Benny's Video (Michael Haneke, 1992)

Benny's Video

Directed by: Michael Haneke

Year: 1992

Language: German,English,Arabic, French

Subtitles: English, French





File Size (in bytes) ..: 734,023,680 bytes

Runtime (# of frames) .: 01:45:11 (157776 frames)



Video Codec ...........: XviD

Frame Size ............: 608x352 ()[=] [=1.727]

FPS ...................: 25.000

Video Bitrate .........: 827 kb/s

Bits per Pixel ........: 0.155 bpp

B-VOP, N-VOP, QPel, GMC ......:[B-VOP]...[]...[]...[]



Audio Codec ...........: 0x0055(MP3, ISO) MPEG-1 Layer 3

Sample Rate ...........: 48000 Hz

Audio bitrate .........: 94 kb/s [1 channel(s)]VBR audio

Interleave ............: 40 ms

No. of audio streams ..: 1



For his second feature film Benny?s Video, Michael Haneke?s focus remained on his pet subject of alienated individuals who react against the moral laws and commonly accepted norms of social behaviour. But whereas the nature of the Schober?s societal malaise in The Seventh Continent is left undefined without apportioning blame, there is little ambiguity at all about the root of Benny?s problems.



Benny (Arno Frisch) is an only child, a bright and intelligent teenager ? he makes a lot of money for a pyramid scheme he has started in school ? given a great deal of freedom by his parents, but little real parental care or supervision. He has a room to himself, a television, video cameras and is generally left to his own devices, listening to heavy rock music and free to watch whatever he chooses from the video rental store. His choice of video is usually horror films filled with gore and graphic violence. One day he meets a young girl of his own age outside the video store and brings her back home and shows her some of the films he watches, including a video clip of the slaughter of a pig on a farm that he has filmed himself. He shows the girl the bolt-gun used to kill the animal, which he has taken from the farm and kept hidden in the room, but while playing around with the tool, something terrible happens.



With Benny?s Video, Michael Haneke again steps into dangerous and controversial subject matter, the very first scene of the film itself showing quite graphically the matter of fact slaughter of a farm animal. As ever, his approach to the rest of the film is similarly documentary-like, apparently distancing himself from making any overt commentary or statement, but the implication is nonetheless quite clear. Children are influenced and increasingly desensitised by the pervasive violence that they see on television. Haneke might disingenuously protest that it is the viewer of the film that makes this connection too simplistically, but the directorial choices of what is shown are full of intent, contrasting Benny?s listening to Heavy Metal music and his choice of horror videos with the young girl?s enjoyment of Roger Rabbit cartoons, effectively saying that this preponderance of violent imagery on our TV screen is killing youthful innocence. It is also significant that the film?s central and most disturbing scene of violence is seen entirely from the perspective of a video monitor.



Haneke attempts to blur the issue of screen violence by including violent television footage of the Bosnian war and news reports on football hooliganism, which he no doubt includes to counter the rather simplistic link between the video nasties Benny watches and the everyday violence in the world. He also brings into question the responsibility of the parents for their son?s actions and questions whether it is even possible to protect children from witnessing such scenes in our current society. This abdication of responsibility on the part of the parents and as a societal problem is mirrored in the pyramid scheme, probably the coldest, most greed-driven manner of making money with no sense of social conscience. The single most significant image of violence however is the home video Benny has made himself ? footage of the slaughter of a pig he made while staying at a farm with his parents. This video clip is watched repeatedly by the boy, rewound and replayed in slow motion. But the connection drawn between screen violence and real-life copy-cat behaviour is too obvious and simplistic, and it contains none of the menace of inexplicably disturbing scenes of the Schobers watching Jennifer Rush and Meat Loaf on television in The Seventh Continent.



There are some interesting issues approached here however, principally the fascination of the filmed image and how it can take on a greater power than reality itself. Benny is shown clearly as being able to relate emotionally more to images on a screen than the real world ? the blinds on the windows of his room are permanently pulled down, leaving a video image showing a ?live? view of the street outside on his video monitor. The film is also notable for the border of controversy that the director is obviously skirting himself in showing these images in his film, making the viewer complicit and forcing themselves to examine their own reactions to what they are watching. It is perhaps to avoid such accusations of using exploitative and controversial imagery that Haneke?s tone here (much like his approach to Code Unknown) is rather didactic and hectoring, having little of the sublime power of decontextualised imagery in his more successful films like The Seventh Continent and The Piano Teacher. Regardless of how successful you regard Haneke?s treatment of his subject matter, there is no doubt that he is a master of formal technique, and Benny?s Video has that same bleak, stripped-down dullness of look and tone that maintains that oppressive tension and sense of foreboding.



Special thanks to Rentboy from Karagarga for the (excellent) English subs!





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