Quote:
What do you do if a stranger comes to your home and politely asks to borrow some eggs?

So far, it doesn’t sound like a good film, but Funny Games isn’t a good film. There’s no way it can be middle-of-the-road, it’s either brilliant or awful, depending on your point of view. Consider that when this film was first shown at Cannes, a lot of the audience walked out, including some professional film critics. In short, this is a film you need to see to have any true appreciation of how it works. I could describe everything that happens in minute detail, and still not impart what actually happens.

Okay, the basic premise of the plot is as follows: a family (Georg the father, Anna the mother, Georgy the son and Rolfi the dog) take their boat to their lakeside holiday home. On the way past their neighbour’s gate, they see their friends on the lawn with two young men, both wearing golf whites and gloves. Of course, we’d expect a thriller film to have elements that deliberately feel wrong, and this strangely sinister picture is emphasised when their friends seem reluctant to talk to them about their golf plans for the next day.

Whilst this reticence is odd, the family think nothing of it and continue on, going through the typical humdrum of unpacking the gear from the car. Suddenly, the neighbour from next door comes over and with him comes one of the young men, introduced as the son of a business associate. Well, that’s alright then. They give Georg and his son a hand to get the boat in the water whilst Anna potters around in the kitchen. Everything’s serene, and Haneke takes advantage of this feeling throughout the film, with long, single camera shots that slow the action down to make you think. Themes are introduced for later; the child borrows a sharp knife which ends up on the floor of the boat, Anna is talking to friends who may be coming to join them in a couple of hours.Then the other young man comes and knocks on the door, wanting to borrow some eggs.

If you’re still reading, you should definitely see this film. In fact, if you’re no longer reading you should definitely see this film.Yet to tell any more of the plot gives away both nothing and everything. Funny Games sees Paul and Peter, the two young men, engage the family in a series of deadly, terrifying and twisted games, all as part of a bet.

Haneke is known for his stance on the topic of violence and realism within his films, and it’s a topic that is openly discussed within the plot. Whilst he makes an extremely strong commitment to being artistic in his portrayals of the characters, he also injects an enormous amount of realism, and from this the film really develops a character of its own.

As the film needs to be digested as a whole, there is one scene in particular that is terrible. You’ll know which one when you get to it, as there’s no way that you can’t hate it when it happens. However, when the credits roll to an awesome (if disturbed) soundtrack, the scene suddenly makes perfect sense, and you’ll know why it was done, and see that this is a film that manipulates you. The pacing is perfect, the script is tight and the performances are little less than astounding.

Now, without trying to sound too ‘woe is me’, reviewing this film is an extremely difficult task; I’ve run out of words because I don’t want to give anything away, and to explain why the film is as good as it is requires going into those spoiling details. So, to take an unusual direction; let’s have a quick word on how this film should be watched. You’ll have gathered that this isn’t a film you watch casually – you’ll want to be awake and prepared to concentrate on the subtitles and the action simultaneously. Although it’s not a drab chore to watch, it’s vastly enjoyable to appreciate. I cannot stress enough that you should watch it with somebody, not because you’ll need someone to cover your eyes during the scary bits, but because you will want to talk about it afterwards; it’s impossible to just stop watching this film and go to bed – you will ask questions. Good questions.

In short, if you want explosions and non-stop action, you’ll already be looking elsewhere, but this is a film that will change your perspective of almost any other film you watch, make you fear golf, and stop you from ever lending eggs to anybody.

Michael Haneke - (1997) Funny Games.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 48mn
Size: 	1.87 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x552 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 199 Kbps
BPP: 	0.162
Audio
#1:  	German 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/C3427FD1681C2F7/Michael_Haneke_-_(1997)_Funny_Games.mkv

Language(s):German, French, Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Michael Haneke – Funny Games (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Die Rebellion (The Rebellion). 1993. Austria. Directed by Michael Haneke. With its silent-era aesthetic of sepia tones and muted color tints, and its interweaving of realism and fantasy, Haneke’s haunting adaptation of Joseph Roth’s expressionistic 1924 novel is an homage to the great Weimar cinema of G. W. Pabst and F. W. Murnau. In a heartbreaking performance, Branko Samarovski plays Andreas Pum, a soldier who loses his leg during the Great War and becomes an organ-grinder to earn a few coins a day. To this loyal citizen of the State, the veterans and firebrands who march in protest against society’s neglect are lazy, insubordinate “heathens.” But when an ugly tram incident condemns Pum to a life of penury and loneliness, his soul is awakened to the bitter waste of a life spent in duty to God and Empire. In German; 90 min

Die.Rebellion.1993.Michael.Haneke.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 45mn
Size:	2.68 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 358 kb/s
Audio
German 2.0ch AAC LC @ 265 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/A67C653E8CA2223/Die.Rebellion.1993.Michael.Haneke.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English, French

The post Michael Haneke – Die Rebellion (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Description from the University of Massachussetts website:
This two-part drama examines the fate of Haneke’s own generation which came of age after World War II. The first part depicts the generational gap between 1950s teenagers and their parents while the second shows this same group of characters twenty years later as they have grown up to be dysfunctional and suicidal adults. Regarded as the most significant of Haneke’s early works, Lemmings contains incipient treatments of many of the themes he would later elaborate on in his theatrical features.

