Abstract
Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf (Le temps du loup, 2003) depicts a grim vision of the world in the aftermath of an unnamed catastrophe. Haneke turns the genre of dystopia into an experimental terrain where he can test the limits of the cinematic medium in the sense of "negating cinema in order to let reality speak for itself" (Nagib 2016, 147). An existential parable, Time of the Wolf envisions a sombre post-millenium age. It is a sharp analysis of what remains of man and society when the frame of civilization collapses. It scrutinizes the functioning mechanisms of the individual, the family and the social community in times of civilization undone. A harsh experiment towards a negative dialectics of the image, the film's exceptionally austere cinematic language confronts the spectator with the aesthetics of the "unwatchable" (Baer et al., 2019) and "cinematic unpleasure" (Aston 2010). The paper explores the ways in which Haneke's "intermedial realism" (Rowe 2017) also manifests in this film through photo-filmic images and painterly compositions, perceptions of stillness and motion, and cultural remnants of the past, giving way to affective sensations of intermediality. 1 cataclysm, the collectively experienced traumatic event that affects mankind, throws the spectator into a post-apocalyptic scenery in medias res, leaving room for the possibility of generalization and recontextualization, reverberating with today's global sense of impending doom. Haneke had kept the script, written in the early period of his cinematic career, in the drawer for long until he felt it topical to deal with in the shade of 9/11, the event that proved to be the first act of a long series of crises, including the 2008 financial crisis, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the terrorist attacks against the Western world, the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the Brexit vote in 2016, the increasingly pervasive environmental crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War, that have shaped the history of the 21st century. With Time of the Wolf, Haneke thus envisions a sombre postmillenium age, picturing a general state that György Kalmár words like this: "our time is that of shock, bewilderment, cognitive disorder, regressive escape from reality and the painful task of readjusting one's sense of normalcy year after year. Oftentimes, the general sentiment is that there is something wrong with the twenty-first century, this is not what history was meant to be, there is something awfully off" (Kalmár 2020, viii) . Michael Haneke's entire cinematic universe is related to crisis, to global crisis as well as to the crisis of the contemporary Western world, of European modernity. As Janina Falkowska suggests, "Haneke's films must be seen in the context of the recent history of Europe: the dissolution of the communist system, German unification, terrorism, mass migratory movements in Europe, and increasing homophobia and terrorist paranoia, as well as general globalization and unification trends within the new global economy and the Western world" (2014, 85) . Falkowska highlights mourning and melancholia as both being reactions to loss, may it be a person, an abstraction or an ideal. In his feature films made since the end of the 1980s, Haneke looks at the unstable pillars Western modernity and identity is built on and at what makes them vulnerable in terms of repressed individual and collective tensions, unprocessed conflicts and historical traumas. Haneke's films showcase apparently stable life patterns that drastically turn into liminal, existential situations due to some intrusion, unexpected invasion or unfolding tension. Haneke's main target is the middle-class, bourgeois family; he looks at what lies behind the carefully sustained balance and façade of the core unit of society. The first feature film of the Viennese-Parisian transnational filmmaker, The Seventh Continent (Der siebente Kontinent, 1989) , having as its protagonists Georg, Anna and Evanames that will repeatedly turn up in his later films, also in Time of the Wolf, suggesting the intratextual connections among Haneke's films and showing protagonists as "everymen" in parable-like narratives -, depicts a grim picture of a family that unexpectedly commit collective suicide. In Benny 's Video (1992) the parents discover traces of a murder committed by their son Benny on a video cassette recorder and then become accomplices by keeping silent and family life becoming a nightmare; Code Unknown (Code inconnu, 2001) builds up, on parallel threads, convoluted identity patterns against the backdrop of immigration, social insecurity and existential despair. In the same year, The Piano Teacher (La pianiste, 2001), the screen adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel, was released, followed, in a chronological order, by Time of the Wolf (2003) ; not ranked among Haneke's best creations, Time of the Wolf carries further the theme of the collapse of the bourgeois family but dissolves it in the larger context of a community of survivors. An ingenious mind game film, Hidden (Caché, 2005 ) is yet another grim depiction of the implosion of the bourgeois family under the impact of some threatening video tapes of unknown origin, the threads leading to the protagonist Georges's adopted half-brother of Algerian origin and his son, and, through that, to issues of collective guilt and collective memory. "Michael Haneke likes to say that his films are easier to make than to watch," a reviewer writes (Conrad 2012) . Haneke confronts the spectator with violence inherent in modern society, with historically grounded fears and uncertainties, through the violence of the image. Perhaps the most brutal confrontation is provided by Funny Games (2007) , in which two gentlemanly behaving youngsters, Peter and Paul intrude in the holiday home in the picturesque Alps of a consolidated bourgeois family and exterminate them in the untroubled manner of playing a computer game. Another instance, The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band -Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, 2009) , devised in high-contrast black-and-white images and extreme long takes that is characteristic in general of Haneke's real-time cinema, takes the spectator back to the period before WWI, and shows the domestic tensions and anxieties of a previous generation that point at the roots of transgenerational trauma transmission. To wrap up the selection of Haneke's filmography, Love (Amour, 2012) is an austere depiction of the intimate relation between an ageing couple, compromised by the limitations posed by the failing body. Based on the above, Haneke's spectator can be sure that a title such as his 2017 Happy End can never be taken for granted but rather as yet another a flick at the high bourgeois shams evoking classical Hanekean themes of crisis such as "family dysfunction, intergenerational revenge, the poisonous suppression of guilt and the return of the repressed" (Bradshaw 2017 ). In the context of the Hanekean oeuvre, the dystopian Time of the Wolf stands apart in offering the largest spectrum of crisis, examining human behaviour at the level of the individual, the family, and the social group interacting in the loose frame of disintegrated community bonds, in times of postcrisis, in the sense György Kalmár defines it, "not after crisis but rather as the time when the effects of critical breakdowns are played out" (2020, viii) .
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