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Post-Industrial Society

The Death of a Family: Michael Haneke’s Seventh Continent

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke makes me sick–and that is not necessarily a criticism. His best-known films, Funny Games (1997 and a searing American remake in 2008), Cache (2005), and White Ribbon (2009), force viewers to squirm for two hours while the perversities of humanity take revenge on our liberal sensibilities. The most notorious example of Haneke’s cinematic style is the American version of Funny Games in which a happy, little, upper-middle class American family is taken hostage in their summer lakeside cottage by two sadistic, upper-middle class teenagers and tortured over the course of a weekend. Pleasant. Haneke said about Read more