Directed by Michael Haneke • 1992 • Austria
Starring Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, Ulrich Mühe
Michael Haneke turns the unflinching gaze of the camera back on itself in this provocative, profoundly disturbing study of emotional disconnection in the age of mass-media saturation. Benny (a frighteningly affectless Arno Frisch), the teenage son of wealthy, disengaged parents, finds release in the world of violent videos—an obsession that leads him to create his own monstrous work of real-life horror. Layering screens within screens and frames within the filmic frame, BENNY’S VIDEO is a coolly postmodern, metacinematic labyrinth in which the boundaries between actual and mediated violence become terrifyingly indistinguishable.
Up Next in Directed by Michael Haneke
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The Castle
Directed by Michael Haneke • 1997 • Austria
Michael Haneke's adaptation of Franz Kafka's absurdist novel follows a land surveyor as he struggles with the increasingly difficult and bureaucratic practices of the local authorities.
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The Seventh Continent
Directed by Michael Haneke • 1989 • Austria
Starring Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni TanzerThe day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction. I...
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71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
Directed by Michael Haneke • 1994 • Austria, Germany
Starring Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lukas Miko, Otto GrümandlThe simultaneously random and interconnected nature of modern existence comes into harrowing focus in the despairing final installment of Michael Haneke’s trilogy. Seventy-one intricate,...
