The Juno writer has met a backlash with her Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried-starring teen horror Jennifer’s Body. “I gotta say, I felt plain on that set,” she admits

Diablo Cody, legs tucked daintily beneath her on the sofa in a hotel facing the Pacific Ocean, and clutching a cup of coffee, is talking about how celebrity makes some people crazy and mean.

“There are some people out there who think that I’m repulsive, that I’m not even human. This guy said, if he had a choice between having sex with me and cutting his dick off, then he’d cut his own dick off. And I was like, first of all I think you’re lying. But second, if he is telling the truth, then that says something pretty profound … about him. I think he was exaggerating, but it’s so odd you’d ever feel the need to write such a thing in a public forum. And if he were to meet me, even for a few moments,” the one-time stripper turned screenwriter adds in a sweeter, more conciliatory tone, “perhaps he could be persuaded not to lop off his Johnson.”

In a world where men now seem ready to lop off their own Johnsons rather than have sex, Cody’s violent new high school sex comedy horror movie, Jennifer’s Body, should fit in nicely. My mind reels back to the first–wave feminism of the 70s, thinking, wasn’t lopping off Johnsons considered mere women’s work back then? Progress takes many strange forms, apparently.

‘This guy said, if he had a choice between having sex with me and cutting his dick off, then he’d cut his own dick off’

As does the backlash, which has been building since before her last movie, the indie romcom Juno, won Cody a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award, guaranteeing the enmity of the people she’d outpaced to the top.

“I had been experiencing a backlash on a grass–roots level for a long time,” she says. “First I was a success in my home town, then there was a little backlash there. It happened in stages, with each new level of success. And then when you win an Oscar, it’s like a global backlash. Obviously you can’t expect everyone to like all your work, but it’s always the people who don’t like it that say it the most loudly. But on the other hand, nobody has ever said anything about me that comes anywhere near what I think about myself. None of them has ever approached my level of self–loathing, even my biggest hater!”

If we dwell on the backlash, it’s because it has become bigger news than the new movie itself, which is being reviewed within its carping context, and often unfairly. Not that a mean–spirited, vengeful backlash against a successful, genuinely witty female writer with a high public profile couldn’t have been predicted with numbing accuracy years ago.

Cody almost purrs when I tell her that Jennifer’s Body reminds me in small ways of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World. Both are acid–tinged depictions of what happens when two female friends grow up and apart as high school ends and adult reality beckons. Except here one of the friends gets turned into a monstrous succubus and starts eating her way – on a monthly, and Cody affirms, not strictly LUNAR, schedule – through the full gamut of high school boy stereotypes: pierced goth kid, offensive linebacker, wannabe ladies man etc. As played by Megan Fox, several orders of magnitude of icy beauty above the mere mortals around her, Jennifer is the worst type of popular high school girl, fully aware of her newfound beauty and confident enough to brandish it like a weapon against one and all. Her best friend Anita (or “Needy” – one of Cody’s slightly too clever–clever emblematic names) Lesnicki, played by Amanda Seyfried of Big Love, Veronica Mars and Mamma Mia!, has known her since they were three (“Sandbox love never dies,” she notes in voiceover), and acts as her sounding board, agony aunt and punching bag without complaint.

Things change when Jennifer pressures Needy to attend a local show with indie band Low Shoulder, led by Adam Brody of The OC (always more fun to watch when he’s being a dick and a villain). The venue burns down, killing scores of people but the pair escape, with Jennifer taking an ill–advised ride in the band’s makeout mobile. Later that night she shows up at Needy’s house covered in gallons of blood and vomiting horrible oil–black sludge in copious amounts.

Cue the metaphorical version of the female high school experience, some of it obvious, all of it fun: Jennifer the literal maneater – and her monthlies really are murder; the voraciousness of a young women’s newly-discovered sexual/bloodletting appetites and the utter inability of the men around her to quench them. And then there’s the way Needy figures out what’s happened to Jennifer – by feminine intuition! Best plot device ever, it saves a ton of exposition.

‘There’s a dark component to being a teenage girl, because overnight you have this power’

“My high school experience was a lot more like Juno than Jennifer, obviously,” says Cody. “I hung out with a group of pretty inoffensive kids, playing musical instruments, having fun and moving furniture around the neighbourhood.

“But there’s a dark component to being a teenage girl, because overnight you have this power. It was so strange to me. I’d always been … I don’t wanna say this ‘weird kid’ … reading books and so on. Then as a teenager, suddenly guys are paying attention, construction workers are whistling at you. And your mom isn’t letting you out of the house in those shorts. It’s like you’ve mutated and suddenly you have a totally different skill set. That power can corrupt you. For me, I went wild. I couldn’t believe my luck. ‘Oooh, I’m in control now, I can have a boyfriend, I can smoke, I can wear a BRA!’ It was all so exciting. I was born to be a teenager, I’m still ready to be one now, and I’m 31 years old. I was obsessed with being a teenager and I’m still obsessed with teenagers. To me it’s the most heightened bizarre time in a person’s life. It’s like you’re a werewolf or a vampire and always changing. There is something horrible and fascinating about girls going through puberty and adolescence. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Virgin Suicides … I really liked that movie and I remember when I was writing this that I wanted to catch that same strange, ominous feeling that it captures about being a teenager.

“At the time I wrote the movie, I was feeling kinda dark, feeling maybe that I was turning into somebody I didn’t like. I had become really driven, and I realised that I had a chance at a career as a writer, so it brought out this desperation in me, gave me some teeth. Part of me was trying to suppress that instinct and be the kind of laidback down–to–earth midwesterner that I really am. And part of me was like ‘NO! We’re gonna make this happen!’ I was being pulled in two different directions, and it felt like it made sense to write a horror movie.”

You have to love a parallel universe where blonde starlet Amanda Seyfried plays the plain–Jane role, I offer.

“I know, and I really had to fight for Amanda Seyfried’s glasses! I said to them, ‘I don’t think the glasses are going to dim her beauty.’ I gotta say I felt very plain on that set.”

The great poets’ lives are infinitely colourful, so why are films about them so dull? Jane Campion’s film about Keats is poetic justice

Jane Campion’s sublime Bright Star, about the love life of John Keats, is the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is this: movies about poets are boring! Even movies about poets who themselves were not in any way boring tend to be boring – deeply, harrowingly boring. You’d think, for example, that no one could possibly make a DOA biopic of Arthur Rimbaud, who packed more debauchery, drug addiction, omnisexual sport-shagging and absinthe abuse into his intensely lived 37 years than any real hookers and drug-addicts could manage if they lived to be 100. Oh, and he revolutionised modern poetry while he was about it. And yet Agnieszka Holland’s Total Eclipse, detailing Rimbaud’s tempestuous relationship with Paul Verlaine, is a snooze. Total Eclipse Of His Art is a better title.

Same goes for The Libertine, in which the lascivious life of John Wilmot, the bawdy Restoration poet who pioneered the strategic deployment of the C-word in poesy, is laid before us like the corpse on an anatomist’s table. He shags for England, he cheats, he conspires, he boffs the bosomy women of Charles II’s court, and treats them like dirt. Can’t fail to entertain, right? Wrong! The movie is so lifeless, I actually fell asleep while interviewing John Malkovich about it (although, in my defence, he should never have given me that third Scotch).

Elsewhere, there’s Sylvia, in which Gwyneth Paltrow, the Norma Shearer of our time (that’s NOT a compliment), essays the suicidal first Mrs Ted Hughes. But since the second Mrs H also did herself in, perhaps the one they should be making movies about is Hughes himself – especially since they had a future James Bond (Daniel Craig) on hand to play him.

Given the high failure rate in these biopics, perhaps film-makers should cast their nets a little wider, since there’s no shortage of nutters and perverts at large in the poetic realm. Good lord, any week in the life of Robert Lowell would have to include several alcoholic blackouts, pendulous bipolar mood-swings and several bracing doses of electro-convulsive therapy. An enterprising writer-director might even take it upon themself to film the Yeats-fixated John Berryman’s confession letter to Alcoholics Anonymous, in which he itemised all his drunken depravity (shat himself in public, made passes at men or women, vomited on countless objects and individuals … ). I also like the idea of a Coleridge biopic, especially one covering his years of opium addiction (“Oi, De Quincey! Quit bogarting my laudanum!”).

