Michael Haneke's Favorite Films

Films that are entertainments give simple answers but I think that's ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think. If there are more answers at the end, then surely it is a richer experience.

My films are intended as 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. - Michael Haneke

My favourite film-maker of the decade is Abbas Kiarostami. He achieves a simplicity that’s so difficult to attain.

Sources: Sight & Sound
Top Ten
Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
Lancelot du Lac (Bresson)
Mirror (Tarkovsky)
Salò (Pasolini)
The Exterminating Angel (Buñuel)
The Gold Rush (Chaplin)
Psycho (Hitchcock)
A Woman under the Influence (Cassavetes)
Germany Year Zero (Rossellini)
L'eclisse (Antonioni)
Profil
Au hasard Balthazar (1966) Robert Bresson, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) Jean-Marie Straub, The Exterminating Angel (1962) Luis Buñuel, Germany, Year Zero (1947) Roberto Rossellini, The Gold Rush (1925) Charles Chaplin, Lancelot du Lac (1974) Robert Bresson, The Mirror (1976) Andrei Tarkovsky, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Stalker (1979) Andrei Tarkovsky, A Woman Under the Influence (1974) John Cassavetes.

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