Doom, gloom and Michael Haneke.

2009-11-02 19:00:01

As Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or-winning laugh riot "The White Ribbon" opens in the UK and Sony Classics ramps up for the December 30th US release of the film, Hari Kunzru comes forth to praise the director and Stuart Klawans to (covertly) bury him. What's funny is they both end up pointing out the same thing. Kunzru -- the awesome British novelist whose "Transmission" is one of my favorite novels of the decade -- offers up his thoughts on the political context of Haneke's films, and on the groundswell of disgust at the way Austria tried to disassociate itself from its Nazi past. But he gets into shaky territory when he gets to Haneke's more recent work, generalizing about "the link between the personal and the political, the influence of the media, video surveillance, social control and the possibility of authentic human community." His inadvertent conclusion is that Haneke's indictments aren't...

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