71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls, 1995) is an Austrian drama by Michael Haneke, available to watch online on iFILM. It closes what Haneke called his "glaciation trilogy," alongside The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video.

The film takes a real incident — a 19-year-old student opened fire in a Vienna bank on Christmas Eve 1993 — and reverse-engineers the weeks before it through 71 disconnected vignettes. A Romanian teenager crossing borders alone. A student whose table-tennis practice tips toward obsession. An elderly couple eating dinner without exchanging a word. None of these people are directly connected. Haneke places a TV news clip of the shooting at the very start, so what follows is less a story than a ledger: ordinary urban life accumulating toward something no single cause can account for.

There is no dramatic arc, no editorial sympathy in the cutting, no moment of catharsis. Haneke strips the film down to a cold observational register and refuses to offer the audience a way out. It is not easy viewing — but for anyone trying to understand how Haneke's method works before the better-known Funny Games or Caché, this is the clearest blueprint. Stream 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1995) online on iFILM.