24 Realities
Per Second
by Nina Kusturica and Eva Testor, Directors
The Cinema Guild, New York, 2005
DVD, 58 mins., color
Sales, $39.95
Distributors website: http://www.cinemaguild.com/.
Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg
andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com
"
film is 24 lies per second at the
service of truth, or at the service of
the attempt to find truth." Michael Haneke
Nina Kusturica and Eva Testor followed
the Austrian film director, Michael Haneke,
for more than two years to make this portrait
of him. It is not so much a documentary
as a record of a series of incidents in
the life of a European auteur.
Dressed in the customary black uniform
of the intellectual, Haneke attends press
conferences, debates the meaning of various
incidents in his films with festival audiences,
endures having his portrait taken by a
photographer who wants to erase all the
details of the hotel room they are in
and recommends that they use his studio
next time, scouts locations, immerses
himself in the minutiae and tedium of
film-making and describes his development
as a film maker while journeying across
Europe. All the ego, glamour and boredom
of the successful art house film director
are shown.
Directors Kusturica and Testor seem to
have absorbed and replicated Haneke's
own great themes of the uncertain position
of the spectator, of the constant questioning
of what is seen and of the role technology
plays in hiding and constructing our world.
The incidents in Haneke's life are not
drawn together into a whole; the film
questions the nature of film and what
is depicted and so constantly undermines
itself. It shows us some aspects of a
professional's life, an artist's life,
but it leaves us unsure of their significance.
Here, the directors seem to say, is some
film of various events in the life of
a film director who questions the truth
of film, we have turned his methodology
back on himself; Haneke makes fictions
which search for truths and we have made
an essay about him which questions such
a distinction.