Benny's Video (Michael Haneke, 2006) – DVD Review

Jan 17, 2012
Hari Navarro

Benny's Video – Michael Haneke - © WEGA FILM

Benny's Video is the second in Haneke's "glaciation trilogy", following The Seventh Continent and preceding 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.

Michael Haneke’s universe is one that is meant as a foil, it obscures and confuses perception only to then wedge its visceral horrors between its audiences teeth with stubborn vigor. It is this near force feeding of indigestible imagery and sound that now universally trademark, and set aside, this most unwavering of filmmakers.

Benny’s Video was but the second of Haneke’s feature films and in many ways set the tone for much of what was to come. Echoes of this fledgling bleak social commentary would be seen to rise again in his equally controversial 1997 home invasion opus Funny Games.

Benny’s Video – Synopsis (Spoilers Ahead)

This is a film that films itself as we witness its narrative through various forms of flickering amateur video. We are introduced to the contorted world view of 14 year old Benny (Arno Frisch pre Funny Games) in the films disturbing and definitive opening scene.

A pig stands in a yard surrounded by various people, a handheld video clicks and crackles as it captures all. A farmer approaches and places a cylindrical device to the swine’s head, a deep thud resounds and the pig recoils, slumping dead to the ground. The tape rewinds and the animal’s death throes are again witnessed, and relished. This is Benny, a young man who has etched and formed an existence totally immersed in video.

Nothing is real unless it finds itself trained into the gaze of his ever present camera. In Benny’s world life can be stalled, rewound and played again. His bedroom his sanctuary; a clutter of electronic devices, monitors, video players – anything that will extract him from the Viennese reality that flows with incessant tedium beneath his window.

Michael Haneke Again Toys With Convention

The library of his local video store provides Benny with an endless source of film, and with it the escapism he so craves. It is here that he befriends and returns home with a young girl. She is unknown to him but in many ways seems to warm to his differentness. In another film they may have become soul mates, destined to be together wrapped up nicely for heart-warming global consumption. But not here, no here Benny seeks to impress his new friend by again replaying his video of the dying pig. An act toward which she is not, as expected, repulsed.

She is instead further drawn to this strange boy who locks himself away on the brittle edge of social acceptance. The girl is intrigued as Benny continues by presenting for her perusal the exact same device as that was used to slay the pig. He places its barrel against his chest and goads her to fire. She refuses, to which he instantly labels her a coward. The barrel is then turned and pressed against the girl’s skin, Benny barely hesitates as he engages the trigger.

The scenes depicting the resulting and brutally pivotal violence are barely seen on screen. Although the audio of the girls agony more than makes up for what our eyes fail to detect. This is truly subversive and sneak under your skin stuff. It taunts as it has the slowly burning effect of initially allowing the viewer to feel cheated, confused, and even bitterly angry.

But all the while it is a film that bides its time, brilliantly pacing until finally slapping its audience with a hail of unanswered, and in many ways unanswerable, questions. It is contrived, relentlessly bleak and brutal to its very core but then with Haneke at the helm we all knew that going in.

Screen Violence

Michael Haneke seamlessly provokes and inspires his audience to dig ever deeper into the superficial, to examine that which most refuse to even acknowledge. With Benny’s Video he employs the boy’s parents to showcase just how all that we see cannot be experienced as purely white or definitively black. It is this grey area that haunts the film. It is these parents and their reaction to the slow realization of what their only son has done that competes to create even more controversy than that of Benny’s soulless violence and total lack of compassion. They take placing the safety and well-being of their son to its very extreme; at the same time throwing accepted convention straight back into the screen.

Violence and its ugliness are used by many of today’s mainstream filmmakers as full stops to meaningless sentences. Here it is a keenly executed exclamation mark, a gateway to the depth and meaning that lurks here always just beneath the skin deep.