Benny's Video

Benny, a teenager in Vienna, never puts his camera down. He keeps replaying footage of a pig being killed. He brings a girl he has met back to the flat and something happens there, with the camera running. Michael Haneke directed. It is the second part of his glaciation trilogy. Its subject is the video culture that settled in during the eighties. What critics point to is how deliberately it muddles the levels of reality: camcorder footage and static camera fold into each other and a distance stays between you and the event. The reception split. Stephen Holden praised the lead performance and described the character as the cold child, a young person whose detachment and short attention span were moulded by television. Some reviewers found the film too didactic about the dehumanising effects of media. What the writing on it agrees on is this: although Benny commits the violence, the film mainly indicts his disaffected parents and leaves its true villain deliberately ambiguous. It premiered at Cannes in May 1992, won the FIPRESCI Award at the 1993 European Film Awards and has since been restored and released by several distributors including the Criterion Collection. Who it is for: viewers curious about early Haneke and criticism of media. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot watch an animal being slaughtered. The film opens on that footage and returns to it more than once.