Fraulein by Michael Haneke presented by YBCA June 12, 2008

BITTER PILLS: MICHAEL HANEKE MADE-FOR-TELEVISION

Long before his well-known films like Funny Games, Cache and The Piano Teacher, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke made films for television—and they’re often as ruthless and compelling as his later work. YBCA presents four of these features, never before seen in San Francisco. In a style at once musical and mathematical, Haneke’s films treat themes of alienation and social collapse; the exploitation and consumption of violence; the bourgeois family as the incubator of fascistic impulse; individual responsibility and collective guilt; and the ethics of the photographic image.


FRAULEIN

After ten years in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, a German soldier returns home to find his desperately lonely wife in an affair with a former French POW; his daughter pregnant by an American soldier; his rebellious son obsessed with rock and roll and James Dean; and his brother a shallow materialist who has sold out the legacy of their father’s reputable construction business. In this melodrama stripped of sentiment, Haneke creates a bitter but riveting portrait of postwar Germany, with its eerily repressed normalcy and its gleaming, amnesiac future of consumer goods proffered by its former enemy. (1984, 113 min, digital video)
Bitter Pills program notes by Josh Siegel, Museum of Modern Art

Public Info:
415-978-2787 or www.ybca.org
$8 regular; $6 students, seniors, teachers & YBCA members

Official Website: http://www.ybca.org