Michael Haneke: Trilogy

“Michael Haneke. I got this fax sometime in the ’80s. This is from Michael Haneke. He’s asking me how I got the video effects in my second feature, Family Viewing, because he wanted to use that texture on Benny’s Video. So that’s kind of crazy. He’s asking me how I did it, he’s thinking that there’s some complicated process I was using, but actually all I was doing is, I had a cable in my VCR, and I was kind of pulling it in and out to get this grainy effect.”

“Michael Haneke was very, very important to me growing up. His first films, they just call it the trilogy here, but I think he called it the emotional glaciation trilogy. You really see Bresson's influence in these films, which are very Bressonian. The Seventh Continent is one of the most perfect films ever made and very upsetting. Benny's Video is a great film about Nazi youth, and the 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance is a great kind of trial run for what he ended up doing with Code Unk...”

“One of the other things that I'm very interested to talk about is here Michael Haneke. Caché is one of my favorite Haneke films but it's one that people maybe know more about. There's a film in this Trilogy here, it's just a excellently perfect film in my mind, it's Benny's Video. And if you like being uncomfortable and disturbed I recommend that you seek that out or come to my House because now I have a copy of it.”