film music

So music has a fiction in that kind of film, but in most films, music is only present to fill in emotions that are lacking. Most films claim to be realistic and the use of music in them is therefore a lie. In real life we never hear music in our lives unless it’s played on the radio or television or a musician is present. But music is used then to make up for lack of tension that the director hasn’t managed to create. I have nothing against musicals—for example, I love the films of Fred Astaire and the films of Hitchcock, but those aren’t realistic films. The use of music in conventional cinema is usually used or almost always used to make up for what’s lacking in emotion because the director has not done his job properly.

Michael Haneke

In terms of cinema and filmmaking, there are certainly the unexpected gifts that the actors bestow on you. Film is always a question of compromises with respect to what you originally intended. My father, who was a stage director, told me that you should be happy if you obtain 40% of what you’ve set out to do. When he told me that, I said, “Well, I’m not interested in becoming a director.” I think that limit of 40% is a bit of an exaggeration, but if you get 70% of what you were looking for, then you can be happy. Usually, when making a film, the surprises are negative surprises. You don’t get what you wanted or what you hoped for. The only nice surprises are those that are offered to you by actors when they offer you these gifts, as I mentioned before, when they are better and give you more than what you had originally conceived. That doesn’t happen every day on set, but if it happens a couple of times in the course of making a film, you can consider yourself very lucky.

Michael Haneke

I’m lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don’t need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That’s an enormous privilege. That’s the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

amour

Michael Haneke on ‘Amour’:

“There was a relative I loved very much, and I had to look on as she suffered,” the 70-year-old Haneke explains, recalling an aunt who suffered from rheumatism and ended up taking her own life. “I wanted to investigate this feeling of being able to do nothing about it.”

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) vs Amour (2012)

Emmanuelle Riva, then and now.

Michael Haneke

Films that are entertainments give simple answers but I think that’s ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think. If there are more answers at the end, then surely it is a richer experience.

Amour

Things will go on as they have done up until now. They’ll go from bad to worse. Things will go on, and then one day it will all be over.

Amour, directed by Michael Haneke, with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva.

Michael Haneke on the set of Amour

Catherine Wheatley in Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image

“Ethical concerns sculpt the themes and forms of Haneke’s work. Each of his feature films presents an ethical problem within its narrative — suicide, murder, conspiracy and rape are recurring themes, for example — and they also demonstrate an underlying concern with questions of guilt and responsibility. But this concern does not only take place on a narrative level, as characters struggle with and against their responsibility for past and present actions: it is also demonstrated on an extra-diegetic level. The content of each of these films presents us with a series of ethical problems which echo or mirror a set of ethical problems that Haneke sees inherent to the viewing situation. These problems revolve around the spectator’s complicity with the cinematic apparatus and their tacit acceptance or denial of this complicity. While questions of complicity, responsiblity and guilt raised within the narratives of Haneke’s films provide in themselves ample material for consideration, they also represent by analogy Haneke’s concerns with the acts of film-going and film-viewing.”