Film · European
born 1942 · Austrian
Austrian art cinema; the 'glaciation' trilogy
Michael Haneke makes cold, precisely composed films about violence and the complacency of comfortable Europe, refusing the consolations of music, close-ups and explanation. He is one of a small group of directors to have won the Palme d'Or twice, in 2009 and 2012, and the second of those films also took the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. He has not made a feature since 2017.
Two polite young men in white polo shirts hold a family hostage at their lakeside house and invite the audience to bet on the outcome; the director filmed it twice, ten years apart, in two languages (1997)
Funny Games — remade shot for shot in English in 2007 with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth
An Austrian family methodically sell the car, destroy the flat and flush their money down the lavatory (1989)
The Seventh Continent (Der siebente Kontinent) — his first cinema feature
Seventy-one unconnected fragments of Viennese life, converging on a shooting in a bank (1994)
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
A repressed piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, her mother and a student; the film and both its leads won prizes at Cannes in 2001 (2001)
The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) — Grand Prix, plus Best Actress for Isabelle Huppert and Best Actor for Benoît Magimel
Videotapes of his own front door begin arriving at a television presenter's house, wrapped in childish drawings of a face bleeding from the mouth (2005)
Caché (Hidden) — Best Director at Cannes; it turns on the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerians
A north German village on the eve of the First World War, shot in black and white; children are made to wear a white armband as a punishment (2009)
The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band) — Palme d'Or
A retired music teacher nurses his wife at home in their Paris flat after a series of strokes (2012)
Amour — Palme d'Or, the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and a Best Actress nomination for Emmanuelle Riva at 85
A construction dynasty in Calais, a collapsing building site, and a grandfather who wants to die; his most recent feature (2017)
Happy End