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Film

6 March 2013

Haneke has often said, referring to the unhappy ending of The Piano Teacher, that he aims “to rape the spectator into autonomy.” He abuses his audience in order to make us self-aware and liberate us from bad habits. Critics have mostly taken him at his word, repeating the sleight of rhetoric that conflates the act of analyzing and violating movie conventions with bashing in the skull of an animal. More…

Thomas Dörflein was so beloved in his home city that he could hardly leave his apartment without being swarmed by groupies, but the real celebrity was his animal charge, Knut, a polar bear cub born in the Berlin Zoo in December 2006. Under Dörflein’s care, the 810-gram whelp nonetheless became Berlin’s first Eisbär to survive infancy in over 30 years. More…