Haneke retrospective shows the auteur as provocateur

At present, there are five major directors active in Europe. Two of them - Denmark's Lars von Trier and Spain's Pedro Almodóvar - are internationally famous, Almodóvar being as close to a rock star as any filmmaker could be. The other three - Hungary's Béla Tarr, Greece's Theo Angelopoulos, and Austria's Michael Haneke - are less well known. None of Tarr's melancholy work has even gotten proper distribution in this country (his movies' length has probably scared off more than one acquisitions person). Haneke, though, has fared much better. More people in this country have had a chance to see "The Piano Teacher" and "Caché" than anything by Tarr or Angelopoulos.

Starting Thursday, Boston University, the Goethe-Institut Boston, and the French consulate, with the Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Film Archive, are mounting "A Cinema of Provocation," a comprehensive retrospective of Haneke's work, including his early films for Austrian and German television. It's an exciting opportunity to catch up with a director in the prime of his career.

Haneke's films show us what too many other movies are too timid or sensitive to: that the world can be harsh. But it isn't just that Haneke rubs our faces in ugliness (though he's not above that). His recent movies explore the way people damage each other, and how the politics of the present or the past can do some serious personal breaking and entering. His films proceed without the emollients of sentiment, compassion, or redemption. Anytime a director can bring himself to show someone hocking a loogie in the face of Juliet Binoche, as Haneke does in "Code Unknown," it's obvious we're watching a world without pity.

But not without sensation. Haneke has an uncanny sense of how to get a rise out of a viewer. I've seen his last five movies with audiences, all of whom, at some point, gasped or averted their eyes. Or, truth be told, got up and left. Whatever he is - a revenge artist, a shockoholic provocateur, a pessimistic social scientist - Haneke is not a clinician. His movies halve the distance between art and spectator, which is to say, at their best, they sock you in the gut. "The Piano Teacher" is about a gravely sexually repressed musician (Isabelle Huppert) with two hazardous relationships - one with her mother, the other with a young male student. There is manipulation, self-mutilation, psychosis, and, from Huppert, one of the art form's great feats of acting. Coming out of the theater was like getting off the Cyclone. What movie set in the world of classical music can say that?

Haneke was supposed to be the jackass moralist of European movies. "Benny's Video" (1992), about a boy inspired to kill after seeing footage of a pig's slaughter, suggested a filmmaker out to harass his audience by condemning it for watching his movie. That's an idea confirmed by the winking terrorist killers in "Funny Games" (1997). In some respects, Haneke seemed to be heir to the mantle of another great European director - Werner Herzog. But if Haneke graduated from Herzog's School of Cruel, he had repositioned his theater of combat from earth's natural landscapes to middle-class living rooms. Haneke's early work gave theorists and intellectuals fodder for knotty considerations of a paradox about representations of violence and its real-world consequences. For others, he seemed peevish, and his movies had a loathsome high-mindedness.

But Haneke spent the next few years reshaping his argument. His disdain for a spectator's indifference to violence turned, amazingly, outward. Switching languages from German to French, he started making movies about a society's conflict with itself, using his subsequent work to make stinging observations about the modern European situation: a European Union that showed no capacity for uniting. He is still slapping sense into old, white Europe. But his last four movies - "Code Unknown," "The Piano Teacher," "The Time of the Wolf," and "Caché" - are masterpieces that operate with keen restraint and a sense of vulnerability no one could have predicted based on a movie like "Funny Games." That's a crucial distinction between Haneke and his equally social-minded European peers. The notorious von Trier, for instance, uses people as marionettes that do his ideological bidding, and some of his recent focus has been on what's wrong with the United States, a place he's never been, not with Europe, where he lives. Haneke's movies worry about Europe's current ethnic and class tensions, and in the instance of "Caché," the past's unbreakable grip on them.

Haneke places characters before ideology, and the stars he casts (Binoche, Huppert, Daniel Auteuil) make complete psychological investments in their roles. This was true even in "Funny Games," and it accounts for the incredible emotional power that deepens his movies. He's completed an English-language version of "Funny Games, set for release next year and starring Tim Roth and Naomi Watts (her fearlessness seems tailor-made for Haneke). And it will be interesting to see whether his evolved ideas about evil and humanity change the power dynamics between the terrorists and their captors. Will the film be remake, self-rebuke, or wholesale reupholstering? If, at the moment, you're not familiar enough with Haneke to know the difference, "A Cinema of Provocation" gives you four weeks to get yourself acquainted.

Michael Haneke filmography
"After Liverpool" (TV), 1974
"Three Paths to the Lake," 1976*
"Sperrmull" (TV), 1976
"Lemmings, Parts 1 and 2" (TV), 1979*
"Variation" (TV), 1983*
"Who Was Edgar Allan?" (TV), 1984*
"Fraulein" (TV), 1986*
"The Seventh Continent," 1989*
"Die Nachruf fur einen Morder" (TV), 1991
"Benny's Video," 1992*
"The Rebellion" (TV), 1993*
"71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance," 1994*
"Funny Games," 1997*
"The Castle," 1997*
"Code Unknown," 2000*
"The Piano Teacher," 2001*
"The Time of the Wolf," 2003*
"Cache," 2005*
"Funny Games" (remake, forthcoming)*

* included in series

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.