Lemminge.S01.E02.Verletzungen.1979.Michael.Haneke.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 46mn
Size:	2.68 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 312 kb/s
Audio
German 2.0ch AAC LC @ 265 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/508C094658E81DB/Lemminge.S01.E02.Verletzungen.1979.Michael.Haneke.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English, French

The post Michael Haneke – Lemminge, Teil 2 Verletzungen (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Haneke unplugged – consistent themes, early, bare-bones exploration.

The dark mood is set in the first scene: the vandalizing of cars. At once a deeply anti-bourgeois impulse and an act that expresses the faceless anomie of the post-war generation, this film is a melodramatic exploration of teenage resistance to overbearing parents and the constricting influence of a too-small Austrian town. Haneke upends Arcadia (youthful innocence) by transgressing boundaries such as sex out of marriage; smoking; and adultery with an adult. His teens damage cars and otherwise passive-aggressively act against parents. Haneke then subverts the bourgeois fiction of happiness and security by suggesting that in the end our own self-absorption and lack of empathy will relegate our relationships to hostile acts. We can never know each other, and that ultimately we cannot care. As the character of Sigrid’s experience suggests, forget friends and family – ultimately we are cast out alone. The film is a bare bones exploration (a la Bergman) of the themes he will explore in more understated fashion in later work and more sensationally in Funny Games and Benny’s video.

Lemminge.S01.E01.Arkadien.1979.Michael.Haneke.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 53mn
Size:	3.03 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 558 kb/s
Audio
German 2.0ch AAC LC @ 265 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/6993E13AFFE7AA4/Lemminge.S01.E01.Arkadien.1979.Michael.Haneke.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English, French

The post Michael Haneke – Lemminge, Teil 1 Arkadien (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
…even after a number of viewings, I’m still not sure if what I have seen is a kind of high Euro-modernist masterpiece about race, culture, urban rage and alienated identity – or a perversely opaque and frustrating essay in enigma, a labyrinth of blind alleys, in which putative solutions are forbiddingly walled off. It is a film which gestures at the literal incomprehensibility of experience, how it resists encirclement and extends beyond the perimeters of perception and interpretation. The mood of Code Unknown is moreover often fractious, crackling with unease and ill-humour, and yet this is a movie whose images and personae linger in the mind, and which can deliver dazzlingly generous, compassionate insights…
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

…Whilst the film is a worthy effort, making some valid statements of how we now live, its message is perhaps weakened by its fragmented structure, some rambling sequences and an over-abundance of characters… Also, the lack of anything approaching a tidy resolution of the film’s multiple strands is unsatisfying and suggests a dearth of inspiration on the part of the film-maker. What the film certainly appears to lack is a punch-line, a clear concluding statement to either reinforce or challenge the audience’s understanding of the film. Instead, it all ends in enigmatic silence, leaving the spectator to ponder: so what?
James Travers, French Film Guide.com

…Michael Haneke creates an intelligently constructed, compelling, provocative, and relevant observation on social inequity, the untenability of cultural assimilation, and the failure of communication in Code Inconnu. Presented as a series of dissociated (and intrinsically ethnographic) episodes on the lives of the principal characters following the fateful (though seemingly trivial) transection, Haneke examines the ingrained social divisiveness, moral complacency, and created bounds of human interaction. Chronologically indeterminate events, interrupted dialogues (often truncated in mid sentence), prolonged transitional fadeouts, and recurrent episodes of missed (and mis) communication… pervade the film’s fragmented narrative structure, exposing the flawed perception of cultural integration and social equality in the constantly evolving racial and socio-economic demography of a traditionally monoethnic society.
Acquarello, Strictly Film School

Michael Haneke - (2000) Code Unknown.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 57mn
Size:	2.46 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	1024x560
Aspect ratio:	1.85:1
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	2 746 Kbps
Audio
English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/E4D21553137E6AC/Michael_Haneke_-_(2000)_Code_Unknown.mkv

Language(s):Malinka, Romanian, French, German, English, Arabic, French Sign Language
Subtitles:English

The post Michael Haneke – Code inconnu AKA Code Unknown (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
An attempt to illuminate the basic relationship between man and woman. A series of individual examples show how they get to know each other, how they fall in love, how they have their first arguments, how they discover difficulties in communication, and how they end up living together. The snapshots from everyday life are ciphers for the entire lack of contact of those who are closest to each other, whose only desired goal is to remain silent together. Because words destroy feeling, sensation, relationship, substance. The phrase has become the real, it replaces the lost ego. Understanding without understanding, routine instead of togetherness. What still takes place is the monologue, the soliloquy, the idiom. The anxious question will be: and what comes after that? Probably the same thing, over and over again.

