Michael Haneke - "71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls"

First and Foremost – though this movie is only his third, one would do well to watch his other works, viz., The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video ,Funny Games (1997),

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf, Caché, Funny Games (2007), The White Ribbon and Amour, before even attempting to watch 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

This is not a happy, feel-good factor, fun movie. One must familiarize with Haneke’s work before even venturing out to see this work.

The entire exercise is a big puzzle and the pieces begin to come together towards the end. To an untrained mind that has not been exposed to the unexpected or shock, this is a big conundrum as the film appears to go in no clear direction for most of the running time. One would therefore do well to stay away from this movie, if one is dunce or looking for something straightforward and easy to while away the time.

The films takes you through the apparently haphazard, disparate and boring unpredictability of daily existence in an Austrian city. Haneke reminds us of the unpredictability of life and that at any moment we could peter out from this Earth.

He specializes in commodifying our everyday life (sleep, brushing, washing, dressing, eating, working, beliefs, thoughts, philosophy, death) and characterizing society where he explores the chaos, anarchy, loneliness and hostility of modern society.



Throughout the movie, the Television is constantly present in the background, reminding us that each events of the world are nothing but a piece of media sensation, regarded as "breaking news", focusing more on "what" rather than on "why" it occurred. The final startling episode thus becomes another portion of media entertainment, to be relished by mass consumers who always long for what is thrilling and contentious, devoid of ever thinking of any ramifications. The TV always figures out that most killings are the work of a typical psychopathic youngster without motive who after watching many violent films and playing belligerent video games have this pent up urge one day to suddenly kill a group of people. The TV feeds the mass with its own opinion and hence sees itself as an opinion-maker. The outlook of the TV thus metamorphosizes into the killer’s motive.

This project can be compared with Krzysztof Kieslowski's work, where he deals with chance events and fateful incidents and somewhere, apparent randomness ends up in meaningful systematic order. One can also compare this with Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) where most of the isolated, unrelated characters meet at the restaurant in the final scene.