Benny’s Video would offer us a warning from the VHS era that feels even more potent in our social media-driven world. At the heart of Benny’s Video lies a teenage boy’s obsession with Video and a parental need to use media and technology as a babysitter.
Michael Haneke is well known for films that reflect and challenge our notions of social development, taking audiences on uncomfortable journeys into some of the darkest corners of human behaviour. Haneke’s ‘glaciation trilogy’ comprises some of his most provocative works.
Starting with The Seventh Continent, a cutting dissection of social progress, wealth, and unhappiness, he followed in 1992 with Benny’s Video, and in 1994 with 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. Within each film in his ‘Glaciation Trilogy,’ Haneke held a mirror to modern society’s most uncomfortable truths, his camera challenging our views on progress, humanity, place, media, and belonging.
Benny’s Video would offer us a warning from the VHS era that feels even more potent in our social media-driven world. At the heart of Benny’s Video lies a teenage boy’s obsession with Video and a parental need to use media and technology as a babysitter. After meeting a girl at the local video store, Benny (Arno Frisch) invites her home to watch his videos, but his disconnected sense of reality soon leads to an event he cannot rewind or pause.
Benny’s Video remains a profoundly uncomfortable viewing experience, as Benny realises that life cannot be edited while his parents (Angela Winkler and Ulrich Mühe) cover his tracks. Through Benny’s dark and sinister journey, Haneke asks us to ponder a series of pertinent questions about parenting, the nature of guilt, and the power of tech and media on adolescent behaviour.
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