71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls). Michael Haneke, 1994.
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Included in Criterion Blu-ray set #1163 Michael Haneke: Trilogy, released 2023. German language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 99 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.
Benny’s Video. Michael Haneke, 1992.
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Edition screened: Included in Criterion Blu-ray set #1163 Michael Haneke: Trilogy, released 2023. German language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 110 minutes.
Summary: Repeated video of a pig being killed.
Details:
1) The film opens with a video of a pig being led outdoors and killed with a captive bolt pistol. We then see this repeated in slow motion, both takes completed at 2:13.
2) The same video sequence of initial killing followed by slow motion killing and death, 23:00-23:54.
The point of this website is to identify scenes of animal abuse, see above. We also talk about film in general, especially how people don’t get it. And manohboy do people not get Benny’s Video. Almost any ‘review’ boils it down to Haneke warning us that young people will commit violent acts due to what they’ve learned from watching violent movies. What a noble and unique observation, except for the tiny details that the film is made by Michael “Wow this guy is smart and wow his films are violent” Haneke, and that this is not Haneke’s point.
Let’s review the plot: Teenager Benny is devoted to renting videos and learning to make his own videos. We see him rent and watch a variety of garbage popular films, the longest sequence being some ridiculous movie where a zombie has highjacked a car and is terrorizing the driver with zombie antics.
Benny’s well-to-do urban professional parents have a hobby farm la-di-da, and the young man has made a video of his father supervising the murder of the poor pig.
The teen has stolen the bolt pistol and videotapes himself killing a friend in the way the pig was killed. Then a surprise ending, The End.
So: Is Benny imitating a car-jacking zombie? Is he imitating some terrorist attack, or Charles Bronson blowtorching whatever? Or even reckless or drunk driving? No. He is imitating his parents. His parents demonstrate unprovoked murder of the innocent on video, and the young man is imitating the exact source that society says he should emulate: his successful, educated parents.
Michael Haneke: Trilogy. Michael Haneke, 1989-1994.
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Edition screened: Criterion 3-Blu-ray set #1163, released 2023. German language with English subtitles. Combined runtime of three feature films approximately 317 minutes.
Summary: The Seventh Continent and Benny’s Video include prolonged scenes of animals dying through human actions. 71 Fragments has no particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.
It always is interesting to hear Haneke discuss his work, including this “Glaciation Trilogy.” The Criterion set includes several director interviews and similar featurettes along with the films:
The Seventh Continent (1989)
Benny’s Video (1992)
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
The Seventh Continent (Der siebente Kontinent). Michael Haneke, 1989.
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Edition screened: Included in Criterion Blu-ray set #1163 Michael Haneke: Trilogy, released 2023. German language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 108 minutes.
Summary: Prolonged scenes of domestic fish dying out of water.
Details: As part of the family’s plan to demolish everything in the house, the father smashes a very large aquarium. The water and a dozen or so beautiful exotic-looking fish spill onto the debris-covered floor.
1) Focused shots of individual fish struggling on the floor, 1:25:35-1:26:18.
2) After a short interlude of the daughter’s upset, focused shots of the fish gasping as they expire, 1:27:36-1:28:18.
All Women Are Bad. Larry Crane, 1969.
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Edition screened: Something Weird DVD-R, released 2006. English language. Runtime approximately 67 minutes.
Summary: No animals or references to animals in the film.
I know there is a competition to use the word sexploitation as much as possible, but that glib adjective doesn’t help my perception of this meditative, disconcerting film. More like Kurtzploitation.
We meet our narrator, a weary door-to-door salesman working a northern New Jersey neighborhood, needing a little rest in the middle of his day. We have spent a few minutes with him, walking up and down identical cement steps without making a sale, and share his fatigue. He wanders into a wooded area and lies down for a rest - in his suit - at the edge of what appears to be a large drainage ditch. His potential nap is interrupted by an enticing noise that sends him on a lengthy rock climbing adventure to find the source. The narration, both plodding and exuberant, lets us share his unarticulated expectation to discover something life-altering, something like Sirens. Finding the unexpected source of the sound triggers his psychological descent into another reality. He returns home to discover his wife’s infidelity, motivating the parallel physical crossing into a darker world. He complies, and determines to explore seedy sexuality in The Big Apple.
