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. It is much closer to what Catherine Wheatley (2009) calls a ‘cinema of ethics’: a relationship established between viewer and screen in which the viewer not only has their imagination freed by the ambiguity of the long take, but also begins to question their own position as viewers and, more broadly, reflect on particular socio-political issues.

Haneke’s intentional promotion of active spectatorship in his film style has been read

5 Melanie Robson as a deliberate attempt to draw his viewers into a sociocultural critique of ‘the mediatised nature of contemporary social experience’ (Sinnerbrink 2011, 116). In

Haneke’s essay, ‘Film as Catharsis’ he has insisted that his films

are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its disempowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus (Frey 2010, 156).

Although this statement lays out Haneke’s political stance against contemporary cinema and television, he also effectively justifies his own stylistic approach in countering this trend. The form of American cinema he refers to here is mainstream

Hollywood cinema. With its increasing rapidity of edits, he argues, it leads to a loss of capacity for emotional engagement and reflection. Audiences of this form of cinema are, therefore, rendered passive and not complicit in the onscreen action. His reference to the ‘disempowerment of the spectator,’ in particular, suggests a desire on

Haneke’s part to re-empower his viewer by offering them choice, as opposed to the

‘consumption and consensus’ he accuses American cinema of promoting.

Haneke’s critique emphasises the element of time in determining the form of engagement established between viewer and screen. In an interview with Christopher

Sharrett, Haneke placed the blame on television for changing our ‘habits of seeing,’ arguing that the medium ‘accelerates experience’ (2003, 31). He contends that television, with its heavy reliance on montage and quick editing, has begun to erode the emotionally-engaged active viewing experience. He goes on, however, to promote the long take in cinema as being capable of reversing these habits ‘by its particular emphasis’ on duration and ambiguity (31). Haneke believes that, as well as

6 Melanie Robson encouraging a form of mental activity, the long take also has the capacity to bestow on the viewer a particular kind of choice in how the image is interpreted. John David

Rhodes further reflects on the concept of viewer agency: ‘This form of cinematography is…closer to a mode of being in which one acts as an agent and not an object. The invitation to activity, ‘personal choice,’ and ‘attention’ are all bound up with…[the] reintroduction of ‘ambiguity’’ (2010, 89). By acting as an agent, Rhodes points out, the viewer is involved in a careful balance of agency and constraint. The

‘personal choice,’ to which he refers, is always bound by a number of key factors: the director’s intentional (or sometimes accidental) composition of the shot, the duration of the shot and even off-screen elements such as diegetic sound and light. All of these elements might introduce ambiguity that encourages the viewer’s individual interpretation of the shot, but a constrained interpretation. The viewer is coerced, rather than invited, into this active participation with the film; or, as Rhodes expresses it, ‘What begins as liberty ends as obligation’ (90). By being offered a choice in how to interpret the film, Haneke activates the viewer’s participation.

The matter of coercion and obligation constitute the true nature of viewer complicity in Haneke’s films. Debates around active spectatorship frequently fall short of characterising the viewer’s obligated participation the films. I contend that the viewer complicity in Haneke’s films is not a choice, but an obligation. Complicity implies more than the active spectator debates normally do: it implies a morally obligated engagement with the film that not only encourages viewer engagement, but also actually requires it for the film’s success. The viewer’s participation can be thought of as an extra-diegetic component of the film that contributes productively to the meaning of the diegetic components. In the scene in which Anne dies, for example, it is not enough for Haneke to invite the viewer to participate, question and

7 Melanie Robson probe why her husband euthanised her, and his choice of method; rather, the shot’s duration and our pre-exisiting complicity in the couple’s drama affirm that it is necessary for us to witness this moment. Haneke’s self-conscious use of temps morts before and after Anne’s death confirms the required participation of the viewer. The viewer occupies a position that exists simultaneously external to the diegesis (the characters cannot access it) and as a crucial element interwoven with every element of the diegesis on which the film relies.

Wheatley (2009) makes some productive inroads into the obligated participation of the viewer, which is brought about, she argues, by the ethical nature of Haneke’s narratives. She points out that each of his films ‘demonstrate an underlying concern with questions of guilt and responsibility’ that reflect similar ethical concerns central to the viewing situation. She continues,

These problems revolve around the spectator’s complicity with the cinematic apparatus and their tacit acceptance or denial of this complicity, and the key focus of Haneke’s films is on the spectator’s responsibility of their own involvement in the spectator-screen relationship (2009, 10).

