Spoiler Warning in Effect

Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989) firmly exhibits the Austrian director’s roots as a filmmaker of uncompromising authority and intelligence, but is chiefly important as the first of many determined and obsessive cinematic crusades in creating bleak, usually nihilistic visions of the modern world. It is the beginning of a complex and fascinating oeuvre of continuing themes of human disconnection, repression and cruelty driven by methods of stripped-down, minimal filmmaking. With The Seventh Continent, Haneke births a first personal work that is born fully formed, after years of practice in theater and hired-studio film projects, constructing a nightmarishly realistic world about an Austrian family’s communal suicide. Stylistically, with this film and others, Haneke immerses himself in hyper-realism reflecting his consistent view of the world as cold, austere and terribly merciless. The Seventh Continent painstakingly and accurately describes human existence as meaningless in modern contexts of mechanical routinization and emotional glaciation.

Critic Bill Chambers of filmfreakcentral.net has said that “a movie without flaws is also one without a soul” which, I think, applied here creates a kind of paradox. Stylistically speaking, The Seventh Continent is undoubtedly flawless and soulless, perhaps decreasing its admirability but not its value and importance, for soullessness is essentially its point. The film is a detached examination of the soulless lives of human androids. After much consideration, I’ve decided that it’s essentially an atheistic picture, observing its disenfranchised characters as automatons no longer interested in their mechanical, godless world. It is debatable that perhaps the characters are intended to believe in an afterlife and suicide is merely a means to reach such solace. As much as suicide conflicts with popular Christian and religious teachings it is possible Haneke subscribes to the nobility of religious suicide as Haneke’s hero, the great Robert Bresson, did and depicted in his Mouchette (1967). However, I interpret the film as an atheistic viewpoint, not simply for the lack of religious imagery, but because the anthropological theme of man’s transformation into machine is more pervasive and relentless, diminishing the religious question.

In The Seventh Continent humans are faceless, usually headless within the frame, and robotically perform constant, mundane tasks, eventually disappearing into the indistinguishable objects that Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962) prognosticated. In addition, it suggests what fellow Teutonic observers of contemporary society, the German band Kraftwerk, envisioned with their electronic cyberpunk predictions of man’s evolution into machine with such albums as The Man Machine and Computer Love. With this idea comes the absence of emotion which emphasizes the overall human disconnection in urban advancement and the gravity of the characters inner dissolving humanness. The film’s world is envisioned as an alienating society of boring avarice and affluence, populated and maintained by heavily routinized robot denizens. Matriarch Anna (Birgit Doll) wakes to the same radio alarm everyday, completes the same morning rituals, listens to banal clients at her optometry office, shops for groceries with glazed eyes and purchases from perfectly calculating clerks, etc. The family car is shown being washed twice by rotating mechanical faucets and patriarch Georg (Dieter Berner) becomes as meaningless an object of technological precision as he himself is shown washing in a similar manner. The couple’s love-making is even observed as mostly cold and passionless, perhaps regulated, suggesting the mere satisfaction of physiological tendencies hidden beneath disinterested visages. Three years pass in the course of the film’s story and the feeling that very little changes throughout these years, until the suicidal decision, is greatly accentuated.

As human identity dissipates and man merges with machine, fusing the biological with the technological into an amalgam of endless potential: evolution, society and culture essentially plateau. The desires of the flesh and body become merely obstacles to overcome. However, the question of repressed, aggregating natural human emotion and conscience is an incalculable equation that bubbles beneath the plasticity. Young daughter Eva (Leni Tanzer) experiences the ennui and emotional alienation of over-modernization, prompting her innate humanity to cry out for connection when she arbitrarily feigns blindness at school. Eva’s attempt at overcoming the increasing emotional glaciation receives slightly violent reprimand from her mother’s slap and is dismissed as a childish act. Anna’s later discovery of a newspaper clipping in Eva’s room headlined with “Blind but no longer lonely” barely seems to register with Anna’s far more advanced glaciation. Eva is shown again as exhibiting traits of humanity in a scene with her dying pet fish, as if the small loss of life jolts some electricity into the alternately dying human pod. Anna exhibits similar reactions after Eva’s suicide, the realization of actual death as a necessary shock to her facileness. In a crucial earlier scene, Anna experiences a burst of repressed emotion as she breaks down sobbing during the second car wash, and she briefly attempts connection with Eva but the urge subsides and she pulls away, her artificial mind unable to comprehend human predispositions for emotion. Meanwhile, Georg simply gawks at the crying Anna, unable to console his wife or even understand the display. Georg is seen as the more highly developed of the man-machines of the film, he quickly ascends the hierarchy at his job, experiences little or no emotional desires and is the most fearless and efficient in their systematic self-destruction. Haneke is particularly preoccupied with observing the shreds of instinctual and primal tendencies that emerge from the metallic sheen of his robotic human test subjects.