But until this happens, the greatest moment of poetry on screen in recent years will always be Kal Penn’s sublime and heartbreaking recitation at the end of Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, a scene capable of raising more tears in just 90 seconds than any of the movies I’ve mentioned above can manage in 90 minutes.

Actor John Cusack made his name in edgy, offbeat films and is known for his outspoken political views. So why is he starring in Sony’s latest blockbuster?

I am waiting to enter John Cusack‘s London hotel room when I’m approached by a dainty blond ice pick of a woman. My heart sinks. Every journalist knows that being taken aside by an actor’s personal publicist is Number Two on the official list of Things Likely To Spoil An Interview. (Number One is the non-appearance of the interviewee.) “I wanted to let you know that John prefers to concentrate on the later part of his career,” she warns me. “I’ll be sitting in with you, and if I sense his energy levels are dropping – like, if he starts giving short answers – I’ll wind things up.” How disappointing that an actor who projects an apparently laid-back persona needs an attack-dog at his heels.

You haven’t truly been held at arm’s length until you have tried to interview John Cusack. It’s not that he is aloof; he displays all the surface signs of engagement, without quite making the leap to authentic friendliness. He has always been cool. His first lead role was in the 1985 comedy The Sure Thing, but it was as Lloyd Dobler, the emphatic and sincere romantic hero of hit teen film Say Anything, that he attracted something like idolatry. Since then he has gone from playing a commitment-phobic assassin in Grosse Pointe Blank, to the cheating music nut in High Fidelity, to the sleazy, weaselly puppeteer in Being John Malkovich, to the romantic lead in mainstream films like Serendipity. Yet ask him about his idiosyncratic choices and you’ll get stock explanations about good business sense. Touch on anything in his personal life and you’ll be stonewalled.

The 43-year-old Cusack springs out of his armchair to greet me. At 6ft 4in, there’s a lot of him. He’s wearing jeans, with a black jacket over a white T-shirt. His black hair is fluffy and a touch unruly, his long face Kabuki-white. He remembers correctly that we last met two years ago; it was in Berlin, where he was preparing to shoot the ambitious action movie Stopping Power. Only the film was never made. The budget fell through, and Cusack sued the production company for a claim of $5.6m based on a deal that guarantees full whack even if the camera never starts rolling. Funny that after missing out on one blockbuster, he signed up so quickly to another. 2012, the film he is here to promote, is an apocalyptic, CGI-heavy blockbuster from Roland Emmerich, the director of Independence Day; exactly the sort of project, in other words, that Cusack can usually be relied on not to make.

I wonder if he had some specific thirst to quench that could be met only with CGI and mass destruction. “I guess so,” he shrugs. “Yeah. I dunno. Who knows?” The ice pick glances up from her BlackBerry. “It’s sort of the way the business is. If you do one type of movie it makes it a lot easier to do other kinds of movie that you want to do. It’s just reality.” This is the Cusack line – there’s no wheat without chaff, you have to do one for “them” and one for you. Or, in his case, you need to star in multiplex-clogging fluff such as Must Love Dogs or Serendipity to get the chance to make, say, Being John Malkovich. “But it’s nice to get that call. ‘It’s Sony’s big release of the year, you’ve got the lead role.’ I thought, ‘Why not?’ “

When we last met, he was bemoaning the state of the industry: “The movies have got more corporate,” he told me. “They’re making fewer movies in general, and those they are making are all $200m-$300m tent-pole releases that eat up all the oxygen.” Now he’s starring in one. But these are lean times for Cusack. Three of his most recent movies (Grace Is Gone, Martian Child and his pet project, the political satire War, Inc) sank without trace in the US, and never opened in the UK. Whereas he once successfully alternated mainstream and personal projects, he is now doing fewer of the former, while the latter don’t seem to be connecting with audiences as they once did.

When we meet, 2012 isn’t yet finished but the 50 minutes screened to the press suggests that a work of striking originality may not be on the cards. Its starting point is the Mayan calendar’s prediction that the world will end in three years’ time, which is going to mean some serious upset for London’s Olympic plans. On screen we witness what apocalypse entails: tidal waves, volcanos, perfectly decent actors delivering dialogue of excruciating tedium. Cusack plays a dishevelled author who is camping with his estranged children when disaster strikes. This is just a shot in the dark, but do you think the destruction of the planet will bring their broken family closer together?

He talks some more about 2012 – “It’s alluding to, or exploiting, the zeitgeist of fear and paranoia in the world” – but his heart isn’t in it. Change the subject to politics, however, and it’s a different story. His faint voice grows louder and he leans forward. Like his longtime chum Tim Robbins, Cusack is one of Hollywood’s campaigning liberals; he writes for the Huffington Post website, where he can also be seen in video clips interviewing Naomi Klein, the Shock Doctrine author who has since become a friend. In the run-up to last year’s election, he recorded a commercial exposing John McCain’s parity with George W Bush. Not that he’s thrilled with the current administration.

“So far, there’s been no transformation,” he says. “The Democrats aren’t changing things. The Wall Street guys are keeping their bonuses, and Obama isn’t going to make any reforms unless he’s prepared to piss off Wall Street. I’m hoping he’s keeping his powder dry until he feels he can really strike – that he’ll become as tough as he needs to be. It’s a sad state in America right now. No accountability for Bush and Cheney’s crimes, and those are slam-dunk felonies right there. No accountability for torture. Obama’s escalated two wars, he hasn’t dismantled the Bush/Cheney terror apparatus, and he’s upholding Bush’s precedent to hold people without charge. Jesus, I wouldn’t want his job. But he wanted it. And we have to be honest about what he is or isn’t doing. We have to be critical and hold Obama accountable. It’s the most helpful thing we can do for him.”

Cusack has always been passionate about politics. He is one of five children (his siblings include the effervescent actor Joan Cusack) who were raised in Evanston, Illinois, by Nancy, a teacher, and Dick, a writer, actor and socially conscious documentary maker; family friends included Philip and Daniel Berrigan, figureheads of the 1960s anti-war movement. “He had this exceptionally big, Irish heart,” Cusack says of his father, who died in 2003. “He was so warm. The older I got, the more I appreciated him.”

I ask when he realised the value of what his father did. “That’s a good question,” he says, tilting his head to one side. “I remember he had an office and a secretary down in Chicago, and he had his name on the door. And I have a memory of him having people over to the house, and they’d be talking about history or something, all these smart people sitting around discussing ideas and stuff. I was just a kid but I got this sense that there was this other world, this adult world, where people would talk about things that weren’t really there. They weren’t talking about dinner, or the piano. They were talking about some other thing.”

The writer-producer-director Peter McCarthy, with whom Cusack made four films including the 1988 cult comedy Tapeheads, remembers the clan with fondness. “They were a very cool family. His mum and dad were righteous people, not in an evangelical sense but with their strong values, their kindness, and they infused their kids with that. They supported John unconditionally in his acting; they never treated it as some hobby. I wouldn’t say he had a lot of confidence, but he always followed his heart. He would do the things that mattered to him.” As a child, Cusack joined the Piven Theatre Workshop, run by Byrne Piven (father of Jeremy Piven, the Entourage regular and one of Cusack’s closest friends). While in high school, he wrote and staged two plays that were screened on a local TV station; he notched up some commercials, and made his film debut in the 1983 sex comedy Class, starring Rob Lowe. He stayed within the approximate confines of the teen genre for a few years, but seemed quickly to realise it was inhibiting him.

“I think Tapeheads was a conscious step for John away from those teen movies,” says McCarthy. The film featured Cusack and Robbins as enterprising motormouths trying to bust into the music-video business. “I remember John and Tim banging on my office door, full of energy. They came in and started improvising and riffing on the script, and it was so much fun. But what’s remarkable about John is he has this grounded quality. He just hangs back there, he’s so disciplined and focused as an actor; he never tries to steal anything.”

I ask Cusack if he enjoys acting. “Sure,” he says. Another shrug. “Depends on the film. I like to take risks. With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you’re gonna get out of it. It’s like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you’re acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.”

He says he doesn’t have much time for the tortured-artist side of his trade. “I probably believed in it a bit when I was younger. Actors are weird enough as it is. We don’t need to act tortured. I’m probably tortured enough.” I wonder if acting is merely a distraction for him these days, and it’s the political writing that most exercises him. “Uh, I don’t think so. Acting can be pretty challenging. I can’t say making a romantic comedy is challenging, but to do anything well, you have to put yourself into it. But no, if I’m doing some commercial movie just to keep my name in the public eye, then it’s just a job. You don’t have to sweat it too hard.”

