Michael Haneke - Life and Career

Life and Career

Haneke was born in Munich, Germany, the son of the German actor and director Fritz Haneke and the Austrian actress Beatrix von Degenschild. Haneke was raised in the city Wiener Neustadt. He attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy, psychology and drama after failing to achieve success in his early attempts in acting and music. After graduating, he became a film critic and from 1967 to 1970 he worked as editor and dramaturg at the southwestern German television station Südwestfunk. He made his debut as a television director in 1974.

Haneke's feature film debut was 1989's The Seventh Continent, which served to trace out the violent and bold style that would bloom in later years. Three years later, the controversial Benny's Video put Haneke's name on the map. Haneke's greatest success came in 2001 with his most critically successful film, the French The Piano Teacher. It won the prestigious Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and also won its stars, Benoît Magimel and Isabelle Huppert, the Best Actor and Actress awards. He has worked with Juliette Binoche (Code Unknown in 2000 and Caché in 2005), after she expressed interest in working with him. Haneke frequently worked with real-life couple Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar - thrice each.

His film, The White Ribbon, premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The film is set in 1913 and deals with strange incidents in a small town in Northern Germany, depicting an authoritarian, fascist-like atmosphere, where children are subjected to rigid rules and suffer harsh punishments, and where strange deaths occur. The Cannes Jury presided by Isabelle Huppert and including Asia Argento, Hanif Kureishi and Robin Wright Penn awarded Haneke's film the Palme d'Or for the best feature film. In 2012, his film Amour also won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. So Haneke joined just 7 other filmmakers to have won the prestigious award twice: Francis Ford Coppola, Shōhei Imamura, the Dardenne brothers, Alf Sjöberg, Bille August and Emir Kusturica.

Haneke believes that films should offer viewers more space for imagination and self-reflection. Films that have too much detail and moral clarity, Haneke argues, are used for mindless consumption by their viewers. It is often difficult for people to ascertain Haneke's philosophy and the exact messages he wishes to illustrate in his works.

Some of his films feature a stereotypical bourgeois couple named Anna/Anne and Georg/Georges (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, Funny Games, Code Unknown, Time of the Wolf, Caché, Funny Games US, Amour). The identity of the couple, as well as that of the actors portraying them, always changes from one film to another. Their surname is sometimes given as Laurent. His other films will feature characters with the same names, albeit unmarried and unrelated (such as The White Ribbon).

His 2012 film Amour has been selected as the Austrian entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards.