if you "enjoyed" Funny Games, you will probably also "enjoy" Time Of The Wolf...(somehow, it doesn't seem right to speak of enjoying a Haneke film, genius though they tend to be)...TOTW is similar in feel to FG (clinical), trades in the same sort of brutality-against-the-bourgeoisie, and provides a reality check for a played-out film narrative (the post-apocalyptic thriller)...suffice to say Tina Turner and/or colorful street gangs are checked at the door...TOTW is also surprisingly tender at turns, if you can believe that...vernoncrane said:
Cache/Hidden (spoilers)
- Thread starter Ned
- Start date
borderpolice
Well-known member
rewch said:
hehehe! what haneke claims exactly mirrors majid's (and his son's) denials! clever stuff
henrymiller
Well-known member
DO SEE 'time of the wolf and EVEN MORE SO 'code unknown'. the latter is especially great.
vernoncrane
garrett dweller
yeah i have a long history of failing to see Code Unknown...its currently, amazingly, sitting in my local Blockbuster but after having missed its so many times a strange aura of trepidation has developed around it....on the subject.. is it only me or has blockbuster hugely diversified its range recently....i heard the manager of my local chatting to a punter and recommending a whole range of new Korean and Chinese movies as they both scoffed at the poverty of Hollywood fare...there has been a shift vis a vis non-english language movies, hasn't there?
sorry for going off topic.
sorry for going off topic.
just seen this, and very very impressed.
after coming out the usher said to the person i was with 'everyone always asks 'who sent the tapes'- totally missing the point!' heheheh. me, i rather like the 'open ending' meme but also henry m's point is cogent- set up a mystery and it's a little haughty to be annoyed if people want to solve it.
found georges less and less sympathetic as the film went on- by the scene in the toilet with majid's son he just seems almost sociopathically unfeeling...so am rather attracted to this 'symptom' theory, though it be a bit silly.
also fits with the colonialism subtext- wonder how this played with moneyed parisians during the riots...
oh and code unknown is excellent, if not quite as compellingly unpleasant as 'cache'- swimming pool scene particularly horrible, and with much in common with the unsettle-the-bourgeois tendencies of the later film (though by all accounts they like being unsettled...)
obviously its great to see such an uncompromising film doing so well. though incidentally, lynch might think of suing over the use of the entire plot of the first half of Lost Highway...
after coming out the usher said to the person i was with 'everyone always asks 'who sent the tapes'- totally missing the point!' heheheh. me, i rather like the 'open ending' meme but also henry m's point is cogent- set up a mystery and it's a little haughty to be annoyed if people want to solve it.
found georges less and less sympathetic as the film went on- by the scene in the toilet with majid's son he just seems almost sociopathically unfeeling...so am rather attracted to this 'symptom' theory, though it be a bit silly.
also fits with the colonialism subtext- wonder how this played with moneyed parisians during the riots...
oh and code unknown is excellent, if not quite as compellingly unpleasant as 'cache'- swimming pool scene particularly horrible, and with much in common with the unsettle-the-bourgeois tendencies of the later film (though by all accounts they like being unsettled...)
obviously its great to see such an uncompromising film doing so well. though incidentally, lynch might think of suing over the use of the entire plot of the first half of Lost Highway...
Last edited:
vernoncrane
garrett dweller
just seen "code unknown" and am still digesting it...much more similar to Cache than "funny games" or the "piano teacher" i thought....i'd be really interested to hear anyone else's thoughts on it while i try and come up with some of my own...obviously the opening and c losing sequences are the most immediate and impressive...really keen to see "time of the wolf" now.. is any of Hanekes earlier s tuff "benny's video " and before, widely available?
)Aha!
Every detail of the film is significant isnt it. The film is rich with meaningful detail, and meditative to make us aware of this. You have to zoom in on everything and find out the hidden (Cache) yourself. For example: during one dinner party Anne is on the phone and we see and hear her but at the same time a guy is standing next to her, talking to another man and namedropping, among others, Baudrillard. This is not subtitled, or audiozoomed-in-on but very important. Baudrillard in conjunction with Georges taking sleeping pills, can be read as a reference to The Matrix. Baudrillard views the media as an autonomous sphere, not really connected to reality. The bourgeois intellectual simulacrum - dinner parties in bookstacked but windowless rooms, pure cocooning - functions in much the same way. The people of the banlieus are of no real importance, or merely the subject of ridicule, like in Georges literary TV show, where a guest compares a certain author with a "little mason in the banlieus."
