Remaking Funny Games: Michael Haneke’s Cross-Cultural Experiment

In recent decades, Austrian director and screenwriter Michael Haneke has become internationally known for disturbing and often brutal films that seek to undermine viewers’ expectations while holding them guilty for the crimes playing out on-screen. When Haneke’s German-language Funny Games premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, it shocked and polarised the film critical community. Yet Haneke has frequently pronounced that he had wanted to address an entirely different – an American – audience. He claims this to be the reason why he eventually decided to direct the almost shot-for-shot transnational film remake, Funny Games (USA, 2007). This chapter extends the idea that Funny Games is founded on the programmatic subversion of conventions and ingrained viewing habits to the mechanisms of cross-cultural remaking. Against the common allegation that US remakes of foreign films are a form of cultural imperialism, Haneke actually uses a Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.) in order to have a wider distribution and to position his auto-remake within American entertainment culture. At the same time, he does not adapt Funny Games to an American cultural context but places virtually the same film into a culturally different environment.