Michael Haneke, two Palmes d’Or and a retirement he never announced

Michael Haneke

Photo: Georges Biard / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 23, 1942 Munich, Germany
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Amour, Funny Games, The White Ribbon
Awards	2 Palme d'Or · Best Director, Cannes Film Festival · Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival · Golden Globe · César · European Film Awards · Prince of Asturias

The news did not come from him. It surfaced in an interview about someone else’s film, when Markus Schleinzer, the Austrian director who spent years as Michael Haneke’s casting director, was asked whether his old friend had seen Rose. He had, and he called it a masterpiece. Then Schleinzer added the part that travelled. Haneke has retired, he told IndieWire, and two weeks earlier he had cooked a fine dinner for his guest. “He did what he could do,” Schleinzer said, “and he’s happy now.”

It is a fitting exit for a filmmaker who spent his career withholding what audiences wanted from him. Haneke’s films end on cuts to black and on long static shots in which the decisive thing happens at the edge of the frame, or off it. He made violence hard to watch on purpose, and then made the viewer’s appetite for it part of the subject. That a director with two Palmes d’Or should leave through a friend’s aside, with no statement and no farewell film, is consistent with everything that came before.

He was the son of two performers, the German actor and director Fritz Haneke and the Austrian actress Beatrix von Degenschild. Born in Munich in March 1942, he grew up in Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna. After failing the entrance exam for the Max Reinhardt Seminar, Vienna’s drama school, he studied philosophy, psychology and theatre at the University of Vienna, never a committed student. In the late 1960s he joined the West German broadcaster Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden as an editor and dramaturg, wrote film criticism on the side and began directing for the stage, a path that eventually led to Vienna’s Burgtheater.

Television came first. His debut television film, After Liverpool, aired in 1974, and for the next fifteen years he worked for German and Austrian broadcasters, adapting writers such as Joseph Roth and, later, Franz Kafka. He was 47 when his first feature, The Seventh Continent, premiered at Cannes in 1989: an ordinary middle-class family in Austria that methodically destroys its possessions before ending its own life. It won the Bronze Leopard at Locarno. Benny’s Video followed in 1992 and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance in 1994, a trio critics came to call his glaciation trilogy, about affluent people gone numb in front of their screens.

Funny Games made the method notorious. Two polite young men in white gloves take a family hostage in its lakeside holiday house; one of them turns to wink at the camera, and when the victims briefly fight back he picks up a remote control and rewinds the film itself. It was the first Austrian film in competition at Cannes in 35 years. A decade later Haneke remade it shot for shot in English, with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, for the American audience he felt it had been aimed at all along.

The 2000s belonged to French-language productions, and to actors who could carry his silences. Code Unknown put Juliette Binoche at the centre of a Paris mosaic told in single unbroken takes. The Piano Teacher, adapted from Elfriede Jelinek’s novel, gave Isabelle Huppert the role of a Viennese piano professor whose repression curdles into self-harm; in 2001 it won the Grand Prix at Cannes and both acting prizes, for Huppert and Benoît Magimel. After the post-apocalyptic Time of the Wolf, Caché sent anonymous videotapes to the doorstep of a Paris television host played by Daniel Auteuil and pulled a buried colonial crime, the 1961 massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris, into a bourgeois living room. Cannes named him best director for it in 2005.

Then came the two films that put him among the few directors to win the Palme d’Or twice. The White Ribbon, shot in black and white in a Protestant village in northern Germany on the eve of the First World War, traces a run of cruelties back toward the village children; Schleinzer directed those children on set. It won the Palme in 2009 and the Golden Globe for foreign-language film. Amour, three years later, followed Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as retired music teachers in a Paris apartment after she suffers a stroke. It brought a second Palme, the Academy Award for best foreign-language film for Austria, a Golden Globe and the César for best film, and Haneke himself received Oscar nominations for direction and original screenplay.

The objection to Haneke has always been the one he invited. His films put the viewer in the dock, and plenty of viewers resent being judged by a man who controls every frame. Stephen Holden of The New York Times found that Benny’s Video made its points about television violence strongly but with a heavy hand, and the English Funny Games sharpened the complaint: a lecture on screen violence, repeated frame for frame, to people who had bought tickets to watch it. Amour is the film that complicates the caricature of the cold moralist. Its cruelty belongs to the body, not to the director, and it is the one place where his control reads plainly as tenderness.

Happy End, in 2017, reunited him with Huppert and Trintignant in a story about a wealthy family in Calais with migrants at the edge of the picture. It competed at Cannes, left without prizes and has turned out to be his last feature. A planned first television series, Kelvin’s Book, announced in 2018 as a ten-part dystopian drama with the German producer UFA Fiction, never reached the screen. He has taught directing at the Filmakademie Wien since 2002, and he took his precision to the opera house, staging Don Giovanni at the Palais Garnier in Paris in 2006 and Così fan tutte at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2013. He has been married to Susanne Haneke since 1983, and they have a son; the rest he keeps to himself.

The last glimpse of him also came secondhand: Schleinzer says he was at the Austrian premiere of Rose, Schleinzer’s seventeenth-century drama starring Sandra Hüller, which won her the Silver Bear at the Berlinale and opens with Mubi in November before a wider release in 2027. “He has done his 10 movies like his all-time idol, Robert Bresson,” Schleinzer said, and the comparison fits less neatly than it sounds. Bresson’s films went looking for grace. Haneke’s keep asking who is watching, and why they stayed until the end.