Wheatley further characterises the nature of this moral involvement with the film. She argues that his films ‘prompt the spectator to think about their own participation in the cinematic institution’ (36). For Wheatley, the viewer is ‘willingly passive’ and asked to consciously take responsibility for their part in the film (36). I argue, however, that this choice is not offered to the viewers; their participation in the film is required by the construction of form in order to make sense of the drama onscreen.

The viewer’s perceived responsibility for their role extends beyond the formal components of the film. Thematically, the spectator is coerced into an awareness of his or her own passive position, and Haneke achieves this by framing the central

8 Melanie Robson dilemma of the film as a trauma that could happen to anyone. James Aston accounts for this tendency by relating this issue to class. Haneke’s films centre on middle-class families whose lives are interrupted or destroyed by a traumatic event. For Aston, these families are made complacent by their position in society, and thus, Haneke’s intention is to target an equally complacent, middle-class viewer and invite them into a more active viewing position (2010, p. 114). He argues that the viewer’s perceived intimacy with the character’s predicament encourages them to take a more active role, since disaster is framed as something not distant, but ‘directly relatable to the social positioning of the intended audience’ (Aston, 2010, p. 115).

Haneke continues the theme of the everyman, middle-class family in Amour, emphasised by the paralleling of character names across his oeuvre – Georges, Anne and Eva.3 Haneke suggests that Amour could have been a social drama; this would have defined the narrative as a product of a particular time and place and thus making a political comment, such as on the limited access to healthcare for the working class.

Rather, he chose to make a largely timeless and placeless narrative to focus on the universality of the couple’s predicament. Haneke states that he foregrounded this moral dilemma by placing Anne and Georges in a socio-economic class that allowed them to afford home care for Anne. He predicted that if he had characterised them as poor, the audience would question, ‘if only they had more money; if only they could afford to keep her at home and have private nursing, it would have been easier for them. Which, of course, is totally false’ (Calhoun 2012, para. 6). With the couple’s socio-economic class foregrounded in the film, the viewer’s complacency is challenged and they are encouraged to engage actively in the dilemma as a moral, rather than a financial, one.

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In order to cement this form of complicity, Haneke always establishes a situation in which our involvement exists a priori in an event that has already happened, and frequently, this involvement frames the viewer as guilty. This guilt is almost always implicated by the opening shot, which effectively removes the viewer’s opportunity for choice in their complicity. This form of implication is evident in the opening shot of Caché. The film opens on a static shot of the outside of a house, framed at a distance. The shot lasts for just over a minute, only at the end of which we hear conversation emerging from an unknown source. Suddenly, the familiar fuzzy stripes of a VCR fast-forward function appear on screen, followed by a cut to Anne

(Juliette Binoche) and Georges (Daniel Auteuil) in their lounge room. Only this second scene clarifies the indeterminable first shot: video camera footage that has been delivered to the protagonists’ house. Haneke employs this technique several times throughout the film. With this technique, he places the viewer in an unstable spectatorial position in which we are never able to ascertain at the beginning of the shot which camera perspective is being used: that of the surveillance camera or the camera that is outside the diegesis.

The film’s frequent framing and reframing of the viewer’s position continually affirms our complicity in the action that takes place on screen. Occurring as the opening scene, the technique employed here ensures that the viewer has no resources to draw on, other than what is shown on screen and the suggestion of a video camera aesthetic that might provide a clue. From the opening scene, to the many other instances of surveillance footage shown in the film, the viewer is at least partially implicated as the unidentified perpetrator. The video camera aesthetic immediately ensures that the viewer is positioned as more involved (and as potentially guilty) than a conventional cinema viewer; but of most importance is the fact that this is video

10 Melanie Robson footage of which we have missed both its beginning and its context. We are voyeurs from the opening moment of the film and soon become aware that those who have set up the camera are guilty of something and, by extension, the viewer is too.

Haneke’s intentional implication of the viewer in the characters’ guilt, however, is not performed merely for its own sake. Although the entire narrative of

Caché revolves around the discovery of who planted the surveillance cameras, the source of this surveillance is not what is really at stake. Rather, the film is about laying bare what cinema can do or allow us to do as viewers, and how this can be achieved formally. This is also what is at stake in Amour, demonstrated through the viewer’s granted privileged access to the characters’ lives. In both films, the viewer is constantly reminded that the film is not really interested in the dichotomy of guilty and innocent. Its interest lies in the interplay of relations between director, viewer and characters that can only be revealed by this dichotomy and articulated by the long take.

