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Michael Haneke’s third feature
film, 71 Fragments Of A Chronology of Chance expands on the
claustrophobically enclosed subject matter of his earlier films, The
Seventh Continent (1989) and Benny’s Video (1992), which looked at
various problems in society from the viewpoint of the middle-class
family. The focus remains on those disenchanted by bourgeois
morality, hypocrisy and the absurdities of modern society, but the
scope here is extended to examine this point of view from a
fractured cross-section of different viewpoints, all of them united
by a moment of shocking and senseless violence.
That moment of violence – and it’s almost a given in any Michael
Haneke film – is a fictional recounting of the killing of three
people in a bank on December 23rd 1993 by a 19 year-old student, who
subsequently shoots himself in the head. This information is
presented to the viewer in the opening screen of the film and the 71
fragmentary scenes that follow show a number of seemingly
unconnected people and events over five separate days from the 12th
October to up to the events of December 23rd, where their paths
intersect.
The people who come into view over the course of the film are from a
variety of backgrounds and ages. One is a young Romanian immigrant
who has smuggled himself illegally into Austria, where he finds
himself trying to survive on the streets of Vienna. We see a
childless married couple and their attempts to adopt or foster a
child. We also see an old man who lives alone and witness his
relationship with his daughter who works in a bank. One of the
threads follows the banal, everyday routine of the security man who
transports money between banks and his drab existence with his wife.
More relevant to the events we know take place at the end of the
film, we see a young man break-in to an army barracks and rob the
armoury and we also follow the progress of the young 19 year old
student, a table tennis player who is increasingly agitated by
events around him, who through an intermediary buys one of the
stolen guns.
Like Haneke’s later film, Code Unknown - which is more or less a
remake of this film, tackling similar themes using the same
techniques – each of the scenes in 71 Fragments Of A Chronology of
Chance is isolated and presented out of context, separated by black
screens and seeming to have no relationship or even narrative flow
in each of the threads. Some scenes appear meaningful while others
seem random and irrelevant – such as a three-minute single take of
the young student relentlessly returning the serve of a machine that
automatically fires out table tennis balls, or a static nine-minute
shot of the old man carrying out an insignificant one-way
conversation with his daughter over the telephone. Other scenes,
also like Code Unknown, show random scenes of sudden unexpected
violence – a minor outburst of anger or an off-screen suicide.
Through this technique Haneke tries to reflect the rhythms of
everyday life, which does not conform to easy identifiable narrative
threads that operate to clear cause and effect. Any one of these
events could be significant in the understanding of subsequent
actions, or they could have no bearing on them at all. When it comes
to understanding the motivations of individuals, Haneke believes
that it is impossible or at least misleading to present characters
as readable, easily defined machines who react a certain way under
certain stimuli – their reactions can often be complex and
contradictory. Like Haneke’s two previous feature films this is a
deliberate technique that is designed to present events impassively
and leave the viewer room to make their own decisions, but here
through a number of random and not so random scenes he takes the
technique much further and would refine it further still with Code
Unknown being completely made up of single-take scenes, the director
refusing to even allow editing and montage to impinge on his
cinematic model of reality.
How successful this technique is in 71 Fragments Of A Chronology of
Chance is consequently heavily dependent on how much significance
the viewer is willing to impart to each scene. The unedited shot of
the young man playing table-tennis for example could be read in many
ways – reflecting the monotony of the routine of his life, his
mechanical response to stimulus, a working-out of his frustration or
anger, or any number of interpretations, all of which could be
psychologically meaningful in any attempt to understand his later
actions in the bank. On the other hand, taken at face value, it is
one long, boring, meaningless scene. The same criteria could be
applied to each scene in the film or to the film as a whole and, by
the director’s own admission, either view could be valid.
Yet there are clearly strong points made, such as the hypocrisy of a
society that will look favourably on a young Romanian orphan simply
because a television station has taken up his cause, yet not apply
the same charity to other, grown-up illegal immigrants. And, like
Haneke’s two earlier films, TV is clearly singled out for heavy
criticism, each of the five days shown in the film starting with a
news bulletin of the days’ significant world events – from the war
in Bosnia, to the violence in Northern Ireland and the long-running
saga of Michael Jackson. The events of 23rd of December
significantly features a bulletin at the start and the end of the
day, into which the totality and complexity of the lives lost in the
bank killing slips like just one other event to be momentarily
puzzled over and then forgotten about.
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DVD
This edition of 71 Fragments Of A Chronology of Chance is
released in France by G.C.T.H.V. It is currently only available as
part of the 3 Films de Michael Haneke boxset which contains the
directors early Austrian films The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video
and 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance. A slipcased boxset, each
of the DVDs is held in an individual thinpak case. The films are
each presented on a dual-layer disc in PAL format and encoded for
Region 2. None of the films or extra features contain English
subtitles.
I’m not aware of the film’s original aspect ratio, but it is
probably safe to say that it wasn’t the 1.78:1 ratio presented
anamoprhically here. How much the film is cropped is unknown, but it
doesn’t seem to affect the compositions significantly. The quality
of the print itself, newly transferred for this DVD release, is
reasonably good, showing little in the way of marks or scratches,
and is clear and sharp throughout. Again the tone is rather dull,
but that is intentional, and the transfer in the main copes well
with this. There is no sign of any macro-blocking or digital
artefacts in the transfer, which is stable throughout. The original
soundtrack is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono is relatively
clear. The film is in German with only optional French subtitles
provided.
The only extra feature is Serge Toubiana’s Interview with Michael
Haneke (23:28), which in addition to discussing specific issues on
71 Fragments Of A Chronology of Chance, looks at the trilogy as a
whole. Haneke sees the films as being about the issues in society
that interested him, subjects that are often talked about every day,
but never directly confronted. This is reflected in this particular
film’s technique – we don’t see the whole story and of what we do
see we understand less. He sees communication, or more accurately,
non-communication being a major theme in each of the films. Haneke
also talks about his outlook in general, not seeing his films as
bleak as they might look on the surface. As for the actual process
of writing and filming – he finds writing mentally exhausting,
filming physically exhausting , but editing a joy and sound mixing,
where the finishing touches can be applied, the most enjoyable part
of the filmmaking process. This is a good and perhaps the most
insightful interview on the three discs.
Overall
Like all of Michael Haneke’s films, 71 Fragments Of A Chronology
of Chance makes for uneasy viewing – less this time for the sudden
explosion of senseless violence (although that does form the
centrepiece of the film) as for the distancing techniques employed
by the director to make the film conform as closely as possible to
the natural rhythms of life rather than allowing the director’s hand
to be seen in a structured, conventional plot with a simplistic
message. Occasionally, this technique can seem wilfully obscurantist
and pretentious, but like all Haneke’s films, it is daring and it
does present relevant and complex issues regarding our attitudes to
living in modern society in a thoughtful and challenging way. The
film is relatively well presented on this French DVD with good
interview material in the extra features, although questions remain
about the choice of aspect ratio. The lack of English subtitles
however, as with the other DVDs in this French Michael Haneke boxset,
will make this edition unintelligible for most UK fans of the
director.
From
DVD Times
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