Two intruders break a man’s leg with a golf club. But we, the audience, don’t see any of this. We see a swing hidden by a smash cut and a Jackson Pollock splatter of blood land on the television screen in the background. We see, Georg, the man, stumbling, trying to crawl, to walk, to drag himself on his broken leg to the end of hall and now the camera offers us no escape; there are no edits, no pans to the background, only a steady, prolonged shot of a man trying to stand on a shattered leg. This isn’t the cathartic Hollywood blockbuster approach to violence or the hyper-stylized approach of Hong Kong martial arts flicks or even the buckets of gore approach of the modern horror film. This is cruel and measured. This is Funny Games, a film by Michael Haneke.
Haneke “[tries] to give back to violence what it really is: pain, injury to another”. Stripping it of any possible consummation, joy, and excitement, he presents violence as it is in reality: bleak, miserable, incomprehensible. As if this directorial decision did not make his films sufficiently excruciating, Haneke suggest that the audience is implicit in the violence. During a scene in which a serial killer forces a woman to play hot and cold to find her dog’s dead body, the killer turns straight to camera and winks at the viewer. A few minutes later the same man breaks the fourth wall and asks the audience to bet on whether the captive family will survive the night. For Haneke, we, the audience, are a part of this sick game; our presence wills it to happen. In his approach lies a hard, dignified morality: violence is wrong and the audience is unethical for participating. And this severe message makes his films unbelievably difficult to watch; they are penance for all the celluloid sins we have committed.
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