Intimacy and Distance The form of viewer complicity at play in Haneke’s earlier films, and Caché in particular, is complicated in Amour by the constant negotiation of intimacy and distance. The distanced, static shot has become a hallmark of Haneke’s cinema. As evidenced by the opening scene of Caché, this technique is frequently employed to draw attention to the act of viewing. Using the terms ‘intimacy’ and ‘distance’ in the case of Amour, however, I refer to not just the physical proximity or distance between the camera and the subject, but also the emotional and ethical relationship established between the viewer and the characters. The extended duration of the long take, which allows access to otherwise inaccessible moments, forms an intimate relationship between viewer and screen. The inaccessibility of the moral dilemma in Amour,

11 Melanie Robson however, also enforces a distanced outsider position on the viewer. The viewer is at once intimate and distant to the diegesis and the characters’ moral dilemma. These additional considerations aid in forming a very particular relationship between viewer and diegesis that is negotiated by the duration of the long take, but doesn’t necessarily hinge on camera-subject proximity. In Amour, Haneke continues his project of providing the viewer some form of agency by using the long take; but by turning the film’s focus to a very different moral dilemma, the viewer’s awareness of their ‘act of watching’ adopts a renewed meaning.

In order to unravel what this renewed meaning is, we must first define the specific nature of the moral dilemma depicted in the film. In Amour, Haneke tackles the question of ‘how to manage the suffering of someone you love’: a deceptively complex task (Foundas 2012). He ensures the outcome of this ethical question is addressed by presenting the end of Anne’s life at the beginning of the film: the opening shot reveals firemen and police breaking down the front door of Georges and

Anne’s apartment and discovering Anne’s body lying on her bed in a funereal pose surrounded by flowers. This scene determines how we are made complicit in the couple’s drama; we enter the film mid-dramatic moment, uninitiated and given enough access (intimacy) to understand that a moral dilemma is being staged for us, but distanced enough to not understand what is at stake. This opening scene operates similarly to that of Caché, and is where our a priori guilt comes to the fore; the scene is not necessarily about a drive to know anything about the characters, but rather a drive to understand our own participation in the couple’s predicament. As this article will continue to explore, the way the viewer is positioned by the formal elements of this scene determine how we understand our own participation. Once the viewer

12 Melanie Robson knows what will be the outcome, the film’s goal becomes a matter of investigating how this outcome occurs.

Unlike many of Haneke’s earlier films, many of which focus on the connection between mass media and violence in the domestic space, Amour rather questions whether a response to a particularly difficult situation is the ‘right’ response, or if a right response exists, and whether cinema can aid in accessing this resolution. The interplay of distance and closeness emerges in this dilemma as

Haneke teaches us that by being too close to the couple’s predicament, we are blinded by bias (like Georges) and by being too distanced (like their daughter Eva), we couldn’t possibly understand. The viewer is, at the same time, both included and excluded from the moral dilemma they are tasked with deciphering. Thus, the establishing of proximity is not just an aesthetic issue, but it also has broader implications for how the viewer responds to the narrative.

It is the matter of inclusion and exclusion that primarily characterises how the long take negotiates distance and intimacy. The nature and scope of the viewer’s access to the world of the protagonists define our viewing position. The film is constantly caught in a tension of inclusion and exclusion, in which Haneke offers us an apparently privileged, intimate view of the diegesis, only to undermine this privilege a moment later. This process is exemplified in a scene near the beginning of the film in which Anne suffers her first stroke: a scene of mundane domesticity in the kitchen during which, before the onset of the stroke, husband and wife converse in one long take while the camera remains largely static. The quotidian setting of this scene is reminiscent of a frequently discussed scene in Umberto D. (Vittorio de Sica,

1952), which is often framed as the exemplification of neorealism. In this scene a maid walks into the kitchen in the morning, drowns an ant plague and sits on a chair

13 Melanie Robson grinding coffee. Bazin argues that, in this scene, ‘The narrative unit…is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis’

