Not so with the second episode in the trilogy, BENNY’S VIDEO (1992; MFA: October 14 at 2:45 pm; HFA: October 26 at 7 pm), a prototype of Funny Games, and in some ways a more unsettling version. The teenager of the title (played by the then adolescent Arno Frisch, Paul from Funny Games) seems a typical, spoiled schoolboy who sells drugs during choir practice and videotapes the butchering of a pig at a local farm. His well-to-do dad (played by the victimized father in Funny Games, Ulrich Mühe) is as disdainful as the father in Lemminge who dismisses the younger generation as suicidal vermin. But he still supplies the boy with the latest video equipment.
One weekend while his parents are away, Benny invites a girl he meets at the video store back to his room. He records on cassette the subsequent unpleasant events. These take place outside the frame of Benny’s video screen, and thus just outside a screen within the screen, unseen but audible. That’s horrible enough, but worse yet comes when the tape screens again for an audience and the crime is seen as reflected in the expressions on people’s faces: disgust, fascination, emptiness — and complicity.
Related:
The play’s the thing, The medium is the movie, When worlds collide, More 
- The play’s the thing
A couple of weeks ago at the Oscars, the first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film to go to an Austrian went to the wrong filmmaker.
- The medium is the movie
In almost every movie you go to these days you’ll see another screen — a television, a computer, even another movie screen — within the screen you’re watching.
- When worlds collide
We humans are quick to anthropomorphize the non-human.
- OOH-OO CHILD
Childhood in America comes under the artist’s gaze in Pine Flat , the fifth film by Sharon Lockhart, and it’s examined with precision and attention to detail.
- Visions of isolation
In Edward Hopper’s world, everyone is lost in an unending rut of office overtime, rattling El trains, cheap fluorescent diners, and bad dates.
- Flora, fauna, and the female figure
The Art Nouveau movement of the late-19th/early-20th century distanced itself from the mass production of the Industrial Revolution with elaborate, one-of-a-kind works made from unusual materials.
- Autumn of the patriarchs
Maybe one shouldn’t judge a country by its movies. What if the US were to be evaluated by the standards of the top 10 films at the box office?
- Sin city
Sex and drugs rock the Boston Festival of Films from Iran
- Power suit
Claude Chabrol initiated the French New Wave with Le beau Serge and Les cousins, and for a decade after his work was as shiny as anyone’s.
- Bodysong
From more than 400 sources, he’s created an operatic narrative of a single human life.
- Not such a wonderful place
The Boston Jewish Film Festival has always been more about the tenuous experience of that global community than about great films.
- Less
Topics:
Features
, Entertainment, Movies, Movie Reviews, More
, Entertainment, Movies, Movie Reviews, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Museum of Fine Arts, Michael Haneke, Gus Van Sant, Michael Pitt, Goethe-Institut, Rob Lowe, Less
