individual film, they provide a framework to begin to approach the director.

‘Stories chronicle the failings of emotionally cold individuals and the implosion of bourgeois social structures when placed under a complicating duress.

‘Culturally, these narratives concern and comment on the identity politics of European class systems, gender roles and ethnic hierarchies, as well as the individual and collective guilt that these structures engineer.

‘Narrative forms tend toward the episodic and elliptical. Befitting art cinema practices, characters’ motivations remain obscure and their goals ambiguous; clear narrative resolutions are foreclosed or made impossible to determine. Haneke’s cinema provokes, demands but ultimately frustrates interpretation.

‘Stylistically, Haneke’s work favours the long take over montage and static shots over camera movement. Specific patterns of editing, framing, sound design and performance produce an uncomfortable viewing experience that, at best, invites a critical attitude towards media, images and the representation of violence and, at worst, uses these elements as titillation or authorial signature.

‘More so than the works of other filmmakers, watching Haneke is coloured by his media performances, theoretical observations and self-analyses. On the festival circuit and in provocative interviews, an ensemble of Hanekean provocations and buzzwords (e.g., “Every film rapes”; “I want to rape the viewer into independence”) competes with the viewer’s experience and invites critical attacks.’ — Mattias Frey

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Michael Haneke @ IMDb
Where to begin with Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke, The Art of Screenwriting
Michael Haneke @ MUBI
Michael Haneke @ Twitter
Michael Haneke’s Harrowing Excavations Of Modern Society
Michael Haneke @ letterboxd
Book: The Cinema of Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke @ No Film School
Michael Haneke Interview: Uncut
Book: A Companion to Michael Haneke
A View to a Kill: Michael Haneke’s “Cache”
Michael Haneke: ‘I use the internet, but I don’t have time to waste on social media’
Michael Haneke • Great Director profile
Michael Haneke assesses his oeuvre
Michael Haneke Talks ‘Happy End,’ Dangers Of Social Media, Immortality & More
Michael Haneke interview: the master of misery cinema on selfies, Snapchat, and ‘the despair that comes after the tears’
A Minute With: Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke: The Intermedial Void
Michael Haneke: ‘I hope all my films are obscene’
Michael Haneke Goes Cruelty-Free With Amour
Michael Haneke by Lawrence Chua
The Conversations: Michael Haneke

 

_____
Extras

Michael Haneke on Long Takes

Les Génériques de Michael Haneke – Blow Up – ARTE

Michael Haneke with Monika Schärer at the ZFF Masters

 

____
Interview

 

In our first interview 20 years ago, when The Seventh Continent came out, the question of religion took up quite some space. You talked a lot about Jansenism, Pascal, and Bresson, for instance. And in later years, theologians have engaged with your work in books and conferences. Nowadays, you rarely talk about such issues, but The White Ribbon is a film that directly tackles religion—in its less transcendent aspects, of course.

I don’t mind this approach to my work, but I am not a religious filmmaker. Not at all. The Seventh Continent is a much more existential film than The White Ribbon, which deals more with the surface of religion, its negative political side; the question of God is not raised at all. No religion automatically spawns terror, it’s always the churches and people who use the basic religious needs of others for their own ideological ends, in conjunction with education and politics. Faith per se is something positive; it generates meaning. I for one have no religious faith anymore. Tough luck! Because if you do, you have a different, more contented view of life. For the Jansenists, the existence of God survives in his remoteness or unavailability. You can say that this is only wordplay, but it’s closer to one’s sensations than a purely rational explanation. You can rationalize and explain away the feeling of being overwhelmed by nature, for instance, but the feeling remains.

You already mentioned that you were baptized as a Protestant, but you’ve also told me that you grew up without seeing much of your father and that you were educated by three “mothers” in cozy Catholic surroundings—which you disliked. Your upbringing must have been quite the opposite from the pastor’s kids in The White Ribbon.

Since puberty, I‘ve always defined myself by taking a certain distance. I see it even in everyday conversations. That’s also why I’m not good at accepting accolades. How should I say . . . As soon as a majority takes shape, I’m against it on principle. It’s instinctive. Whenever people agree on everything, I get aggressive. At school, I didn’t go to Catholic religious instruction—we had Protestant instruction once a month, and I enjoyed being different from all the others in my class. I never liked being slapped on the back, and I don’t want to do the back-slapping myself, either. I was a loner as a kid and I’ve remained that way. I’m not especially proud of it, of course, it’s just a fact.