When he mentions staying in the public eye, he means it on his own terms. For an actor of his stature and celebrity, Cusack is a virtual stranger to the gossip rags. Months or years after the fact, we might learn about those formerly special someones in his life (such as Minnie Driver, Neve Campbell, Claire Forlani and Alison Eastwood), but he is uncompromising on the matter of privacy, and solicits similar discretion from those around him.

I tell Cusack that nobody seems to have any dirt on him. “Oh, yes they do,” he laughs ruefully. “I’m sure they do. Maybe they’re just saving it all up to bury me.” He has even offered advice to friends whom he thinks are dropping their guards, living their lives in public. “If I feel they’re playing with the tiger too much, I’m like: don’t go there. Don’t get into it. That stuff only goes one way. If people are constantly reading about you, and you’re overexposed, they’ve got no reason to go see your movies. Also, it’s not pleasant or nice to have your privacy invaded.”

I bring up the most explicit instance of this happening to him – when he was pestered by Emily Leatherman, a woman in her 30s who threw letters and packages into the grounds of his Malibu home. Last year, Leatherman was convicted of stalking Cusack and breaking a restraining order; she was given five years’ probation, and ordered to avoid Cusack’s homes and businesses for 10 years. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean that,” he protests. “I was referring to whatever way the intrusion might be manifested. You know, however those things happen. It’s a bizarre world. We shouldn’t care about what celebrities are doing. I don’t read those magazines. I don’t like to. Why do I wanna find out what all these celebrities are doing?”

As the publicist gestures for me to wind things up, I tell Cusack that the importance he places on privacy would seem to conflict with giving interviews. “I don’t like doing them,” he admits, stating the obvious somewhat. “If it was up to me, I’d just put the movies out there. Or maybe I’d do a couple – I’d think of some smart things to say so people think, ‘Oh, he’s cool.’ It doesn’t seem polite to try to be in the limelight more. I don’t even know if I was invited in to begin with. I’m well aware that I might have worn out my welcome already.”

• 2012 is released on 13 November.

Hari Kunzru assesses the films of Michael Haneke

According to legend, the Austrian flag was invented during the Third Crusade by the Babenberg duke Leopold V. After a particularly gory battle outside the city of Acre, the duke found his tunic was completely drenched in blood. When he removed his belt, the cloth underneath was still white. So taken was he by this colour combination that he adopted it as his banner. In 1946, the provisional Austrian government, recognised by the Allies after the previous year’s surrender, published the Red-White-Red book, an attempt to show that Austria was culturally completely separate from “Prussian” Germany, and should be treated as “the first victim” of nazism, “left in the lurch by the whole world”, rather than as a perpetrator of atrocities. The book was an early step in a deliberate national policy of obscuring Austria’s Nazi history, and the flag, with its connotations of violence, religious faith, purity and innocence, has played a role both in cementing the Austrian second republic as a cohesive nation state, and in burying many things the country’s elite would rather forget about the Anschluss, the war and the subsequent decade of allied occupation.

After the war the allies largely bought into Austria’s mythology of victimhood, and the spectre of Soviet expansion dominated western policy-making, so the denazification of Austrian society was at best half-hearted. By 1948, of the estimated half a million party members (out of a population of around seven million) only 40,000 were subject to any kind of sanctions, and most of those were pardoned by blanket amnesties at the end of the occupation in 1955. This meant that in all areas of public life there was continuity with the Nazi period. The official narrative had little to say about the country’s 65,000 dead Jews, preferring a story in which Austrians of all religions and political persuasions had passively undergone a cataclysm in which all had suffered, whether in Mauthausen or at Stalingrad.

The generation of Austrian artists who grew up in the postwar years were forced either to adapt to their national climate, or confront it head-on. The Viennese Actionists staged violent and sexual provocations. Feminist film-maker Valie Export imagined the capital as a city taken over by alien bodysnatchers. Writers such as Thomas Bernhard and the Nobel prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek pushed their prose to extreme levels of brutality and bitterness, railing against a cultural establishment which was busy retailing a chocolate-box Alpine idyll to the outside world, while retaining a tight grip on dissent. Austrian PEN, the writers’ organisation, was dominated by former Nazis and ultra-orthodox Catholics, who controlled prizes and state subsidy for publication well into the 1970s. Bernhard’s disgust grew so powerful that he specified in his will that none of his work was to be published or performed in his native country. Until the late 80s, the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, “working through the past”, the national accounting which was central to the transformation of postwar Germany, had barely begun.

It was against this background that the director Michael Haneke, who had produced a large body of theatre and television work, started to make feature films. His first, The Seventh Continent (1989), is probably the most succinct and unsparing condemnation of bourgeois consumer culture ever committed to celluloid. The plot is simple. We see a middle-class Viennese family, husband, wife and young daughter, going about their daily routines; they work, go to school, shop at the supermarket. Their life is materially comfortable, yet seems affectless and empty. Cracks appear round the edges. One day at school, the little girl pretends to be blind, for reasons her teacher finds hard to fathom. The wife’s brother bursts into uncontrollable tears at the dinner table. This stifling world is contrasted to a tourist poster of Australia, an image of a beautiful, desolate coastline. One day the parents announce they intend to emigrate to this remote utopia. We see the father quit his job and go to the hardware store to buy tools. The mother hoards prescription sleeping pills. Then they lock the door to their apartment and proceed, systematically and laboriously, to destroy all their possessions, cutting up clothes and family photos, smashing furniture, flushing currency down the toilet. Finally, they sit in the wreckage, watching Celine Dion perform on the last functioning thing in their home, a TV. One by one they swallow a lethal dose of pills. The father scrawls his wife and child’s time of death on the wall, then lies down and waits to travel to the seventh continent himself.

Haneke shows us this domestic tragedy with a lack of passion that edges far out into coldness, using long, static shots to undermine drama, lingering on the material possessions that have come to define and dominate the lives of his protagonists. Most shockingly, for an audience accustomed to the conventions of mainstream cinema, he is entirely uninterested in providing a psychological explanation for their actions. Often the camera just frames body parts, metonymic hands performing their work of destruction, consuming mouths and TV-watching eyes that seem less than fully alive. The absolute nihilism of the family’s suicide is also a desperate bid for freedom, for escape from the tyranny of kitsch – the ersatz relationships with objects that have subsituted for full human community in their lives. The sheer pitch of the anger that drives this grim story makes it difficult to watch, even as the film’s austere style damps down all sensationalism.

The Seventh Continent is the first in what has become known as Haneke’s “glaciation trilogy”, after the director’s claim that the films were intended as a reflection on the “progressive emotional glaciation of Austria”. His second feature, Benny’s Video (1992), presents the pampered teenage son of another wealthy Viennese family, an avid consumer of violent films and an equally avid film-maker, who tapes his life on high-end equipment bought by his doting parents. One day he brings home a young girl, impressing her by showing footage of the slaughter of a pig he witnessed on a country holiday. She’s even more impressed when he produces a bolt gun. The two play a desultory game, and Benny shoots her. She falls out of frame, and we watch the rest of the protracted, horrific scene on a monitor that Benny has set up to relay a live feed of his bedroom. Benny pleads with the girl to stop screaming, then fires twice more to silence her. We see very little of the “action”, which mostly takes place out of shot. Afterwards Benny cleans up and calmly goes downstairs to raid the fridge. When his parents return, he shows them the tape. There is little discussion, no ethical debate, just a reflexive decision to cover up the crime. Benny’s mother takes him on a luxury holiday to Egypt. When they return his father has disposed of the corpse.

Similarly, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) centres on violence and emotional alienation. Told in the disconnected “fragments” of the title, the narrative is based on a real incident in which a 19-year-old student opened fire on customers at a bank. Haneke expands this into a portrait of Vienna as an environment of suppressed menace, its modernist architecture framing lives of anomie and desolation. A bitter old widower rails against his daughter. A withdrawn little girl is rejected by prospective foster parents. When a husband tells his wife he loves her, she is so shocked that she sneers at him. Mortified, he slaps her face.

