Bennys' Video, 1992
A lumbering, full-grown pig, muzzled through a leash that has been tied around its snout, is led
outside the barnyard doors of an unidentified farm and into a clearing where a group of apparent
bystanders cavalierly await its slaughter. The skittish, herky-jerky video image taken from the
handheld camera moves in relatively tight side view close-up to frame the head of the animal as
the farmer places the barrel of a revolver onto its forehead between the eyes and, amidst its
persistent (and disturbingly unnerving) suffocated grunts and squeals, pulls the trigger - the
pig's body immediately collapsing to the ground, its limbs still involuntary twitching from the
residual neurological response impulse to the bullet's fatal impact. The video image is then
curiously paused and rewound in slow motion, the soundtrack audibly slowed to a cadent, monotonic
bass to the point where the origin of the sound becomes strangely alien, disembodied, and haunted.
The viewer of the amateur footage is revealed to be its unseen videographer, an adolescent named
Benny (Arno Frisch), who shutters himself for hours in his dark, cluttered room perpetually
immersed in the self-induced, often compounded stimuli of loud music, rented videos, and
broadcast television, his view of the outside world paradoxically reduced to a live video feed
onto a monitor from a camera that has been positioned to point out of his shade-drawn window and
onto the street. His distracted, emotionally distant father (Ulrich Mühe) and equally
disaffected, obliging mother (Angela Winkler) seem tolerant of Benny's hermeticism, even
exploiting his estranged, sentinel-like omnipresence in the household and penchant for
video surveillance to spy on their older daughter Evi's suspect activities after moving
out of the family home, as she uses the well-appointed apartment to host a party designed
to generate revenue through a pyramid scheme in her parents' absence. It is a convenient
domestic arrangement of tacit mutualism (and mutual disregard) that soon reveals the moral
crisis innate in their dysfunctional relationship when Benny befriends a seemingly bored and
aimless young girl (Ingrid Stassner) who transfixedly watches the random features displayed
from the shop window of a local video store each afternoon after school, and brings her
home to share in his obsessive, alienated reviewing of the slaughter footage.
The second installment on the correlative effects of urban
alienation and media violence in contemporary society in what would become known as Michael
Haneke's trilogy of "emotional glaciation" (along with The Seventh
Continent and 71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance), Benny's Video is a
provocative, confrontational, and indelibly haunting exposition on isolation, rootlessness,
displaced turmoil, and human desolation. Using the opening sequence of the animal slaughter
home video as Benny replays, hyperextends the moment of death through frame by frame pauses,
or otherwise manipulates the resulting images captured on tape into increasingly
indistinguishable resolution and textured, decontextualized audiovisual patterns of signal noise,
Haneke illustrates the underlying process of cognitive abstraction - and consequently,
systematic dissonance - that serve to not only dissociate the innate violence of the act
with its logical consequence, but also blur the distinction between the experiential
levels of fictional and real violence through the synthesis (and contextual anesthetization)
of public information and entertainment in the creation of a commercially viable, commodified
consumer media product. Moreover, through the narrative incorporation of Evi's pyramid scheme,
Haneke also provides an intrinsic structural correlation to the collapse - and perversion -
of the nuclear family in the absence of communication, trust, moral guidance, and emotional
engagement as the ever-widening confidence game reveals an overarching socio-behavioral
pattern of self-interest, a mindset that compels the individual to become progressively
distanced from the initial source of the "investment" in order to realize
profit, and the requirement of the participant's covert complicity (and cover-up) in
the perpetuation of the scheme. It is this underlying disarticulation of moral
responsibility and dissociation of cause and effect in the wake of media saturated
infotainment and socially fostered, empty shell games of deflected accountability
that is inevitably reflected in the film's eerie prescience on its examination of the
consequence of desensitizing technology and the pervasiveness of media violence - a
senseless and tragic portrait of empty privilege, alienated communication, and
despiritualized bankruptcy.
© Acquarello 2005. All rights reserved.
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In
an age of a borderless, new European economy, the volatile encounter
of four people on an anonymous Parisian street underscores the underlying
social disparity inherent in any increasingly multicultural, contemporary
urban society. A brash, impatient young man named Jean (Alexandre
Hamidi) accosts his older brother's girlfriend, an actress named Anne
(Juliette Binoche), on the street after being unable to reach her
on the telephone. Attempting to gain alliance against their father
(Josef Bierbichler) from his brother Georges (Thierry Neuvic), a photojournalist
on assignment in the Balkans, Jean, without solicitation, begins to
complain to the polite, but hurried and preoccupied Anne, of his objection
to his father's unconsented plans to renovate the family's farmhouse
with the expectation of apprenticing him to assume eventual responsibility
for the farm. Pressed for time and unprepared to appropriately address
Jean's personal issues, Anne attempts to placate him with a snack
purchased from a nearby vendor and gives him the keys to the apartment,
providing a terse reminder that he cannot stay indefinitely. Jean's
frustrated attempts to voice his grievance leads to a thoughtless
act: discarding his crumpled paper bag into the lap of an undocumented
immigrant from Romania named Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu) who is panhandling
near the entrance of a cornershop. A principled and tenacious music
teacher of African descent, Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), witnesses the humiliating
episode, and confronts Jean to demand an apology. The altercation
soon draws the attention of the police who seem to quickly side with
the young transgressor, duly noting Jean and an interfering, tangentially
aggrieved shop owner's complaints. Eventually, the well-intentioned
Amadou and inculpable Maria are officially detained.