(1994), and "Funny Games" (1997). Each of these films encompass the major themes and philosophical concerns threading throughout Haneke's oeuvre: a nightmare vision of the First World, obsessive consumerism, and technological dominance. Since 1989, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has earned the reputation of one of the most provocative and subversive auteurs in contemporary European art cinema. The focus of this book is Haneke's first four German-language films that represent a radical director's attempt to locate the root causes of a pervasive moral and psychological deterioration. This is not activist filmmaking in the sense of evoking change, but instead a radical cinema propelled by Haneke's aggressive methods of cultural vivisection. The book's target audiences are film scholars, graduate students in the fields of cinema analysis and critical studies, and art-cinema aficionados.

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