Bertolt Brecht was sceptical about photography: “less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG [a German electrical factory] tells us next to nothing about these institutions.” Making something visible, he suggested, was a long way from understanding it. 

Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent is a coruscating social drama; Hari Kunzuru describes it as “probably the most succinct and unsparing condemnation of bourgeois consumer culture ever committed to celluloid”. But as he goes about eviscerating bourgeois culture, Haneke uses a form of cooly observational cinema that seems very close to what Brecht called photography’s “mere reflection”. 

The daily rituals of an Austrian family’s everyday life – eating, shopping, showering, working, commuting – are observed with crisp and unadorned clarity. As these moments accumulate, the fact that these crystalline shots are in fact telling us “next to nothing” about the motivations, thoughts, or souls of the family members is precisely what we become aware of. The stifled inexpression embedded in 1980s Austrian cultural and social life – what Haneke has called its “glaciation” – is translated into the film’s own diffidence. Haneke puts us in the position of voyeurs then refuses to reward that voyeurism with the intimate, sordid comprehension we imagine it must yield.

What seemed problematic to Brecht – purely superficial observation – is for Haneke a mercurial tool. Unusually in a film that is so palpably polemic, Haneke seems to collude with the medium’s capacity for reticence more than its capacity for revelation. The recurring image of the family’s fish tank is a double-edged one: it reflects the film’s apparently transparent perspective on its characters’ lives, but also reminds us that this vantage point is merely onto an artificial surface (who knows what those fish are thinking?). At the film’s entropic climax, an axe-blow smashes the tank and sluices the living room with water, fish and glass: the illusion is in pieces.

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