We are swimming in a flood of images.

Love, travel, education, sex, consumption - even war is fought with images, real and fake, documents and fakes.

That doesn't mean that the real dying and killing would be less, on the contrary.

But the number of those who only perceive it as an image, in an abstract and aestheticized form, is constantly increasing.

The images push themselves in front of the experience, they create a gap, a buffer with which one can keep reality at bay.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Cinema seems incurably old-fashioned in this new media world.

Its image production is much slower than that of smartphones and digital cameras, it takes months or years where they only need seconds.

But with this heaviness comes an advantage.

Because cinema can interrupt the visual cycle, it can rip apart the veil of illusion that other media are weaving more and more densely.

In the cinema, the images can look back - and thus show the viewer that the sentence "Here you are being lied to" does not only apply to Russian state television.

Of course, this kind of disillusionment is not a simple exercise, but an art.

At the moment it is only practiced by a few film directors.

The biggest among them is the Austrian Michael Haneke.

Twenty-five years ago, Haneke's film "Funny Games" was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

The film is about two teenagers in tennis gear who terrorize and kill a family at their vacation home.

Once the wife manages to shoot one of the two tormentors.

Then the other grabs a remote control and rewinds the scene on the screen until his accomplice is alive again.

After the performance, the audience split into outraged and enthusiastic.

Some felt like the victims of cynical manipulation, others said they had never seen a better film.

There were shouting duels in front of the cinema.

Cannes has not experienced a comparable uproar at a festival premiere since.

When Funny Games came out, Haneke was fifty-five years old.

He made his first feature film, The Seventh Continent, when he was forty-seven.

Before that he had worked for twenty years as an editor, dramaturge, screenwriter and filmmaker for West German and Austrian television stations and as a freelance theater director.

Haneke, born in Vienna as the son of an actress and a German actor, came from the depths of the director's trade, his early works, including the Ingeborg Bachmann adaptation "Three Ways to the Lake" and the two-parter "Lemminge", correspond to the gold standard of the time television.

But compared to The Seventh Continent and the films that followed it, they seem like journeyman's plays.

The "Trilogy of Emotional Glaciation", which he began with his cinema debut and continued with "Benny's Video" and "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance", made Haneke known in the German-speaking world.

"Funny Games" opened the doors of the international film business for him.

His next film, Code: Unknown, was made in Paris, starring Juliette Binoche.

Since then, France has become Haneke's artistic homeland, even though he returned to Vienna for the “Piano Player” based on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek, where he continues to live and teach.

But even the cast with Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel and Annie Girardot showed that Haneke no longer wants to act according to the rules of German-language cinema operations.

In the meantime, alongside Binoche and Huppert, he has also incorporated Daniel Auteuil and Jean-Louis Trintignant into his film family.

Instead of working with good actors, he now shoots with the best.