After Liverpool (1974).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 28 min
Size: 	1.30 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	640x360 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.347
Audio
#1:  	German 1.0ch AAC LC @ 93.4 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/FDD1596D23C3BBA/After_Liverpool_(1974).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/2B2CE628131309B/After_Liverpool_(1974).de.srt
https://nitro.download/view/702A289995D9AF5/After_Liverpool_(1974).en.srt

Language(s):German
Subtitles:German, English

The post Michael Haneke – After Liverpool (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Ever wonder about the ancestors of the murderous jocks in Funny Games? In the Palme d’Or-winning The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke time travels to rural Germany on the cusp of WWI to find the answer—or, rather, to make the audience’s collective skin crawl at the question. The setting is the small village of Eichwald, a bucolic commune that, presided over by such stern patriarchs as the landowning baron (Ulrich Tukur) and the pastor (Burghart Klaussner), is presented as a 19th-century holdover inexorably giving way to the darkening modernity of new times. Not that Haneke displays much nostalgia for the town’s traditions: Life here is dismal, oppressive, and rigidly hierarchical, erected on puritanical morals and reinforced with ritualized punishment. Hitler—the “bitter flower of German irrationalism,” as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg once put it—may still lurk beyond the horizon, but the seeds of fascism have already been sown in society’s unquestioning adherence to power structures.

Haneke hints at horrors to come in the series of disturbing, mysteriously connected events that hits the town, from the horse-tripping trap that nearly kills the local doctor (Rainer Bock) to the burning of a family barn. Malice oozes beneath immaculate surfaces, dread fills the air. Parents mete out brutal whippings, kids are hectored, molested, and mutilated: The town schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) may narrate the happenings, but it’s the young generation that both bears silent witness to and is contaminated by the free-floating distrust and anxiety. (Not for nothing is the film subtitled “A German Children’s Story.”)

Though it opens with an abrupt bit of animal abuse and includes at least one interlude of risible faux-Strindbergisms (“My God, why won’t you just die,” the doctor sneers at his long-suffering mistress), the film is thankfully light on the Austrian auteur’s patented high-handed shocks. Instead, Haneke unfurls a tapestry of barren relationships and deforming conformity in which the greatest jolt comes not from a director arrogantly sucker-punching his audience, but from the dawning realization that the strange crimes aren’t so much polluting the village as merely crystallizing the hypocritical rot that was always there.

Something of a distant Teutonic cousin to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s caustic Le Corbeau, White Ribbon amply displays Haneke’s filmmaking mastery, with dozens of characters introduced and explored in a meticulous, detail-rich flow. (Shot by Christian Berger in monochromatic tones, it at times has some of the scrubbed chiaroscuro of Ingmar Bergman’s early films.) In its not-a-hair-out-of-place rigidity, however, it’s a mastery that often feels deadening and threatens to turn its sins-of-the-father inquiry into a static, academic thesis on the Children of the Corn series.

What saves the film from becoming a coldly analytical ant farm is Haneke’s respect for each character, the way he refuses to turn their pain into items on a diagram. It’s there in the way the pastor’s young son offers to replace his father’s beloved slain canary with his own pet bird, or in the shy courtship between the teacher and a nanny (Leonie Benesch), a tentative bond that offers a convincing portrayal of positive emotion in the filmmaker’s dour worldview. Nobody will ever mistake Haneke for Jean Renoir, but his grudging humanism here suggests for the first time a flicker of warmth behind cinema’s reigning Ice King.

	
Michael Haneke - (2009) The White Ribbon.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2h 26mn
Size: 	3.02 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x560 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 746 Kbps
BPP: 	0.200
Audio
#1:  	German 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/1E05ADA95C2BDD2/Michael_Haneke_-_(2009)_The_White_Ribbon.mkv
or
https://nitro.download/view/9840104E5E2E6EE/Michael_Haneke_-_(2009)_The_White_Ribbon.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/B48CCF581CB4984/Michael_Haneke_-_(2009)_The_White_Ribbon.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/FB602075D772D86/Michael_Haneke_-_(2009)_The_White_Ribbon.part3.rar

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Michael Haneke – Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte AKA The White Ribbon (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.