The Seventh Continent / Der siebente Kontinent (1989) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Michael Haneke
Writers: Michael Haneke, Johanna Teicht (script)
Stars: Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni Tanzer

Michael Haneke: Trilogy
One of contemporary cinema’s most original, provocative, and uncompromising filmmakers, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke dares viewers to stare into the void of modern existence. With his first three theatrical features, The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance—a trilogy depicting a coldly bureaucratic society in which genuine human relationships have been supplanted by a deep-seated collective malaise—Haneke established the rigorous visual style and unsettling themes that would recur throughout his work. Exploring the relationship among consumerism, violence, mass media, and contemporary alienation, these brilliant, relentlessly probing films open up profound questions about the world in which we live while refusing the false comfort of easy answers.

The day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction. Inspired by a true story, the director’s first theatrical feature finds him fully in command of his style, observing with clinical detachment the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture—and the horror that lurks beneath its placid surfaces. The Seventh Continent builds to an annihilating encounter with the televisual void that powerfully synthesizes Haneke’s ideas about the link between violence and our culture of manufactured emotion.

Extras:
- High-definition digital master, supervised by director Michael Haneke, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- New interview with film historian Alexander Horwath
- Interview from 2005 with Haneke
- Trailer




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