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Visiting architect Peter Eisenman ’55 introduced a sceening of three short films by Michael Haneke on Wednesday including Funny Games.
In Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, a scene-by-scene Hollywood remake of Haneke’s own foreign feature, two effete young men who claim to be guests of the neighbors visit a family in their vacation home in order to borrow eggs. The shell of the family’s complacent bourgeois lifestyle quickly breaks open, however: The boys, named Peter and Paul, refuse to leave. Playing on the host/hostage dialectic, the boys subject the family to irrational games of “do unto others,” as if parodying the concept of Christian charity in the guise of a sadistic Tweedledee and Tweedledum.