Film - Think

"[Films are]…polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus."

- Haneke

Time of the Wolf claims its title (Wolfszeit) from an old German poem describing an apocalypse, a poetic rendering of the world in stages of social chaos. As Haneke's story goes, Anna is leading her teenaged daughter Lise and shell-shocked son Ben through the French countryside in search of food and shelter after some unknown catastrophe has pushed Europe into an ungoverned, informationless confusion. Making their way from shelter to shelter with no food or water, they eventually come upon a small gathering of vagrants in an abandoned railway station. With the rest of this group of survivors Anna decides to wait for a train to happen by, hopefully on its way toward or from civilization. Haneke’s sparse tale dispassionately tracks the devolution of this micro-society as they wait. Women are reduced to bartering leverage and men to their status on the scale of the will to power. As a larger band of dislocated vagabonds descends on the station, a sort of tribalism emerges. It is one that hasn’t completely stepped beyond traditional European race tensions, which, other than a few packs of cigarettes, remains the only shred of European cultural identity in the film.

Throughout the film Haneke continually plays with the depth of field, alternating between and isolating his characters. This destabilizing effect engages us in the frantic anarchy of his script. He lets sound dribble from frame to frame, at times moving from silence to intolerable din back to silence over the course of a few frames. In one memorable scene Anna stumbles through pitch-black darkness for several moments as we see nothing but that odd blackness of unexposed celluloid. It sits at the beginning of the film like a negative space, as if a scene used to be there but has been taken out, and in the jarring resumption of the film we never recover from a nagging sense of loss. In this way, Time of the Wolf takes from us far more than it gives to us.

Perhaps this initial setup what makes the final image of the film so haunting. It is inconclusive, draining the film of any sense of myth that may have developed. Haneke seems to be implying that his film is not a "parable for our time," a "cautionary tale" or any description that is regularly applied to post-apocalyptic fantasies. Rather the film is an exercise in hopelessness, abandoning myth rather than leading us to it. It becomes a reverse apocalypse. Rather than unveiling the future, it further cloaks it in cynicism, robbing us of the possibility of anticipation. The film really only begins after this ending, the preceding scenes a way for Haneke to develop the well-marked edge of this side of the chasm spawned by the conclusion. It is like Lessing’s ugly ditch, Wittgenstein's raft, or a host of ways we use to describe the unspeakable. Perhaps in terms of film, Haneke has enacted here the reverse of the Starchild sequence in 2001. We can only say: “My God, it’s full of nothing.”