Benny's Video

Benny's Video (1992) is an Austrian-Swiss drama you can watch online on iFILM — Michael Haneke's second feature and the middle film in his informal trilogy on media violence, sitting between The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.

Fourteen-year-old Benny (Arno Frisch) lives in a comfortable bourgeois apartment in Vienna. His parents — played by Angela Winkler and Ulrich Mühe — are preoccupied and largely absent. His room is stacked with monitors, cameras and tape decks. He rewinds the same clip over and over: a pig being killed with a bolt gun on a farm. One afternoon he brings a girl home. What happens next he also films.

Haneke never shows the act directly. He shows the television playing the tape while the camera holds on the mother's face. That choice is the film's whole argument — about the screen as buffer, about the middle class that prefers not to look, about a child who has processed so much recorded violence that the boundary between image and event has gone blurry. Demanding, cold and precise. Stream Benny's Video (1992) on iFILM.