SFC 11 (1) pp.

7182 Intellect Limited 2011

Studies in French Cinema Volume 11 Number 1

2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.11.1.71_1

LISA COULTHARD University of British Columbia

Negative ethics: The missed event in the French films of Michael Haneke
ABSTRACT
In their engagement with guilt, complicity and the multiple forms of violence, Michael Hanekes films interrogate the ethical implications of violent action. I argue that this cinematic interrogation of violence articulates an ethics of radicality that can be paralleled with Alain Badious concept of the event. As opposed to the more conventional definition of ethics as an investigation of moral problems, norms or criteria for the way in which we live, ethics in Badiou suggests a revolutionary radicality, one that posits an alteration in the structure of the symbolic, and in the subject that breaks new territory and shatters past frameworks. Similarly engaged with the interrogation of the ethics of violence, Badious concept of the event highlights the way in which Hanekes films articulate an ethical space for interjection. Focusing on the missed events, those ethical encounters with radicality that do not occur, this article argues that Hanekes films suggest a negative utopia by pointing to what could have been.

KEYWORDS
Haneke Badiou ethics act philosophy Lacan

Representing cruelty in its agonistic complexity, and framing interpersonal abuse within the failures of socio-political formations, Michael Hanekes films foreground the connection of violence to philosophical concepts and debates, and, most importantly, to ethics. Although sometimes placed within the

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1. Developed most explicitly in his work on tragedy in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1986), Lacans concept of the ethical act is distinguished from ordinary violent action by its shattering impact: as Act, such a gesture is differentiated from mere violence insofar as it restructures the frameworks of the symbolic networks that organize subjectivity, and, in so doing, ensures that the individual is forever changed in his or her act.

parameters of what is considered a new European extremism, Hanekes films eschew the direct representation of explicit violence, and contain none of the graphic sexuality, nudity or cinematic sensuality usually associated with those European film-makers considered extreme or sensational, such as Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis or Gaspar No. In contrast to the audio-visual richness and attention to the corporeal that we find in these film-makers, Haneke offers a glaciated cinema that is as stylistically cold as his thematic concentration on alienation. Thus, even when addressing the murder of children, bodily dismemberment, graphic suicide, rape, sadism and brutality, Hanekes films do so via subtle, minimalist and reduced depictions, which explore rather than merely utilize or expose violence, and which interrogate the ethical implications of cruelty and violent action. In what follows, I will argue that this cinematic interrogation of violence articulates an ethics of radicality that can be paralleled with Alain Badious concept of the event. As opposed to the more conventional definition of ethics as an investigation of moral problems, norms or criteria for the way in which we live, ethics in Badiou suggests a revolutionary radicality, one that posits an alteration in the structure of the symbolic and in the subject that breaks new territory and shatters past frameworks. In short, this kind of ethical moment is itself a form of violence; it is this kind of radicality that, I contend, orients Hanekes cinematic ethics. It contextualizes his placement within a frame of new extremism, and informs the spectatorial discomfort that is frequently mentioned in accounts of his work. What this approach to ethics in Haneke through the lens of Badiou allows us to see is the way in which the negativity of Hanekes cinema articulates his positively inflected ethics. To be more precise, it is in the recognition of what could have happened, but did not, that we note Hanekes powerful statements of radicality, an interpretive shift that contextualizes the perceived aggression towards the audience within a frame of necessary ethical cruelty: his films suggest a negative utopia by pointing to what could have been. That is, rather than the usual assertion that Haneke gives us effects without causes, I assert that his films reveal the multitude of small, everyday, banal causes and decisions that slowly and inexorably lead to violence and trauma. Within the framework of Badious philosophy, we can see these moments of possibility (points where a different path could have been taken) as so many potential events, as lost opportunities for truth. It is in these missed encounters of Hanekes films that we can note an ethical space for interjection, where we see how destruction, trauma and cruelty could have been avoided through acts of fidelity. Rather than suggesting a mere ethical problem or situation, then, I here propose a more precise definition of ethics, one that helps to contextualize the popular recognition of Hanekes cinema as philosophically difficult, politically and morally engaged, and provocative to the point of aggression. Badiou offers not only a framing of the reception and provocation of Hanekes cinema, but also an invitation to think critically about the relations between subjectivity, political philosophy and the ethics of cinematic style. Indebted to Jacques Lacans notion of the authentic act, Badious event is not merely an ethical or moral occasion, but rather a moment of radical restructuring that changes both the subject and the field of the possible.1 The event does not occur so much as it gives rise to a decision, a fidelity and process of the truth that then retroactively render a situation evental. As Badiou summarizes, being faithful to an event means thinking the situation according to the event, which in turn compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation (Badiou 2001: 412). Truth to an event

