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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.

— Michael Haneke

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More quotes by Michael Haneke

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.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Haneke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.