On the career arc of Michael Haneke and what his films say about the limits of cinema's responsibility to its audience.

Haneke is the director who most explicitly interrogates the ethics of spectatorship. His films — The Piano Teacher, Cache, Funny Games, The White Ribbon — are all, in different ways, about what it means to watch, and what watching implicates the viewer in.

Funny Games was made twice: once in German in 1997 and once in English in 2007, with the same script and the same shot structure. The second version is not a remake but a redistribution — Haneke wanted the film seen by the American audiences who were the target of its argument.

The argument of Funny Games is uncomfortable to state directly: the film is about sadistic entertainment, and by watching it, you are complicit in sadistic entertainment. The characters who break the fourth wall and address the camera directly are acknowledging that the violence you are watching exists for your consumption.

Cache's formal argument is different but related: the film is about surveillance and guilt, and its entire narrative construction depends on the question of who is watching whom. The final shot of Cache — which contains information that most viewers miss on first viewing — is a formal statement about how much is visible when you know where to look.