The period of the glaciation films was bookended by two events which shattered Austria’s postwar silence. In 1986 the country elected the former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to the presidency. During the campaign, difficult questions were asked in the media about Waldheim’s wartime service in the Balkans, during which he was alleged to have been complicit in deportations and mass executions.

The story received international attention, and Waldheim was banned from entering the US. The German media, in particular, mounted vicious attacks on Austria’s conspiracy of forgetfulness, and the country began a period of intense self-examination, much to the resentment of many conservatives, who felt that it should be allowed to move on. In 1989 the far-right leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), Jörg Haider, was elected governor of Carinthia, causing widespread outrage because of his xenophobia and open admiration for the Third Reich. During the 90s the Balkan wars brought an influx of refugees, and Austria, which had little experience of mass immigration, became increasingly polarised. Haider’s power and influence grew, until in 1999 the FPÖ was invited to become part of a coalition government. Immediately all 14 of Austria’s EU partners withdrew their cooperation. The following year Haider was forced to step down.

Political neutrality and economic growth had been central to the postwar rebranding of Austria. As in Germany, the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) had created a new prosperous urban bourgeoisie. Seen against the background of the culture wars of the 90s, Haneke’s assaults on this class are more pointed than mere critiques of consumer society, an artistic staple throughout the western world; they are an attempt to violate the state of amnesiac comfort that had given rise to the ski-tanned neofascism of Haider and his supporters – Vergangenheitsbewältigung by force. Haneke wasn’t even the most vocal proponent of artistic confrontation. Invited to write a play to celebrate the centenary of Vienna’s Burgtheater in 1988, Bernhard responded with Heldenplatz (Heroes Square), a blistering attack on Austria’s self-image that caused a national scandal, provoking accusations that the playwright was nothing but a Nestbeschmutzer, a dirtier of the social nest. Jelinek, who in her 2004 Nobel acceptance speech would refer to her country as a “criminal nation”, spent much of the 90s conducting a public war of words with Haider and the FPÖ. In the same period there were mass demonstrations at the Vienna Natural History Museum, which in the mid-90s still had a “Race Gallery” displaying waxworks of “higher and lower races”, and retained the skulls of murdered Jews and Polish partisans, collected as “scientific” artefacts during the Nazi period.

Haneke followed the glaciation films with Funny Games (1997), which remains his most controversial and disturbing work. The usual wealthy Viennese family are on vacation at their luxurious lakeside villa. The mother opens the door to a pair of well-spoken, preppy young men in tennis whites. They turn out to be psychopaths, who imprison and torture them. The film offers no respite from the horror of the situation, which it follows to the bleakest possible conclusion. Along the way, it becomes clear that this isn’t merely a depiction of sadistic violence – as ever, Haneke’s camera avoids lingering on violent acts – but a film about the depiction of violence in movies. Not that this makes Funny Games any less traumatising, but then that seems to be Haneke’s point.

In interview, the director described it as “a kind of counterprogram to Natural Born Killers“, claiming that Oliver Stone’s cartoonish, sexy serial murderers exemplify Hollywood’s wish to make violence “consumable”, allowing the audience to take pleasure in it and avoid experiencing its real consequences for the victims. Like the work of Quentin Tarantino (and all the dross that’s followed in its wake, from Guy Ritchie to Eli Roth), there’s a knowingness to Stone’s gore, a postmodern referentiality, that explicitly invites a “cool” distance from the other’s pain. Haneke, on the other hand, wants to implicate us in what we’re watching. Why, he wants to know, would any sane person buy a ticket to see this stuff?

Funny Games plays, with a certain dry relish, on our sympathies and expectations, offering gestures at genre plotlines (the last-ditch escape, the reversal of fortune), then unceremoniously squashing them. The killers aren’t even really characters. They refer to each other by a series of nicknames – Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry, Beavis and Butthead. They’ve climbed out of the screen, mere functions, media effects. At intervals, the film breaks the illusion of naturalism. One of the pair makes asides to the audience, asking at one point whether we’ve had enough. In the film’s most infamous scene, the mother successfully grabs a shotgun and kills one of her tormentors. The survivor angrily hunts for the TV remote control. When he finds it, he “rewinds” the scene, which plays again, coming out in his favour. As ever, the tortured burghers are not entirely innocent. Their attempts to flee are foiled by their own security systems – lighting and high gates – and there’s a clear implication that their smugness about their possessions and social status is in some way connected to the eruption of horror, the return of the history they’ve had to repress to achieve their position.

Foreign critics, many of whom were repelled by Haneke’s film, claimed to detect in Funny Games traces of the very politics the director has opposed throughout his career. Reviewing it for the Village Voice, J Hoberman wrote that “symptomatic of the fascist mind-set is the self-righteous application of a strict code of civility from which the ruler himself is naturally exempt. Haneke’s fondness for didactic coercion and his lofty Adornian views on the debased nature of popular culture do seem to indicate a certain arrogance. His notorious comment, repeated to more than one interviewer, that he wishes to “rape the spectator into autonomy” has only strengthened the view of him as a Teutonic sadist, taking a perverse pleasure in his power over spectator and characters alike.

An Anglo-American audience, seeing merely a critique of video violence, could be forgiven for seeing Haneke’s provocations as tasteless and heavy-handed. However, the achievement of “autonomy” (a key word in German anti-authoritarian politics) is precisely the goal of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. A simplistic reading of him as a “humorless pedant” (another verdict of the Village Voice) is wide of the mark.

Where Anglo–American critics detect a culpable lack of sympathy, Germans have acclaimed Haneke as an inheritor of Brecht, skilfully alienating the spectator from the material in order to provoke a critical, intellectual response. Indeed some have praised him for finding a way to continue Brecht’s project into the new century. Now that postmodernism’s stylistic free-for-all has inured audiences to the formal “alienation effects” used in Brechtian epic theatre, Haneke has found other ways to wrong-foot the spectator, a peculiar combination of shock and deadening that blocks off most easy ways to “consume” his bleak stories. However, Adorno’s powerful description of the neurosis that comes with working through the past suggests that there may be something less controlled than either of these versions of the director – the cold sadist or the cold neo-Brechtian – allow. There is, in his films, an inability to deal with the pain of the world, a psychic wound whose display is not purely voluntary.

The Piano Teacher (2001) made few converts among those already hostile to Haneke’s project. Adapted from Jelinek’s semi-autobiographical novel, it describes Erika, a woman trapped in various ways – by her domineering mother, with whom she lives, despite being in her 40s; by her life as a tutor at the Vienna conservatory; and by her own profoundly thwarted sexuality, which can only find expression in the enactment of extreme masochistic fantasies. By portraying, in Erika, the frozen heart of Vienna’s classical music establishment, Haneke was picking at another aspect of Austria’s carefully-constructed brand. His own love for musical high culture is central to his film-making, and he frequently presents classical music as an artistic vehicle for self-knowledge, contrasting it to what he sees as the debased aural kitsch of rock and pop.

However he’s uncomfortably aware that his prefered route to authentic emotion is also a status signifier. The luckless family in Funny Games is first shown playing a “name that tune” game in the car. In Benny’s Video, a choir of “innocent” boy sopranos (among them the murderous Benny) sing a Bach motet (Trotz dem alten Drachen), while passing notes about a pyramid scheme. Hypocrisy is everywhere, and being a music-lover does not inoculate you against it. Erika has a special relationship with one of the key works of the Austrian canon, Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle. Haneke has described song 17, “Im Dorf” (“In the Village”) in which the traveller exhorts barking dogs to drive him away from the sleeping hamlet, because he doesn’t deserve rest, and is “zu Ende mit allen Träumen” (“through with all dreams”) as Erika’s “motto”. Her isolation is thus also a kind of disabused clarity. Her inability to feel “normally” is also what sets her apart from the amnesiac “sleepers” around her.

As Haneke’s reputation in Europe grew, he received invitations to collaborate with major stars of French cinema. Isabelle Huppert, Erika in The Piano Teacher, also plays the lead in Time of the Wolf (2003). Code Unknown (2000) is built around Juliette Binoche, and in Hidden (2005), Binoche is joined by Daniel Auteuil. With Haneke’s move to France, his work became less focused on anatomising Austrian society than in presenting a kind of pan-European moral landscape. These films seem less confrontational than Funny Games, less concerned with consumerism than the glaciation trilogy. The desire to shock the audience appears to have ebbed, to be replaced by a pervasive sense of tragedy, a more muted response to the concerns which have informed Haneke’s work since the beginning – the link between the personal and the political, the influence of the media, video surveillance, social control and the possibility of authentic human community.