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thus marks a restructuring in thought, practice and subjectivity itself, a move that Badiou refers to as an immanent break: Immanent because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else there is no heaven of truths. Break because what enables the truth-process the event meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation (Badiou 2001: 423; Badious italics). Radically intervening in accepted norms, the event thus renegotiates what is known and possible: as Badiou notes in a reference to Lacan, the event punches a hole in accepted knowledges. In this restructuring, the event represents a violent break and as such it is always more or less militant, combative (Badiou 2001: 75): it is the excessive gesture in Badious terms, the Keep Going! (Badiou 2001: xi) that repudiates all merely consensual social norms (happiness, pleasure, health [] ) in favour of an exceptional affirmation whose value cannot necessarily be proved or communicated (Badiou 2001: xvi). This is why for Badiou there is no ethics in general, no formula of pre-existing objective conditions for the ethical, but rather only ethical interventions, processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world (Badiou 2001: 28). In this intervention and restructuring, then, the truth of the event is clearly utopic: as Lacanian theorist Slavoj iek contends, the utopian gesture is the gesture which changes the co-ordinates of the possible (iek 2004: 123). With this in mind, and returning to Hanekes cinema, we can rethink the negative acts as failed events, encounters lost because of the dominance of consensual norms in the face of potentially restructuring, radically truthful acts. Rather than merely pointing out moral problems, our shared guilt or our complicity as viewers, then, Hanekes films explore through negation, as they offer a series of missed truths and events. These are ethical moments in which subjects and acts fail to radically change anything, and only bring about further violence and destruction: the parents cover-up in Bennys Video (1992), the massacre of bank patrons in 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie du Zufalls/71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), the failure to respond to the cries of a battered child in Code inconnu: rcit incomplet de divers voyages/Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000), the rejected love letter in La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (2001), or the disavowal of guilt in Cach/Hidden (2005). Even in Le Temps du loup/The Time of the Wolf (2003), we can note the way in which the apocalypse itself fails to change the parameters of capitalist greed and selfishness. But rather than a failure to recognize the encounter with the other (in the tradition of Levinas an approach that these missed encounters seem to invite), I contend that we have a more radical instance of what constitutes failure in these films. It is not in each case that a nonviolent solution could have necessarily been brought about by communication and cooperation, but rather that a more radical solution is needed, an act that would change the field of what is possible, known and good, an event that would alter the very sense of what constitutes the parameters of being. In order to analyse this in more detail, let us consider Hanekes three most recent French language films: Le Temps du loup, La Pianiste and Cach. Unlike his earlier Code inconnu and 71 Fragmente, each of these films is focused on a single narrative with clear central protagonists and economically paired down storylines. In addition, each is more stylistically in accordance with familiar cinematic modes: in opposition to the black-outs, fractured form, emphatically desubjectified shot-framing and monochromatic colour schemes of a film like Der siebente Kontinent/The Seventh Continent (1989), for instance, these films feature warmer colour palettes, more conventional editing and shot structure,

