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Michael Haneke (; born 23 March 1942) is an Austrian film director and screenwriter. His work often examines social issues and depicts the feelings of estrangement experienced by individuals in modern society. Haneke has made films in French, German, and English and has worked in television and theatre. He also teaches film direction at the Film Academy Vienna.
Haneke's first films were his "glaciation" trilogy, consisting of The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny's Video (1992), and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), each of which depict a "coldly bureaucratic society in which genuine human relationships have been supplanted by a deep-seated collective malaise" and explore "the relationship among consumerism, violence, mass media, and contemporary alienation". He went on to win the Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prix for The Piano Teacher (2001) as well as its italic=no twice, for The White Ribbon (2009) and Amour (2012), the latter of which received five Academy Award nominations and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He also directed Funny Games (1997) and its 2007 remake, Code Unknown (2000), Time of the Wolf (2003), Caché (2005), and Happy End (2017).
Haneke showed a strong interest in literature and music, but as an adolescent developed a "downright contempt for any form of school". During this period of his life, he has later described himself as a "rebel". He had ambitions of becoming an actor in his youth, later abandoning these plans after failing an entrance examination at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. He later attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy, psychology and drama. Not a committed student, he would spend most of his time attending local movie theatres. After leaving university, he began working odd jobs, before working as an editor and dramaturge at the southwestern German television station Südwestfunk from 1967 to 1970, a time during which he also worked as a film critic. He made his debut as a television director in 1974.
In 1997 he directed the television film The Castle (1997). The project is based on the Franz Kafka's novel of the same name. The film starred Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. Also that year he directed the feature film Funny Games (1997). The plot involves two young men who hold a family hostage and torture them with Sadomasochism games in their vacation home. The film premiered at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. David Rooney of Variety wrote about his continuation of the examination of violence writing, "Haneke is clearly more interested in the implications of violence than the acts themselves, and the psychological wallop they pack is strengthened by having most of the physical and emotional carnage played off-camera".
Haneke achieved great success with the critically acclaimed French film The Piano Teacher (2001). The film starred Isabelle Huppert as a sexually repressed piano teacher who soon becomes involved with a younger man. The film tackles subjects such as masochism, rape, incest, sexual repression, sexual violence, and the relationships between men and women. It premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival where it received rapturous reviews. It won the prestigious Grand Prize at the festival and also won its stars, Benoît Magimel and Huppert the Best Actor and Actress awards. David Denby of The New Yorker wrote, "Haneke avoids the sensationalism of movie shockers, even high-class shockers like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Roman Polanski's Repulsion. There are no expressionist moments in The Piano Teacher—no scenes of longing, no soft-focus dreams or cinematic dreck". Denby concluded, "the is a seriously scandalous work, beautifully made, and it deserves a sizable audience that might argue over it, appreciate it—even hate it." A few years later he directed the dystopian drama Time of the Wolf (2003) starring Huppert. The film revolves around a family trying to find their way after a global cataclysm. The film received positive reviews with Scott Foundas of Variety Magazine writing, "Haneke demonstrates profound insight into the essence of human behavior when all humility is pared away, raw panic and despair are the order of the day, and man becomes more like wolf than man." In 2005 Haneke reunited with Juliette Binoche in the psychological thriller Caché after she expressed interest in working with him. Haneke frequently worked with real-life couple Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar – thrice each. The film opened the 2005 Cannes Film Festival to positive reviews. The film involves themes of collective guilt, collective memory and colonialism. He incorporated stories of the Paris massacre of 1961 into the film. Haneke won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director for the film. It was also included in the BBC's 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century.
In 2006 he gave his debut as an opera director, staging Mozart's Don Giovanni for the Opéra National de Paris at Palais Garnier when the theater's general manager was Gerard Mortier. With his next film The White Ribbon (2009) Haneke chose to shoot in black-and-white and in Germany. 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 film premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and won his first italic=no. It later won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and earned two Academy Award nominations for Best International Feature Film and Best Cinematography losing to The Secret in Their Eyes (2009) from Argentina and Avatar (2009). Critic Roger Ebert described the film as "visually masterful" adding, "His films are like parables, teaching that bad things sometimes happen simply because they...happen. The universe laughs at man's laws and does what it will."
In 2012, he was to direct Così fan tutte for the New York City Opera. This production had originally been commissioned by Jürgen Flimm for the Salzburg Festival 2009, but Haneke had to resign due to an illness preventing him from preparing the work. Haneke realized this production at Madrid's Teatro Real in 2013. "Giving Così fan tutte a Little Extra Gravity" by George Loomis, The New York Times, 5 March 2013 In 2013, he was the subject of the documentary film . That year, Haneke won the Prince of Asturias Award for the arts.
In 2017, for his twelfth film, Happy End Haneke reunited with Trintignant and Huppert. The film also starred Mathieu Kassovitz and Toby Jones. The film centers around a bourgeois French family dealing with a series of setbacks and crises. The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 70th Cannes Film Festival. The film received respectable reviews. Alissa Wilkinson of Vox described it as a commentary on "the European refugee crisis and the pitfalls of Social privilege". Wilkinson added, " challenges its audience to pay attention to put together the story, then, is as much an aesthetic statement about how to watch a movie as a political one. We have to observe and see what's in the background. And that's just what the family at the center of the movie doesn't do, and what makes them civilized monsters — a proclivity they pass on through generations."
Haneke says that films should offer viewers more space for imagination and self-reflection. Films that have too much detail and moral clarity, Haneke says, are used for mindless consumption by their viewers. Haneke teaches film direction at the Film Academy Vienna. One of his students there was director Katharina Mückstein.
In June 2024, Haneke's list of all-time favorite films was published on . He lists more than 100 films, quoting several works by directors Ingmar Bergman ( Persona, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence, Scenes from a Marriage) and Abbas Kiarostami ( Where Is the Friend's House?, Through the Olive Trees, And Life Goes On, Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us).
| 1989 | The Seventh Continent | 69% (7 reviews) | 89 (7 reviews) | ||
| 1992 | Benny's Video | 64% (11 reviews) | 60 (9 reviews) | ||
| 1994 | 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance | 67% (5 reviews) | 71 (8 reviews) | ||
| 1997 | Funny Games | 71% (38 reviews) | 69 (10 reviews) | ||
| 2000 | Code Unknown | 75% (51 reviews) | 74 (13 reviews) | ||
| 2001 | The Piano Teacher | 73% (89 reviews) | 79 (26 reviews) | ||
| 2003 | Time of the Wolf | 67% (54 reviews) | 71 (20 reviews) | ||
| 2005 | Caché | 89% (135 reviews) | 84 (37 reviews) | ||
| 2007 | Funny Games | 52% (144 reviews) | 44 (33 reviews) | ||
| 2009 | The White Ribbon | 86% (147 reviews) | 82 (33 reviews) | ||
| 2012 | Amour | 93% (227 reviews) | 94 (45 reviews) | ||
| 2017 | Happy End | 70% (155 reviews) | 72 (30 reviews) |
At the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, his film The White Ribbon won the italic=no, and at the 67th Golden Globe Awards the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2012, his film Amour premiered and competed at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The film would go on to win the italic=no, making it his second win of the prestigious award in three years; this made him the seventh director to have won it twice and the only Austrian director to have accomplished this. The film received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress in a Leading Role for Emmanuelle Riva; it won in the category of Best Foreign Language Film.
In 2013, Haneke won the Prince of Asturias Award for the arts. His twelfth and most recent film, Happy End, was nominated for the italic=no at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
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