Michael Haneke’s work and the ‘Oddly Enough’ news from Reuters.com: two different mediums, two different agendas, but both a comment on everyday life and our relation with the media, the power of the facts and a glimpse of how things are told to us.

Michael Haneke’s films are powerful, leaving you with mixed feelings of beauty, horror, disappointment. He leaves you to distill those feelings on your own, without guiding you and telling you what to think, challenging you with a presentation of socio-political issues that forces you to create your own point of view. This open-endedness could explain why some people don’t like Haneke’s work. The films aren’t easy, and watching them is not the most relaxing experience. But he’s not trying to show us beauty. Any attempt to do so would, for him, result in a lie (he famously dismissed feature films as “twenty-four lies per second"). So, to show beauty, he avoids showing it explicitly, and leaves it for us to find.

This feeling of not being guided by a writer's emotion can also be seen in the ‘Oddly Enough’ news from Reuters, where the borders between the mundane and the surreal blur into the extraordinary and become something that is, for me, inspirational. The reports are of seemingly trivial events, but ones that could shatter a person’s life, like in Haneke’s movies – a single, often insignificant, fact that can disrupt someone’s previously complacent existence, sometimes forever… sometimes without a possibility of return.

In an interview with Serge Toubiana, Haneke was asked why Art makes us happy: "It is difficult to answer simply, at a time where God in people’s mind isn’t as strong as it used to be, Art is a desire to a better world, you can provoke it without showing it, if you show it, show your vision of the paradise, it becomes banal." Haneke’s films are a revolt, an expression against the fake, a riot of provocative visual alternatives and mind games that challenge the easily consumable conclusions spoon-fed to us in mainstream movies.

Avoiding clichés is an act of self-consciousness that forces us to be inspired instead by the forgotten and supposedly insignificant things around us… things that can be so inspiring in themselves because the focus shifts away from the source.

Oddly Enough news on Reuters.com
About Michael Haneke

Below, some of the Oddly Enough articles published to accompany the text.