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Most artists renowned for a spare, minimalist aesthetic developed it painstakingly over time: the early work of Samuel Beckett and Robert Bresson is almost voluble compared with what was to come. But this fascinating triple-bill collection reveals that Michael Haneke was even more glacially austere at the start of his film career than he would be with The Piano Teacher and this year's arthouse blockbuster Hidden. If you imagine those films stripped of their big-name stars, glossy production values and familiar milieu (Haneke's work aside, Austrian cinema has barely registered in Britain), you'll see that we're not exactly talking lightweight escapism - but for formal and intellectual rigour they have few equals in contemporary cinema. The Seventh Continent (1989) was Haneke's first film after several years in television and the theatre. Much of it comprises prolonged sequences of domestic and workplace routine, whose very banality creates an oddly lulling effect that makes the off-kilter moments much more disquieting (a little girl feigning blindness to get attention; her father buying an impressive array of sledgehammers and power tools), well before they turn into what must be the grimmest final act in even this filmmaker's notoriously misanthropic oeuvre. Benny's Video (1992) initially appears to be a somewhat simplistic essay in the corrupting power of the video image, as it depicts the daily life of a bright but almost autistically detached teenager who prefers slow-motion replays of both faked and actual violence to any significant engagement with the outside world. But, as Haneke mercilessly reveals, Benny's outwardly 'normal' parents are even more morally disconnected when it comes to protecting their own. And 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) comprises 71 short vignettes, each separated by a second or two of black screen and often cut off in mid-sentence. We're informed at the start that the film was inspired by a real-life random shooting incident, which forces us to examine outwardly trivial images for clues as to a possible hidden agenda - an approach he also invites us to practice on interspersed footage of real-life atrocities in Bosnia, the Middle East and Northern Ireland.

 

Michael Brooke on 6th November 2006
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