FILM SCREENINGS

Three Paths to the Lake

1976. Austria/West Germany. Directed by Michael Haneke. With Ursula Schult, Guido Wieland. The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann—whose introspective, distillate style is suited to Haneke's own—was enormously influential in Europe for her fiction, poems, and essays on feminism, philosophy, language, and postwar politics. In this adaptation one of her celebrated stories, a successful photojournalist visits her father's home and looks back on her life and loves, only to find the paths to illumination blocked. Many of the story's themes—photography, memory, and ethics; the indeterminacy of language; the loss of intimacy and self—would resurface in Haneke's Code Unknown and Caché. "[Bachmann's] great quality as an artist is precisely this: that she cannot find it within herself to suppress, in her art, her experience as a woman" (Christa Wolf, The Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics, 1983). In German; English subtitles. 97 min.