[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a House feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

Ed Howard: It isn't very fashionable to be a moralist in art these days. Films that deal with moral issues in a direct way are often tagged, rightly or not, as preachy and didactic. So in a way Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke is an anomaly, a director who unapologetically has a definite moral agenda that he's been exploring for over 20 years now, closer to 40 if one considers the TV work he made in the '70s and '80s before embarking on his feature film career in 1989. Not that Haneke himself would probably consider himself a moralist—he's consistently said that he wants his films to ask questions but not necessarily answer them—but whether his films are polemical or simply explore these issues in more ambiguous ways, there is a undoubtedly a core of forceful moral ideas about politics, media, and human relationships that runs through his entire oeuvre.

In this conversation, we'll be discussing most of Haneke's feature films, from his early "glaciation trilogy" (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), made in his native Austria, to his brutal thriller deconstruction Funny Games, to the films he's made in France (Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché) and his return to Austria for the harrowing parable The White Ribbon. It's a consistently provocative and challenging body of work, and consistently bleak as well, something that's only reenforced by revisiting all of the director's films in a condensed period of time. But what's not often acknowledged is the thread of hope that also runs through much of Haneke's work, because being a moralist means not only documenting the evils of the world but presenting at least a slim hopefulness that the conditions depicted in these films are not permanent. Continue Reading »