Michael Haneke & VALIE EXPORT on Power, Violence and Intimacy in German-Austrian Cinema

#11 Michael Haneke & VALIE EXPORT on Power, Violence and Intimacy in German-Austrian Cinema

How do you introduce two of Austria's most internationally successful filmmakers and artists to an international audience and how do you grapple with them yourself? That was our starting point for this episode, in which we take on Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (2009) and VALIE EXPORT's The Practice of Love (1985). Both films also connect to a central thread of Season IV and our research project ReFraming Masculinities: how cinema represents masculinity, here as authoritarian fatherhood and the "soldier male" in Haneke's village, and as networks of male power in EXPORT's political thriller.

At first glance, the two films could hardly be more different. Made more than twenty years apart and rooted in very different cinematic traditions, they nevertheless ask surprisingly similar questions: Who has power? How is violence produced and passed on? What happens when political and social structures enter private life, the family, the relationship, the body? And how can films so deeply rooted in a specific Austrian or German context become internationally relevant?