Is Caché a masterpiece? I’m loathe to use the term, and though I saw the film twice in 2005, I (regrettably) omitted it from my top 10 list at year’s end. And yet, I return to it more than any other of last year’s movies, unable to shake what Haneke was up to. The same potential exists for these four DVDs: If you can make it through the films themselves (they do not make for easy, carefree spectatorship), the ideas are sure to haunt you into the indefinite future. Few filmmakers have generated as conceptually unified an oeuvre as Haneke, evident even from these early works, which resonate with contemporary concerns and reinforce the director's standing as one of the most audacious filmmaker-philosophers working today.

Haneke’s next project is an English-language remake of Funny Games (1997), the most recent of the four films Kino just released. In the original version, an average enough Austrian family — father, mother, son, daughter — repair to their country home for a quiet vacation away from all the soul-crushing social concerns of Haneke’s other films. There they are confronted by two sociopathic teens, who begin, innocently enough by dropping by to borrow four eggs and then quickly and ruthlessly turn to holding the family at gunpoint.

From Straw Dogs to Panic Room, the setup is a familiar enough exploitation film premise, in which audiences take whatever sadomasochistic pleasure they can in watching the family pushed to the brink, only to turn the tables on their assailants in a final act of superhuman resolve. Haneke is not that type of filmmaker, and there’s no question that his ability to pull off a straightforward thriller pales in comparison with Peckinpah or Fincher. Haneke is an intellectual provocateur, not a stylist, and as such, he takes Funny Games in a different direction.

At that table-turning moment, the mother grabs one of the captor’s rifles and uses it to dispatch the nearest of her captors, but her act of split-second heroism fails as the remaining villain locates a remote control, quite literally pauses the movie in progress, and rewinds backwards through what has just unfolded. The scene repeats, only this time the outcome is different: Knowing what lies in store, the captor grabs the rifle first, admonishes the mother, and executes her husband. The siege continues until she too is dead, and the two killers move on to the next house.

This trick, a violation of the fundamental rules of moviegoing, reveals not only the underlying theme of all Haneke’s films — that the real-world act of viewership itself takes priority over the fictional proceedings of the narrative — but a startling truth about spectatorship in general: Why do we as audiences subject ourselves to films like Straw Dogs? What unspoken bargain have we entered into with the filmmaker with regard to what we hope to see unfold? And whose side are we on anyway (as one assailant asks of the audience, for they clearly have the upper hand in Funny Games)?

Where Hollywood filmmakers test their films and even reshoot endings to better conform to the audience’s wishes, Haneke examines the effect that having our expectations so violently upended has on the “pleasure” we derive from the experience. After witnessing so much brutality, are we truly “satisfied” by seeing the on-screen villains violently punished for their actions, or is it possible that we the audience are the true perpetrators here, complicit by our taste in subject matter in everything that befalls the characters?

There is nothing more or less artificial about the way Haneke positions a camera for one of his cold, static shots than, say, the way Fincher passes through a keyhole and tours Jodie Foster’s house in one of his stylized maneuvers. The key difference with Haneke comes in the fact that he intends for his audience to examine the artifice (consider Caché in the way we must constantly ask ourselves whether we are watching through Haneke the filmmaker’s eyes or studying yet another surveillance video, as if any difference truly exists between the two).

Working backwards through the new Kino releases, Haneke’s 1994 feature 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance begins with the on-screen announcement of a bank shooting in which a college student killed three people. Here, we have as the basis for the film a news item, and what is news, Haneke seems to be asking, if not a sensational account of the extraordinary? After all, news organizations never cover the banalities of everyday life, such as the amount of time we spend sleeping or the time we waste standing in grocery store checkout lanes, but Haneke does just that.

For 90 minutes, Haneke alternates between European news footage (a typical example: children decorating a Christmas tree in Sarajevo while “hundreds of grenades fall on the city”) and the banalities of human experience. Each of the characters he follows has some tie to the bank shooting that closes the film, but the crime itself is unpremeditated and so the psychology of these preceding scenes is self-contained, not necessarily an indicator of things to come.

How long can you watch someone practice ping-pong in silence before losing patience? Or listen to a lonely old man trying to hold a simple phone conversation with his daughter? Does seven and a half minutes seem too long? And yet, Haneke would argue, these mundane routines are more representative of these characters’ daily lives than the cinematic sparks of excitement that constitute other movies.

On DVD (versus the theatrical experience), audiences have mastery over the movie. Just as the criminals in Funny Games took control over their film, you the viewer can choose to fast-forward through the long dull stretches if it is merely the narrative that interests you in 71 Fragments (that is, if you wish only to witness the bank shooting at the end of the movie).

But 71 Fragments is not about the shooting. In fact, given Haneke’s track record with depicting acts of violence in the most realistic possible way, it’s significant that he downplays the firestorm itself (in light of his other films, it would not have been surprising if he’d chosen to show the shooting through the cold eye of a bank security camera — as it no doubt would have appeared on the evening news).

Instead, the film is about those very banalities, and seemingly uninteresting scenes go on as long as they do as a challenge to audiences. He’s not trying to annoy us with his quotidian tableaux, but rather, inviting us to interact with them on an intellectual level. Can we relate with the characters and arrive at our own conclusions about their daily lives?

This is the very opposite of escapist entertainment and can be extremely difficult to decipher on home video (when you may be busy washing the dishes, folding clothes or paying the bills while giving the TV only a sliver of your full attention), but it’s worth engaging with it fully. Even viewed in fast-forward, its insights still register with an open-minded viewer (I’m the first to admit that there are other films, such as the works of celebrated Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, that I can’t stand to watch any other way).