([1972] 2005, 81). The primary purpose of such a moment, Bazin argues, is not to narrate a story using classical narrative logic, but to ‘make cinema the asymptote of reality,’ to privilege realism (82). This revelation of the succession of concrete instants of life is evident in the kitchen scene in Amour in the initial static shot, as

Georges sits on the chair in the background. While the apparent ‘action’ of the shot is in Georges’s dialogue (albeit its quotidian nature), Anne is placed in the foreground of the shot, going about the mundane actions of boiling the eggs, holding the pan under running water and making tea. These framed actions reveal to us portions of the couple’s life that are seemingly surplus to the requirements of the narrative. Any drama that might be present in the scene is ‘destroyed’ by foregrounding Anne’s mundane movements and the couple’s quotidian conversation.

Where the aforementioned tension becomes apparent in this scene is during the very instant of Anne’s stroke. It becomes evident during this moment that

Haneke’s intention is to do more than reproduce reality through the narration of successive instants of life. With the camera placed in the same position as the beginning of the scene, Georges stands up and walks towards frame left, busying himself in the pantry, while Anne sits silently at the dining table. Sometime during this shot, Anne suffers a stroke, yet both the viewer and Georges miss the exact instant of this occurrence. As Garrett Stewart observes, ‘it is as if [Anne] suffers from the principle of narrative ellipsis that Haneke so wilfully manipulates in his editorial style’ (2013, 16). She is physically present, which is confirmed by the viewer, but much like a cinematic ellipsis, her psychological absence goes unnoticed until

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Georges notes her lack of response later in the scene. The unbroken recording of the time before, the moment itself and the time after fool the viewer into believing they have had a privileged, unobstructed view of everything that occurs in the shot.

The downplaying of drama during the precise moment of the stroke emphasises our conditional access to the diegesis. Stewart continues, ‘Technique seems almost internalised as a mental dysfunction: a tiny stroke or coma’ (16).

Anne’s unnoticed psychological absence from the scene reveals a strategy distinct to

Haneke’s framing of this world: the revelation of what cannot be shown or cannot be seen by the viewer; a failure of the cinematic medium. By making us aware of what we cannot be shown, Haneke permanently undermines our own vision. This is a particularly confronting revelation, considering the apparent uninterrupted long take and the deliberately wide shots favoured by Haneke throughout the film that tempt the viewer with a sense of objectivity. He showcases a modernist tendency to draw attention back to the viewer’s role, in turn questioning the coherence of the ‘reality’ with which they are presented.

This failure of the cinematic medium is further emphasised by the film’s overt disruption of intimacy between Georges and Anne. During the scene, the camera is positioned in a single, static medium long shot while the characters make and eat breakfast. Their dull conversation about calling contractors to fix their broken front door captured in this long take is punctuated by a series of shorter, tightly framed shot/reverse-shots between the couple sitting at the breakfast table, forming an intimate (in terms of character, dialogue and framing) moment between them. The moment of distanciation and detachment occurs as soon as Anne becomes unresponsive. Roy Grundmann also discusses this scene, characterising their initial conversation as intimate merely because of its ‘quotidian nature’ (2012, para. 5). He

15 Melanie Robson suggests that, therefore, Anne’s attack is ‘all the more dramatic because it disrupts precisely one such conversation between them’ (para. 5).

The significance of this moment is not just a matter of disrupting the couple’s intimacy. It also marks the first instance of the viewer’s disruption of intimacy with the couple. Up till this point, we have always encountered them together, if not in the same frame, then in the same physical space. After Anne’s unresponsiveness becomes apparent to Georges, a couple more short shots occur, before he stands up and hurries into the hallway towards the bedroom to dress in preparation for seeking help for his wife. A static shot, in which the camera is positioned physically in the kitchen but gazing down the hallway towards Georges’s retreat into the bedroom, presents an aesthetic dilemma that questions each characters’ centrality to the narrative: whether to remain with the unresponsive Anne, or to follow Georges into the bedroom, both of which threaten to deny the viewer access to one half of this vital scene. The duration of this static shot opens up the opportunity to reflect on this dilemma, before cutting to a shot of the bedroom where Georges is putting on his jacket. This scene highlights the conditional nature of the viewer’s complicity: we are forcibly implicated in the diegesis, but Haneke always makes us aware of what we might be missing around the edges of the camera’s frame.

