“A simplicity that’s so difficult to attain”: the director Michael Haneke says is still unsurpassed
Having made acclaimed movies in French, German, and English language and worked extensively in television and theatre across his career, Michael Haneke is without question one of international cinema’s most prominent voices.
In the decades since he made his feature-length directorial debut on 1989’s The Seventh Continent, the filmmaker has become known for his unflinching, uncompromising, and often unsentimental work, shining a light on the stark realities of the human condition, regularly injecting his work with lashings of graphic violence and disturbing imagery to enhance the thematic undertones.
His deliberately-paced, engrossing, and immersive approach to cinema, layered in authenticity and ambiguity, have become hallmarks of his aesthetic, meaning simplicity is rarely a term attributed to his films. However, that’s precisely the reason why he views Abbas Kiarostami as one of the true greats, with the pioneering Iranian managing to achieve “a simplicity that’s so difficult to attain”.
A figurehead of the ‘Iranian New Wave’, Kiarostami’s poetic style and distinctive compositions earned him a legion of admirers, with his prolific output maintaining a balance between quantity and quality. Between his first feature in 1973 to his last in 2012, he helmed dozens upon dozens of productions that melded fact with fiction, documentary with reality, and external simplicity with internal complexities.
Those are just a handful of the reasons why Haneke holds Kirostami in such high regard, and when he was asked to cast his eye across the landscape of contemporary cinema, there was only one answer when he was pressed to name the one whose work he cherished most of all.
“He is still unsurpassed,” Haneke said of Kiarostami in The Other Journal. “As Brecht put it, ‘simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve’. Everyone dreams of doing things simply and still impregnating them with the fullness of the world. Only the best ones achieve this. Kiarostami has, and so has Bresson.”
Invoking the name of playwright Bertolt Brecht and the legendary Robert Bresson as points of comparison illustrates just how Haneke views Kiarostami as a monolithic presence in the world of modern cinema. It’s a view that’s been espoused by many, including the equally-illustrious Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese. The latter of which hails his unrivalled “purity”.
That perceived simplicity, which Haneke remarked was an incredibly difficult thing to create, was made to look effortless by Kiarostami throughout his entire career. Although there were many minimalist elements prevalent throughout his back catalogue, the filmmaker wasn’t entirely accepting of his output being broadly described as such.
He did admit that “my films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism,” but from his point of view he was only trimming the fat. “Elements that can be eliminated have been eliminated, some elements are highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark.” There wasn’t a wasted second in a Kiarostami film, and he made something his peers struggled to achieve look like the most natural thing in the world.