In the reception of your films, violence and its media depiction are often discussed as your major theme. But there may be a larger term that defines your interest better and that includes violence, namely the notion of lovelessness. It’s also at the center of the new film.

Doesn’t all dramatic work deal with this? Chekhov at least, who is the greatest dramatic writer next to Shakespeare. He is so heartbreaking in Uncle Vanya, the way he presents carelessness and the desperate longing for a love that, in the end, one is unable to muster anyway. And it’s also what’s prevalent in daily life, the feeling of a lack of love that everyone is afflicted by.

But since the fetish of love in all its variations has been such a core element of middle-class ideology for two centuries, it’s not surprising that the great artworks of this same era regularly uncover the actual lack of love in bourgeois relations. It’s an important type of social critique, and I see your films as part of this tradition—even though you don’t tend to view them as explicit social critique.

Well, I’m certainly a part of bourgeois culture, and I do view the society I live in as pretty loveless. In The White Ribbon the theme probably presents itself more pointedly, almost in model form, because of the historical distance between the story and ourselves. But it’s not limited to works from the past two centuries. I think that poems or artworks from earlier times appear to us through our own framework. You read or hear something that was made in the 17th century or in antiquity and you draw it toward you. Otherwise we wouldn’t be moved by so many creations from the distant past. There is a continuity of certain themes that can’t be dismissed, even if the forms of social life and artistic expression undergo massive changes.

I’m interested in the topic of education and its representative in The White Ribbon, the teacher and narrator of the film. In many ways he departs from the rigidity, cynicism, or brutality that the other figures of authority often show—the pastor, the doctor, the steward. The teacher is the only male character who really asks questions, almost like a detective, and he’s also the only one who is allowed a genuinely sweet love story. But we never really see him in his job, teaching things to the pupils or bringing some enlightenment. It’s almost as if he becomes part of the repressive system by default, his potential as an alternative figure not fully realized.

Yes, of course. On the one hand he is a bit of an outsider from the start. He’s a counterweight in the whole construction, someone who takes a distance and has his doubts. Teachers often play this role. Look at how Wittgenstein practiced his job as a schoolteacher—he was in direct conflict with the small community where he worked. I also remember one or two teachers from my own childhood who were real idealists. On the other hand, he’s a bit of an opportunist sometimes, for instance when he echoes the pastor’s authoritarian stance toward the pupils. He’s not fully up to snuff in terms of acting as an alternative. To me there are no completely positive or negative characters in the film. The pastor is not evil either, he’s really convinced of what he does. He really loves his children. That’s the horror of it. It was normal to beat one’s kids. When he tells them, “I won’t sleep tonight, because tomorrow I will have to hurt you,” it sounds cynical to our ears, but I think it’s better to believe him. It’s not very interesting to see him as a sadist or as a grotesque mental case. If these people had just been perverts, this kind of behavior wouldn’t have had such broad effects. And I’m not sure if any other system of education is inherently better. It’s always about the individual pedagogical impulse: do you do something just to exert your authority, or to help the other person find his or her way in society—as shitty as society may be. Each educational system is only as good as the person who acts in it.

As a professor at the Vienna Film Academy, you are also a teacher. Do you feel an obligation beyond the professional side, beyond teaching filmmaking, to educate the students in a more general sense?

I guess I’m a relatively demanding teacher because I think it’s no use treating students with kid gloves. At the Academy, they are working with a net anyway, so I try to quickly raise the requirements to prepare them for the professional life. I also try and give them internships on my shoots, but it can’t be more than two per film. And usually I don’t mix with the students on a personal level. I mean, I give advice whenever they call me, but I don’t go out for a beer with them. I don’t believe the role of “best buddy” is something that a teacher or parent should aspire to. I think kids hate that, they find their buddies at school, but in a father or teacher they look for a role model.

After the Cannes premiere, several critic friends asked me which literary work The White Ribbon is based on. But it’s an original script, of course. Can you describe the tone that you were aiming at? What kind of writing were you thinking of when working on the dialogues and the narration?

