After watching a videotape of his parents kill a small pig on their summer farmhouse, a young boy videotapes himself as he kills a girl, just because he wants to see what it feels like to do so. A middle-aged woman, who still lives at home under the scrutiny of her dominant mother, sits on the edge of a bathtub and uses a razor blade to cut her labia, just before sitting down for that routine dinner with said mother (”THE PIANO TEACHER”, 2006). After a seemingly endless routine of working, buying, eating, and shopping, a family decides to destroy all their possessions and commit group suicide (”THE SEVENTH CONTINENT”).

Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michael Haneke presents the social failures of middle class Europe and slices them open with a fine blade for audiences to inspect and discuss. Each film deals with how the modern Family is presently unequipped to survive the alienation caused by the growth of technology, consumption, and capitalism.

Haneke consistently uses an abrupt, off-screen violence that derives its strength from sound FX instead of traditionally confrontational visual carnage, creating a distancing, analytical stage for his ideas. By forcing us to endure visceral depictions of the failure of the family, Haneke asks us to question Western values at large, which he believes deadens the bond between human beings.

When a father prefers to watch the stock market rather than talk to his son, destruction follows. When a family can no longer communicate because they are too busy wondering how to keep the summer house in tip-top shape, as their daughter suffers from loneliness, destruction follows. One plus one is two. What Haneke states is just as simple. The stylistic skill with which he stages harrowing truths to the film-going audience puts him in a rank with the most important filmmakers of our time.

I recently watched “BENNY’S VIDEO” (1992) – having already seen it and been completely disarmed by its frank portrayal of a spoiled youth with little else to do than commit murder just because he wants to know what it feels like. The film slays bourgeois comfort to the very end – when the parents attempt to cover up their son’s dirty deeds by crushing up the victim’s body into bits (none of this occurs on-screen, mind you) so that they can protect their comfy “reputations”, the son hits them with a final blow: handing them in to the authorities with taped footage of their cover-up plan.