Code Unknown (Haneke, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm
This 35mm presentation is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details via this link. The film will be introduced by Jelena Milosavljevic, Events Programmer at the cinema.
Code Unknown is
one of the richest achievements of modern European art cinema. Director
Michael Haneke places his typically forensic gaze on modern western
society and finds it wanting but the way he does so is cinematically
innovative. Implicating the audience and challenging the expectations of
the viewer is the aim here and the director succeeds, leaving mysteries
which will have filmgoers arguing long after they have left the cinema.
Chicago Reader review:
'Aptly
subtitled “Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys,” the best feature to
date by Austrian director Michael Haneke (2000, 117 min.) is a
procession of long virtuoso takes that typically begin and end in the
middle of actions or sentences, constituting not only an interactive
jigsaw puzzle but a thrilling narrative experiment. The second episode
is a nine-minute street scene involving an altercation between an
actress (Juliette Binoche), her boyfriend's younger brother, an African
music teacher who works with deaf-mute students, and a woman beggar from
Romania; the other episodes effect a kind of narrative dispersal of
these characters and some of their relatives across time and space. I
couldn't always get what was happening, but I was never bored, and the
questions raised reflect the mysteries of everyday life. The title
refers to the pass codes used to enter houses in Paris—a metaphor for
codes that might crack certain global and ethical issues.'
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is an extract.
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