In accordance with the unemotional state of man-machines, The Seventh Continent contains physical interiors of clean stylish design and exteriors of bitter, wet concrete, reflective as appropriate locals of rigid modernity. Georg’s work environment is notable in its dichotomous yet indistinct separation between the industrial work sector and the offices, parallel in their similar oppressive blandness. The family abode is a similar construct of prefabricated and contemporary trendiness, complete with hip background dinner music. Similarly, simple car transportation becomes a stark journey through grim night, weather and hazard as the family traverses long stretches of monotony and insignificant death, passing plastic-wrapped cadavers from roadside accidents. The manner in which Haneke shoots all this is preeminent in establishing the personal style that Haneke continues to shoot his pictures, with long, usually uncut takes and appropriate camera distances and movements depending on the ideas conveyed. His predominant use of tight framing for the film beheads the characters or almost disembodies them completely, accentuating their insignificance as members of the actual human species and highlighting their nondescript machine-like qualities. Black screen intervals jaggedly cut between nearly every scene, implicating the passing of time but also formalizing the film’s meanings with a frankness and caustic spareness. Haneke’s minimalist design is immaculate and calculated in such a way that every shot matters and anything unessential or superficial is excluded. The film is structured with three sections and each are filled with circular reoccurring sequences and motifs, resulting in a style that mirrors the systematic routinization of the man-machines. For instance, the tight framing used to show the routine of everyday tasks in the first two sections also similarly observes the family’s ruination of nearly all personal material possession in preparation for their suicide, suggesting that even in self-destruction a man-machine will be unfailingly systematic, ritualistic and inescapably routinized.

The Seventh Continent utilizes the constituents of technological modernization, which neutralize humanity and perpetuate emotionally unresponsive behavior, as a self-reflexive comment. Haneke seems almost hatefully, if not effectively though, preoccupied with the concept of television as entertainment and its desensitizing effects on humans. The television appears self-reflexively in most of Haneke’s films, such as in relation to violence in Funny Games (1997) and the voyeuristic quandary in Caché (2005). In The Seventh Continent the television’s presence is constant and embodies a symbolic whole of technological advance and the plateau of modern inertia. It is as almost as harsh a criticism as in Haneke’s episode of the Lumière and Company project (1996), in which Haneke observes modern channel surfing through the antiquated camera eye. I wouldn’t necessarily say that Haneke simply hates television/entertainment because it’s more complex than that. More so he acts as a critic of its careless and superficial frequent uses, designing his films as provocative psychological and philosophical tests of the medium, usually in relation to the viewer. However, as the family descends into darkness and death washes over the film, the television is present, even in their last hour, as if providing some crucial life support to the expiring machine bodice. With the film’s final shot of television static, drowning out Georg’s dissipating final memories, Haneke vitriolically suggests that despite the family’s escape from modern technology’s dehumanizing grip, this technology will continue to exist and remain effective. Paradoxically, the family’s escape into death becomes singular, selfish and in a way just as meaningless as life.

The film’s use of optometry and feigned blindness as motifs of omniscience, voyeurism, vision and observation is a self-reflexive technique concerning a number of meanings. A full image of an eye during an optometry session becomes a reflection of Haneke as a consistently invisible presence in his films, essentially as the god-like manipulator. An idea of omniscience that every director is intrinsically bound to but one that few are as interested as Haneke in its elucidation and nature. The eye image assaults the activity of the viewer as well, again questioning the moral validity of projected images as voyeuristic entertainment. The juxtaposition of optometry and false blindness shadows the ideas of clear moral vision and how this vision affects decisions. Specific to the characters, this premise describes tragic misunderstanding in Anna’s ironic blindness to her daughter’s needs.

The Seventh Continent is Kafkaesque in Haneke’s masterful understanding of crippling alienation and the consequent inner turmoil that infects the mind, revealing the existential dread and parental grief that plagues the characters. Similar to Kafka, is Haneke’s perception of life as an experience encased in the discomfited human shell, suffocated by neurosis and oppressed by a world of modernity, parental authority and ambivalence. There is a deceptively optimistic view that the title suggests, in addition to hints at the Australian continent, that there is a place that one can escape to in order to be happy and fulfilled. However, in the context of the film, this idea becomes a cruel, false envisionment of unattainable paradise, bound to the problematic concept of incessant searches for greener pastures. The actual seventh continent becomes a whimsical ideal, an impossible state to escape to from dark realities.

The Seventh Continent is ultimately about humans evolving into machines, experiencing the physiological problems of human nature, realizing their meaninglessness and consequently destroying themselves. The film all too well understands the deconstruction of humanity and any purported individuality by means in its own trajectory to reach ultimate advancement. Haneke creates a truly pessimistic vision of this human trek through time and does so with a bare method that is as enlightening as it is disheartening.

(91/100)

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age