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and well-known, internationally acclaimed actors. Although this move to superficially more appealing visuals must not be overstated (Hanekes minimalist style is still in clear evidence), the small changes in style and form of his recent films ought not to be ignored. Indeed, it brings to mind ieks analysis of Krzysztof Kieslowski, in which he notes the Polish directors aesthetic shift when he began to make French co-productions (the French trilogy, Trois couleurs/Three Colours). Utilizing better-looking actresses, a more attractive and varied mise-en-scne, a richer colour palette, and more radiant illumination, Kieslowskis French films take on a much more inviting look; but it is one, iek argues, that intensifies rather than subverts his politics, ethics and philosophical commitment. For iek, Trois couleurs points to the way in which the stylistic shift towards more conventionally pleasing aesthetics operates in concert with a move towards a more precise and provocative philosophical realm (and away from moralism): formal beauty works to crystallize radical thought, rather than undermining it through a privileging of style (iek 2001). Among other parallels that may be seen between Kieslowski and Haneke, this account of a greater concentration on visual richness or beauty associated with a move to French film production, working in concert with a more precisely formulated and potentially more provocative ethical position, is, I think, worth investigating in more detail. Although I do not wish to set up a clear demarcation between Hanekes Austrian and French work, it is nonetheless useful to consider Hanekes recent French films as offering some insight into a directorial repositioning that I contend is characterized by a deepened ethical critique, made more radical by the films comparatively viewer-friendly surfaces. It is crucial of course to emphasize the word comparatively here. None of Hanekes films is easy to digest or view in any conventional way; rather, I point to the relative visual pleasure made available in La Pianiste, Cach and Le Temps du loup as compared to the more overtly aggressive Austrian films. Indeed, in opposition to most scholars who maintain a consistency of glaciation throughout Hanekes audio-visual style, I contend that the emphasis on autumnal colours, moments of brilliant or chiaroscuro lighting effects, attractive and identifiable stars, and varied mise-en-scne in each of these recent films marks a shift in his uvre, one which it could be argued renders the continued effect of audience discomfort and provocation all the more intriguing and worthy of interrogation. In addition to questions of visual pleasure, there are philosophical and analytical commonalities that invite this grouping of films. In particular, in each there is an emphasis on inaction, stasis and failure that gains an ethical force. There are of course violent acts in each of these recent films, as well as audience provocation; but the emphasis is on stasis, on a complacent violence of inaction rather than violent action. It is an emphasis that stands in opposition to the kind of cruel aggression towards the audience evidenced by Funny Games (1997), the total eradication of Der siebente Kontinent or the explosive violence of 71 Fragmente. More specifically, each film ends abruptly midstream, cutting off action seemingly arbitrarily for the credits in a way that leaves the viewer grasping for closure and meaning. The concluding aporia of Cach, where the mystery itself is not only unsolved but undermined is in this way markedly distinct from the television newscast that closes 71 Fragmente. Although the latter film offers no direct or psychologized explanation for the actions at hand, at least the acts themselves attain a certain clarity and existence.

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Figure 1: Erika (Isabelle Huppert) and Walter (Benot Magimel) in La Pianiste (electricsheepmagazine.co.uk). In recent French films, then, the effect is not one of continued action, so much as it is a distressing statement of unrelenting inaction, a sense of the brutal and dull persistence of life unchanged. Considered this way, the films take on a coherence of purpose and ethical focus that can be approached as articulations of the consequences of denied truths and missed events. For instance, although Robin Wood asserts the powerfully subversive and empowering nature of Erikas self-inflicted stab wound at the end of La Pianiste (Wood 2002), it is equally clear that this is a private act, and her isolation as she walks into the night feels anything but revolutionary. In that film, it is her suitor Walters failure to move beyond the parameters of his courtly love paradigms into unknown territory that initially restricts any move towards truth. But it is equally Erikas lack of fidelity in her superficial self-inflicted wounding (a kind of repeated gesture of her labial slicing in the bathroom scene earlier) that creates the impasse at the end of the film: that is, in one way we can see her final act as one of mere repetition rather than radical change. Thus, while ending in movement, the film offers the paradox of a blocked act, a persistence rather than utopic change or possibility. This is its ethical force: it insists on the difficulty as Lacan would have it, the necessary impossibility of breaking into the new territory of action, of maintaining ones fidelity to the truth of the event. This sense of a dystopic continuance, the terrifying possibility that nothing will change, is similarly evident in the ending of Le Temps du loup, the final of shot of which consists of a mobile framing of a landscape shot from a moving train. The shot lasts almost three minutes and involves no human presence, aurally, visually or even by implication. As David Sorfa notes, this final shot can be seen to be a very tentative moment of hope (Sorfa 2006: 101); that is, an indication that the hoped for train has arrived and that the people at the station have been rescued. This sense of optimism is