In terms of the formal mode, I decided on two things early on: to do the film in black and white and to have a narrator. Both are means to create distance and avoid any false naturalism. It’s the memory of someone from that era, so I wanted to find a language adequate to this period. I wanted to write from the feeling of how I had experienced this era through literature. Theodor Fontane is probably the closest I can think of. His writing seems representative. I like this measured language—it gives a kind of dignity to the subject and to the reader, it doesn’t jump at you. It’s gentle and discreet.

It’s pretty daring, I think, to introduce such a strong narrator. Ten or 15 years ago, this might have been deemed old-fashioned, but in today’s film landscape it feels like a radical gesture.

That’s why I felt it was legitimate to do it, and why it was fun. It’s like a slap in the face of what is seen as up-to-date and necessary in storytelling today. And it’s an attempt to provoke a certain attentiveness or thoughtfulness in the viewer that the current narrative models in film no longer provoke, even if they are very refined or complicated. There are also people in music and literature who create highly advanced works and at some point return to a “classicist” mode.

Apart from the creation of distance, are there other reasons for the choice of black and white?

There’s a very important practical reason, too. You need to bluff when making a historical film, because you never find original settings that have remained unchanged. You always have to add to the locations and structures that you find, which is much easier if the end result is in black and white and not in color. If you drive through the former GDR, for instance, you see that the houses have very different colors than ours, made by a different industry that produced different chemicals. Each era and each region have their own color that dies with the specific companies that produced it. I rarely see historical films that seem to get it right in color.

What are the positive exceptions?

Patrice Chéreau’s Queen Margot I find terrific—he manages to create a historical climate for which we have no photographic sources, of course, but which I find fully credible. At the same time, it becomes operatic. Visconti managed to do that too, even better.

So far, the technical side of filmmaking has not been a major topic of discussion about your work. But the look of your films seems to become more important, with Time of the Wolf, for instance, and especially with the new film.

For me, it’s always important, but the more experience you have, the closer you can follow what the cinematographer does. For instance, I always fight for less light when we shoot! In this case we shot on color film, because if you work with candles and oil lamps a lot, you need extremely light-sensitive material, which is unavailable in black and white. It became a black-and-white film only in postproduction. I had a fantastic crew—Christoph Kanter, my art director who I’ve been working with for ages, Moidele Bickel, the costume designer, whom I hired because she had done the costumes for Queen Margot—the best I’ve seen in cinema. She’s a master in creating the necessary patina, clothes that look truly worn. I don’t think a director needs to be proficient in all these crafts, cinematography, set design, etc., but he needs the ability to quickly perceive all details and proportions and see if something is wrong.

Today, digital postproduction also allows you to “fix” things that weren’t physically possible or went wrong on the set.

The only thing that counts is the result, in its effect on the viewer. And if the viewer is being respected in the work, then all kinds of artistic or technical intervention are not only legitimate, but should be required.

Would it be conceivable for you to make a computer-generated film in the manner of Pixar, provided it were possible to render fully realistic, lifelike images of humans?

Absolutely. It could be total cinéma d’auteur. But the pleasure and the value of collaborating with others, primarily with the actors, would be gone. The kind of tension that you always look for, between a written part and a real person who inhabits that part with all the additional qualities that are unique to this actor—that element would be gone.

 

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14 of Michael Haneke’s 24 films

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The Seventh Continent (1989)
‘The Seventh Continent is the work of a developing artist (keeping in mind, of course, Haneke’s years in theatre and television), but the film dates extraordinarily well. Its major themes find more focused exposition in the extraordinary La Pianiste, a work adapted from another source but unmistakably Haneke’s in its major concerns. Like the devastating news account from which the film is drawn, The Seventh Continent is a horrendous announcement of the demise of a civilisation.’ — Christopher Sharrett

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Michael Haneke discusses The Seventh Continent

 

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Benny’s Video (1992)
‘From its startling opening, featuring video footage of a pig being slaughtered with a bolt gun, it’s clear that Michael Haneke’s second feature is unlikely to pull its punches. After all, in his previous film, The Seventh Continent (1989), Haneke featured a family locking themselves in their own house, destroying it out of sight of the prying eyes of the world and, when there is nothing left, finally despatching themselves. If that film satirised aspects of Western middle-class life, Benny’s Video had its sights aimed at the way we consume media and what we regard as entertainment.’ — CURZON

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Die Rebellion (1993)
‘Andreas Pum lost a leg and won a medal in the war. Even after the general breakdown he still maintains a firm belief in the legitimacy of order and the authority of the state. When he himself gets caught up in the wheels of the state apparatus, he begins to reconsider his values. Too late. Dying he renounces his god.’ — AFC

the entirety

 

