When it comes to filmmakers, we often assume that they’re keeping up to date on the latest releases and constantly watching films. However, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke doesn’t seem to find the time to keep up with things so closely these days. What with creating award-winning films that touch on the full capacity of humanity and teaching at the Film Academy Vienna. Yet, there’s still one director he makes time for and has been blown away by.
Speaking with Roger Ebert, Haneke discussed his earlier love and dedication to watching movies, stating: “When I began to make films, or when I began to think I wanted to make films, then I saw any number of the films. I’d go to the movies three times a day, and I was very influenced or impressed by the great filmmakers such as Bresson and Tarkovsky.” However, the filmmaker currently does more teaching than watching new films, stating that most of his current film-watching happens with his students.
However, he does go on to explain that the films that have most inspired him recently are those of “the so-called ‘third world’” which show him situations, characters and storytelling that are missing from cinema and filmmaking in the Western world. He declines to mention many of these as “inevitably [he] forgets some, and they feel insulted or offended”, but the one that truly stuck in his mind is Ashgar Farhadi.
Farhadi is one of the most critically acclaimed directors to come from Iran, frequently making movies about the country and both its political and interpersonal complexities. He won the ‘Best International Feature Film’ at both the 2011 and 2016. The first was for his drama A Separation, which focuses on a middle-class Iranian family who separates and the disappointment and conflicts that arise from their children and parents.
The second was for his Iranian-French movie The Salesman, which also follows a married couple who are struggling to hold their relationship together while they star in an adaptation of Arthur Millar’s The Death of a Salesman.
Speaking of Farhadi, Haneke says, “I’m thinking of filmmakers like [Asghar] Farhadi from Iran; he presents films that I don’t find anywhere else.” This is true; Farhadi’s films have been so influential in bringing a view of Iran to the rest of the world that he even received a Legion of Honour from France. So it’s unsurprising that award-winning and culturally influential Michael was blown away by his work.
In fact, Farhadi was compared to the German visionary by Peter Bradshaw after releasing his film About Elly. After all, Haneke’s works, such as his early Glaciation Trilogy, The White Ribbon and Amour, explore similar themes of alienation, group guilt and family dynamics. So it makes plenty of sense then that Haneke would find something worth watching in Farhadi, especially given his desire to be presented with something outside his own realm of experience. And that’s where many cinephiles and perhaps filmmakers fall short themselves, as they are only ever searching for cinema that speaks to their exact experience, leaving them to grow bored and stuck with the genre.