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Figure 2: Le Temps du loup (cinemovies.fr).

aided by the previous sequence that features one of the very few scenes of true human tenderness, compassion and self-sacrifice, both on the part of the boy Benny and his rescuer. However, any sense of optimism is undermined by the tedious duration of the travelling train shot as well as by its fundamental ambiguity. It is unclear whether this is meant to imply a train filled with people (and if so, what kind of new start this movement could possibly imply, given what we have witnessed thus far), an empty train moving of its own volition across an uninhabited territory; or whether it is merely a dream image, wish fulfillment, or past memory. The status of this image is thus like those of the inserted moments of Georges childhood in Cach: radically ambiguous. It is also crucial to note that the shots duration stresses not a reaching of goals, or even forward propulsion, but mere pointless movement, the experience of which becomes uncomfortable and tedious, as we yearn for some kind of human presence or conclusive ending. It is the radical ambiguity of these concluding images that forces the ethical point in each film. It would be as wrong to consider the train movement at the end of Le Temps du loup as a clear-cut indication of salvation, as it would be to consider the end of Cach as a solution to the films central mystery. Indeed, each film amputates, cuts away those elements that appear to be at first the shaping generic, narrational and thematic concentrations. Le Temps du loup is a post-apocalyptic film without an apocalypse (or its post); La Pianiste is a romance without romance; and Cach is a film that sets up a mystery that remains not only unanswered, but undermined. This denial

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from within is most prominent in Cach, where the whole concept of the mysterious stalker/threat that opens the film, and appears to root and orient the action, is subverted as the film proceeds. As John Mullarkey notes, the film finally reveals who is the blackmailer, who is filming the guilty, with the answer no one (Mullarkey 2009: 15). As he goes on to note, the film suggests a kind of Levinasian responsibility for others in its assertion that there is no blackmailer, there is no blackmail, there is only responsibility, and all of us are always already responsible before the details of any innocence or blame can be attributed (Mullarkey 2009: 15). But more than this, the films status as mystery without mystery insists upon the lack of change, the failure of progression, illumination or revelation. This sense of hiding from the truth is thus as evident in the films ending as it is in Georgess retreat to the comfort of the monochromatic bedroom in a pharmaceutically-induced haze. The film itself refuses to solve the mystery, because to do so would be to take the attention away from the failed truth-event itself, that is, the receipt of a call from the past and his refusal to face the encounter with fidelity. Indeed, if anyone shows a fidelity to the truth, it is the originator of the tapes (and one must include here Haneke himself), which do not threaten directly, but expose and persist, and continue to do so even in the face of opposition and violence. In each instance, it is important to remember the potential for radical restructuring offered by the event: in order for an event to take hold, there must be absolute fidelity to its truth, a devotion that eradicates acting on the basis of public opinion or self-interest. It is intensely subjective (for Badiou there is no ethics as such, only subjectified responses), and is by necessity a confrontation with the structures and objects that one thought governed ones life, those merely consensual norms noted by Badiou (2001: xvi). In the instance of Cach, for example, Georgess fidelity to the truth of the event would require a radical act, severing his ties with all those things he holds dear: status, domestic peace, comfort, marital harmony and bourgeois routine. Rather than face this undermining of what structures his life, Georges clings to these elements more fiercely than ever, an act that causes death and trauma to those around him. The ethical force is not, then, one of mutual responsibility, or the necessity of recognizing the other, but instead an insistence on the events ignored potential and the subjects refusal of the real. Georgess fidelity could in fact bring about more violence, but it would be revolutionary and restructuring in its truthful force rather than mere acting out. That is, if Georges had indeed responded with fidelity to truth, it would by necessity be self-destructive on some level, as a truly ethical act requires a rebirth of the subject; as iek argues in his critique of Levinas, what is required is not a consensual and harmonious recognition of otherness, but a radical revisioning of the self.2 This is crucial to the films treatment of history and memory insofar as it stresses the necessity to act in the present, rather than to obliterate, dwell on or retreat to the past. As Haneke has noted in interviews, his intention in Cach is not to go back to past events, to reconsider initial crimes, but to address the ways in which we confront and negotiate the past today. What is most significant in Cach is not Georgess past act, but the way he reinscribes and exacerbates that original act through its repetition. He lies, hides and places his own well-being and comfort above others in the same way he did when he was six. Instead of Keep Going!, Georges keeps lying and keeps hiding. It is in this retreat that Haneke locates an ethical call to action.