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71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
‘This cerebral Austrian mystery, by avant-garde director Michael Haneke, will disturb those viewers with the patience to wade through it. The film begins with a grisly mass killing. It was Christmas eve 1993 and a 19-year old student inexplicably murders several people and then kills himself. The fragmented film flashes back to October 12 and then progresses toward the fateful night. Throughout the film many characters appear and suddenly reappear. A homeless teenaged Romanian exile roaming Vienna’s streets and begging provides continuity. Each fragment begins with a newscast that functions as a surreal Greek Chorus One shows footage of the war in Sarajevo, and the other is a story about Michael Jackson.’ — Sandra Brennan

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Das Schloß (1997)
‘Existential drama directed by Michael Haneke and adapted from the novel by Franz Kafka. Land surveyor, K. (Ulrich Mühe), arrives at a small village that houses a castle. Though he was invited to the castle by officials, authorities refuse to allow him to enter and befuddle him with increasingly bizarre bureaucratic obstacles. K. grows perplexed by this and ultimately feels alienated from the society he has entered into.’ — Blackwell’s

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the entirety

 

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Funny Games (1997)
‘Michael Haneke’s most notorious provocation, Funny Games spares no detail in its depiction of the agony of a bourgeois family held captive at their vacation home by a pair of white-gloved young men. In a series of escalating “games,” the sadistic duo subject their victims to unspeakable physical and psychological torture over the course of a night. A home-invasion thriller in which the genre’s threat of bloodshed is made stomach-churningly real, the film ratchets up shocks even as its executioners interrupt the action to address the audience, drawing queasy attention to the way that cinema milks pleasure from pain and stokes our appetite for atrocity. With this controversial treatise on violence and entertainment, Haneke issued a summation of his cinematic philosophy, implicating his audience in a spectacle of unbearable cruelty.’ — The Criterion Collection

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Code Unknown (2000)
‘This isn’t necessarily Haneke’s best film (though it’s certainly in the running), but it’s definitely his least hectoring and (befitting its title) his most mysterious. Indeed, it takes a long time just to determine what Code Unknown is about, as its multiple narratives appear largely unrelated. Characters from one story occasionally encounter those from another, but not in the usual way that suggests everything is connected—it seems more like a means of imposing some small degree of structure on what’s basically a series of non-comedic blackout sketches organized around a common theme. Eventually, it becomes clear that Haneke is interrogating the idea of intervention, as it plays out between lovers, between strangers, and between nations. That may sound tediously academic, but Haneke’s skill at orchestrating almost unbearably visceral confrontations makes it anything but.’ — AV Club

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Michael Haneke on Storyboarding CODE UNKNOWN

 

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The Piano Teacher (2001)
‘The films that have followed The Piano Teacher have referred more and less directly to problems of postcolonialism and migration. In some, like Time of the Wolf (2003) and Caché (2005), these are the explicit focus. In others, like Amour (2012) and Happy End (2017), the fragility of the European Union stands in the background—in immigrant workers waiting to be paid; in refugees flooding the city of Calais. Using the same actors and even variations on the same characters again and again, Haneke inscribes these problems within the family, giving his corpus a quality that critics have called taxonomic: he examines the possibilities of contemporary (haute) bourgeois life in an increasingly volatile political reality. And the disaster is ongoing.

‘Yet The Piano Teacher mostly eschews historical and sociological questions. Instead, it stakes its claim on the continued vitality of an endangered European tradition—not classical music but the art cinema itself. Positing a masochistic spectator who wants to suffer through a film like this one, it makes a bid to turn us into teachers—or its transmitters. The paradox is that it works, and that this may mean accepting, as Erika muses in the novel, that “art is no consolation.”‘ — Moira Weigel

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Isabelle Huppert Discusses “The Piano Teacher”

 

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Time of the Wolf (2003)
‘I originally wrote it as a science-fiction film, and now it’s set in the present. The audience no longer has to be prepared for the possibility of catastrophes happening. I was working on the screenplay for a different film when I was bowled over by 9/11, and I thought, “Something which has a lot in common with Time of the Wolf is happening here.” It was originally supposed to be my first project with Isabelle Huppert. Despite her support and that of the now-deceased Toscan du Plantier, financing the project wasn’t possible: too expensive, too complex, not a lot of fun, in other words difficult to sell. Thanks to the success of The Piano Teacher, backers were prepared to invest more money, and because of the material’s unfortunate currency due to 9/11, it suddenly became possible.’ — MH

