Michael Haneke: Trilogy
Benny's Video
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Synopsis
One of contemporary cinema’s most original, provocative, and uncompromising filmmakers, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke dares viewers to stare into the void of modern existence. With his first three theatrical features, The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance—a trilogy depicting a coldly bureaucratic society in which genuine human relationships have been supplanted by a deep-seated collective malaise—Haneke established the rigorous visual style and unsettling themes that would recur throughout his work. Exploring the relationships among consumerism, violence, mass media, and contemporary alienation, these brilliant, relentlessly probing films open up profound questions about the world in which we live while refusing the false comfort of easy answers.
Picture 7/10
The second dual-layer Blu-ray disc in Criterion’s recent box set Michael Haneke: Trilogy presents the filmmaker’s second theatrical feature, Benny’s Video. It is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1 with a 1080p/24hz high-definition encode. The high-def master comes from a scan of the 35mm original negative.
The presentation, like the other films in the set, is sourced from a dated master that ultimately hinders the end results a little bit. Minor shimmering pops up in tighter patterns and grain can have a bit of a buzzy, digital look, all of which are artifacts that I would say are more-or-less expected with dated digital masters. Yet even if I was expecting them, I was happy to see that they are, in the end, minor nuisances that rarely draw attention to themselves. Criterion’s encode appears to be pretty strong and this manages to keep the master’s baked-in artifacts baked at bay, and thanks to that, there is still a solid if imperfect film-like consistency to the image. Details are still rendered cleanly, and the end presentation still looks significantly sharper when compared to what Kino’s DVDs offered.
It also looks like some further restoration work has been done and I don’t recall any significant blemishes ever popping up. Colors also look great despite being limited to mostly blues and grays, while black levels manage to come off deep and inky. That said, range in the shadows is still limited and the finer details do get lost in them, limiting depth.
All around it’s not perfect but it more than gets the job done.
Michael Haneke: Trilogy - Screen Captures
Audio 7/10
The film comes with a lossless single-channel PCM soundtrack. Similar to the other films in the set the soundtrack isn’t overly showy and generally quiet in nature. It does have a handful of standout moments, though, and dynamic range ends up being surprisingly wide during these moments. A scene featuring screams sticks out in particular.
Extras 6/10
As with the previous disc the supplements begin with a 2005 interview featuring director Michael Haneke discussing the film. Here the filmmaker explains the cold look in the trilogy and his reasoning behind a number of his choices, like how he shows one key sequence through a television screen in order to amplify the artificiality of what the viewer is seeing. He also gets into the influence behind the film, which sounds to have been built around one line spoken by the film’s title character, which itself was taken from an article he read. I’m avoiding spoilers but I don’t feel it spoils anything by saying Haneke saw the statement as one being made by someone “not connected to reality.” Haneke again is incredibly forthcoming about his work, and he also gets a bit more into the connecting details of the three films in this set. It runs a very breezy 21-minutes.
Criterion then includes a 24-minute interview with actor Arno Frisch, more than likely coming from the same session footage that went into his interview found on Criterion’s edition of Funny Games. This discussion of course ends up focusing on Benny’s Video, the actor talking a bit more about the casting process here before getting into the production and the moments that stick out to him (the film’s key sequence sticks out in his memory due to the other actor’s performance). He then goes over his character and how he viewed his relationship with his parents. It’s another wonderfully in-depth discussion with the actor providing some terrific insights.
The disc also features a 14-minute program around the film’s deleted scenes, Haneke talking about the sequences at a digital editing suite. Most of the excised footage comes from the film’s final section taking place in Egypt, primarily the “home video” footage shot by Benny and his mother. There was also a whole sequence around a solar eclipse that was ultimately cut out, even though they went to the trouble of creating the central eclipse in a studio. Haneke explains the reasoning for cutting the material out, though it seems to essentially come down to it taking up too much time.
Finally, similar to the other titles, this disc closes with the film’s original trailer.
Yet again there isn’t much but it’s at least all worth going through, and I did like how the program around the deleted footage was set-up.
Closing
The presentation comes out looking solid enough but is again limited by the source master. The supplements, which end up focusing on the film itself in comparison to the other discs in the set, also provide excellent insight.
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