Analysis of Space: La Pianiste, 2001

Michael Haneke: Interiors

  • Production Designer: Christoph Kanter
  • Cinematography: Christian Berger is responsible for the luminous light in the film. The light in the interiors depending on the color of the light is optimized by the help of different kinds of furniture lamps. Berger’s Cine Reflect Lighting System was used in this film for the first time.
  • All scenes on real locations, 
  • except Erika’s apartment, the sex-shop cabinet, and the restroom. 28

Plot

Adapted from the Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin (1983), The Piano Teacher tells about Erika Kohut’s (Isabelle Huppert) seemingly successful life as a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, whose facade begins to fall throughout the film. Her interest in the composers Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann ensure her expertise in Romanticism. Controversially to this lifestyle as a powerful and successful woman, she lives with her mother (Annie Girardot), with whom she has a relationship of dependency, abjection, and violence. Until she meets the student Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), her life looks like under control although she has subdued sexuality with an interest in voyeurism and self-mutilation. The extra-ordinary talented engineer student Walter enrolls to the conservatory and insists on becoming the pupil of Erika, with whom he is in love. Erika’s answer to his romantic love is the demand to obey sadomasochistic conditions, which she explains in a letter to him and outlines the terms of their relationship. Finding out Erika’s emotional interior world Walter rejects her emotionally and begins a brutal relationship with her, eventually beating and raping her.29 Erika’s contradictory emotional states apparently change in her different habitats. The public space has a symbolic for her sexual desires whereas the conservatory is the place where she lives her brutally self-controlled side by disciplining her pupils. On the other hand, the apartment is the place where her deepest emotions reveal, here she is vulnerable.

Erika’s Apartment

The film begins with Erika entering her apartment. We hear the tight shot of the door. Seconds later we are introduced by the soundscape to the second character of the film, Erika’s mother(Annie Girardot). Hearing the sound of her television we begin to know about her world. In the hallway, Erika’s mother starts to ask questions about her late arrival. The hallway where mother and daughter usually meet when Erika comes home is one of the main places in the film. (Fig.5.1) As usual in Haneke-Films the entrance space is not only spatially but also metaphorically a stage for the collision of the characters’ inner worlds. She tries to cross the hall to her dubiously private room, which does not even have a key and is not the room she sleeps in since she shares one bedroom with her mother. (Fig.5.2)

Throughout the entire film we sense that the apartment is the territory of Erika’s mother. Even when Walter (Benoît Magimel) follows Erika to the apartment they have difficulty in finding privacy. Walter and Erika barricade the door to her room with a wardrobe. It is also a rebellious act of Erika to her disciplinarian mother who is responsible for her perverse and self-harming phantasies. In this privacy, Walter gets closer to Erika’s deepest desires and sexual phantasies which disgust him. Throughout the film, space becomes more and more meaningful. Where Walter was seeking privacy with Erika, she now looks for him at the club where he plays ice hockey. Where at the beginning Erika was being chased by Walter, later on, she has the shoe on the other foot. She asks him to talk in the storage room where an unpleasant encounter takes place. She escapes the room taking the door to the outdoor ice rink and disappears on the white background like disappearing in the nothingness. (Fig.5.3) The following night Walter returns to her apartment. The violent blows, humiliation and the kicking cannot be defined clearly as ‘rape’ as Erika who expressed her sadomasochistic interest does not show any feelings of neither pain nor pleasure. This event takes place in the windowless, oppressively, claustrophobic hallway in her mother’s territory. (Fig.5.4) The hallway in the film is heavily coded as „interior“ and „female“ which becomes Erika’s mind. 30

