Censorship In The Piano Teacher By Elfriede Jelinek
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In 2001, Michael Haneke directed a film called, The Piano Teacher based on a book by Elfriede Jelinek. Haneke’s view, as conveyed to the viewer, is not to rail against pornography, per se, but to rail against its impact as generated by men or, moreover, by a capitalist-patriarchal society. This similar modality of thinking introduced by Linda Williams in 1989, in which she “...moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does…” (Slade 656). Haneke diverges from mainstream Hollywood cinema in which films depict violence as the “norm” and sexuality as taboo. The film depicts pornography typically in a castrated way with most scenes cut before any jouissance. The annihilation…show more content… Haneke’s method is interesting in that while he depicts a feminist approach to pornography as a fetish/consumer object and how it is consumed by a capitalist-patriarchal society, it is still told from a male viewpoint. Consumption of an object affects the way in which women view themselves sexually as well as how they may behave in society and this may be contradictory to their actual desires. ( “Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour...the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers” (Marx 3)]. There are a number of examples that underscore the film’s conceptualizations: the Drive-In voyeurism scene, the porn shop scene, bathroom fellacio scene, pornographic letter, the second fellacio scene all culminating in the erupting rape…show more content… The disruption of the patriarchy is caused by Erika’s bodily presence as she moves across the store and violates the society in which she lives. The adult male's gaze with disbelief and disdain while she, in turn, gazes at her pupil browsing hardcore pornography magazines with similar disdain. Upon viewing harcore pornographic film, she gives no indication of pleasure (indifferent) from the voyeurism, almost as if she is trying to understand the sexual relations between men and women. WHAT IS PORNOGRAPHY TO HER ACC TO THE DIRECTOR KEEPING IN MIND HANEKE’s and WILLIAMs VIEW? WHAT IS IT TO THE MEN? In the following scene, her retribution to the shame she endured from the patriarchy gets re-directed toward her