In the December issue of  Sight & Sound Geoff Andrew interwievs the director Michael Haneke.

Geoff Andrew interviewed Michael Haneke in summer 2009, aftter his latest film The White Ribbon had won Palme d’Or in Cannes Film Festival. Recently in the European Film Academy’s annual Awards ceremony, which was taking place in Bochum, Germany on 12th December, it received even more prizes. The White Ribbon received both main prizes: Best European film of 2009 and Best European Director for Haneke.   

GA: Do you feel your style – your approach to cinematic storytelling – has changed at all over the years?

MH: I hope it’s developed, rather than changed. After all, I’d been working in television for a long time before I made my first feature, which wasn’t until I was 48 –  (laughs) the same age as for Bresson! But I’m perhaps more conscious of my methods now. When I started out I did things more instantaneously. Now I’m trying to find cinematic language that restores a little freedom to the viewer. With a book the reader provides the images through imagination; other art forms are like that too. But cinema steals those images from the viewer, by allowing little chance of standing back a bit to reflect on the film. From a moral perspective, that’s not good.

So I try to give the viewer a little more freedom; but how, if an image is still an image?You have to work with what’s offscreen – or, at least, with what is not onscreen – and use the kind of dramaturgy that isn’t ‘finished’, that leaves openings for interpretation. Those seem to me the only two ways of giving the viewer more freedom. I see my job as being partly about increasing the possibility of imagining for the spectator. That way we might bring cinema more in line with other arts.

While there are obviously great many filmmakers who see their role in exactly the opposite light, there are others who share this view – Kiarostami, for example, who for me is the greatest. It seems the only for the cinema to make any real progress. Film can become faster, more violent, more technologically sophisticated, of course, but even then it’s staying fundamentally the same. (…)*

*Full text can be found: Sight and Sound, 12’09, 14.-17. p.

Prepared by Zane Balčus