Many people know that Michael Haneke chalked up a substantial œuvre in television over the course of some 20 years – but who has seen these works? Few, it seems, as they are rarely mentioned in discussions of what he later did in cinema. To a certain extent this is understandable, as his teleplays are something else entirely, having been made for a very specific audience inside a clearly defined set of aesthetics, instead of an international viewership connected by a shared sense of what a quality film looks and sounds like. That said, things weren’t clear-cut in the 90s, which was a transitional period during which Haneke worked for both small and the big screen. Die Rebellion fuses the best of both worlds: the formal rigour of his films with the sometimes surprising emotional depth of his teleplays. The latter, in some ways, is due to the work’s source, the eponymous 1924 novel by Joseph Roth, previously adapted for TV by Wolfgang Staudte in 1962.
The story is simple: a veteran of the Great War who lost one of his legs but not his belief in (or perhaps fear of ) the state gets in a row with a bourgeois man who insulted him; from here on, his life goes downhill, into prison, and from there to a new career as a toilet attendant (note to all those who think of Der letzte Mann: the novel was already published when F.W. Murnau started shooting his 1924 film). This abuse by the state as well as the civil world disillusions him so much that after death, he refuses to be saved and spend his eternal with God.
Visually, Die Rebellion is one of Haneke’s most splendorous works: striking in its attention to detail, enchanting in its use of colour and monochrome. A good part of the story is told via voiceover, so that the actors often just need to look on silently, becoming screens for our projections of compassion, sorrow and anger – at class entitlement, state violence, and a God who only helps when it appears to be too late.

Olaf Möller