Time of the Wolf, an underrated contribution to the post-holocaust science-fiction genre (recently undergoing revival of serious cinematic interest with adaptations of José Saramago’s Blindness and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), shows Huppert attempting to shepherd her children through the blasted landscape of a near-future France, which has undergone an unspecified catastrophe. Society has broken down, and the brutal realities of power and hierarchy dominate the lives of the terrorised survivors. In Haneke’s Hobbesian nightmare there is (surprise!) no redemption. The director, so concerned in his earlier career with tearing down the social order, now appears to be weighing the positive value of civilisation. What remains beyond simple human acts of kindness and cruelty when all the apparatus of our sophisticated, mediated society is taken away?

Code Unknown uses the episodic style of story-telling that Haneke first deployed in 71 Fragments. Anne (Binoche), an actress, is in a stormy relationship with Jean, a war photographer. A chance event – Jean’s younger brother throwing a piece of trash into the lap of a Romanian beggar – opens up a constellation of interconnected stories, which show how macro-scale political concerns – war, immigration, policing – play out in individual lives. Built up from long, unedited takes, the film reads like a response to the mawkish and fundamentally dishonest multi-stranded narrative films recently popular in Hollywood, a genre particularly associated with the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams), but also including work such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and Paul Haggis’s Crash.

In these films, chance, coincidence and small personal epiphanies are woven into quasi-religious parables about providence and fate. This cheap transcendentalism offers a kind of fake consolation, an apolitical quietism which Code Unknown rejects out of hand. Sometimes communication fails, actions are meaningless, and redemption is out of stock at the supermarket. Questions about our ethical duties to one another cannot, for Haneke, be resolved by the application of a little aesthetic glitter. Instead they must be wrestled with, fought for, and the viewer must actively participate, instead of passively consuming the awe-inspiring spectacle of networked existence. In this, Haneke’s technique seems to relate to Roberto Bolaño’s vast (and equally bleak) novel 2666, which asks the reader to work at connecting disjointed narratives, much of the meaning residing in the “silences” between its various sections.

Haneke has frequently quipped that he has “adapted” Godard’s famous observation about cinema to read “film is a lie at 24 frames a second in the service of truth”. Hidden is an application of this thesis – that one may use the lying image to go beyond its lies – to a story about media ethics, visual representation and repressed memory. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is a television intellectual (that most debased of Haneken types) who receives an anonymous video showing surveillance footage of his house. More videos soon arrive, and whoever is watching him seems to be implying that he has a secret to hide. Indeed he does, and his personal guilt is linked to one of the most shameful episodes in postwar French history – the murder of up to two hundred Algerian demonstrators by Parisian police in 1961. Under the direction of police chief Maurice Papon (later convicted of crimes against humanity for his actions under the Vichy regime during the second world war), gendarmes beat unarmed men and women, throwing some from bridges into the river Seine. Essentially Haneke is reprising his scolding of Austria for its political amnesia and applying it to France – Georges’s bad faith is a microcosm of his country’s.

Hidden perfects one of the director’s primary neo-Brechtian techniques, also used to great effect in Code Unknown, in which we watch long sections of narrative, only to discover that they are “re-presentations” – that what we’ve taken as immediate and genuine, as “first hand” is in fact recorded or even being acted for a film crew. Haneke’s visual style, with its minimal use of montage, its absence of fast-cutting, its deliberate long slow takes, is a rejection of a duplicitous aesthetic he associates with television – in which, it must not be forgotten, he had a long career before turning to cinema. He seems to see the very power of his chosen medium as a problem, which must be broken before one can speak honestly, before cinema can look at the world, as Heidegger wrote of Trakl, with “the austerity of letting be”.

Formal trickery is largely absent from The White Ribbon, Haneke’s latest film and in many ways his most traditional in feel. Set in a North German village just before the outbreak of the first world war, it presents a feudal society, dominated by the Junker baron, whose tenant farmers labour on his land, their moral welfare overseen by the unbendingly rigorous pastor. Beneath the surface of this picturesque rural idyll is an atmosphere of simmering class resentment, directed both against the Baron and the Polish guest-workers brought in to complete the harvest. This suppressed malice soon erupts into horrific violence. The baron’s young son is assaulted. Another child is blinded. In the absence of an obvious culprit, everyone becomes a suspect.

Told from the perspective of the village school teacher, a mild and ineffectual young man, the film’s closest cinematic ancestor is perhaps Le Corbeau, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 film about poison pen letters in a French village. Clouzot’s film (made by a German-run production company) was banned after the liberation for its perceived vilification of French rural communities, the preferred story being of a countryside united against a foreign invader, rather than the uncomfortable complexities of collaboration and resistance. Haneke’s aim seems to be to undermine a similarly simplistic narrative of rural life in imperial Germany, which in recent years has been the object of nostalgia, much in the way the mythical “endless summer” of Edwardian England has obscured the social divisions in the years prior to the first world war.

Shot in ravishing black and white, The White Ribbon makes references to the photographs of August Sander, particularly the famous image of three farmers on their way to a dance, which seems to be the film’s visual point of origin. Sander’s portraits of a cross-section of German society were uncongenial to the Nazis, and Haneke’s Sanderian borrowings, along with his beautifully composed landscape shots, particularly of fields of ripe wheat, are also pointed references to the visual aesthetic of fascism, and to the Heimat (homeland) films popular in postwar Germany and Austria, sentimental rural tales for nations undergoing the trauma of defeat. Though fascism is never directly addressed, we are made aware that the utopian agrarian idyll which formed the basis of so much Nazi fantasy was always a lie. The smiling blond school children will grow up to be the adults of the Third Reich. The “weisse Band” of the title is an ironic symbol of innocence, tied by the pastor to his son’s arm as a pledge of purity and used to strap his arms to the bed at night to prevent masturbation. It is also, perhaps, a nod to the moral and political problem of red-white-red, the tangled relationship between the profession of guiltlessness and the reality of violence that has dominated Haneke’s film career from the start.

The White Ribbon is released on 13 November. The BFI in London has a season of Michael Haneke’s films from 5-30 November.

The film was called Hell, and it duly became hell. But this 1964 flop by Henri-Georges Clouzot shouldn’t blind us to his genius

Brigitte Bardot called him “a negative being, for ever at odds with himself and the world around him”. Another actor described him as “an interfering man who wanted every actor under his control”. The man they are both describing is Henri-Georges Clouzot, one of France’s greatest film directors, whose work plumbed the depths of misanthropy, paranoia and revenge so unremittingly that it was hard not to believe he was exploring his own psyche in public.

Clouzot was hated and feted in equal measure. One of his first masterpieces, the 1943 film Le Corbeau, is now hailed by critics, but on release it united the French left and the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in an unlikely alliance against Clouzot’s vision of pettiness and self-loathing in a small French wartime town divided by a poison-pen letter scandal. It was brave story to tell in a France torn apart by war; Le Corbeau was pulled from cinemas, Clouzot was fired from the Nazi-owned Continental studios and, after the war, received a lifetime ban (rescinded in 1947) from the French film industry for working with the Nazis.

Today he is largely forgotten, or at best mistaken for the bumbling inspector in the Pink Panther franchise. But now the disgracefully neglected Clouzot is being brought to new audiences with a documentary about his doomed 1964 project concerning a jealous husband’s mental collapse into paranoid fantasy. Called L’Enfer (Hell), the film became a real hell for the director and everyone on set.

One of L’Enfer’s problems was that Clouzot had by then become notorious as a director with a taste for violence and betrayal – and not just in his films. During the filming of La Vérité (The Truth) in 1960, he wanted Brigitte Bardot to fall asleep and drool for one scene. As you do. So he gave her some pills saying they were painkillers. They turned out to be sleeping pills. Bardot had to have her stomach pumped. Her subsequent verbal attack on him was understandable. But she was not the only actress he made suffer. Suzy Delair, who starred in the 1947 film Quai des Orfèvres, disclosed that he slapped her on set. “So what?” Delair told one interviewer. “He slapped others as well … He was tough but I’m not about to complain.”

