Re-Examining the Active Viewer in Michael Haneke's Amour
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Melanie Robson Complicity, Intimacy and Distance: Re-examining the active viewer in Michael Haneke’s Amour The source of viewer activity in Michael Haneke’s films has previously been attributed to two key factors: first, the viewer’s confrontation through the depiction of violence; and second, the films’ ethical stance, through which viewers are encouraged to question their own position in a broader socio- political environment. This viewer activity is often framed as a choice for the viewer. Haneke’s 2012 film, Amour, challenges these assumptions through its lack of physical violence and the tackling of a moral dilemma that differs significantly from the director’s typical socio-political commentary. This article argues that, in Amour, the viewer is unavoidably complicit in the moral dilemma of the film. I map out the terms of this viewer engagement using three-interrelated terms – complicity, intimacy and distance – that work in tandem to both engage the viewer in an inescapably intimate relationship with the characters and also make the viewer aware of their limited access to the diegesis. This is principally achieved through the negotiation of the long take in the film. I further argue that the location of violence and trauma is to be found in the a priori implication of the viewer’s guilt: with the film set in a closed, domestic space, the viewer performs violence through our privileged viewing position and our violent ‘act of viewing.’ Keywords: Michael Haneke, Amour, complicity, active spectatorship, violence, long take Introduction Most of Michael Haneke’s films address a particular moral issue – suicide, violence in the media, sexual repression – and in doing so, implicate the viewer through Haneke’s distinct construction of form. His 2012 film Amour’s focus on the personal, domestic issue of illness and euthanasia means it occupies a very different place in Haneke’s oeuvre. Amour is set in a small apartment in Paris and revolves around an elderly couple, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), who 1 Melanie Robson are both retired piano teachers. Near the beginning of the film, Anne suffers a stroke. Despite her medical needs, she refuses to stay in hospital, and Georges is forced to negotiate the dual, and sometimes contradictory, roles of husband and full-time carer. In the film’s pivotal scene near the end of the film, Anne lies in bed in a state of physical pain, unable to communicate except through incoherent sounds. Her dutiful husband sits in profile on the side of the bed facing his disabled wife. The camera is positioned statically on the right side of Anne’s bed. At the beginning of the shot, Georges tells Anne a story about his childhood contraction of diphtheria at school camp, after which he was isolated in a hospital behind a glass wall and prevented from communicating with his family. His own story of miscommunication is designed to sympathise with his wife’s inability to communicate. The static long take as Georges tells his story to Anne is almost too banal; Georges tries to ignore the pained, involuntary noises Anne makes, as he recites his narrative that seems to be a comfort to him just as much as an intended comfort for his wife. A moment passes as the characters both remain in the same position in the same static shot, before Georges slowly reaches for a pillow on the bed, places it over his wife’s face and presses down on it until she becomes still. The camera remains in the same position for about a minute after Anne has died. It is this ‘minute after’ that is crucial in defining the value of this shot. In many of Haneke’s films, a moment of temps morts usually precedes and follows the most violent acts.1 By witnessing the time before and after the action, we occupy a privileged position that is frequently denied to the cinema viewer. The caveat of this position is that we also adopt the guilt implied by the violent act that follows. In such moments, Haneke not only acknowledges the viewer as witness to these events, but also implicates us in the violence of the scene. Even scenes devoid of physical 2 Melanie Robson violence that capture large empty rooms and long silences are inherently violent, merely because the viewer performs a violation of an oft-hidden space of the characters. Such scenes exemplify Haneke’s primary interest - the shot’s inaction. In doing this, he brings to the fore the viewer’s complicit involvement in the characters’ predicament that is developed through the duration of the shot. This article explores how the viewer’s complicit relationship with the onscreen action is developed in Amour through Haneke’s formal choices. The phenomenon of viewer complicity in Haneke’s films has been given significant scholarly attention in the past with regard to his earlier films (see, for instance, Wheatley 2009, Sinnerbrink 2011, Rhodes 2010). However, little work has been done on its operation in Amour.2 The ethical dilemma at the heart of Amour calls for a renewed interrogation of how the director engages his viewer. Since this implication is predicated on the viewer’s violation of the diegetic space (and, in turn, the couple’s moral dilemma), a close formal analysis focusing on the operation of the long take, mise-en-scene and the manipulation of diegetic time is used in this article to examine the viewer’s unusual complicit position. The long take, in particular, enables a tripartite relationship between viewer, character and film in which the viewer’s engagement is always acknowledged and required in the duration and framing of the shot in order to make sense of the moral dilemma at hand. To characterise the nature of this engagement, I refer to three interrelated terms: complicity, intimacy and distance. The terms intimacy and distance are used in tandem throughout this discussion. Using these two terms, I wish to imply both the physical distance that the camera maintains from its subject, and, as a result, the ethical distance created between viewer and subject. The operation of complicity, intimacy and distance is evidenced in the euthanasia scene above. In this scene the 3 Melanie Robson moment of suffocation, and the immediate time after, exemplifies how the viewer’s complicity in the shot is also an act of violation: the relentless gaze of the static long take through Anne’s death places the viewer in an inescapably intimate relationship with the action on screen. The continuation of the shot afterwards further magnifies this effect, in which Georges’s helplessness becomes apparent. The long shot duration and the intimacy of the moment – referring to both the physical space and the intimacy between the characters – ensure that, in the time before and after Anne’s death, the viewer’s presence violates an often inaccessible place. Our violation of this space renders us a complicit figure. In this sense, the terms complicity, intimacy and distance are intertwined and will be discussed throughout the article. In what follows, I firstly consider the various lenses through which the generic term ‘active spectatorship’ has been explored in the past, and examine how this viewer activity operates in both Caché (2005) and Amour. Viewer activity operates very similarly in both films, but a very different moral dilemma motivates Caché, which affects the way in which the viewer is implicated. Secondly, I move into a more specific analysis of Amour and examine the negotiation of complicity and distance. These two terms considered together allow for a more in-depth understanding of how the viewer’s involvement in the diegesis is not just one of complicity, but also a violation, and a constant negotiation of our position as both distanced outsiders and implicated insiders. The Complicit Spectator The debates around active spectatorship, including those offered by Haneke scholars, offer some productive ways to think about the relationship between viewer and screen. However, they frequently fall short of characterising the viewer’s obligated participation in the diegesis. His films encourage a reframing of the active spectator to 4 Melanie Robson think of it rather in terms of a complicit spectator. In order to nuance the distinction between viewer activity and complicity, we need to consider how the term ‘active spectatorship’ has been used in the past. This term is often used to refer to the assumption that viewers are accustomed to reading films via a conventionalised system of classical editing techniques popularised by mainstream Hollywood (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 2005, 55-60). By utilising the long take and breaking from these conventions, the filmmaker encourages the viewer to use their own judgement in exploring the image with his or her own eyes, thus removing the viewer from a conventional passive position. This process maintains links with a Bazinian conception of the value of the long take: the technique ‘demands that the spectator cultivate viewing skills that go beyond those elicited by classical cutting. The viewer will have to scan the image, seek out salient points of interest, and integrate information into an overall judgement about a scene’ (Bordwell 1997, 65). For scholars such as André Bazin and David Bordwell, the viewer’s activity is encouraged by the inherent ambiguity of the long take. For Bazin, the process of inviting a more active mental attitude in a film’s viewer was to finally realise the fundamental essence of cinema: its capacity to reveal the fundamentally ambiguous and dislocating nature of the real. The form of viewer activity invited by Haneke’s films, however, extends beyond the confines of Bazin’s phenomenological view of cinema.