The aesthetic climax of the film is an interminable docking of the Hudson River ferry as we arrive in Manhattan. We spend about eight minutes watching the ferry creep the final fifteen feet to the dock and wiggle into place while our salesman calmly confirms that the ritual is taking forever, everyone on board is anxious, it’s a precision maneuver. It is easy to superimpose two women dressed in black sitting on the dock, knitting, waiting for disembarkation.
This string of long contemplative scenes, each hypnotizing in a taxing way, probably constitute half of All Women Are Bad’s short runtime. The subsequent sexual encounters he discovers, always as voyeur rather than participant, historically were marketed as the point and purpose of the film. They alternate between mundane and unknowingly comedic, occasionally mildly upsetting. They serve primarily to demonstrate that our man has lost his mind by showing distressing transformations that exist only in his damaged imagination. I was left unconvinced that All Women Are Bad but reasonably sure that All Men Have Been Driven Insane by the disconnection they battle between the natural world and the artificial world, a struggle amplified rather than calmed by the colonialization of sexuality.
Sátántangó. Béla Tarr, 1994.
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Edition screened: Arbelos Blu-ray, released 2020. Hungarian language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 439 minutes.
Summary: Realtime death of a cat by poisoning.
The seven-hour and twenty-minute film is presented on two Blu-ray discs.
Disc 1 presents Part I (137 minutes) and Part II (125 minutes). Disc 2 presents Part III (178 minutes).
The famous 16-minute cat-killing scene takes place in Disc 1, Part II. It begins with mild inappropriate handling by the young girl at 45:00 (shaking, rough handling) then accelerates into a long scene of the girl rolling aggressively on the floor with the cat as though they are struggling. The cat actor does not dig this, growling and ears flat. The cat then is retained in a suspended net while rat poison is added to milk, which the girl makes the cat drink by forcing its mouth into the bowl. We see the cat near death, barely moving, with her head in her bowl concluding at 1:01:17. The girl lugs the dead cat around through her remaining scenes in Part II (concluding at 1:18:59). Part III begins with the girl’s funeral.
There is much discussion about whether this cruelty in fact resulted in the cat’s death or if an on-set veterinarian revived the animal off-screen at the last minute. As always, my position is that even presenting these images, these ideas, to our cruel society is reprehensible. The game of Lie Or Truth allows some people unacceptable smug justification if the depiction turns out to be a Lie. And in any case the girl carries around a clearly-dead real cat for twenty minutes.
This scene is long and excruciating but is not as upsetting or graphic as many of the murdered-pet scenes common in pop-style movies of the late 20th-century. There is no blood, no shocking closeup, no horrifying moment of discovery. The scene consists mostly of the one-sided wrestling match of the girl holding the cat roughly while rolling around on the floor. Viewers of pop movies typically take animal murder in stride, understanding it as a plot device inevitably intended to warn or threaten some straying spouse or unwanted neighbor that he or she could be next. And these scenes usually are fast: a one-second shot of a grimacing strangled cat and we're done. Béla Tarr satisfies neither of these criteria, offers no release valve. No easily summarized aspect of plot is advanced, and viewers unfamiliar with films like Sátántangó do not know that opening a can of beans or walking from one room to the next also often requires ten or twenty minutes film time.
Cat-killing scene aside, every moment of this movie is beautiful. Just skip the 16 minutes as outlined above, thus removing ethical stress and a little screening time in one fell swoop, especially if you share my interest in swoops, fell or otherwise. Why is the cat killed? Because destroying the single nice thing in her world is the only influence the depressed young girl can exert in her bleak life. It is a desperate and misguided expression of self in an oppressive environment. Feel free to skip this section of Part II and enjoy the rest of this otherwise bright and cheery film.
**Please note, if you’re watching this film as a single file instead of across two discs on the blu-ray release, then the animal cruelty commences around 2 hrs 56 mins.
After the Rehearsal (Efter repetitionen). Ingmar Bergman, 1984.
A Ghost Story. David Lowery, 2017.
The Intrusion. Zebedy Colt (as Arthur Nouveau), 1975.
A Moment of Silence at the Grave of Ed Gein. Jörg Buttgereit, 2012.
Le Trou (The Hole/The Night Watch). Jacques Becker, 1960.
Rendezvous (C’était un rendez-vous). Claude Lelouch, 1976.
My Dinner with André. Louis Malle, 1981.
Lemon. Hollis Frampton, 1969.
