![]() It's shot like a Todd Gaines review: short segments punctuated by cuts to black. Like a prototype for Code Unknown, 71 Fragments follows a series of characters and story lines which only very rarely have anything directly to do with one another. I wanted a masterpiece, but what I get was merely exceptional. I could see what he was going for and admire his efforts at thematic filmmaking, but it wasn't as interesting or entertaining as I had hoped. While I've never disliked one of his films, I also haven't fallen deeply in love with any of them, and that trend continued with my screening of 71 Fragments. (Chance probably has nothing to do with these developments.) He's still puzzling over the important questions - how do we live and why - but his outrage no longer feels quite as punitive, perhaps because he has come to realize that his wagging finger is not an arrow but a pendulum.I've been striking out recently with traditional narrative cinema, so with a little inspiration from fellow Letterboxd users I decided to return to a director who's nothing if not unconventional: Michael Haneke. Haneke has in recent years mellowed his tone and adapted a more classical approach to narrative, adding French money and stars along the way. Haneke has emerged as an important force in world cinema in the last decade, principally on the strength of powerful provocations like "Code Unknown," "The Piano Teacher" and "Caché." These later, rather more accessible films are very much of an intellectual piece with his earlier work, but Mr. For those who miss the point: a young man mechanically hits Ping-Pong balls spitting out of a machine, again and again, testing his will or maybe his sanity as well as the viewer's patience.īorn in Germany and educated in Austria, Mr. ![]() A homeless Romanian boy eats garbage, then watches a woman play ball in a park with children and a dog that looks considerably better fed (and loved) than he does. An old man visits his daughter, a teller in a bank, only to be coolly rebuffed as if he were just another bothersome customer. In one home, a woman and man struggle with their newborn elsewhere, a childless couple struggle with a new foster daughter. In "71 Fragments," the former Yugoslavia smolders between snippets of jet-black film and scenes from everyday Viennese life. We slurp our soup while Sarajevo burns on the boob tube. Haneke, the point seems less that evil is commonplace than that we don't engage with it as thinking, actively moral beings. Briefly put, "71 Fragments" is, like other Haneke films, a moral and philosophical meditation on the banality of evil and our nominal complicity, inside the movie theater and out, in a world in which a television news report on Michael Jackson is squeezed between horrors from Bosnia and Somalia. Haneke has self-consciously referred to as his "glaciation" trilogy, which began with his first feature, "The Seventh Continent" (1989), and continued with one of his most controversial works, "Benny's Video" (1992). "71 Fragments" is the final installment in what Mr. Haneke, one of the great if occasionally more maddening voices in contemporary cinema. The film, which was never released in America, opens this week at Anthology Film Archives as part of a retrospective dedicated to Mr. Consider the word chance in the title of Michael Haneke's 1994 feature "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance." An icy-cool study of violence both mediated and horribly real, the film follows a handful of seemingly unrelated characters all of whom - perhaps by chance, perhaps by divine intervention, though mostly through artistic contrivance - have the grave misfortune to be in an Austrian bank when a 19-year-old student starts randomly if purposefully unloading his revolver.
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