Michael Haneke
Benny's Video

Haneke's cinema is, first and foremost, a cinema of violence. In all his films, always based on real events (even "The Piano Teacher," which is based on a novel, but autobiographical) and reinterpreted through the lens of the Austrian author. Paradoxically, however, Haneke has declared that he hates films about violence: horror cinema, Tarantino, and even "A Clockwork Orange." 
Violence must be present, but it should never be shown. To glorify it, to make it cathartic, to use it as a vehicle for a message, or to mock it means to empty it, to neutralize it... 
Violence in cinema is such only if the viewer is aware of its devastating effects without having witnessed the act that led to those consequences. And with Haneke, the mechanism works perfectly: just recall the absolute masterpiece "The Seventh Continent," where the total absence of blood generated the most terrifying film I have ever seen in my life.
The vehicle of these destructive sensations is definitely the direction and, above all, the use of the off-screen space. If violence occurs off-screen, the viewer is forced to witness an explosion of pain, but without the opportunity to close their eyes and not look. 

This is what happens in "Benny's Video," Haneke's second film for the cinema and second feature film of the "Glaciation Trilogy," a film not completely successful, especially considering it comes right after "The Seventh Continent" - still the highest point achieved by him - yet extremely important for fully understanding the director's poetic style and his highly imitated but practically inimitable style. 
Inimitable because, in an era where there is an obsessive search for the beautiful frame and aesthetics for its own sake, he offers us his detached, alienating, and unreachable cinema, managing to be unforgettable. 

Benny, fourteen years old, lives surrounded by thousands of screens. Screens that simultaneously project different things: a bourgeois party, the killing of a pig, series-Z movies. Benny is so immersed in this multitude of projections that he doesn't even need to open the curtains: a camera shows him what is happening under his house. Everything must be filmed, and everything must be seen through an audiovisual recording because reality is now less true than film documentation (and it seems a terribly prophetic reflection on what would happen twenty years after the film's release with the explosion of social networks and smartphones), so it doesn't matter if a person is killed: cinematic representation and reality coexist in a climate of extremely cold and disturbing lucid delirium. 

The Austrian director has always reflected on the function of the medium in our lives and the relationship of the gaze with the world, of reality with representation; theories that would later be more explicitly expressed in "Funny Games" with the idea of the rewind.
A rewind that also appears in "Benny's Video": our cinematic memory has replaced our personal memory, allowing us to make it permanent. The same idea that underlies Haneke's cinema, namely recovering news events and reworking them according to his own poetics, seems to confirm the theory of "Benny's Video": everything is filmable, and everything that wants to be true must be consumed. It doesn't matter if the video - in this case, also cinema - is representation or false, as it can be reproduced in a time separate from the original one: whoever watches it will always end up believing it because what is filmed and reproduced is always more interesting than what is seen live with one's own eyes.

But we were saying that Haneke's cinema is a cinema of violence: violence generated by the contrast between man as such, therefore animal and dominated by impulse, and cultural man, the result of an ordered civilization. A violence that must be conveyed, in off-screen, through irrational acts. In this irrationality, studied and understood, the nature of man and the mechanics of our daily lives emerge. This is why Haneke's films are so effective and terribly sincere, devastating and terrifying.

The finger is pointed against that cinema and, above all, television that shows us violence without understanding how it can generate more violence. The greatest danger for man is the conscious exchange of fiction for reality and experience. Since cinema is still a strong medium, capable of an expression that is not possible with books or other expressive means, then this horror must bend to staging, be told, and be disseminated. 

As a film, "Benny's Video," already encompasses the entire poetics of the author. It is not among his best (too slow, especially in the second part - and this is coming from someone who loves slow films), but it remains an essential viewing for every self-respecting cinephile and, above all, for admirers of the Austrian director's cinema, still among the best exponents of contemporary cinema.