Violation and Violence The form of disruption and distanciation at play during Anne’s first attack is evidence of how complicity and intimacy work in tandem. By making the viewer aware of our conditional access to the diegesis, it becomes clear that our violation of this private, intimate space is more highly charged: we are complicit to an unwitnessed event.

Earlier in this article, it was revealed that Haneke’s films almost always begin from a position of assumed viewer guilt. This guilt exists as a result of the viewer violating

16 Melanie Robson the private space of the characters, but never being privy to what has occurred before the beginning of the film. In this sense, our engagement with the film is always conditioned on some form of violence. In the case of Amour, this is not violence in the traditional sense; rather, it takes the form of a threat to our intimacy with the diegesis, the couple and their moral dilemma, as well as a confrontation of our inability to access the ‘reality’ of their predicament.

Regarding some of Haneke’s earlier films, violence is theorised in terms of its confrontational capacity, which, as some scholars argue, encourages a critical engagement with the image; the violence on screen ‘shocks’ the viewer into a consciousness of their viewing position (see Landwehr 2011). Robert Sinnerbrink attributes this depiction of violence to ‘the distractible state of the spectator in societies of the spectacle,’ in which ‘spectators whose powers of decoding and assimilating visual information have become more acute but whose ability to understand, reflect upon, and assign emotional significance to this visual information has become more attenuated’ (2011, 119). He questions,

how can film force us to engage with the image, to arrest the information flow and force critical thought in response to what we see, to deepen the emotional and intellectual impact of the images that surround us, while at the same time forcing us to reflect upon our desire for, and fascination with, images of violence, cruelty, and suffering, now consumed as entertainment? (119).

While this assessment of the viewer’s engagement with violence is more relevant to

Haneke’s earlier films, in which a more overt depiction of violence and suffering is on display, Sinnerbrink’s statement speaks to Haneke’s overall intention in confronting his viewer: not to explicitly feed our desire for violence, but to make us acutely aware of our capacity to process the film’s confrontation.

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Thus, the kind of violence depicted in some of Haneke’s earlier films contributes significantly to our complicity, owing to the method used to depict it. In

Caché, for example, Majid invites Georges into his apartment on the pretext of wanting to ‘show [him] something’. The camera, again adopting the video surveillance mode employed earlier in the film, is set up at the far end of the room, at a distance from the door. The two men enter and stand in the doorway before Majid suddenly slashes his own throat with a knife, splattering blood across the wall. In the same shot, Georges stands still in shock and then quickly leaves the room. The juxtaposition of the calm conversation between the two men with the sudden shocking image of Majid performing such a violent act on himself in the same static shot highlights Haneke’s typical approach to violence and the long take: a formal technique that can be used to confront the viewer through an immediate juxtaposition of images. The lack of montage and the presence of silence in these shots aid this process, in which the viewer is left unprepared for the violent act to follow. These moments of sudden, horrific violence are often the prime source of confrontation for

Haneke’s viewers: the throat slitting in Caché, the doctor’s molestation of his daughter in The White Ribbon (2009), Erika’s stabbing of herself in the theatre lobby in The Piano Teacher (2001). These examples all have in common a depiction of not just the violent act itself, but the moments before and after. The long take has the unique capacity to continue recording beyond the event, and in doing so, somewhat voyeuristically implicates us in the actions of the diegesis. The viewer bears witness to a usually inaccessible, intimate moment. These moments confront the viewer with what can’t be known or represented in such situations. The long take that extends beyond the point of violence attempts to unravel what this violence leaves in its wake.

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While Amour maintains a particular violent and confrontational mode, the content of these confronting moments differs significantly from Haneke’s typical depiction of physical violence and tabooed actions in his earlier films. There is little violence in the conventional, physical sense of the term, apart from the unexpected slap that Georges gives to Anne in a moment of frustration. Rather, the violence lies in the depicted emotional struggle that confronts not only the two protagonists, but also the viewer. In Amour, Haneke’s central concern is no longer feeding or reflecting on the viewer’s sadistic desire for violence and cruelty, as Sinnerbrink suggests. But the former part of Sinnerbrink’s question – ‘how can film force us to engage with the image, to arrest the information flow and force critical thought in response to what we see’ – is significant for Amour (2011, 119). This question is partially addressed by

Justin Wolfers when he explains, ‘This relationship Haneke creates affirms that we as an audience are also full of guilt…and it is this dynamic that plays upon the viewer, stripping us of our usual spectatorial distance’ (2014, 159). In Amour, the physical violence of Haneke’s earlier films is missing because the ‘violence’ of Amour is entirely bound up in our complicity in the film. Our engagement in the film is predicated on our unwilling invasion and violation of the characters’ private space.