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THE MAKING OF

 

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Caché (2005)
‘The crux of the problem in Hidden, as it often is in the work of Haneke’s artistic soul mates, revolves around questions of control, of power and emotional manipulation—more precisely, who is behind the surveillance tapes and what was their motive in making and sending them. Imagine the scenario of Rear Window re-presented from the perspective of wife-murderer Thorwald rather than voyeur-sleuth L.B. Jeffries (minus the resolution, of course). Except in this case the plaintive cry delivered by Thorwald when he enters the lair of his eager tormentor—“What do you want of me?”—is delivered by guilt-ridden investigator Georges to a hapless victim, when it should be directed inward at the deceptions propping up his fatuous sense of self. Once again, this is typical film noir turf implanted with the fleurs du mal of contemporary crisis. We feel insecure, stressed, threatened by elusive forces whose connection to us as individuals is obscure. Yet we can’t quite shake rumbles of complicity, of having acceded to something for which we will ultimately be held accountable and from which our unprecedented standard of living cannot protect us. It is this heart of darkness that beats beneath the icy surface of Haneke’s films. An unwelcoming site, we avoid it at our peril.’ — Paul Arthur

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Funny Games (2007)
‘Regardless of what version you are watching, Funny Games is a painful watch, acting as a rather soulless one hour and fifty-minute essay in violence on screen and how we need to change our ways. It is one of the few films I have watched in my lifetime that actively positions itself against the viewer and takes every conceivable opportunity it can to anger you. Then again, maybe it was not supposed to be enjoyed in any conventional way, especially when taken for what it is: a filmic experiment into our enjoyment of violence and nothing more.’ — David Monaghan

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The White Ribbon (2009)
‘I always like to feed the viewer’s distrust of what they’re shown in film. That’s expressed in The White Ribbon solely when the narrator says, “I don’t know if all the details of the story I’m going to tell you are true, a lot of it’s hearsay, etc.” The film’s story is told in a contradictory way – it’s not that we see only what the narrator was actually able to see. There are also scenes where he wasn’t there. That’s my wink at the beginning, to make it clear that we’re not dealing with a factual account, but someone’s construct made in an attempt to reconstruct the truth. The film never claims that “This is how it was.”’ — MH

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Amour (2012)
‘Amour will, I believe, take its place alongside the greatest films about the confrontation of ageing and death, among them Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Kurosawa’s Living, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Rosi’s Three Brothers and, dare I say it, Don Siegel’s The Shootist. It’s worthy of being discussed in the same breath as the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett, of which Christopher Ricks wrote in his bitingly perceptive Beckett’s Dying Words: “We know about our wish to go on being, we human beings, our wish not to die. Samuel Beckett, who rigged nothing, fashioned for himself and for us a voice, Malone’s, at once wistful and wiry: ‘Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.’ These are the accents of a consciousness, imagining and imagined, which braves the immortal commonplace of mortality.”‘ — Philip French

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Happy End (2017)
‘Happy End unfolds in short, oblique scenes, including a number of video recordings whose authorship is either mysterious (à la Hidden and its unlabelled videotapes) or purposefully disembodied (as in security footage of an industrial accident). Context is absent; exposition is non-existent. This return to form(alism) is self-conscious, and one way to read – and quickly dismiss – Happy End is to characterise it as a greatest hits album of sorts, with all the old Haneke classics, from sociopathic teens and monstrously self-involved bourgeois parents to class warfare, racism and assisted suicide in one handy tracklist. Such a characterisation, while not inaccurate, ignores the subtle but significant shift in the material towards a lighter, though hardly benign, seriocomic tone.’ — Adam Nayman

