ABSTRACT
The cinema of Michael Haneke is one that consistently interrogates the limits of representation. This can be discerned in the relationship between the seen and the obscene that Lisa Coulthard (2011) recognises in her investigation of violence and the depiction of sexual abuse in, for example, The White Ribbon (2009). It can also be found in the presence of death, as Serge Goriely identifies (2010), such as the lingering familial suicide in The Seventh Continent (1989). There is a recurrent concern here with what cinema can (or should) achieve, and what I will argue in the first instance is that this tendency already seems to suggest an encounter with the Lacanian Real and (or as) the unrepresentable.