Beyond the physical break-in that is briefly referred to at the beginning of the film, the act of the invasion occurs on two different levels. On one hand, there is the invasion of illness into the couples’ apartment that fundamentally changes their lives, and on the other, what might be termed the ‘invited’ invasion of Anne’s visitors and carers, who are increasingly depicted as unwanted guests. The former highlights the universality of Amour: this form of invasion is a violence that could and probably will happen to everyone. A number of scenes exist in which the camera is placed in

Anne’s room when she is bedridden and the viewer watches the daily, painful rituals

19 Melanie Robson undertaken by Anne, Georges and the incompetent nurses. The viewer’s inclusion in the same seemingly private space of Anne while being cared for by her nurses makes the viewer become most strongly aware of their own uncomfortable and confronting position. One such scene involves the nurse almost violently brushing Anne’s hair, as the camera is statically positioned at the end of her bed and front on. We see Anne’s pained expression as the nurse forces a mirror in front of her face, insisting that her

Anne ‘will want to look [her] very best,’ despite her permanent bedridden state. The viewer is, on the one hand, physically removed from the action of the scene, and on the other, an equal participant in the invasion.

The viewer’s implication in the physical invasion is affirmed by the framing of the opening shot of the film. In the first few moments after the opening credits, the screen is black and then suddenly cuts to the inside of the apartment door. The first cut of the film is performed on the violent sound of the door shattering under the force of the fireman’s axe. Already, our arrival is conditioned on a particular kind of violence. Although occurring at the beginning of the film, this moment is the endpoint of both Georges and Anne’s story, during which all the characters, including the viewer, have gradually entombed themselves in the enclosed space of the apartment.

Conceived of chronologically, this opening shot represents the first moment that the tomb has been opened since Anne fell ill and the viewer is granted access (albeit a brief glimpse) to the outside world. Further, when Georges and Anne point out the break in to their home after they return from the piano recital, it is as though this break in (which is never further investigated) is performed by the viewer; Haneke lures the spectator into the gradually retracting world of the protagonists without offering any opportunity for respite.

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Like Cache, the first moments of Amour place the viewer in an a priori implication in the diegesis. The opening shot of the film occurs after a significant event that we are not privy to. The particular framing of this shot – aimed at the inside of the front door – immediately implicates the viewer in this event. The viewer, as the invading outsider, is ‘framed’ for an unidentified crime from the opening shot, as the camera is initially sealed inside the apartment. This framing makes it immediately clear that the viewer is inextricably bound up in the play of relations that exist prior to our arrival. Here, the interplay of complicity and intimacy becomes evident: for

Haneke, the act of viewing is always an act of violation, and we never adopt the role of viewer innocently. In Amour, our necessary implication in the film violates not only the physical domestic space of the diegesis, but also the relationship between the characters and, more abstractly, the moral dilemma that plays out in the film. Our violation of these spaces produces the film’s drama.

In a literal sense, Haneke frequently addresses the theme of home invasion. In films such as The Piano Teacher and Funny Games, this invasion is perpetrated by one or two individuals, violently interrupting and corrupting the domestic space.

David Sorfa justifies the prominence of home invasion narratives in Haneke’s films, particularly Benny’s Video (1992) and The Piano Teacher, as a way of ‘mak[ing] sense of the category of home’ (2006, 99). The figure of the other must exist in order to make sense of this category. ‘While this is a necessity,’ Sorfa continues, ‘this points to an instability within the concept of the home, which pretends to require only itself, but, in fact relies on the existence of other, always perceived as threat, for its own existence’ (99). This unstable position is established by a series of static long takes in empty rooms occurring the night of Anne’s first attack: the apartment’s entrance hall, the bedroom, the lounge room, the dining room and finally the kitchen.

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These shots are decontextualised and devoid of characters and offer a rare, seemingly taboo glimpse into a moment between diegetic action. This moment further invites us to recall Anne’s earlier comment after the discovery of the break in: ‘Imagine if we’re in bed and someone bursts in.’ The camera performs the fear that has already been stated.

