*Benny's Video (1992)
Directed by
Michael Haneke
Genre: Drama / Horror
Runtime: 105 min
Country: Austria / Switzerland
Language: German / English / Arabic / French
Color: Color
imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103793/
For fourteen-year-old Benny, anything recorded on videotape is inherently better and more real than what he can see with his naked eyes. He is barely noticed by his professional parents and spends most of his time either viewing wild and violent films or looking at the view outside his window through his video camera. One day, on a whim, he invites a girl to his house and coolly murders her while his video camera is rolling. Then he hides the body temporarily in his closet and goes off to a party. The calm and unexcited way his parents discuss the situation when he explains it to him, using his video film to demonstrate, makes it clear that his own creepiness has a long background in that of his parents. — Clarke Fountain
overweight towards the end.
Not as accomplished and tight as some of Hanekes other movies. Some episodes in the latter part of the movie could have been shortened (the vacation), and gives the movie overweight towards the end. A chilling first act, but the climax negates what has been happening all along. It raises important issues and is worth watching, nontheless.
Benny's.Video.avi 
71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994)
aka 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
Directed by
Michael Haneke
Genre: Avant-grade / Experimental
Runtime: 96 min
Country: Austria / Germany
Language: German / Romanian
Color: Color
imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109020/
Haneke has an amazing clarity about people's alienation
This film is the last in Michael Haneke's trilogy about alienation called "Vergletscherung die Gefühle", and it ends in a violent climax which is a result of the previous fragments that Haneke presents to us. In this film Haneke developed a style that is very reminiscient of his 2000 film "Code Inconnu". It features rather short episodes, and within each episode there is scarcely editing or camera movement. Each episode is divided by a second's black screen, and Haneke often interrupts and ends the episode in the middle of a person's sentence. This is a very economical style of filmmaking, and it certainly demands a lot of the viewers, because you only get the information you really need to connect this episode thematically to the others. Because this is a thematic film, and it is a brilliant, stylish, ice-cold half-misanthropic study of people's lack of ability to perform tender acts with each other. I have never seen people make love in a film by Haneke, except for the masochistic and sad attempts in "La Pianiste". Rather, Haneke shows his characters in situations where they are tired, fed up, irritated or full of hate; quite ordinary human emotions. You cannot blame Haneke for not being a positive director, for he is the only filmmaker working today who can portray and observe his characters so coldly and so unpassionately. And his project seems to be to expose our lack of love and passion for each other, but most of all our lack of ability to tell it as it is. Speak to each other and solve everything, seems to be Haneke's advice, without him really giving it. I never seem to like Haneke's characters, and that is a good thing really. Like fellow German-speaking directors Herzog and Fassbinder, Haneke seems a bit misanthropic in his characteristics. Too many directors try too hard to give characters sympathetic traits, and you just lose interest in the story. "71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls" is quite an achievement in filmmaking, and it is a film that will stick with me forever. I will never forget because I never knew why (the incident at the end). That is how I will remember this film, and how many times in real life is "why" the only question never answered?
[TVrip.DivX.GER.sub.ITA).71.Fragmente.einer.Chronologie.des.Zufalls.(by.Michael.Haneke,.1994).avi * Now we need this:
the first part of his agonizing trilogy:
The Seventh Continent (1989) IMDB
anybody got a chance?