In terms of violence to his female stars, Clouzot was a monstre sacré akin to his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired and whose psychological thrillers of the 1950s and 60s bear close comparison with Clouzot’s greatest films – The Wages of Fear (1953), starring Yves Montand, and Les Diaboliques (1955), with Véra Clouzot as a wronged wife who conspires with his mistress, Simone Signoret, to murder her husband. Four years after La Vérité, Clouzot set about making L’Enfer. It was about a man driven mad by the supposed infidelities of his beautiful wife.

Clouzot cast 26-year-old Romy Schneider, who, though Austrian, was then one of France’s leading film stars. French cinema was a-tremble with expectation: could L’Enfer repeat the success of his earlier, great films? And what on-set tortures did Clouzot have in store for Schneider?

Moreover, French cinema had been revolutionised by the nouvelle vague since his last film, and the likes of Godard and Truffaut had arguably eclipsed Clouzot. Could he now show those young pups he was still the greatest French exponent of the seventh art? The director Costa-Gavras, who worked as production assistant on L’Enfer, said: “He was criticised by the nouvelle vague for planning out everything in the script. The big word of the epoch was ‘improvise’. He had a nice line about that: ‘I improvise on paper.’”

Clouzot was known as a forbiddingly meticulous metteur en scène, storyboarding his films so intensively that actors often felt thwarted. On L’Enfer, he sought to revolutionise cinema by meticulously creating a film using the experimental sounds of Pierre Boulez’s Ircam in Paris, and the then-voguish images of kinetic art to express his hero’s increasingly wild fantasy life. These lurid colour sequences would be juxtaposed with black-and-white footage shot on location.

But he never finished L’Enfer. After a few weeks of studio tests in Paris and 10 days on location, Clouzot abandoned it. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s new documentary anatomises that cinematic nightmare– and it makes painful viewing, though it is filled with tantalising images of what might have been.

How did it come about? Thirty years after Clouzot’s death in 1977, his widow, Inès de Gonzalez, found herself trapped in a broken lift with a young film-maker. During their enforced intimacy, Inès told Bromberg that she had 185 cans of film (about 13 hours) of the unfinished penultimate film. She entrusted the footage to Bromberg to make a film containing interviews with the crew and newly dramatised scenes based on Clouzot’s script.

But we also have something extra: Claude Chabrol’s 1994 film based on Clouzot’s script, also called L’Enfer, starring Emmanuelle Béart as the flirtatious wife and François Cluzet as the paranoid husband. That is hardly enough, even if Chabrol inherited Clouzot’s mantle as the French Hitchcock. His treatment of the story is never as bravura as Clouzot’s promised to be. The test shots for Clouzot’s L’Enfer that appear in the new documentary show that he envisaged using kinetic art in a way that parallels how Hitchcock had used Salvador Dalí’s surrealist dream sequences almost 20 years earlier on Spellbound.

Maybe, though, it was in making these test shots that Clouzot’s ambition went beyond his capacity to realise a film. Film-maker Bernard Stora, then an intern on the film, worked on the tests. “I walked into something totally insane,” he recalls. “Clouzot had the best cameramen and the most seasoned technicians. It seemed clear from the beginning they didn’t know what they were doing.”

The producers, though, saw rushes of this stuff and loosened the purse strings: they saw genius where Stora saw insanity. Clouzot then had a virtually unlimited budget – but it only encouraged him to dream big and worry 24/7. Once on set, hell began in earnest. Clouzot started shooting at a lakeside hotel. But there was a difficulty. The lake, which figured in most scenes, was scheduled to be drained for a hydroelectric generating project. Clouzot had only 20 days to wrap the project. The shoot became as tense as a countdown Hollywood thriller.

L’Enfer’s key protagonists – Schneider, Serge Reggiani (who played the fantasising husband) and Clouzot – are all dead. But what we learn from the documentary is that Clouzot upset his leading man much more than his leading lady. After 10 days on set, Reggiani walked off, claiming to be suffering from Maltese fever, and threatening legal action. “Serge said he wasn’t there to be insulted by a schizophrenic maniac,” says Lan Nguyen, a junior member of the crew.

Reggiani, according to other crew members, had been steeling himself against being bullied on set by the notorious Clouzot and so was already in a highly strained state. How had Clouzot upset Reggiani? He had insisted that, in order to demonstrate the husband’s jealousy, Reggiani would have to run behind a camera car repeatedly, ostensibly following Schneider’s car. Reggiani found himself running for 10 miles a day up vertiginous mountain roads – great footage, but the ordeal took its toll.

After Reggiani quit, Clouzot needed a replacement. Jean-Louis Trintignant (male foil in the 1956 Bardot vehicle And God Created Woman, and soon to be a star of European art cinema) was invited to the set and was wooed by Clouzot into taking the part – but decided against it.

Clouzot now decided it was too late to hire a replacement. Notoriously insomniac at the best of times, he rewrote the film through the nights and shot new footage during the days. The idea was that he would later edit his way around the problem of not having his leading man on set. He became increasingly stressed, alienated and paranoid. Perhaps – and this is just a thought – he should have taken the role himself?

And then one day, while he was filming Romy Schneider and Dany Carel having a lesbian tryst on a boat on the lake, he had a heart attack. He was taken to hospital and was compelled to abandon the film. “It happened at the right moment,” says Stora. “Things weren’t going well.”

Clouzot would make only one more film before his death in 1977. In 1968′s La Prisonnière, he used some of those weirdo kinetic art shots he had filmed for L’Enfer. It didn’t revolutionise cinema, and was forgotten even in a France that cherishes its cinema. Clouzot had been consumed by the very hell he tried, and failed, to show on screen.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is released next Friday

• This article was amended on Friday 30 October 2009. It originally said that Simone Signoret played the wronged wife in Les Diaboliques. This has been corrected.

Whether it’s explaining character motivation, or the effect on the audience, film invites you to sit on the psychologist’s couch

Cinema is a powerful medium for exploring the human condition and the complicated workings of the mind. That is why it has particular resonance for psychoanalysis. Cinema allows the inner world to be represented through moving pictures – and some of our most vivid modes of “thinking” or “dreaming” occur in pictorial form. The mind’s capacity for flights of thought, for complex networks of fantasy, can be represented in the sometimes headlong careering of cinematic images.

Film can offer an enlightening and sometimes disturbing insight into troublesome or dangerous emotional states – and film directors have been engaged by the richness of their characters’ inner lives as psychoanalysts have by their patients’. Both groups learned from the other: many psychoanalysts have written on film, while film theorists and writers have made use of psychoanalytical concepts.

So how are psychoanalytic ideas helpful in thinking about films, and the experience of being in the cinema? First, films offer a narrative of human experiences, relations and activities. Psychoanalytic ideas help make sense of characters’ behaviour, though unlike in real life we don’t have the characters responding to help deepen, modify or falsify our interpretations. Instead, we try to make objective appraisals of what the director presents to us.

A psychoanalytic account of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) might include reference to Donald Winnicott’s account of false self functioning. Winnicott suggested that too much intrusion into a child’s life might hamper their ability to be spontaneous in later life, and lead them unconsciously to become insincere and overconcerned with conforming. Truman Burbank, the protagonist of the film, strikes us as such a figure, and part of the pain of the early scenes lies in this sense of his falseness: his over-friendly smile, exaggerated politeness, forced joking and cliche-ridden language. The film portrays his voyage (including a literal voyage) to an uncertain exit from his defensive and unsatisfying, but protected life, an escape requiring not only suspicion and rebellion on his part, but also a supportive Other.

Close-ups on a character’s face and eyes offer an irresistible invitation to the spectator to enter further into the character’s internal world. Psychoanalytic insight can be applied across other art forms, but there is another kind that focuses on what is unique to cinema both as an art form and as an experience for the viewer. Films take place in dark rooms; they are illusions created by flickering beams of light. There’s a parallel in that with dreaming. Important, too, is the element of voyeurism; sitting in the dark, we become an illicit presence at often intimate and private interactions.

The setting itself may even suggest something of the primal scene. The film theorist Andrew Webber has suggested that the slicing of the eye in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) acts as a self-reflexive infliction of punishment on us, the viewers, for our voyeuristic and excited curiosity.

Films may also offer something akin to psychoanalytic working-through. In Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001), a mother, father (himself a psychoanalyst) and daughter work through the pain, rage and guilt about the tragic death in a diving accident of their adolescent son/brother. The process is observed in detail and with psychological accuracy, showing the different (defensive) strategies each of the surviving members of the family adopts to come to terms with their loss. Eventually it will be the unexpected appearance of a “third” (an ex-girlfriend of the dead boy) that allows the whole family to emerge from their grief.