Every detail of the film is significant isnt it. The film is rich with meaningful detail, and meditative to make us aware of this. You have to zoom in on everything and find out the hidden (Cache) yourself. For example: during one dinner party Anne is on the phone and we see and hear her but at the same time a guy is standing next to her, talking to another man and namedropping, among others, Baudrillard. This is not subtitled, or audiozoomed-in-on but very important. Baudrillard in conjunction with Georges taking sleeping pills, can be read as a reference to The Matrix. Baudrillard views the media as an autonomous sphere, not really connected to reality. The bourgeois intellectual simulacrum - dinner parties in bookstacked but windowless rooms, pure cocooning - functions in much the same way. The people of the banlieus are of no real importance, or merely the subject of ridicule, like in Georges literary TV show, where a guest compares a certain author with a "little mason in the banlieus."
Last edited:
For those of you inquiring about Hanekes earlier works, check out Der Siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent) This will most likely answer some questions concerning why he does what he does, or will atleast supply you with some footing to further appreciate, or atlest understand, his methods. I cant say I get all this talk of 'openendedness' concerning Cache, as it is perhaps his most approachable film, to the point where it almost condescendingly adapts basic filmic techniques and narrative structures familiar to the Thriller genre.
My understanding of the meeting at the end was that it was Haneke’s way of giving the audience the option of assuming that the videos were in fact being made between the two sons, which is perhaps the easiest closure to such a complicated narrative, and would actually round off the story quite nicely. But If you’ve seen Funny Games, you are probably aware of Hanekes interest in audience-complicity, his disinterest in narrative progression and his somewhat back-handed use of other genre’s techniques to further criticize the commonly held assumption that media can actually incite extreme acts of violence in young people. Like Hitchcock, Haneke is capable of taking fragments from familiar works and adapting them to fit a very unfamiliar and often disconcerting narrative frame to further criticize the radical potential of film itself (or any medium for that matter). Id recommend Benny’s Video, as it is (from what ive heard) perhaps the best example of this, but I have’nt seen it yet.
Though it might seem too obvious to point out, I think the use of video and the static surveillance shots that signal the presence of the grand Other in Cache were actually intended to mirror the active (or passive) process of viewing the film itself. The footage definitely had a other-worldly feel to it, and the only other element that seemed out of place other than the use of VHS tapes (as it is commonly known that even terrorists use DVD’s today) was the fact that such a wealthy couple even had the VCR to play the recording, highlighted by the fact that they seemed to own a flatscreen, possibly HD plasma set. The final shot seemed to be of the same ‘situated’ footage aswell, and as stagnant as it may sound, the only person I could assume was sending the tapes was myself. (or the audience, collectively)
…and as far as all of the confused typifying of Haneke’s work as being to 'French' for his own good, it might be useful to consider that he is actually Austrian, and highly critical of both intellectual pomposity and Frances foreign policy.
My understanding of the meeting at the end was that it was Haneke’s way of giving the audience the option of assuming that the videos were in fact being made between the two sons, which is perhaps the easiest closure to such a complicated narrative, and would actually round off the story quite nicely. But If you’ve seen Funny Games, you are probably aware of Hanekes interest in audience-complicity, his disinterest in narrative progression and his somewhat back-handed use of other genre’s techniques to further criticize the commonly held assumption that media can actually incite extreme acts of violence in young people. Like Hitchcock, Haneke is capable of taking fragments from familiar works and adapting them to fit a very unfamiliar and often disconcerting narrative frame to further criticize the radical potential of film itself (or any medium for that matter). Id recommend Benny’s Video, as it is (from what ive heard) perhaps the best example of this, but I have’nt seen it yet.
