A Cool-Eyed Perspective

“Violent World & Unknown Code: A Tribute to Michael Haneke in Person,” composed of seven features virtually unknown in the U.S., unspools Friday through Sunday at the American Cinematheque.

Acutely observant and unrelenting, the Austrian filmmaker explores with a concerned detachment and a spare style the interplay of alienation, violence and obsession in the modern world, with special implications for the state of his own country. He has said the challenge for him is “not how do I show violence, but how do I show the viewer his own position in relation to violence and its portrayal?” His films do leave that viewer asking questions of himself or herself.

This is perhaps especially true of “The Piano Teacher,” Austria’s official entry for foreign-language film Oscar and winner of the Grand Prix last year at the Cannes Film Fest, which also bestowed best actress and best actor awards on its stars, Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel. As a Franco-Austrian co-production, it requires acceptance of a Vienna in which everyone speaks French, which is surely easier for Americans than Europeans.

In any event, this update of Elfriede Jelinek’s celebrated 1983 novel, which launches the series Friday at 7 p.m. in the Lloyd E. Rigler Theater at the Egyptian, casts Huppert as Erika Kohut, a formidable piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory caught in a love-hate, mutually dependent relationship with her dominating, possessive, puritanical and ultra-critical mother (Annie Girardot). The mother is clearly dismayed that her daughter, nearing 40, is teaching rather than pursuing a dazzling career as a concert pianist. Conceivably, Erika might have fulfilled her mother’s dreams had her mother not been such a monster--and were her father not on his deathbed in a mental institution.

In the classroom, Erika is a severe, demanding and confidently opinionated taskmaster. Repressed and devoid of self-esteem, Erika is sexually frustrated in the extreme, driven into porn video parlors, engaging in acts of self-mutilation and voyeurism. Into her life comes a handsome, cocky and talented young man, Walter (Magimel), eager to become her pupil and drawn to her challenging combination of a spiky intellect, an aloof manner and a beauty undimmed by her conservative look. Huppert illuminates unsparingly this woman who can experience love only as a form of debasement; in Magimel she has a co-star who matches her audacity as an actor. American audiences may find it harder than Europeans to view “The Piano Player” as a comment on the enduring fascistic tendencies in Austrian society, but it is a powerful portrait of emotional disorder lapsing into outright evil.

A post-screening discussion with Haneke will be followed by “The Seventh Continent” (1989), the first installment in a trilogy examining violence and the media. Arguably a great film, it is the kind of work that lodges so disturbingly in memory that not everyone will wish to submit to it--an observation that could apply to most of Haneke’s films. “Continent” depicts an affluent, upwardly mobile Viennese couple (Dieter Berner, Birgit Doll) with a small daughter (Leni Tanzer) who are introduced in tight, close-cropped images, to emphasize their daily routines, gradually revealing more of their lives. Haneke then takes a tack that seems to come from way out of left field and is all but unbearable to watch. Upon reflection, however, we realize that the film has proceeded with a terrible logic. Based on an actual incident, “The Seventh Continent” eschews conventional exposition in asking us to consider the systematic withering of the soul in our starkly impersonal modern existence.

“Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Seven Journeys” (2000), in its local premiere Saturday at 7:30 p.m., proves to be one of Haneke’s most satisfying films despite its deliberately elliptical style. Of its many people, its central figure is a hard-working Parisian actress, Anne (Juliette Binoche). Haneke sets his many-stranded story in motion when Anne’s young brother-in-law Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) flees his dour father’s farm. Entrusted with a key to Anne’s apartment, Jean buys some fast food, contemptuously tosses his empty paper bag into the lap of a woman, Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), seated by a building and begging for money. Jean’s contemptuous act enrages a young African man, Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), whose subsequent altercation with Jean ends up with him arrested as Jean is let go.

From this deft, succinct opening sequence, Haneke follows Anne’s story as an aspiring actress making her way professionally while married to Jean’s brother Georges (Thierry Neuvic), a photographer frequently on assignment in war-torn nations. We learn of Maria’s hardships as a Romanian immigrant, in Paris and her home country, of Amadou’s family disapproving of his dating white girls, of many other individuals’ daily life experiences. The film opens and closes in a children’s sign language class, in which fellow pupils strive to understand a little girl telling a story. Haneke presents a portrait of contemporary Paris seething with racial tension and injustice, which mirrors the misery and chaos of the world itself.

Tonight’s 7:30 Alternative Screen presentation at the cinematheque is Mark Osborne’s “Dropping Out,” an instance of an amateurish handling of a potentially clever idea: A suicidal young man (Kent Osborne, the film’s writer and the director’s brother) finds himself more valuable dead than alive as his aspiring filmmaker friends become thrilled with the possibilities of videotaping his self-inflicted demise, which he had intended to be sent to a girl who shunned him. 6712 Hollywood Blvd. (323) 466-FILM.

Also notable: The UCLA Film Archive’s Kon Ichikawa series continues at Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater ([310] 206-FILM); Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman” (1928) screens tonight through Sunday at the Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A., (323) 655-2520; and, at Glendale’s Alex Theater, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., the fourth annual presentation of Three Stooges shorts. (818) 754-8250.