Finally, some films also give the audience the chance to make use of Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit, or later revision, in which events can be reinterpreted. An obvious example would be Triumph of the Will, (1935) Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious and powerful propaganda documentary of Nazi Germany. Seen outside the ideological context in which it was made, it is transformed into the most effective condemnation of the regime it was intended to celebrate.

• Michael Brearley is president of the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The 5th European Psychoanalytic film festival is at Bafta, London W1, until Sunday. psychoanalysis.org.uk/epff5

Whether it’s explaining character motivation, or the effect on the audience, film invites you to sit on the psychologist’s couch

Cinema is a powerful medium for exploring the human condition and the complicated workings of the mind. That is why it has particular resonance for psychoanalysis. Cinema allows the inner world to be represented through moving pictures – and some of our most vivid modes of “thinking” or “dreaming” occur in pictorial form. The mind’s capacity for flights of thought, for complex networks of fantasy, can be represented in the sometimes headlong careering of cinematic images.

Film can offer an enlightening and sometimes disturbing insight into troublesome or dangerous emotional states – and film directors have been engaged by the richness of their characters’ inner lives as psychoanalysts have by their patients’. Both groups learned from the other: many psychoanalysts have written on film, while film theorists and writers have made use of psychoanalytical concepts.

So how are psychoanalytic ideas helpful in thinking about films, and the experience of being in the cinema? First, films offer a narrative of human experiences, relations and activities. Psychoanalytic ideas help make sense of characters’ behaviour, though unlike in real life we don’t have the characters responding to help deepen, modify or falsify our interpretations. Instead, we try to make objective appraisals of what the director presents to us.

A psychoanalytic account of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) might include reference to Donald Winnicott’s account of false self functioning. Winnicott suggested that too much intrusion into a child’s life might hamper their ability to be spontaneous in later life, and lead them unconsciously to become insincere and overconcerned with conforming. Truman Burbank, the protagonist of the film, strikes us as such a figure, and part of the pain of the early scenes lies in this sense of his falseness: his over-friendly smile, exaggerated politeness, forced joking and cliche-ridden language. The film portrays his voyage (including a literal voyage) to an uncertain exit from his defensive and unsatisfying, but protected life, an escape requiring not only suspicion and rebellion on his part, but also a supportive Other.

Close-ups on a character’s face and eyes offer an irresistible invitation to the spectator to enter further into the character’s internal world. Psychoanalytic insight can be applied across other art forms, but there is another kind that focuses on what is unique to cinema both as an art form and as an experience for the viewer. Films take place in dark rooms; they are illusions created by flickering beams of light. There’s a parallel in that with dreaming. Important, too, is the element of voyeurism; sitting in the dark, we become an illicit presence at often intimate and private interactions.

The setting itself may even suggest something of the primal scene. The film theorist Andrew Webber has suggested that the slicing of the eye in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) acts as a self-reflexive infliction of punishment on us, the viewers, for our voyeuristic and excited curiosity.

Films may also offer something akin to psychoanalytic working-through. In Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001), a mother, father (himself a psychoanalyst) and daughter work through the pain, rage and guilt about the tragic death in a diving accident of their adolescent son/brother. The process is observed in detail and with psychological accuracy, showing the different (defensive) strategies each of the surviving members of the family adopts to come to terms with their loss. Eventually it will be the unexpected appearance of a “third” (an ex-girlfriend of the dead boy) that allows the whole family to emerge from their grief.

Finally, some films also give the audience the chance to make use of Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit, or later revision, in which events can be reinterpreted. An obvious example would be Triumph of the Will, (1935) Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious and powerful propaganda documentary of Nazi Germany. Seen outside the ideological context in which it was made, it is transformed into the most effective condemnation of the regime it was intended to celebrate.

• Michael Brearley is president of the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The 5th European Psychoanalytic film festival is at Bafta, London W1, until Sunday. psychoanalysis.org.uk/epff5

The film was called Hell, and it duly became hell. But this 1964 flop by Henri-Georges Clouzot shouldn’t blind us to his genius

Brigitte Bardot called him “a negative being, for ever at odds with himself and the world around him”. Another actor described him as “an interfering man who wanted every actor under his control”. The man they are both describing is Henri-Georges Clouzot, one of France’s greatest film directors, whose work plumbed the depths of misanthropy, paranoia and revenge so unremittingly that it was hard not to believe he was exploring his own psyche in public.

Clouzot was hated and feted in equal measure. One of his first masterpieces, the 1943 film Le Corbeau, is now hailed by critics, but on release it united the French left and the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in an unlikely alliance against Clouzot’s vision of pettiness and self-loathing in a small French wartime town divided by a poison-pen letter scandal. It was brave story to tell in a France torn apart by war; Le Corbeau was pulled from cinemas, Clouzot was fired from the Nazi-owned Continental studios and, after the war, received a lifetime ban (rescinded in 1947) from the French film industry for working with the Nazis.

Today he is largely forgotten, or at best mistaken for the bumbling inspector in the Pink Panther franchise. But now the disgracefully neglected Clouzot is being brought to new audiences with a documentary about his doomed 1964 project concerning a jealous husband’s mental collapse into paranoid fantasy. Called L’Enfer (Hell), the film became a real hell for the director and everyone on set.

One of L’Enfer’s problems was that Clouzot had by then become notorious as a director with a taste for violence and betrayal – and not just in his films. During the filming of La Vérité (The Truth) in 1960, he wanted Brigitte Bardot to fall asleep and drool for one scene. As you do. So he gave her some pills saying they were painkillers. They turned out to be sleeping pills. Bardot had to have her stomach pumped. Her subsequent verbal attack on him was understandable. But she was not the only actress he made suffer. Suzy Delair, who starred in the 1947 film Quai des Orfèvres, disclosed that he slapped her on set. “So what?” Delair told one interviewer. “He slapped others as well … He was tough but I’m not about to complain.”

In terms of violence to his female stars, Clouzot was a monstre sacré akin to his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired and whose psychological thrillers of the 1950s and 60s bear close comparison with Clouzot’s greatest films – The Wages of Fear (1953), starring Yves Montand, and Les Diaboliques (1955), with Simone Signoret as a wronged wife who conspires with his mistress to murder her husband. Four years after La Vérité, Clouzot set about making L’Enfer. It was about a man driven mad by the supposed infidelities of his beautiful wife.

Clouzot cast 26-year-old Romy Schneider, who, though Austrian, was then one of France’s leading film stars. French cinema was a-tremble with expectation: could L’Enfer repeat the success of his earlier, great films? And what on-set tortures did Clouzot have in store for Schneider?

Moreover, French cinema had been revolutionised by the nouvelle vague since his last film, and the likes of Godard and Truffaut had arguably eclipsed Clouzot. Could he now show those young pups he was still the greatest French exponent of the seventh art? The director Costa-Gavras, who worked as production assistant on L’Enfer, said: “He was criticised by the nouvelle vague for planning out everything in the script. The big word of the epoch was ‘improvise’. He had a nice line about that: ‘I improvise on paper.’”

Clouzot was known as a forbiddingly meticulous metteur en scène, storyboarding his films so intensively that actors often felt thwarted. On L’Enfer, he sought to revolutionise cinema by meticulously creating a film using the experimental sounds of Pierre Boulez’s Ircam in Paris, and the then-voguish images of kinetic art to express his hero’s increasingly wild fantasy life. These lurid colour sequences would be juxtaposed with black-and-white footage shot on location.

But he never finished L’Enfer. After a few weeks of studio tests in Paris and 10 days on location, Clouzot abandoned it. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s new documentary anatomises that cinematic nightmare– and it makes painful viewing, though it is filled with tantalising images of what might have been.

How did it come about? Thirty years after Clouzot’s death in 1977, his widow, Inès de Gonzalez, found herself trapped in a broken lift with a young film-maker. During their enforced intimacy, Inès told Bromberg that she had 185 cans of film (about 13 hours) of the unfinished penultimate film. She entrusted the footage to Bromberg to make a film containing interviews with the crew and newly dramatised scenes based on Clouzot’s script.

