Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Funny Games
1997 · Michael Haneke · Funny Games on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at what the two young men are wearing when they arrive. (setting)
Pristine white polo shirts, tennis whites, white gloves. Haneke dresses them in the same class markers as the family they visit. Nothing about them is dirty, marked, or coded as an outsider.
Payoff: The genre usually makes the threat visibly other. Here it arrives with better manners than you have, which removes the distance you would normally keep.
Notice how seldom the camera moves during a whole scene. (camera)
Jürges shoots frontal, often symmetrical, evenly lit, and lets takes run. There is no creeping push toward a threat, no cut to relieve you. Scenes continue after the point where a thriller would move on.
Payoff: Without the usual camera work steering your pulse, you are left watching a room rather than being driven through one. In the reading: temps mort (dead-time). Duration the plot does not need is what the reading calls dead time, the everyday simply held until you feel the length of it.
Listen for music and notice how long you go without any. (sound)
There is essentially no score. You get the hum of the house, the lake, a car, a television. The one place music erupts is loud and abrasive and belongs to no one in the family.
Payoff: Music is how thrillers tell you what to feel. Stripped of it, you have to decide on your own what you are watching.
Notice that neither young man ever raises his voice. (performance)
Frisch and Giering play politeness, boredom, small courtesies. No psychology is offered, and the explanations one of them gives for himself contradict each other. Lothar and Mühe answer with exhausted, entirely ordinary fear.
Payoff: Refusing the killers a motive removes the comfort of understanding, which is usually how an audience makes cruelty safe.
Watch where the camera points while something terrible is happening. (staging)
Haneke puts the worst of it outside the frame or at its edge, and films the room, the doorway, the faces nearby instead. The event is never available to look at directly.
Payoff: What you supply from your own head is what the film is really about, and it makes your appetite the subject. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. Violence placed where you cannot locate it is what the reading calls the absolute out-of-field, a beyond that cannot be enjoyed.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what Haneke keeps out of the frame. Your own imagination fills it in, and that filling in is the film's subject.