2. For ieks most thorough analysis of Levinas see iek (2005).

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Figure 3: Anne (Juliette Binoche) in Cach (dvdbeaver.com).

3. Moreover, the focus on Schuberts Die Winterreise, as has been noted by Robin Wood, Christopher Sharrett (2006) and Catherine Wheatley, places the trope of the jilted lover at the forefront.

Similarly, we can approach La Pianiste as a parody not only of melodrama (a status Haneke himself notes), but of romance itself, through its exposure of the failures of fidelity to the truth of love. For instance, in the first sexual encounter between Erika and Walter in the bathroom, we can hear the recital playing at a low volume in the background (giving the effect of a kind of lavatory Muzak), and we can hear the Foley effects of body, skin and mouth sounds at a disturbingly loud volume. This, combined with the content of the scene (characterized by the confrontational shifting positions of power), and the use of longer takes, as well as the stark white and black of the cavernous bathroom locale, creates a scene that is anything but a romantic love encounter. It is important here to recognize the way in which romantic, courtly love is foregrounded throughout the film, and the way it plays a very crucial role in Elfriede Jelineks novel (Die Klavierspielerin, 1983), upon which the film is based.3 In Jelineks novel, the character Walter is repeatedly (and ironically) referred to as a Knight in pursuit of his Lady, a trope that is carried throughout the novel. This trope finds more subtle incarnations in Hanekes film, but is nonetheless central in its thematic substance. Most particularly, in both film and novel, there is a link made between the idealized romantic distance of the Lady of courtly love, and the cold and cruel Lady of masochism. In short, the film makes clear that courtly loves rituals, and its basis in a masochistic desire, provide the foundation for Walters so-called love. In particular, it articulates the way in which the Lady is both idealized and terrifying, and the threat she represents as one of proximity. Courtliness relies on distance and on the postponement of desire; the Lady must remain out of reach. In La Pianiste, this problematic proximity becomes explicit in Walters romantic idealization and elevation of the cold and cruel Erika, which quickly turns to disgust when he is confronted with the real of her being and the rawness of her desire and humanity, both of which he rejects outright in the letter-reading scene.

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This focus on love is crucial not only for analysing La Pianiste, but for understanding the ethical event itself, as it is upon love that Badiou founds his notion of fidelity: The word fidelity refers directly to the amorous relationship, but I would rather say that it is the amorous relationship which refers, at the most sensitive point of individual experience, to the dialectic of being and event, the dialectic whose temporal ordination is proposed by fidelity. (Badiou 2005: 232) For Badiou, the true love encounter (or love-event, as he terms it) is one of the most significant of events, and indeed provides a kind of intimate paradigm for his notion of fidelity to truth as such. For Badiou, love is ethical, and in the true love-event (as opposed to mere passionate or lustful encounter), the loving subjects are reborn and recreated in the act: The lovers as such enter into the composition of one loving subject, who exceeds them both (Badiou 2001: 43; Badious italics).4 This is precisely what fails to occur in La Pianiste, a fact rendered apparent throughout the film, but especially and painfully so in the bathroom scene, in the later scene of letter-reading, and of course in the rape scene. Similarly in Cach, the familial and romantic life of Georges and Anne lacks the kind of reorientation of the One that marks the loving event for Badiou. They operate in conflict, at odds and via deceit; there is never in the film a sense of the couple working together to achieve change. Shot in isolation, separated by the mise-en-scne, moving swiftly past each other in silent (and not so silent) resentment, Georges and Anne have none of the hallmarks of Badious amorous, loving event. The film is as much about this failure as it is about the evental infidelities relating to guilt, history, conscience and violence. To consider the way these failures open an ethical space, a forceful negative gesture, and not merely a portrait of nihilistic disaffection and alienation, it is necessary to address the structure and stylistic patterns of Haneke that stress ethical intervention and interrogation, most particularly his use of silence, repetition, inserts and long takes. In short, along with his manipulation of open endings, these salient techniques of Hanekes signature style form the cornerstone of what critics and scholars refer to as his minimalism. They are as present in his recent films as his earlier works: the refusal of non-diegetic music, the use of long takes without substantial dialogue, the slowing down of cause and effect narrative trajectories through this latter technique, as well as the ambiguous repetition of televised, videotaped and/or flashback inserts throughout the text. In Cach alone, we can note these techniques from the notorious opening and closing shots to the inserts of Georgess childhood that occupy a realm somewhere between subjective memory, non-diegetic insert commenting upon the action and traumatic flashback of the text itself. The penultimate shot of the farmhouse after Georgess retirement to bed offers a particularly pointed instance of this kind of ambiguity. It is simultaneously a dream image (we have just seen Georges take a sleeping pill, shut the curtains and retire), an objective insert directed at the audience (a reminder of the past and a comment on Georgess refusal of truth for the sake of comfort), and a traumatic intrusion of that which will not be put to rest: history. It is also noteworthy that the shot features events not narrated by Georges in any detail, and that evoke all the harm and cruelty involved in his lie. We see the struggle, the trauma and hurt, a recognition that offers a sharp contrast