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*

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, It’s an angle. The kiddos just need to be indoctrinated in Halloween goodness then nature will take its course. Ha ha, I can’t believe that I remember that ‘Gilligan’s Island’ episode but I do. Enjoy the pay, man, and the work too if necessary. ** Dominik, Hi, D! Yeah, they made it through. Just had to delete a couple of boners and a fist-in-an-ass pic. I’m not on Instagram but, based on Facebook’s suggestions and targeted ads, they really don’t get me at all. Like I must have clicked on a link related to The Killers out of boredom or something at some point because now Facebook thinks I must be interested in every tiny career move they make. If my last love wish comes to fruition, toss me a little slice so Zac and I can make our movie, ha ha. Aw, now that’s some perfectly targeted and kind love from you right there. Every drag artist you love standing in a huge crowd on the street below your window singing your favorite love song at the top of their lungs, Dennis. ** justin, Hi, Justin! Oh, cool, you found the book. Let me know what you think of it if you remember and feel like it. It was really nice to get to interact with you for a minute during the Zoom thing. Hopefully the first of many future tete-a-tetes. Obviously, feel way more than free to come in here and hang out whenever the mood strikes. It would be a total pleasure. Take care. ** David Ehrenstein, You managed to post! Everyone, Mr. E’s new FaBlog thing is called ‘A Feces in The Crowd’, and it seems to be about the most horrible you-know-who in the world. Here. ** G, Hi Golnoosh! I think you’ve hit on something with loonyhole. Should we set up a Zoom workshop for him? My toe improves albeit extremely gradually, thank you. Yes, you must come visit France as soon as hell on earth lifts! Aw, thanks about ‘The Weaklings (XL), and thanks to Mr. Moore too if he’s out there. What does your teaching involve? Stress aside, is it interesting and promising so far? ** wolf, W-w-w-w…! I saw the Celmins retro in San Francisco. I know it was in NYC too, not sure where else. I don’t think it’s scheduled for a Paris visit, but who knows these days. She’s a friend of mine, although I haven’t seen her in a long time. But when I lived in NYC I used to visit her and hang out a lot. She’s wonderfulness incarnate and a real toughy at the same. Great combo, you will surely agree. I think every museum in Paris is now open except for the Jeu de Plume which doesn’t open until next April for some unknown reason. Oh, envy on the Steve McQueen show. I really like his videos, much more than his feature films, at least so far. Did you see the double sided one with the Jamaican guy on the boat shown on one side and his grave being dug shown on the other? That was incredible. I can imagine how a gym could keep one sane even though I don’t even really know what one looks like inside, although I suppose it’s a fairly easy guess. ** Ian, Hi, Ian! Stuff is reasonably okay in Paris. Oh, shit, you’ve gone red. We have too, actually, but France is being not so hardcore in its punishment, at least not yet. Ugh. Pozzing is a thing, and pretty popular based on my slave/master searching, but, if I had to guess, I think the reality could easily be that a large majority of the Pozzers/Pozzees are on secretly Prep, and that it’s more of a psychological head trip fetish than an actually endangering one. But I don’t know. I’m not a huge DeLillo fan, truth be told. I think ‘White Noise’ was the last of his books that I fairly fully liked. I greatly prefer the earlier books leading up to that one when he was still pretty economical and less sort of show-offy. I haven’t even tried the most recent couple or few. Yeah, even when I have issues with his work, I’ve never thought a book of his was as anywhere as ugh as ‘The Corrections’. I share your ‘yawn’ big time, which can’t be surprising. Great about your traction re: ‘Routine’. Do you think you’re quite close to the finish line? Great to see you! ** Armando, Hi, A. I’m pretty good, thanks. Toe is very, very slowly seeming to be less painful. I’m not going to put my address here, but I can give it to you by email or Facebook message or something. ** Steve Erickson, I thought that was pretty inspired too. I assume QAnon’s thing for my blog was an extremely passing fancy. Haven’t seen or heard of a peep from them vis-a-vis here in months. Hm, I think the people you know who uncharacteristically like ‘LA’ must dislike his stuff for the wrong reason. It’s definitely meant to be far better seen in a theater, yes. New song! Thank you! Everyone, Mr. Erickson has added to his growing roster of musical accomplishments thusly. Steve: ‘I finished another new song, “I Am A Normal Person”. I’ve been planning to work with samples from ASMR videos for a while, and I finally did it here. I took a sample of a woman saying “oh my god” repeatedly (which was heavily processed in the original video already) and edited it in software so that the voice becomes another instrument instead of a delivery system for words. The also comes from another sample from that video.’ ** Right. The other day I realised I’d never made a Haneke post for strange, unknown reasons, so I have rectified that situation today. Love him or hate him for ‘don’t care’ him, there it is. See you tomorrow.