Lemmings by Michael Haneke presented by YBCA June 14, 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.
LEMMINGS (PART ONE: “ARCADES”)
Sat, Jun 14 & Sun, Jun 15, 4 pm

LEMMINGS (PART TWO: “INJURIES”)
Sat, Jun 14 & Sun, Jun 15, 7:30 pm

Lemmings is a two-part drama about the fate of Haneke’s own generation that came of age after World War II. Each part is a complete film in itself; it is not absolutely necessary to see both films to understand the work.

Lemmings (Part 1) is a dramatic and withering portrait of Austria’s second “lost generation:” teenagers who grew up in monstrously repressive bourgeois families, forbidden to speak of wartime collaboration and defeat, indoctrinated with an unquestioning obedience to family, state and God, as well as taught that kindness is weakness and their own sexuality is shameful and abject. Contemptuous of their parents’ impotence and hypocrisy, they rebel in destructive ways. (1979, 113 min, digital video)

Lemmings (Part 2)—In this Sophoclean tragedy, the sins of fathers and mothers—depicted with such frightening clarity in Lemmings (Part 1)—have been passed on to their children, now living in loveless marriages and bringing unwanted children of their own into the world. It is a world in which despair and longing are met with cold indifference, disdain or enfeebled gestures of kindness, and the fleeting comforts of prayer, pills, alcohol, illicit affairs, television and misdirected rage only lead to further injury. (1979, 107 min, digital video)
Bitter Pills program notes by Josh Siegel, Museum of Modern Art

Who:
Films by Michael Haneke

Where:
YBCA Screening Room, 701 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103

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

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