Vienna

The language in the film is French but the setting is in Vienna. We can see it from the signboards and hear German from the television. The atmosphere of the European cosmopolitan life is shown with the contradictory consumerist world that lies beneath its facade. We experience Vienna as a city of a high-art culture which makes art to become a product. The contrasty lifestyle in Vienna is perceivable in the architecture. The simple apartment of Erika’s mother contrasts the overwhelming architecture of the conservatory and the house of the bourgeois class, where Erika as a musician is the main entertainer but at the same time distanced from this lifestyle. (Fig.5.5) For Haneke’s Vienna is the capital of classical music and therefore the center of something extraordinary but it is also the place where classical music becomes an object for consumption. The distance between Erika and her bourgeois listeners comes up in Jelinek’s novel too, where she has a small chance to emancipate herself as an artist in contrast to the film. 31

Woman at the Window

Erika is lonely and distanced from the mass society. We can sense her melancholic loneliness at the scene where she in her office with her back turned to the camera is almost entirely in shadow. She is looking at the street scene of Vienna. „The shot’s interior is configured in a horizontal plane that spans a drawing of Robert Schumann, her piano and an unidentified, framed musical score which is crossed by a vertical plane of the open window framing Erika’s silhouette. The scene refers to the painting of Caspar David Friedrich, The Woman at the Window (Frau am Fenster, 1822), in which alone human figure, back to the viewer, mediates upon a grandly scaled natural scene, but which often simultaneously suggest the limits of vision and the qualitative differences between perception and experience. It also links to the area of Erika’s professional expertise (refers to Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann): “Romanticism“ 32 (Figs.5.6, 5.7)

The Bathroom of the Conservatory

In the film the bathroom of the conservatory forms an escape from publicity even if it is a public bathroom of the school. The bathroom scene where Erika and Walter have their first sexual encounter is shown with a long static shot, looking at the tiles. It almost becomes a timeless coordinate-space full of ambient noises in the background. (Fig.5.8)

Konzerthaus

The rape scene of Erika is followed by the concluding scenes of the film. The scene reunites all the classes which we see throughout the film in the conservatory which is the concert hall of Vienna where Erika should perform instead of her pupil. In the foyer of the hall Walter walks calmly past, he is chatting as nothing ever happened, her pupil that she wounded greets her, and her mother is undermining others’ praise with the withering indictment that it was only a school concert… As Erika stabs out of sight a kitchen knife in her shoulder, then she goes out. The scene is cut followed by the final scene of a static long shot showing the Konzerthaus, in the darkness, with its classical symmetry. The small silhouette of Erika walks out of the building and disappears in the darkness of Vienna. 33 (Figs.5.9, 5.10, 5.11)


  • 26 Oppenheimer, Jean. “Rural Terrorism”. American Cinematographer (January 2010): 18–24. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
  • 27 Pekler Michael, Omasta Michael, in Falter 38/2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20110531210105/http://www.falter.at/web/print/detail.php?id=997, 16.9.2009
  • 28 Cieutat, Michel and Rouyer, Philippe (2013), ‚Haneke über Haneke’, Alexander Verlag Berlin, Köln 2013, p. 258
  • 29 McCann Ben and Sorfa David (editors), The Cinema of Michael Haneke Europe Utopia’, Wallflower Press, 2012, p. 196
  • 30 McCann Ben and Sorfa David (editors), The Cinema of Michael Haneke Europe Utopia’, Wallflower Press, 2012; Article: Kate Ince,
  • Glocal gloom: existential space in Haneke’s French-language films, page 90
  • 31 McCann Ben and Sorfa David (editors), ‚The Cinema of Michael Haneke Europe Utopia’, Wallflower Press, 2012; Article: Felix W. Tweraser, Images of Confinement and Transcendence: Michael Haneke’s Reception of Romanticism in The Piano Teacher, page 200
  • 32 McCann Ben and Sorfa David (editors) ‚The Cinema of Michael Haneke Europe Utopia’, Wallflower Press, 2012; Article: Felix W. Tweraser, Images of Confinement and Transcendence: Michael Haneke’s Reception of Romanticism in The Piano Teacher, p.198, 199
  • 33 idem, p.205
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