This will be the first in a series of written observations and analysis, covering past and present film. I will begin with Time of the Wolf (Le Temps du loup), a French film created by Austrian director Michael Haneke in 2003. Haneke has been involved in filmmaking since the early 1970s. In the 90s he began to produce his films in France. I’m not sure the reasons for this, but my guess is that he enjoys creating within the open-minded French cinema. He started first in television. His first film was The Seventh Continent made in 1989. The film was about escaping urban decay. I should say, ‘human decay’ in an urban setting. Here is a quote by Haneke taken from Wikipedia.
“My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.”
That quote reminds me of another by Herzog in the documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Herzog is kind of ranting in one scene and he says that people should make real war on television and advertising. I think perhaps Haneke is a soldier in that war. The war against cultural decay. But I suppose what he’s really fighting is globalization. That reminds me of another Herzog sound bite.
“I don’t want to live in a world without lions.”
Haneke’s films are very painful to watch. They deal with violence, alienation, and manipulation, popular themes in modern film. He has no mercy for his audience. Or for his characters. His films aren’t cold though. I find them almost too empathetic. That is his great cruelty. His characters have realistic emotions because they are well understood, consequently so is their pain. And, in a Haneke film there will most assuredly be pain.
I would like to point out, that as of this moment, I have only seen Funny Games and Time of the Wolf, and that some of these observations I’m making may be premature. Time will tell I suppose. For now it is safe to say that he’s a mature filmmaker and as my friend put it, a master of indication.
Time of the Wolf is a film that at it’s core is about the loss of modern civilization. We begin to experience this loss very early in the film, when the principle family, having fled their home in the city, arrive at their country cabin only to find a strange man and his family already occupying it. There are some brief interactions and pleading and then the father is shot and killed. The killer throws the remaining wife, daughter, and son out of the cabin and they are forced out into the cold foreboding countryside.
Haneke utilizes the environment as an agent of illusion. Fog, smoke, distance, or flickering shadows often obscure our view of things. What would normally be a friendly even peaceful landscape becomes threatening and claustrophobic. The camera is often shot with close framing cutting out the area of action so that we only see the results of actions but not the actions themselves. This is an alien world and one that won’t be easily understood.
Slowly as the film progresses, it is revealed through periphery, that some kind of natural disaster or manmade catastrophe has happened. The people in the countryside are cut off from supplies, such as gasoline and water. This is a place of growing desperation. At first the mother and her children go door to door asking for food or shelter, but after being repeatedly turned away, they learn to accept that no one will help them.
Eventually they meet a boy who has learned to survive in the wilderness. He has a cruel and distant demeanor. He cannot understand how the mother and children can be so ignorant.
As the story progresses this picture of ineptitude becomes all the more clear. The family members become hollow and traumatized, like war victims. Haneke painstakingly documents there slow loss of humanity. Their sorrow, however, is not theirs alone, as is heart–achingly described in a scene with a Polish couple, who’s baby dies of dehydration.
The whole scene is shot from the waist down. Perhaps it is the view from that of a child (or ghost child). In the background you hear the penetrating screams of the mother, who’s soul is has been destroyed by the loss of her child. The funeral party then leaves. The grave site remains and we are left with the image of an empty field beyond, and in the fading cries of unendurable truth. In the distance something like a torch–lit caravan, passes by in the night. This image is reminiscent of the ending in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged where mankind has degenerated to the point of using wagon trains instead of steam trains.
As you can see, this is a very dark film, both literally and figuratively. And, it only gets darker.
Upon arriving at a train station, the family meets a group of people that have been taking shelter in the station. They have a plan to barricade the rails and force the next train to stop. The group is lead by a man name Kowalski, who trades protection for sex, something many of the women have been reduced to accepting. A story then begins to circulate about a group of extremists called the Just who have taken to stripping naked and then leaping into fires to appease the force they perceive are causing this disaster, hopping to appease it/them. One night, the boy wakes up, after one of his many nose bleeds, and decides to follow in their footsteps.
It’s fascinating how Haneke composes this image of human degradation. This is not a prose film. Many scenes are carried with only the low sounds of desperate hunger and grinding teeth. When people talk they don’t seem like speaking humans, more like crazed animals ready to kill to survive.
At some point, the family runs across the murderer that killed their father/husband. They begin to shout at him. They try to force the train station community to give them justice. But the realization is, in this world without police procedure or courts, there is no way to do this. All decisions have become survival decisions; no one gives anything away for free.
The film ends with scenes of the French countryside, as seen from a passing train.
great article man, it would be helpful if you lighten those screen grabs up a bit. honestly most of them are totally black on my screen.
I’d do anything for you Bolig.