Profession: Director? Shouldn't that be Profession: Writer-Director? Doesn't Haneke write all his movies? Once again the role of the writer in filmmaking is inexplicably dismissed. But I digress. This film is a must not only for fans but also for newcomers who might have got on board with Haneke since The White Ribbon.
In reverse chronological order, Michael H. Profession: Director takes the viewer from his Oscar-winning Amour back through his filmography: The White Ribbon, Caché, Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher, Code Unknown, Funny Games (tellingly, the remake is passed over), 71 Fragments of the Chronology of Chance, Benny's Video and all the way to his 1989 debut The 7th Continent. Some films are given more heft and screen time from director Yves Montmayeur but we are treated, if that's the right word, to the most startling images in Haneke's canon.
Between the unsettling scenes from his films and interviews with the man himself, Montmayeur resurrects on-set footage of cast doling out the kudos, calling him, amongst others, a "genius of creating distance." While hagiographic in tone there are at least attempts to get inside Haneke's head to see what's what but in the documentary's talking head moments Haneke steadfastly refuses to analyse his own films - boooooo! - and blankly resists one interviewer's (unclear if it is Montmaueur) attempts to get the director to interpret his work.
What's striking is that watching the interviews of Haneke in and around the shooting of last year's Amour, and his interviews in the early nineties, the seventy-four-year-old writer-director looks just as old now as he did back then. It's as if he appeared fully-formed, ready to push audiences to their limit, which he certainly does. Montmayeur's footage of the Cannes premiere of Funny Games finds some of the snooty well-to-do elite dismiss it as ‘Nazism,' others denounced it as immoral while a small number tried to leave but were hemmed in. Good.
Just in case it had to be said, or maybe it's good to remind ourselves, but we need documentaries like these to show how bloody brilliant some people are.