Though it might seem too obvious to point out, I think the use of video and the static surveillance shots that signal the presence of the grand Other in Cache were actually intended to mirror the active (or passive) process of viewing the film itself. The footage definitely had a other-worldly feel to it, and the only other element that seemed out of place other than the use of VHS tapes (as it is commonly known that even terrorists use DVD’s today) was the fact that such a wealthy couple even had the VCR to play the recording, highlighted by the fact that they seemed to own a flatscreen, possibly HD plasma set. The final shot seemed to be of the same ‘situated’ footage aswell, and as stagnant as it may sound, the only person I could assume was sending the tapes was myself. (or the audience, collectively)
…and as far as all of the confused typifying of Haneke’s work as being to 'French' for his own good, it might be useful to consider that he is actually Austrian, and highly critical of both intellectual pomposity and Frances foreign policy.
mike said:
But if the last scene was a surveillance video, then Majid's son wasn't making them, because he was in it - I had thought that this was perhaps the point of the scene, along with the sinister suggestion that the meeting could lead to violence, or could have been a sign of previous collusion between the two boys, etc.
Tate said:
right, but if you wanted an easy explination, as many do, then the last scene could just be one of two possibilities: a regular long-shot of the two boys meeting and plotting to kill the father, the end. Or, if it is to be read as surveillance, then it opens up the possibility of someone else (not present in the film) acting as the surveyor, possibly manipulating the boys, or maybe not, but i dont think thats important. In either case, there is a definite (seemingly metaphysical) rupture between who is filming/sending the tapes and whatever involvement the two boys have in the affair, either each on his own or collectively. there actually arent "innumerable possible explaanations". just two or three, but unfortunately, it does require some thought.
Beyond being just a mere humanist, I think Hanekes frustration with all the concern over who-did-what lies in the fact that he is a cold-blooded formalist. Rather than just making a film about the massacre of a couple hundred Algerians during the ALNF's protest in Paris in 1961, he has to go and make this weird, pseudo horror film that obscures what i know about the event and how it is generally represented. Why not just make a nice, modestly budgeted documentary that tells me things the way they are so i dont have to worry about knowing anything more about them?
I thought it was about people being unapologetic for colonialism. And how families stand behind perpetrators ie. the Binoche character. And how current imperlism in Iraq etc. shows just how incredibly arrogant imperial powers are.
And Haneke is saying the world is watching the european bourgeouis family unit. As it has blood on its hands and still wont feel guilty for it. Arabs will be mistreated while white man feels no guilt.
And Haneke is saying the world is watching the european bourgeouis family unit. As it has blood on its hands and still wont feel guilty for it. Arabs will be mistreated while white man feels no guilt.
P
Parson
Guest
the thing about haneke's films (he's austrian not french) is that he doesn't explain huge plot points. the title cache could easily apply to just about all his films.
you never learn anything about the killers in funny games, you never learn what caused the situation in time of the wolf. you don't know why the family goes crazy in seventh continent. you don't know who sent the vids in cache.
it is haneke's signature trademark to leave huge questions that are open to interpretation.
there is no single correct answer
P
Parson
Guest
what the
P
Parson
Guest
lol
saw this recently, and rather liked it. I took the ending to simply show that clearly Majid didn't do it, nor did his son or Pierrot. In other words, someone outside did it, and can keep doing it, watching Georges' son, etc., and exposing yet more ugliness hidden beneath french bougie-hamfisted-intellectual life.
I didn't find the open-endedness of this film too annoying, although, for example, Barton Fink kinda pissed me off on that front. I don't really remember it too well, but I remember that none of the various possible readings of the movie (fantasy, psychoanalytic, etc.) were sufficiently coherent, which was pretty annoying... And even as a "metacommentary" on movie plots or expectations of movie plots, or whatever, it didn't do much for me.
I didn't find the open-endedness of this film too annoying, although, for example, Barton Fink kinda pissed me off on that front. I don't really remember it too well, but I remember that none of the various possible readings of the movie (fantasy, psychoanalytic, etc.) were sufficiently coherent, which was pretty annoying... And even as a "metacommentary" on movie plots or expectations of movie plots, or whatever, it didn't do much for me.