Catherine Wheatley on 'Playable Reality' in Haneke Benny's Video at BFI Southbank

In the latest in our series exploring the dialogue between film and philosophy, Catherine Wheatley examines Michael Haneke’s unsettling tale of teenage alienation and disturbance. In the latest in our series exploring the dialogue between film and philosophy, Catherine Wheatley examines Michael Haneke’s characteristically unsettling tale of teenage alienation and disturbance (and a life mediated by screens). Opening the film (which established his international reputation as arch-provocateur) with a video screen framed within the cinema screen (and an act of disturbing graphic violence), Haneke provides his audience with an interpretative key to what will follow: a highly reflexive sequence, it raises questions of how film can make reality ‘playable’, and what this means for its audience, for its consumers. Catherine Wheatley is a lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London and the author of Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image, as well as a BFI Film Classic on Haneke’s Hidden. The screening of Benny’s Video will be followed by a talk and an in-depth discussion.