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Austrian director Michael Haneke came up with the idea of making this film after his trilogy about alienation (Der Siebente Kontinent, Benny's Video and 71 Fragmente...). It is a self-reflexive film about violence in the media, and it clearly points to its own factitiousness on several occations, which makes it really difficult to accept that people do not like the film, or that they were frightened by it. This is not a frightening film, but it is frightening that people are frightened by it. You must be stupid to be scared during "Funny Games", I believe people are more likely to be repulsed than scared. Repulsed by themselves because they are to blame for the violence in this film. Haneke pulls out a number of Bertolt Brecht- inspired asides to the camera that makes this film a reflexive masterpiece, a film that offers its viewers a clear argumentation of why film violence is not consumable, why it never can or should be entertaining to watch violence. "Funny Games" is almost anti-film, it is obviously not a classic film, and it is closer to the work of Jean-Luc Godard than any violence-obsessed Hollywood director. "Funny Games'" false mask is removed several times when the sadistic, violent young man Paul (or Beavis or even Jerry) stops the film time and steps into a conversation with the audience. "Is it enough? Really? Don't you want a plausible development?" he says coolly and disturbingly to the audience, who by now should know this is an experiment and not a thriller.

The violence in this film, in contrast to American genre films such as thrillers, action films and horror films, is invisible. The consequences of the violence, though, are visible and feels painstakingly real. This is not an exciting film either, because Haneke either leaves out or totally turns around all the "rules" of a horror film. The message in this film is what I believe viewers who do not like it reacts strongly to. The film clearly is an attempt to make the audience expose themselves and their wish to see people killed on film. Its meaning is that the audience understands their role as the initiators of the killings and violence, and that they never want to see violence on film again. The violence in the media gives us a wrong impression of what violence is, because violence is real and it should not feel good to see fictional violence. It should hurt, and because it's your fault that it happens, it should hurt to watch it, too. The French director Gaspar Noé seems to have understood this when making "Irréversible", which is the best film about violence since "Funny Games". With this film, Michael Haneke wanted his audience to never indulge in visual, violent pleasures again. Unfortunately, it left many people so cold they never want to see a film by Haneke again. That is a shame: He is a director with a conscience.

This film is the last in Michael Haneke's trilogy about alienation called "Vergletscherung die Gefühle", and it ends in a violent climax which is a result of the previous fragments that Haneke presents to us. In this film Haneke developed a style that is very reminiscient of his 2000 film "Code Inconnu". It features rather short episodes, and within each episode there is scarcely editing or camera movement. Each episode is divided by a second's black screen, and Haneke often interrupts and ends the episode in the middle of a person's sentence. This is a very economical style of filmmaking, and it certainly demands a lot of the viewers, because you only get the information you really need to connect this episode thematically to the others. Because this is a thematic film, and it is a brilliant, stylish, ice-cold half-misanthropic study of people's lack of ability to perform tender acts with each other. I have never seen people make love in a film by Haneke, except for the masochistic and sad attempts in "La Pianiste". Rather, Haneke shows his characters in situations where they are tired, fed up, irritated or full of hate; quite ordinary human emotions. You cannot blame Haneke for not being a positive director, for he is the only filmmaker working today who can portray and observe his characters so coldly and so unpassionately. And his project seems to be to expose our lack of love and passion for each other, but most of all our lack of ability to tell it as it is. Speak to each other and solve everything, seems to be Haneke's advice, without him really giving it. I never seem to like Haneke's characters, and that is a good thing really. Like fellow German-speaking directors Herzog and Fassbinder, Haneke seems a bit misanthropic in his characteristics. Too many directors try too hard to give characters sympathetic traits, and you just lose interest in the story. "71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls" is quite an achievement in filmmaking, and it is a film that will stick with me forever. I will never forget because I never knew why (the incident at the end). That is how I will remember this film, and how many times in real life is "why" the only question never answered?

The master of surrealistic cinema, Luis Buñuel, changed his approach to the bourgeoisie after "Tristana", and his last three films are all comic and prevail through a mixture of pure surrealism, extreme irony and the one consistent theme of Buñuel's auteurship- hatred of the ruling classes.

"Le Fantôme de la Liberté" is perhaps Buñuel's least accessible work since his first two films, "Un Chien Andalou" and "L' Age d' Or". It is a thematic continuation of "Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie", where the seven protagonists just couldn't finish, or even start, a meal. This is a strong metaphor for Buñuel's view that the bourgeoisie is a dying class, and that not even a violent revolution is needed to remove the bourgeoisie from power and wealth. They are perfectly capable of doing so themselves, through their indulgence in pathetic etiquette and decaying sense of morality. "Le Fantôme" is not funnier than "Le Charme", but it is harder to understand, and this is exactly what Buñuel and Carrière wanted after the success of "Le Charme" at the previous Academy Awards.

In "Le Fantôme", not even the characters are consistent throughout the film. This film is like a relay, where one member of the ruling class passes the stick to the next, and never comes back to the vision of the audience. They just leave, like Buñuel wanted them to, perhaps, but in this film is an important factor because it confirms Buñuel's non-human view of the people of this class. His was a collective hatred, and this film reflects his collective view of the bourgeoisie. The film contains absurd, surreal incidents, like priests playing cards while smoking and drinking, parents reacting to postcards of famous buildings given their daughter by a stranger as they were obscene and a writer killing tens of people from his sniping-position at the roof of a building. The writer is found not guilty, and the continuing mix-up of characters, two actors competing for one role makes for a very confusing narrative. Or maybe the "story" is just a mockery of traditional storytelling in film. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet made "Last Year in Marienbad" just to prove that telling stories is a bourgeois thing and not necessary for modernist or revolutionary cinema.

This film is actually based on a painting by Francisco José de Goya called "El Tres de Mayo" (The three in Mayo), and "Le Fantôme" starts with a short episode of how Buñuel depicts the incidents during the Napoleon Wars. But it's the theme of Goya's painting that Buñuel is concerned with, and this film is more than a mockery of the bourgeoisie, it is also an attack on communist doctrine which all over the world only seems to take from the people what is was supposed to give to the people: Freedom, and also an attack on leftist defeatism. The glorification of the defeat is perhaps the modern Left's biggest problem, which only leads to a move away from power. "Down with freedom!", Buñuel's revolutionaries shout- and the firing squads start firing at the dying revolutionaries.