Excesses of millennial capitalism, excesses of violence: several critical fragments regarding the cinema of Michael Haneke.(Critical essay)

 
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me. 
But unless I learn to use 
The difference between poetry and rhetoric 
My power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold ... 
--Audre Lourde, Power 

Exegetical Method and Polemic on Millennial Capitalism

A point of illumination on the process of critical thinking and writing one would be hard pressed to dispute is that it is ineluctably a reflection of the moment in which it is produced. A critic/writer can be no more, to greater or lesser extents, than the sum of, among other things, his ever-shifting politics, personal history, image-repertoire and ethical values. All or some of these characteristics may be masked or exposed to varying degrees when the moment necessitates (the effort to appear 'totally objective'--an oxymoron, really--being one), but the fact remains that critical practice is forever braided to the threads of the critic's, for lack of a better word, 'personality.' Likewise, one might extend this rather elementary insight to artists of any and all rank. In fact, for an artist to practice his craft devoid of personal investment is to merely give motion to the gestures of the craft and, in turn, reject the conduct of art. It should follow, then, that the skillful articulation of an artist's innermost obsessions and concerns stands certainly, for the critic, as a principle criteria of assessment. The obvious question that arises here is, how are we to discern in the work of art what does and does not belong to the 'personality' of the artist? In other words, what in a given work is of value and what are we to ignore or discard?

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Assessing the work of the critic should, in theory, be a less foggy enterprise than assessing the wok of the artist, as it is the duty of the critic to openly make intellectual judgments that are both objectively critical and personally informed, and to do so with as little obfuscation as possible. It is the 'personality' of the critic that is his greatest asset. Contrarily, the artist, particularly filmmakers, given the broad division of labour involved in the production of a film, need not make any such commitment to personal revelation to perform his craft successfully; for example, I find Sam Raimi's Spiderman (2002) to be exemplary of the American action genre and a fine piece of entertainment, but I cannot say it reveals anything to me about Raimi personally or politically, or about the regrettable socio-economic conditions coterminous with its production and historical moment, or that any of his films dating back to The Evil Dead (1981) reflect any differently.

Increasingly, it appears that fewer American filmmakers are willing to express even the faintest tremor of a reactionary political stance (save the distorted historiographies of Stone and the gross 'aesthetizations' of Spielberg) against their country's dreadful contemporary predicament(s) or to commit themselves to an ideological project, opting all too often to play an automaton in the great assembly line of the Hollywood machine (a mournful thought given America's current political climate and the imperialist doctrines of the George W. Bush administration). However, the foreign counterparts to these trite American filmmakers have time and again demonstrated a stronger predilection toward a personal/political/philosophical project and a commitment to the consistency of its expression, being invariably more innovative narratively and formally than the better portion of contemporary American cinema. It is not my place at the moment to speculate on the intricacies of this dissymmetry, but suffice it to say that foreign narrative cinema of the last decade (if not longer) has been disproportionately more stimulating and intellectually more in tune with the myriad crises (globalization, ecological destruction and mass-scale poverty are just a few) facing mankind in the crepuscular dawn of the 21st century than Hollywood has dared to. At this point reiterating the role played by the critic's 'personality' becomes significant because it is with much personal interest and to the best of my critical acumen that I forthrightly acknowledge Michael Haneke as the most important filmmaker working in contemporary world cinema. It is the total sum of the constituents making up my 'personality' and the specificity of the cultural moment I am writing in as I experience it that informs this pronouncement as much as it is an objective and empirical appreciation of Haneke's body of work thus far. This may seem to the reader so directly a point of fact of the critical process as to question the purpose of articulating it at all, but the experience of this revelation for me was strong enough to warrant a full-scale reinterpretation of my research on Haneke's cinema which, after vacillating between several different theoretical frameworks and attempting to decide on the most productive model to move forward with, I directed a simple question toward myself: what is it about Haneke's films that reverberate so strongly with me at this point in time? (1)

I posed this question to myself while sitting in a designer ...