The viewer’s position as outsider is further confirmed by the framing of at least two particular shots early in the film that deny the viewer access to the central element of the shot’s action. Immediately after Anne’s comment about burglary, she walks into the bathroom (offscreen) and Georges is framed by the doorway in the hall facing her. This framing is almost exactly repeated a few minutes later (albeit more closely framed) when Georges walks into the kitchen after Anne’s first attack. In both instances, the viewer is denied access to one side of the conversation. As such, the framing of these shots invite the viewer to question their enforced distanced standpoint; we occupy the position of the ‘other.’ In this sense, the viewer is positioned as an outsider who is never truly at home in the space of the couple’s apartment. Further, this position is primarily the catalyst for almost-always-distanced standpoint adopted by the camera throughout the film.

Amour attempts to reverse the inherent distancing effects of the long take by, at least in part, working against the explicit denial of sight present in Caché. In the scene with the nurse described earlier, as well as many other similar scenes of indignity, the viewer is not only invited into an intimate moment, but also invited to perform a surveillance of others’ guilt. These two roles, again, confirm the balance of intimacy and distance. Significantly, this scene is denied from Georges, placing us in an apparently superior position. Grundmann argues that we are offered two contrasting perspectives of Anne: this scene partially occupies the first (that of the

22 Melanie Robson outsider) and it ‘defines Anne as a deformed spectacle of suffering.’ The second perception, Grundmann argues, ‘develops in the course of the film and…rejects all that the first image is about and instead, one might say, it focuses on the beauty of her humanity’ (2012, para. 10). Despite these dual, developing perspectives offered, the film is no more transparent than Caché about the solution to the character’s moral dilemma. It can be assumed that the inclusion of such scenes is to force the viewer to bear witness to the indignities done to the vulnerable Anne by both the nurses and her daughter; but the inevitable cut at the beginning and end of the shot decontextualise the scene: the viewer is made aware that, despite what we witness in the duration of the long take, we are always being denied view of something vital. The enclosed space of this scene, and the camera’s distance from Anne and the nurse, also evidences the viewer as being positioned as an invading outsider.

Here, we return to the matter of spectatorial intimacy/complicity: the two faces of Haneke’s cinema. Through re-examining the euthanasia scene described at the beginning of this article, it becomes clearer how the viewer’s implication in the guilt is transmitted to the viewer via the placement of the camera and the length of the shots. In Thomas E. Wartenberg’s (2013) ‘Not Time’s Fool,’ he discusses the morality of the act of euthanasia and, in particular, the choice of suffocation as the means of death. Wartenberg attributes this choice to Haneke wanting the viewer to be shocked by what Georges does and to avoid allowing him to take the easy way out.

Conversely, Grundmann proposes a more sinister motive on Georges’s part: ‘Even when fueled by radical compassion and even in the arena of romantic love

[euthanasia] is never completely altruistic. Indeed…it emerges as something that can rather be described as selfishness incarnate’ (2012, para. 2).

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The analysis of the viewer’s complicity undertaken throughout this article reveals that Georges’s motivation is not so clear-cut. In this scene the length of time and the stasis of the shot capture Anne’s necessarily lengthy death. The viewer is exposed to the transition between story-telling and suffocation and, subsequently, the uncomfortable image of Anne resisting and then becoming still. The moments of mundanity before Anne’s death, and silence afterwards, implicate the viewer in

Georges’s actions. Our sense of violation of the couple’s interaction is made palpable by the unrelenting long take, yet we remain distanced by the scene’s ethical incomprehensibility. Once again, the viewer is positioned to survey both their own and Georges’s guilt. Rather than being a selfish act, therefore, the formal construction of this scene shows that Georges has to struggle to kill his wife using this particular method, forcing him to share the pain with both his wife and the viewer. At this point, the film’s moral dilemma becomes even clearer: Georges’s options throughout the film are all inflected with struggle, including the care of his wife and her death, forcing us to question if his motive for killing her (which we may assume to be selfish) is actually to preserve her dignity or remove her pain. The viewer can only make this revelation because of the privileged position we occupy in the scene and, more broadly, throughout the film.

