Michael Haneke’s first feature-length film, The Seventh Continent, examines the modern world. The film tries to disturb the audience’s feelings by obliging them to question their lives and understand the reasons for Haneke’s focus on the details of everyday life via the destructive change in the psychological mood of an upper-middle-class family.
The Details of Everyday Life
The film’s fundamental idea is simple: To show a family one day in a year, in three chapters (1987, 1988, and 1989). Haneke reflects social ideologies by focusing on the most miniature but most prime representation of the social structure, which is a family. The audience faces the routine of the three family members – Georg (the dad), Anna (the mom), and Evi (the child) – for the first thirty-five minutes in three parts.
In the first part, they wake up, get up from their bed, wear their slippers, brush their teeth, get dressed up, give the fishing worm to the fishes in the aquarium, prepare and have breakfast, and go out from the garage by car. In the second part, they work at their job. In the third part, they go to the supermarket, get some gas from the gas station, and come back to their house. Then, Evi does her homework. Georg takes a shower. Anna puts the stuff they bought from the supermarket in the fridge. Later, they have dinner, watch TV, and go to sleep.
What grabs our attention is the significance of Anton Peschke’s cinematography. He shows the characters’ faces minimally. On the other hand, he captures material goods in detail to underline their importance in the family’s life and the modern world. The alarm clock, gas meter, calculator, radio, and TV are some of the efficient and straightforward examples of these people’s daily rituals, which are shown to define the position of an individual in a throw-away society in Western culture.1
When the family members smile at each other at the dinner table, they cannot create a conversation. Haneke expresses these communicational issues by attracting our attention to the family’s loveless and careless attitudes towards each other. The family’s economic position and the materialism of the bourgeoisie are introduced and defined by Haneke’s point of view. He manipulates reality by using wide lenses and employing a measured value of noise.
From a Dream to a Nightmare
The film’s story is also as simple as its fundamental idea: A European family who plans to escape Australia. In the first two chapters of the film, Haneke gives the audience an endless zone of hope for the future. The beginning of the third chapter also gives the audience the idea that the family members will immigrate from Austria to Australia. However, it is seen that they have just returned from Georg’s parents’ house to their house. Haneke misleads the audience on purpose.
Afterward, in a letter by Georg to his parents, the audience faces the shocking truth: The family will commit suicide. They withdraw all their savings from the bank and sell their car. Then, before self-destruction, they have an upper-class breakfast. It is reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1498). After breakfast, they start self-destruction by demolishing their clothes and goods. They express their long-time depression and feelings of emptiness by destroying everything they own.
The breaking point of the film is seen in the middle of self-destruction. When Georg tries to break the aquarium’s glass, Anna says, “No,” which signifies that she is not yet ready to commit suicide. On the other hand, Georg is determined. He closes the door of hope for life by breaking the aquarium’s glass and killing the fish in it. Additionally, Haneke also tries to explain the endless cycle of the dominant ideology. The destruction of the aquarium is a symbol of the individualistic society of so-called ‘free’ individuals. The family members can give themselves up for a better society. However, the unbearable weight of death would still defeat them.
Afterward, the audience encounters the most significant criticism against the industrial culture in the film. Haneke manipulates the reality once again, with a long shot of the family members throwing their money into a closet to indicate that death becomes more real via negative material values. So, it is not surprising for the audience to see them watching TV even when trying to take their own lives.
Conclusion
The audience faces the truth that all the family members are no longer alive at the end of the film. The snowy TV screen – which is the last shot of the film – is used as a symbol to define the absurdity of people’s lives in the modern world. What makes this film unique is Haneke’s approach to interrogate how a society or the modern world might take shape after postmodernism. What remains still are the lies of modernism, or in other words, manipulated truths. These manipulated truths lead to the destructive preoccupation with materialism, as evident in the film.
Works Cited
1. Şavlı, Büşra. 2016. "Yedinci Kıta: Haneke’nin Acıtan Aynasından İlk Yansıma." Filmloverss. January 10. Accessed February 5, 2018. https://filmloverss.com/yedinci-kita-hanekenin-acitan-aynasindan-ilk-yansima/.