Mrs Tilton: glad to have been of service ;).

I have been overexposed to them, so that most things they did became very predictable and boring

De gustibus usw. Still, I must thank you for jogging my memory, as it’s long past time I read Holzfällen again, and I shall pack it in my bag this weekend.

And frankly what has happened AFTER WWII has not shown that we have improved in any sort of discernible way from the violence of OUR 30-year war (1914-1945). So humanity has proven Haneke and his “intellectual milieu” right!

I don’t necessarily have anything per se against those I mentioned (well, actually that’s not true of Ostermeier and Schlingensief) and in fact I like some of that stuff quite a bit and acknowledge that they’re very talented (again, with the exception of those in brackets). It’s more that I have been overexposed to them, so that most things they did became very predictable and boring. Also, I detest their dominance and more or less unquestioned status within certain parts.

… Bernhard…

As in Thomas?

If so, you think Haneke’s work having a “family resemblance” to Bernhard’s is a point against Haneke?

“Gay for Johnny Depp” – best band name ever!

could you describe the Circle of Haneke?

I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a circle, though there are some strong connections, but rather stick to milieu instead or maybe family resemblances – some names below:

Schleef, Marthaler, Castorf, Jelinek, Schlingensief, Seidl, Bernhard, Ostermeier etc.

I’ve always felt Michael Mann has a silliness problem.

I agree wholeheartedly (“The Keep” is hard to beat as far as silliness is concerned), but I love him precisely for the single-mindedness with which he sticks to this rather antiquated worldview – also, many of his films have a wonderful cinematic power to them, which is quite rare actually.

And unlike your good self, Novakant, I’ve always felt Michael Mann has a silliness problem. His main (only?) subject is machismo, and his world was most fully expressed in the humourless Zoolander posing of Miami Vice.

That said, Brian Cox was way the best Hannibal Lecter.

novakant, forgive me but could you describe the Circle of Haneke? Feel free to limit yourself to what can be google”d.

The movie was 3 hours of watching unsympathetic hoods tangle with unsympathetic cops, without the director’s appearing to realize that the hoods were unsympathetic—that last being the fatal flaw.

I believe that the film was shot in digital colour and then converted to black and white. The monochrome imagery is often superb, but a definite digital flavour remained in the tonality: a very small flaw in a terrific movie.

We’re all getting used to the aesthetics of digital, and this is an interesting test case. It’s shot on old-style colour film. The “digital flavour” you detect comes entirely in post-production. It’s a reminder that traditional black and white has colour variation in it, as you’d expect from an organic chemical process. By contrast, this digital black and white is produced by removing the colour information.
(It sounds as though they didn’t simply desaturate the final negative, but used the colour channel information in their digital scans to preserve the subtlety of the tonal range in their black and white images. Nonetheless, once you map it and grade it to a straightforward scale of grey values, all that old-style organic variation is lost.)
If you feel the organic imperfection of celluloid black and white is important, you could reintroduce it, digitally, in a post-production fake. One can imagine a White Ribbon in which the period is evoked by reproducing the photography of the time, along the lines of Roger Deakins’ work in The Assassination of Jesse James. The interview Novakant links to at #6 explains that they specifically decided against doing that kind of thing. While Deakins is obviously an all-time great, I think Haneke’s approach has more running room as regards how digital will be used in the future. I also like the attractive modesty the interview shows as far as making artistic claims for a given technical approach. Christian Berger (Haneke’s cinematographer) talks about creating a modern black and white, but refuses to define it, and says that in the end it just amounts to “a different taste, no?”
Contrast that with the inflated claims Michael Mann made for Public Enemies. To his mind, fidgety digital video “looked like what it was like to be alive in 1933. In the end it made total sense: video looks like reality, it’s more immediate, it has a vérité surface to it. Film has this liquid kind of surface, feels like something made up.”
Public Enemies completely failed to engage. The White Ribbon does engage, superbly. And that, surely, is what matters.
I’ll bet that over time your slight discomfort with the “different taste” of the various flavours of digital will fade, as these new aesthetic standards establish themselves.