By examining Amour through the lens of viewer complicity, this article has shown specifically how Haneke communicates feelings of guilt and moral ambiguity through form. Through shot duration and camera angles, he finds the perfect balance between revealing and concealing, such that the viewer is both violating an often inaccessible cinematic space but also forced to question their role in the characters’ drama. This process affirms the viewer’s complicity. Despite thematic changes, this analysis reveals that Haneke’s method has not changed throughout his career. From

24 Melanie Robson depictions of explicit violence (Benny’s Video; Funny Games) to end-of-life decisions

(Amour), his approach to implicating his viewer remains consistent; in each of his films, it is not the depictions of violence that we are confronted with, but rather the revelation of our own violation of the cinematic space.

Notes

1. I use this term to mean dead time, or ‘the time preceding or following action’ (Kovács 2008, 128). 2. Rosinski (2015) also explores the ethical dimension of Amour, but through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy, focusing on the bodily presence and decay of Anne throughout the film. 3. These names vary slightly between films – Georges/George/Georg, Anna/Anne/Ann, for example.

References

Amour. 2012. Produced by Margaret Ménégoz. Paris, France: Les Films du Losange. DVD. Aston, James. 2010. “The (Un) spectacle of the real: Forwarding an active spectator in Michael Haneke’s Le temps du loup/Time of the Wolf (2003).” Studies in European Cinema 7 (2): 109-122. doi:10.1386/seci.7.2.109 1 Bazin, Andre. [1972] 2005. “Umberto D.: A Great Work.” In What is Cinema? Vol. 2, edited by Hugh Gray, 79-82. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benny’s Video. 1992. Produced by Veit Heiduschka. Freienstein, Switzerland: Lang Film. DVD. Bordwell, David. 1997. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 2005. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge. Caché. 2005. Produced by Veit Heiduschka. Paris, France: Les Films du Losange. DVD. Calhoun, Dave. 2012. “Michael Haneke: interview.” Time Out London. http://www.timeout.com/london/film/michael-haneke-interview-3.

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Foundas, Scott. 2012. “Michael Haneke on Amour: ‘When I Watched it with the Audience, They Gasped!’.” Village Voice, 20 December. Frey, Mattias. 2010. “The Message and The Medium: Haneke's Film Theory and Digital Praxis.” In On Michael Haneke, edited by Brian Price and John David Rhodes, 153-166. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University. Grundmann, Roy. 2012. “Love, Death, Truth - Amour.” Senses of Cinema, no. 65. http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/love-death-truth-amour/ Kovács, András Bálint. 2008. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950- 1980. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. Landwehr, Margarete Johanna. 2011. “Voyeurism, Violence, and the Power of the Media: The Reader’s/Spectator’s Complicity in Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher and Haneke’s La Pianiste, Caché, The White Ribbon.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 8 (2),117-132. Rosinski, Milosz Paul. 2015. “Touching Nancy’s ethics: death in Michael Haneke’s Amour.” Studies in French Cinema 15 (2): 180-196. Rhodes, John David. 2010. “The Spectacle of Skepticism: Haneke's Long Takes.” In On Michael Haneke, edited by Brian Price and John David Rhodes, 87-104. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University. Sharrett, Christopher. 2003. “The World That Is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke.” Cineaste 28 (3): 28-31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41689604 Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011. “A Post-Humanist Moralist.” Angelaki 16 (4): 115-129. doi:10.1080/ 0969725X.2011.641350 Sorfa, David. 2006. “Uneasy domesticity in the films of Michael Haneke.” Studies in European Cinema 3 (2): 93-104. doi:10.1386/seci.3.2.93/1 Stewart, Garrett. 2013. “Haneke's Endgame.” Film Quarterly 67 (1): 14-21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2013.67.1.14 The Piano Teacher. 2001. Produced by Veit Heiduschka. Paris, France: Mk2 Productions. DVD. The White Ribbon. 2009. Produced by Stefan Arndt. Vienna, Austria: Wega Film. DVD. Umberto D. 1952. Produced by Angelo Rizzoli. Rome, Italy: Rizzoli Films. DVD. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2013. “‘Not Time’s Fool’: Marriage as an Ethical Relationship in Michael Haneke’s Amour.” Paper presented at the Cinematic Thinking Workshop: Cinema and/as Ethics, UNSW, Sydney, December 9-11. Wheatley, Catherine. 2009. Michael Haneke's Cinema: The Ethic of the Image. New York: Berghahn Books. Wolfers, Justin. 2014. “A masterpiece you might not want to see: The ethics of devastating cinema.” Kill Your Darlings 17: 157-166.

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