Ties that Bind

Michael Haneke’s award-winning film ‘The White Ribbon‘ (2009) has generated controversy about the way in which it presents emergent fascism. However, there is a vanishing point other than National Socialism that hasn’t yet engaged critics: the end of Austria-Hungary in 1918. By juxtaposing World War I and II, the director creates a stereoscopic effect — a form of flexible, encompassing memory. Furthermore, Haneke combines his analysis of authoritarian pedagogy in the film, which he borrows from the protest movement of 1968, with his typical media-specific reflections on the potential and pitfalls of cinema to work through the past. The talk will present parts of Fatima Naqvi’s book ‘Trügerische Vertrautheit: Filme von Michael Haneke‘ (‘Deceptive Familiarity: Films by Michael Haneke’), which recently appeared with Synema Verlag, Vienna.

Fatima Naqvi is Associate Professor in the German Department at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses on European film and German literature. Her research interests include Austrian authors and filmmakers of the post-1945 period, the intersection of fine art and literature, dilettantism and the theorization of interdisciplinarity. She is also the author of ‘The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe 1970-2005′, New York: Palgrave, 2007, and of How We Learn Where We Live: Thomas Bernhard, Architecture, and Bildung (2012). Fatima Naqvi is Associate Member of the ICI Berlin.