4. It should also be noted that Lacan and iek also posit falling in love as a form of the authentic, ethical act.

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to Georgess claim that no harm was done in his act. Moreover, in signature Haneke style, the camera placement is an extreme long shot without audible dialogue, shot with a static camera, and lasting over three minutes. It is as if the film pauses, is silent and lugubrious for a moment, in order for the audience to have space to think. These formal aspects directly link this sequence to the final shot in front of the school that is similarly ambiguous both in its content and its origin. Are these shots diegetically motivated, or are they directed at the audience with a kind of objective interrogative force? Clearly they are both, and this is where Hanekes ethical investigation lies: in the uncertain space in between interpretations. This concluding double sequence ensures that the film ends in a register away from Georges and within the realm of ethics: together these shots emphasize the absent encounter, the missed event that did not occur. Further, as Libby Saxton has argued in her astute analysis of history and memory in Cach, the status of the childhood inserts supposedly coming from Georgess memory/imagination indicate a kind of Mise-en-scne of bad faith [] But the images which resurface in Georgess guild-ridden memory and haunted nightmares serve instead to trouble cause and effect relationships and question memorys relationship to history. Rather than revealing hidden truths, some of them bear false witness to the past, as part of the web of protective fictions that Georges has constricted to conceal the facts. (Saxton 2007: 1011) I would take this even further, however, as I think this dubiously subjective aspect of the insert image in Cach has its parallel in the Australian poster of Der siebente Kontinent, the repeated and concluding television newscast in 71 Fragmente, or the concluding train shot of Le Temps du Loup: it is not clear that these shots are necessarily tied to any subjective experience of any character. Indeed, in some ways, these erroneous flashbacks in Cach can be seen simultaneously as Georgess warped perspective, as a privileged aspect to the way he saw the world then, or as an ironically inflected non-diegetic comment on the action and the character, that is, as a kind of illustration of the lie at the heart of memory. This final childhood image (the penultimate shot in the film) in particular stands out in the film, as it does not reiterate Georgess lies or self-deception, but appears to reveal events as they happened from the same objective, frontal position as the concluding shot. If the one is considered subjective, then by association the following image might be as well; or if one is objective directorial commentary, the other might be as well. Either way, the images correlate in their ambiguous status in a way that ties the entire events of the film past and present together visually, ontologically and ethically. Indeed, considered this way, Cachs usual interpretative frame focusing on guilt (an emphasis supported, of course, by Hanekes own comments) can be reoriented towards a more general, and more ethically and politically constructive focus on fidelity to truth as such. That is, it is not merely about the guilt of privileged, bourgeois complacency in the face of political violence, racism and destructive othering: rather, it is an attack on infidelity to truth itself. This marks a political and ethical reorientation away from guilt and towards something potentially more forceful. As Steven Shaviro notes in his comments on the film, guilt can be seen to be productive only of a kind

