Nina Kusturica and Eva Testor’s documentary film of director Michael Haneke at work derives its title from Haneke himself: “I always say that film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.” Haneke’s observation is in turn clearly inspired by Godard’s famous line that cinema is “truth 24 times a second.” It is a sign of a filmmaker’s arrival on the cultural landscape that they can gloss Godard.
And it is a measure of a filmmaker’s arrival that he gets a documentary about his work. 24 Realities per Second seems a good title, for as Kusturica and Testor attend to the ragged revelations of the auteur’s to-ing and fro-ing, ebbing and flowing, their film bears out Haneke and Godard’s dicta. This is a series of impressions of its subject derived from 2-and-a-half years of pursuing Michael Haneke with a hand-held camera to see what would come of it. What you get is a series of apparently disconnected scenes of the subject: on trains, in cars, directing actors, talking at a Q&A, shards of experience that may reveal glimpses of temperament and preoccupations. As Haneke would argue, none of these disparate moments in itself is the truth, but all contribute to some idea of the true. Like that favourite Godardian figure the detective, we deduce a picture from clues. And as Godard would argue, truth is always in front of the camera. Kusturica and Testor explain themselves thus: “Time and space lose relevance. The purpose is not a precise reconstruction of events, but the best linking of different images to picture Haneke’s work.”
This fragmented observational quality recalls the French New Wave contention that when we watch a film we see what the filmmakers saw on the day the film was shot. The film is a record of its making. This exploratory ‘film-in-the-making’ mood is established from the start. The opening shot finds Haneke and his crew scouting locations in a field. It feels as though Kusturica and Testor are looking for a way to begin. As their film progresses, it seems to be making itself in Haneke’s footsteps. We get an increasing sense of the effort involved, of how exacting and tetchy Haneke can get in his pursuit of the right shot and look. But however blunt he gets with the crew, it is forgotten the next day. (Tetchiness is the auteur’s prerogative). Elsewhere, Haneke strives for the correct projector light for showing Time of the Wolf, composes shots on location, ribs a photographer on a publicity shoot. There is a (quite gruesome) consultation with crew members over which animal carcass to shoot with worms devouring its insides. We are reminded of how awkward Haneke’s own films make the spectator feel. But the director’s work, academic, intellectual, precise, seems as far from Kusturica and Testor’s grab bag of scenes as it is possible to get. Indeed, your first impression is of disorganization. At one point, the camera gets pushed behind a train seat and the stitching in the upholstery comes into view. At another, the camera behind Haneke’s head in a speeding car renders the landscape as nothing but white blur. You need to watch this torrent of impressions a number of times for the forms of association Kusturica and Testor suggest to become apparent. “The eyes are the organs of curiosity”, Haneke is heard saying as we peer through an aircraft’s cabin windows. At what? Landscape…clouds?
Studying the way their film has been put together is an endless pursuit of vague associations, leads lost and found. It befits their subject that the filmmakers look to us to make up our own minds about how revealing their essay is, (which of course invites you to go back to it again and again). Interview becomes a method with which to pin down this enigmatic wraith. Moments when Haneke explains himself become more accessible if only because verbalized ideas seem more easy to assimilate than plain images. Early moviegoing experiences left indelible impressions on Haneke. A film set in the African savannah ends and a homesick little Austrian bundled off to Denmark during the postwar reconstruction finds himself back in “horrible Denmark.” In Tom Jones (1963), Albert Finney turns to the camera and speaks to Haneke. Startled by these breaches of cinema’s fourth wall, Haneke was made aware from a young age of film’s illusion. Most Anglo-American filmmakers’ accounts of seminal moviegoing moments regale with the condition of being always already immersed in the illusion. We are reminded of New Hollywood confessions of cinephilia. Like we avid cinephiles in the audience, Spielberg and DePalma drew their inspiration from unquestioning movie love. Haneke’s early scepticism about cinema’s illusion has led him to work on the spectator in a very different way: Funny Games (1997), The Piano Teacher (2001), Hidden(2005), others. These savage conceits find the spectator as reluctantly but compulsively complicit in their manipulation as they are in the prejudice and pain of modern civilization.
Kusturica and Testor’s observations also locate us between the filmmaker and the publicity machine that generates ‘Michael Haneke.’ The observational form’s promise is that getting close and personal will reveal the individual. Via glimpses of PR people, photographers, interviewers, a tantalizing glimpse of a nervous Isabelle Huppert being soothed as she poses for the cameras, this film also becomes something of an account of the construction of the modern star auteur. An interviewer asks that stock PR question: “how does it feel to live in one country while working in another?” Kusturica and Testor rush us away.
Haneke seems the ideal subject for this sort of documentary since he is the most prominent recent exponent of a European tradition that makes the audience question the purpose and use of the story they are being told. Kusturica and Testor’s flight of imagery and intuition ends with a reiteration of the abstract blur we saw through the car window earlier as the camera shifts slightly to the right of Haneke to a blank white screen. Back at the Q&A, Haneke answers a query on interpretation: “It’s up to you to decide what it means.”
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© Copyright Richard Armstrong 2006. No part of this article
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