Jumbo Records' Jack on Haneke
A poetic response to the cinema of Haneke which we're diving into this month.
Jumbo Records
No phantoms and no apparitions and no camphorated saints in hand
No incendiary bull-headed demons in the grip
No accusation-covered devil with its horned, tasseled hay
No mixture of hostile lawless absolutes
Only you
There is an absolute existence,
A mere existence,
that in the void of self-preservation you find your absence
is the decisive presence of the miracle
your passage from the threshold of the inevitable
is the dripping down of a drop of tar in infinite darkness.
Ahmad Shamlu, “A Separation,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from Majmu’eh Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu
This astonishing poem by Iranian writer Ahmad Shamlu, beautifully translated by J. Mohaghegh from his equally beautiful text The Writing of Violence in the Middle East, writhes in the dying-heart of Haneke’s Austrian cinema. A cinema of transcendent bleakness, sustained by the cancer of its origin.
In the void of self-preservation you find your absence is a line to live by, a line that defines Haneke’s entire body of work. Haneke opens up the miracle of the void, makes emptiness his subject; interrogating humankind’s essential brokenness at a clinical cinematographic remove.
Through Haneke’s lens we reach zero. Helpless. We teeter at the threshold of the inevitable. An inevitable that skips like a stone along the surface of black water, lapping an ellipses without end.
In Haneke’s world (our world), we are mere drops of tar in infinite darkness. And in this recursive recess, this violent abyss, we confront ourselves. This is the veritable horror of Haneke’s nihilistic cinema.
By Jack Donnison, Jumbo Records.
See The Piano Teacher on 35mm, presented by Pervert Pictures, on Sun 20 Jul at 17:00. And you can see Hidden from Sat 26 Jul at HPPH.
