Michael Haneke Quotes
born 1942 Austria
Michael Haneke (born 23 March 1942) is an Austrian film director and screenwriter.
Random Michael Haneke quote
10 quotes
I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.
Today's conventional cinema, or mass cinema, doesn't take the receiver seriously as a partner. It sees the audience member as a bank machine, whose only function is to spit out money.
Consider the pigeon just a pigeon...There are lots of pigeons in Paris.
Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.
My favourite film-maker of the decade is Abbas Kiarostami. He achieves a simplicity that's so difficult to attain.
Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking.
I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable.
Film is an artificial construct. It pretends to reconstruct reality. But it doesn't do that—it's a manipulative form. It's a lie that can reveal the truth. But if a film isn't a work of art, it's just complicit with the process of manipulation.
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.
I know very well the sorts of pressures you're under in television. I don't work in television anymore myself, but I'm constantly hearing from colleagues who present scripts to networks and are told, "The script is too complex. You have to keep it simple because the audience is dumb. You can make more money for the advertisers that way."