By

Elsie Walker

Published on/by

Vimeo

Accompanying text

Elsie Walker is author of “Hearing Haneke: the sound tracks of a radical auteur” (now in production with Oxford University Press). She co-created this video essay with Jacob T. Swinney, whose video essays for Slant, Fandor, and the Tribeca Film Festival are already world-renowned. This video essay (“Taking Time to Hear…”) is about sound as a kind of salvation. Haneke demands that we experience pain along with his characters but, contrary to many scholarly arguments that the director is a sadistic and cruel filmmaker, Walker explores how Haneke prompts us to experience a form of ultimate compassion.