Violence in Haneke’s early work functions as a deadly virus. It needs a
transmitter before activation.

Even though Barbara Albert, Jessica Hausner, and Ulrich Seidl are most often
regarded as the originators of Austrian film renaissance, the first and the
fiercest blow on the sleepy Austrian everyday life was delivered by their big
daddy, Michael Haneke. And even though there is so much talk about globalization
at established film festivals, especially in the context of a nationality that
is starting to be treated as an accessory, Haneke abolishes the term “national”.
His handwriting is transnational. After all, even though the story of his latest
film, La pianiste, is set in Vienna that is no longer its basic
determinant, but merely a detail. It is more the author’s accidental artistic
choice, than some sort of a strict cultural and geographical requirement. In the
same way, the Austrian location of the brutal horror, Funny Games, which
toys with the motif of a weekend from hell, often used in Hollywood films of B
production, is totally irrelevant. Almost nothing relevant would change, if the
weekend house had been built on an American lake.

Haneke’s beginnings in the film industry happened in the 1970s and were strictly
connected to TV production. Therefore, it is no wonder that TV and video had a
great impact on his early essays about the relationship between media and
violence, sublimed in a trilogy that consists of the films: Der 7. Kontinent,
Benny's Video and 71 Fragmente Einer Chronologie Des Zufalls . His
fourteen-year-old TV addict, Benny, overdosed on television violence, will
transform into a cold-blooded killer and finally make a terrifying confession to
his parents recorded on a VHS tape. And the fragmented structure of
Kronologije slučajnosti, which is a thematic continuation of Benny's
Video , suggests not only an “accident”, but also some sort of “destiny”.
After all, violence in Haneke’s early work functions as a deadly virus. It,
therefore, needs a transmitter before activation, in order to infiltrate the
cell before it becomes active. In Funny Games, the role of a virus is
played by Peter and Paul, while the ideal family plays the healthy cell. After
the virus attacks, in a manner of refined forms of physical and psychological
torture, there comes the execution. Evil doesn’t only threaten the family whose
healthy cell has been destroyed by Haneke’s abusers, but it also devastates the
cell of the film as a medium.

Haneke’s obsession with violence continues in his later phase. In Code
inconnu, violence is a product of intolerance and hatred. And in La
pianiste, it is reflected in the aggressive treatment of his heroine as a
conspirator of sexual pleasure, who takes away from men their exclusive right to
enjoy voyeuristic séances and terrorizes them with series of stopped orgasms.
Coitus has to be sentenced to death. And her need to dominate in the
psychological war against her pupil includes her own humiliations, such as
sniffing of a thrown away handkerchief soaked with sperm in a porn video store’s
cabin. The end of violence? No way! (Dragan Rubeša).