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Tartan Video
Benny’s Video: 
Michael Haneke Trilogy:
Posted: February 8th, 2008.
One of the most inscrutable, alarming, frustrating, and fascinating contemporary film directors, Michael Haneke (THE PIANOTEACHER, CACHE) has created a name for himself by examining disturbing issues (sadism, violence, suicide, racism, voyeurism,alienation, nihilism, and misguided faith) with a cold cerebral eye.
Benny’s Video opens with disturbing images of a pig being slaughtered; it is one of the many images obsessivelyviewed and reviewed by Benny, the 14-year old son of a wealthy Viennese family. Detached and ignored, Benny seems able toexperience life only through his video camera. When he kills a young girl and records it on tape, his parents go aboutcovering up the murder, and Haneke draws everyone–Benny, his parents, and the viewers themselves – into a web of complicityand postmodern dysfunction.
Though his films are difficult to watch and invariably leave the viewer with more questions than answers, Haneke’s unswervingfilms are some of the most compelling examples of the new European cinema.
Benny’s Video is out February 25th on DVD for £19.99, but can be ordered on Amazon.co.uk by clickingon the above link for £14.99 at the time of posting this press release, but also available is a 3-DVD boxsetcontaining Benny’s Video, The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments of a Chronolgy of Chance, the boxsetalso containing interviews with Michael Haneke and currenly going for £15.97 on Amazon.
News page content input by Dominic Robinson, 2008.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.