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‘Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name You have to be honest, that’s the only thing’—Michael Haneke, in an interview   The voice, now over 70, is usually candid, bumptious; the statements – zealous, with the pang and the patina of a reproach – typically fixed at the high pitch of imperiousness A choice remark: ‘Why do I rape the viewer? I try to rape him into being reflective, and into being intellectually independent and seeing his role in the game of manipulation’ Or, another: ‘I look at the viewer directly, I talk to him, I wink at him I do this again and again to show how much one can manipulate’ More cargo, dispatched this time by critics – the voice has changed, the statements have not: ‘Haneke does want to teach us a lesson, though, to call us to task for our complicity with villains and our enjoyment of screen violence’ And again: ‘In Haneke’s films, the viewer is implicated in the horrors that unfold on the screen; there is nowhere to run, not even after the film has stopped’ Of course, Haneke’s arrival as one of the indisputably major directors of the last ten years has meant more than the mere mincing, or the unflinching duplication, of his words; the forty-year output, the twenty-two features, and now – counting Amour, his latest film – the two Palmes d’Or and five Academy Award nominations, have been, for many people, the achievements of a first-rate intelligence, the outcome of a defiant career of remedies levelled at the illusions, the innutritious myths of an overstretched commercial cinema But Haneke is the source of his own mythology, and has been at least since the appearance of The Piano Teacher twelve years ago The severity of the face in the photographs – from top to bottom: the uncharitable brow, the admonitory cut of the eyes, a mouth in rebuke – is now a blunt habit Physically formidable, a moviehouse mystic dressed in black, Haneke represents for many people an artist at odds with a