Imke Meyer, Bryn Mawr College

Post-Empire, Post-Apocalypse? Michael Haneke’s Film Wolfzeit.

When Michael Haneke’s film Wolfzeit premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003 and subsequently was shown in select theaters and at film festivals in Europe and North America, the critics’ reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Wolfzeit, a French-German-Austrian co-production starring Isabelle Huppert and set in an unspecified European location in a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, irritated critics. Haneke’s 2001 film version of Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel Die Klavierspielerin, also filmed in French and also starring Isabelle Huppert, had been a critical and—compared to Haneke’s earlier films—a popular success. While Die Klavierspielerin certainly was no light entertainment, it was visually far less abrasive than Time of the Wolf. If critics had hoped for the kind of alienated beauty in image and sound found in Die Klavierspielerin to reappear in Wolfzeit, they were disappointed. The picture is set mostly in desolate post-apocalyptic landscapes littered with animal corpses and covered by a foggy veil that lends a grayish hue to the images. Since no artificial light sources were utilized in the filming of the movie, many of the night scenes take place in virtual darkness. The dialogue between the characters is sparse, carried on mostly in French and in some Eastern European tongues. The lavish classical music soundtrack of Die Klavierspielerin is replaced by silence or sounds of suffering humans and animals.

The cause of the post-apocalyptic state of the world is never explained, and the plot mainly consists of the characters waiting for events that could help move them out of the post-apocalyptic landscape that surrounds them. In other words, the film makes no concessions whatsoever to the generic or narrative expectations of its audience. These facts might explain the reactions of a critic who likens the film to a “verspätet existenzialistischen Provinztheaterinszenierung” (Urs Richter in filmtext). In a similar vein, Thomas Groh states in Jump Cut: “Die Spitzen, … die Drastik der Bilder, … und die so strikte wie angesichts des Stoffes auffällige Verweigerung einschlägiger Genrekonzessionen scheinen allesamt bloβ einem einzigen Zweck verpflichtet zu sein: Der Inszenierung ihres Urhebers als von sich eingenommenem Mahner zur Moral, als Erretter der Filmkunst vor dem Profanen des Genre-Einerlei. Das ist, gelinde gesagt, zu wenig.” Reactions to the film in North America were similar, and voices praising the film are few and far between.

In my paper, I want to suggest that Haneke’s film should not be understood as a failed disaster movie or a tedious attempt at self-aggrandizement by the director, but rather as a parable about the collapse of nation and empire in general and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in particular. While the post-apocalyptic landscape in which the film is set is non-specific, visual elements abound that remind the viewer of images of Eastern European villages around the turn of the last century. The post-apocalyptic, post-industrial landscape looks like the pre-industrial landscapes of a region with a rural economy. Characters speaking Eastern European languages appear on the scene and are treated condescendingly by the dominating French speakers. Absurdly, even after an apocalyptic event, the narcissism of minor national and ethnic differences leads the dominant group of French speakers to actions that marginalize the Eastern European “Others”: the apocalypse should have made visible the constructed nature of nation and empire, but even in the face of nothingness, the characters grotesquely cling to imaginary notions of nation. This behavior on the part of the characters is, of course, not capable of ending their disorientation in a post-apocalyptic world. Rather, their disorientation and nostalgia for bygone notions of nation and community are reminiscent of post-Habsburg Austria’s nostalgia for the lost empire.

In my reading of Haneke’s Wolfzeit, I will draw comparisons between the film and some of Franz Kafka’s texts, notably Die Verwandlung and Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer. Like Die Verwandlung, Haneke’s film never dwells on the question of what might have caused a radical change to “die wirklichen und selbstverständlichen Verhältnisse,” to use Kafka’s formulation. Rather, as in Die Verwandlung, the viewer is forced to accept the inexplicable presence of a radically altered and nightmarish reality. And as Kafka’s Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer, Haneke’s film radically deconstructs the notion of empire.