The Seventh Continent/Der Siebente Kontinent
Michael Haneke, 1989 Austria 104 mins)
The target for Haneke's brutal examination in The Seventh Continent/Der Siebente Kontinent 1989 (Haneke's first film) is the bourgeois family unit. The lives of a well-off, successful family are depicted in minute, methodical detail over three years. The Schober's are a normal family, doing everyday normal things but one day they decide to destroy everything they have.
Matt Peterson at brooklynrail.org writes:
Rarely has the banality of middle class family life been presented as this brutal and inhuman. Haneke's loaded presentation of this ostensibly ordered universe possesses an ominous menace comparable to Roman Polanski at his best.
Michael Haneke draws inspiration from the ascetic naturalism of Robert Bresson; from Michelangelo Antonioni's cold and distanced presentation of characters, but without his eye for beauty; and from the control and political weight of Jean-Luc Godard's mid-late '60s abstraction, but without his eye for color or his fetishizing of beautiful women. Anything these filmmakers provided that might distract from tension, Haneke decisively rejects. Haneke's mise en scene is confrontational, oppressive, and sterile, though not without its own sardonic grin. Undoubtedly influenced by Bertolt Brecht, both in his approach to craft as well as his inherent political agenda (epater le bourgeois!), Haneke's most apparent gift as a filmmaker is his mastery of pacing.
Christopher Sharrett sensesofcinema.com writes:
Michael Haneke's masterful first film The Seventh Continent/Der Siebente Kontinent introduces concerns basic to the director's art, principal among them the notion that the 'death of affect', a key fixation of postmodernity, should not be a subject of cynical celebration (as it seems to be for many artists of the moment). Rather, Haneke views the end of affect, which is to say the acceptance of alienation as an inevitable and rather 'hip' state of being, as a profound sickness that serious art no longer interrogates, the standard postmodern view being that its study is a naive and dated preoccupation. As a consequence, Haneke is often associated with cinema's great modernists, with Antonioni frequently cited as the kinsman of closest sensibility. The association seems reasonable, with the provision that Haneke 'updates' Antonioni's project, applying to the current world a vision appropriate to late capitalist, media-saturated culture, and that evokes early modernism, with its concern for some sense of continuity between classicism and modernity. From Antonioni, Haneke derives elements of his vision of the modern urban setting. People spend endless, wordless, wasted moments in car washes and supermarkets, and work in buildings composed of machine-packed substructures recalling Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) as well as Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964), while vast, low-ceilinged office spaces of endless, uniformly spaced desks, suggest Welles' vision of The Trial (1961) as much as L'eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1963).
Haneke makes the story eminently plausible by focusing on the stultifying aspects of everyday life taken for granted by the current bourgeois order of things. The rote actions of the day - from turning off an alarm clock to tying shoelaces to eating a bowl of cereal - are invested with a chilling aspect recalling Warhol's presentation of the consumer landscape. In his compositions Haneke employs a kind of television aesthetic, that is, an insistence on the tight shot, usually to emphasise the plasticity of commodities, although without television's insistence on rapid cutting. To the contrary, with this first film Haneke introduces his belief that the spectator must today become reacquainted with older ways of seeing. The stasis of The Seventh Continent and his subsequent films emphasise this notion; the media landscape, dominated by the ambitions of advertising, is pure montage, concealing the fact that such phenomena as the 'action' film of corporate cinema deprives us of a view of real experience in the hyperactivity of its alienated 'speech'.
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