Benny`s Video.

Benny`s Video.

Benny's Video is a 1992 horror-of-personality film directed by the Austrian Michael Haneke. The plot of the film centers on Benny a teenager who views much of his life as distilled through video images, and his well-to-do parents who enable Benny's focus on video cameras and images.

The film opens with a home video of the slaughter of a pig on a European farm. The man uses an air gun and shoots through the pig`s brain, a scene which would upset any PETA REP

The video than rewinds to play the slaughter in slow motion, which emphasizes the hand-held barrel against the pig's foreskull

Maverick Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke loves rewinds. His recent Hidden (2005) begins in a similar way, while his Funny Games (1997), uses a clever rewing scene as well

These scenes of rewinding serve to take the viewer out of the moment, to remind us that we are viewers, to detach us from our involvement in the unfolding story, to position us as consumers of video

The film than goes to introduce the main character a teenage boy named Benny

While his parents are away for the weekend, Benny invites a girl he has seen outside the local video store to his home. He shows her the video of the pig slaughter, and they talk about the film leading to Benny showing her the slaughtering gun and holding it up to his chest. All the while his home video is video taping everything live.

Something goes terrible wrong - Should I stop there? No!

Looking through the contents of a girl's bag, Benny finds a wooden ball which opens like a Russian doll to reveal another ball, and another, until eventually there is nothing there at all

Benny has just videotaped himself murdering the bag's owner. What comes later is more shocking when his parents discover what happened and try to cover it up

A MUST SEE!

The film's structure is at first a string of seemingly unconnected episodes, which gradually blend to center on Benny and his fascination for video and televised images.

In a brief DVD feature interview with writer/director Michael Haneke, he makes a few interesting remarks about guilt as a motivator, though the characters in Benny's Video don't seem terribly burdened by that emotion. The closest he comes to explaining the film is to say that he is fascinated by stories of people who do violent things, but can't explain why they did them. Guilt and violence are also factors in Haneke's Caché, but they're approached in that film with a good deal more subtlety and suspense.