When it comes to films that manage to balance everyday banality and exceptional behavior in a way that proves both entertaining and insightful, only Fargo comes to mind, but I encourage you to consider the parallels: Fargo closes after a day of unusually grisly detective work with a quiet moment in which pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson sits in bed comforting her husband on the selection of his painting for use on a three-cent stamp. Perhaps I’m being too detailed about a non-Haneke film here, but my point is that the Coens’ specificity about something completely separate from their central story (a man who had his own wife kidnapped in order to extort a ransom from his wealthy father-in-law) suggests that Fargo may not actually be about the criminal malfeasance, but rather the Gundersons’ private life.

Back to the topic at hand, 71 Fragments contains similar scenes, most notably, one in which a married couple lies awake at night thinking about what they’ve seen on television that day. Analyze this scene, not the climactic bank shooting, and the entire film comes into focus. Unlike the Coens’ approach to Fargo, Haneke hasn’t bothered to make the crime story entertaining in and of itself. Here, he has provided us with no separate artificial level on which to appreciate the film. As Haneke tells his students, “When you’re playing billiards, you can hit the ball directly or by banking it. And it’s always better to bank it.”

It means more work for viewer, but greater reward than any of those movies engineered to sell popcorn can offer. Most taxing of these early Haneke features is Benny’s Video (here I mean “taxing” not as a pejorative term, but merely as a way of reiterating that Haneke’s films are challenging by design, some moreso than other). It also happens that of Haneke’s early works, Benny’s Video (1992) bears the strongest similarity to Caché in the sense that it separates human experience into two categories: as it is lived and as it is recorded.

If the nature of guilt is Haneke’s recurring theme — and he comes right out and says as much on the instructive Q&A sessions included with each of the films — then Benny’s Video and Caché come at the subject from opposite ends. In Caché, a series of ominous videos anonymously delivered to a married father remind the man of a long-suppressed selfish act from his childhood. In Benny’s Video, an adolescent obsessed with videotaping and later rewatching scenes from his life kills a young female friend on-camera and shows the footage to his parents. It is their guilt, by contrast with Benny’s chilling ambivalence, that leads them to cover up the crime and justifies the fact that they, not Benny, are eventually arrested for the crime.

Two techniques, seen for the first time here, have since become essential components of Haneke’s method. First is the notion of watching action unfold through the filter of a monitor or TV screen (as the murder happens “live,” Haneke chooses to show it not from the most advantageous perspective of an omniscient filmmaker, nor the limited lens of Benny’s camera, but rather, on the video monitor in Benny’s bedroom, two steps removed from the killing itself where audiences are made most aware of their own voyeurism). The second is the act of rewinding and reviewing recorded footage, the way Benny does throughout the film, as if the experiences themselves are more real on second viewing than at the moment they first occurred.

When you think about it, this is the reality of the movie-watching experience, where events don’t actually exist in any form other than that depicted on-screen. The connective tissue between fragments exists not on the cutting room floor, but exclusively in the audience’s imagination, and Haneke’s duty as a filmmaker is, as he puts it, “to make (the construction) contradictory enough to create the illusion of the richness of life.”

That richness is accomplished through the complexity of details Haneke manages to capture, not the satisfaction of his characters (I challenge you to find a conventionally happy character anywhere in Haneke’s films), and no film offers a more depressing depiction of day-to-day life than The Seventh Continent (1989), a wrist-slitter originally commissioned for Austrian TV. The movie opens in a car wash, as a family sits silently within, daydreaming about a billboard illustrating travel getaways to Australia (the “seventh continent” of the film’s title). If stacked end to end, how many hours of their lives have been spent washing the car, brushing their teeth, making the coffee, buying gasoline, driving to work, and so on?

Haneke reduces each of these routines to disembodied tasks, suggesting the toll their mindless repetition takes over time. His indictment comes in the fact that nowhere in this dull cycle of self-imposed conformity does the camera manage to find any evidence of “life.” The characters exists as automata in an impersonal culture, stripped of meaningful intellectual or emotional connections. Inspired by a news story about a family who destroyed all their possessions (withdrawing all their money from the bank and flushing it down the toilet even) before collectively committing suicide, The Seventh Continent is a harrowing interpretation of a real-life event. But is it a fair social critique?

If Haneke’s challenge to the audience in each of his films is asking them to use their individual experience to make sense of the characters’ actions, is it realistic to offer a movie in which the only thought seems to be about the futility of wasted time — time that could be spent, what, climbing mountains, writing novels, having meaningful social interactions with fellow humans? Granted, it is no doubt more difficult to convince a clinically depressed man to take a shower than the average person (after all, as the man might argue, he will only get dirty again), but doesn’t our own experience tell us that our minds are often most active when our actions seem to be running on autopilot — in the shower or on the toilet or stuck in traffic? These are the moments when inspiration is most likely to strike.

That’s the paradox operating in all of Haneke’s films: To take them at face value is frustrating at best, as Haneke is seldom interested in straightforward storytelling. It is the ideas that matter. Even by the standards of European art films, his films seem bleak, and yet a separation exists between what is literally being shown and what is actually going on. No one is more acutely aware than Haneke of what can be communicated on screen if only you know where — or how — to find it (remember that final shot in Caché, in which information is literally hidden on screen, or more subtly, the way Juliette Binoche’s character conveys, as I read it, that an affair has come between the married couple without ever saying anything to make that assumption explicit?), and sometimes, what the filmmaker leaves out can be as telling as what he elects to include.

[this essay first appeared on Collider.com]