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of empty, self-serving liberal humanist compassion, and, as a result, viewed as politically and ethically useless.5 Given this potential for guilt to operate in apolitical, weakly moralistic and self-congratulatory ways, it is interesting how ubiquitous it is as an explanatory and interpretive framework for the radical ethics of Cach. All the best commentators on the film (Grossvogel, Saxton, Sorfa and Wheatley) insist on its ethical and political significance being effected by the interrogation of guilt, and its transference from the film and its characters to its viewers. If we reorient this discussion towards one of truth, then the net is cast wider, so that the lies surrounding the French treatment of Algerians in 1961 becomes one of many evental failures that range from the banal and everyday (marriage, love, illness, friendship, parenthood), to the personal, national and global implications of traumatic and violent events. An insistence on the radical, uneasy and discomforting nature of fidelity to the truths of immanently evental situations is the essence of the ethical extremism that marks the aporia of the films ending, not merely a sense of shared guilt and complicity in the crimes addressed. We lack fidelity in everything we do from dinner party conversations, to silent spousal resentment, to violent threats so long as we opt for comfortable continuity over evental immanent breaks. While it is obviously not possible here to address all the ways in which Hanekes films stylistically foreground a sense of this cruel ethics of truth, these few examples indicate the force and significance of these strategies as invitations to ethical inquiry. In the pauses allowed for audience contemplation, the films emphasize the ethical space opened by the potentialities offered for fidelity to the truth-event, and to the radical revisioning of subjectivity. It is this space that is extreme in Haneke, not his violence. As Badiou, Lacan and iek remind us, ethics are always in excess, are always disruptive, and frequently destructive; the space that an event opens up is at once recreative and potentially traumatic. In opening this space in the cinematic frame, Hanekes films enforce this sense of discomfort associated with the ethical, and make us question those consensual, social norms to which we so often retreat, like Hanekes characters, in an effort to postpone a confrontation with the real. Recognizing that the negative gestures carry utopic ethical force is integral to approaching the so-called extremism of Haneke, and crucial to considering the role of violence and trauma in his films. Through this framework of a renegotiated and difficult ethics, we can see that Hanekes concentration on violent after-effects is not so much a rejection of cause and effect rationalizing, as it is a comment on the missed encounters, failures of fidelity and wrong choices that result in further violence and dull persistence.

5. http://www.shaviro. com/Blog/?p=476.

REFERENCES
Badiou, A. (2001), Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso. (2005), Being and Event, London: Continuum. Grossvogel, D. I. (2007), Haneke: The Coercing of Vision, Film Quarterly, 60: 4, pp. 3643. Lacan, J. (1992), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 19591960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Mullarkey, J. (2009), Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image, New York: Palgrave. Saxton, L. (2007), Secrets and Revelations: Off-screen Space in Michael Hanekes Cach, Studies in French Cinema, 7: 1, pp. 517.

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Sharrett, C. (2006), Michael Haneke and the Discontents of European Culture, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 47: 2, pp. 616. Sorfa, D. (2006), Uneasy Domesticity in the Films of Michael Haneke, Studies in European Cinema, 3: 2, pp. 93104. Wheatley, C. (2006), The Masochistic Fantasy Made Flesh: Michael Hanekes La Pianiste as Melodrama, Studies in French Cinema, 6: 2, pp. 11727. (2009), Michael Hanekes Cinema: The Ethic of the Image, Oxford: Berghahn. Wood, R. (2002), Do I Disgust You? or Tirez pas sur La Pianiste, CineAction, 59, pp. 5464. iek, S. (1994), The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, London: Verso. (2001), The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kie lowski Between Theory and Post-Theory, London: BFI Publishing. (2004), Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London: Verso. iek, S., Santner, E. L. and Reinhard, K. (2005), The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Coulthard, L. (2011), Negative ethics: The missed event in the French films of Michael Haneke, Studies in French Cinema 11: 1, pp. 7182, doi: 10.1386/ sfc.11.1.71_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Lisa Coulthard is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of British Columbia. She has published many articles on contemporary French cinema and currently working on a book on sound and music in the films of Quentin Tarantino. Contact: Department of Theatre and Film, University of British Columbia, 6354 Crescent Road, Vancouver, B.C., V6T1Z2. E-mail: lmcoulthard@gmail.com

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