But we also have something extra: Claude Chabrol’s 1994 film based on Clouzot’s script, also called L’Enfer, starring Emmanuelle Béart as the flirtatious wife and François Cluzet as the paranoid husband. That is hardly enough, even if Chabrol inherited Clouzot’s mantle as the French Hitchcock. His treatment of the story is never as bravura as Clouzot’s promised to be. The test shots for Clouzot’s L’Enfer that appear in the new documentary show that he envisaged using kinetic art in a way that parallels how Hitchcock had used Salvador Dalí’s surrealist dream sequences almost 20 years earlier on Spellbound.

Maybe, though, it was in making these test shots that Clouzot’s ambition went beyond his capacity to realise a film. Film-maker Bernard Stora, then an intern on the film, worked on the tests. “I walked into something totally insane,” he recalls. “Clouzot had the best cameramen and the most seasoned technicians. It seemed clear from the beginning they didn’t know what they were doing.”

The producers, though, saw rushes of this stuff and loosened the purse strings: they saw genius where Stora saw insanity. Clouzot then had a virtually unlimited budget – but it only encouraged him to dream big and worry 24/7. Once on set, hell began in earnest. Clouzot started shooting at a lakeside hotel. But there was a difficulty. The lake, which figured in most scenes, was scheduled to be drained for a hydroelectric generating project. Clouzot had only 20 days to wrap the project. The shoot became as tense as a countdown Hollywood thriller.

L’Enfer’s key protagonists – Schneider, Serge Reggiani (who played the fantasising husband) and Clouzot – are all dead. But what we learn from the documentary is that Clouzot upset his leading man much more than his leading lady. After 10 days on set, Reggiani walked off, claiming to be suffering from Maltese fever, and threatening legal action. “Serge said he wasn’t there to be insulted by a schizophrenic maniac,” says Lan Nguyen, a junior member of the crew.

Reggiani, according to other crew members, had been steeling himself against being bullied on set by the notorious Clouzot and so was already in a highly strained state. How had Clouzot upset Reggiani? He had insisted that, in order to demonstrate the husband’s jealousy, Reggiani would have to run behind a camera car repeatedly, ostensibly following Schneider’s car. Reggiani found himself running for 10 miles a day up vertiginous mountain roads – great footage, but the ordeal took its toll.

After Reggiani quit, Clouzot needed a replacement. Jean-Louis Trintignant (male foil in the 1956 Bardot vehicle And God Created Woman, and soon to be a star of European art cinema) was invited to the set and was wooed by Clouzot into taking the part – but decided against it.

Clouzot now decided it was too late to hire a replacement. Notoriously insomniac at the best of times, he rewrote the film through the nights and shot new footage during the days. The idea was that he would later edit his way around the problem of not having his leading man on set. He became increasingly stressed, alienated and paranoid. Perhaps – and this is just a thought – he should have taken the role himself?

And then one day, while he was filming Romy Schneider and Dany Carel having a lesbian tryst on a boat on the lake, he had a heart attack. He was taken to hospital and was compelled to abandon the film. “It happened at the right moment,” says Stora. “Things weren’t going well.”

Clouzot would make only one more film before his death in 1977. In 1968′s La Prisonnière, he used some of those weirdo kinetic art shots he had filmed for L’Enfer. It didn’t revolutionise cinema, and was forgotten even in a France that cherishes its cinema. Clouzot had been consumed by the very hell he tried, and failed, to show on screen.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is released next Friday

Harmony Korine is the one-man awkward squad of indie cinema, and his new film Trash Humpers, a tale of delinquent seniors, looks to be his most off-putting yet

On stage during a Q&A after the London premiere of his new film Trash Humpers, it’s as if Harmony Korine has become a character in one of his movies: a bad-taste bar mitzvah comedian, perhaps. Someone in the audience asks how he cast the film’s trio of suburban prostitutes. Korine replies that one of them was his high-school girlfriend: “I admit she doesn’t look that great today.” Ba-boom. Where did he get the idea for the film? Well, there was this house in his neighbourhood when he was a kid where people would dump their elderly relatives for $90 a month. The old folks were fed undercooked meat and forced to listen to Herman’s Hermits. With a final flourish, answering who knows what question, Korine declares, “I’m the most American director making movies today.” He’s beaming wildly.

That last line has the audience in stitches, not least because the film they’ve just watched is Korine’s least accessible (some would say least watchable) to date. If you have seen his 1997 directing debut, Gummo, then imagine its glue-sniffing teenagers 50 years down the line. They’ve become gonzo OAPs, suburban winos who prowl Nashville back alleys at night, dry-humping dustbins and bridges, cackling insanely and committing the occasional murder. There’s no plot, little comprehensible dialogue and no suggestion of a world outside the humpers’ network of miscreant buddies (whose number includes a cross-dressing poet in a French maid’s outfit). What’s more, the actors aren’t even old people: Korine cast himself, his wife Rachel and a couple of buddies, all wearing masks and looking like retirement home Freddy Krugers. Filmed on crappy VHS in the style of a home movie, Trash Humpers is the cinematic equivalent of listening to black metal: most people hate it, some can stomach 10 minutes, only the devoted will go the full 78 minutes.

After the Q&A I bump into a friend of Korine’s who worked on the film. How much of what he said on stage was true? “Some of it,” he says laughing. “A lot of it was complete fantasy.” In the past newspaper features about Korine were littered with his self-mythologising tall tales (there was the one about the time he found a piece of a guy’s shoulder in a pillowcase). A mutual acquaintance who has known Korine since around the time Kids was released in 1995 (he wrote the script at 19) tells a good story of the director being in Los Angeles in the late 90s. This was around the time Werner Herzog was calling him “the future of American cinema”. A big Hollywood actor, hearing Korine was in town, summoned the young director to the studio where he was filming. Korine showed up in blackface and took off his trousers before being chased off by security. There’s a video of it somewhere, apparently. Or is it just one of the fibs that Korine likes to circulate?

But during our interview proper, the day before the premiere, American indie’s enfant terrible keeps his answers more or less straight. Now 36, with grey streaks in his beard, he’s a darn sight more sprightly than when he was a few years ago, when he lived in London and shuffled around looking twitchy. The only trace now of his once-distinctive jitters is the non-stop gum-chewing.

Others on Team Trash Humpers make up for Korine’s seeming lack of nerves; you get the impression they are uncertain how to plug the film. A publicist calls it his detox film (Korine is a former heroin user), a purging of all those nasty toxins. That would explain the paranoid tone, but in truth he has been clean for a few years. Korine says the film is more of a reaction to Mister Lonely, last year’s comeback. His first film in eight years, Mister Lonely was a rich and touchingly old-fashioned melodrama set in a commune of celebrity impersonators. But with an $8.2m budget, he says he found the backroom wrangling crippling: “The people involved, the logistics, the bureaucracy. So much energy is put into capitulating. It just chops your head off.” Korine thrusts himself into the back of his seat for effect. Trash Humpers was more of a wham-bam production. Shooting – practically on his doorstop – started four months ago and he was done editing in time for the Toronto film festival in September.

So far the film has divided opinion – nothing new for him there. Experimental art film or sub-Jackass goof-off? Korine seems to be hedging his bets ever so slightly on its place in his body of work. Maybe it’s not even a movie at all, he suggests: “I wanted to make something that replicated an artefact. Or a found object.” At one point there was talk of presenting it as a VHS tape that had been found in a ditch or in a box in someone’s attic.

In perhaps his only lapse into interview whimsy, Korine claims that when he was making the film he was convinced of its commercial appeal: “I was actually thinking it would be the kind of thing someone like Miley Cyrus might like.” What would Miley Cyrus like about it? The man fellating a twig? “I just thought it was so base and, in some ways, so on the surface, that it’s something that someone like her could identify with.” He’s beaming again. As usual, he doesn’t give a twig himself for criticism, or for the charge that Trash Humpers is nothing more than boring provocation: “I don’t give a fuck if people think that or not. I honestly don’t care.”

Korine refuses to be drawn on his private life. He spent a handful of self-destructive years between New York, London and Paris. Anyone familiar with his work probably has a fair idea of the rest of it: break-up with on-off muse and girlfriend Chloe Sevigny, teeth falling out, houses burning down, drugs, near homelessness. Then there was Fight Harm, the abandoned film in which he picked fights with strangers, filmed by David Blaine. “I was quite unhealthy,” he says with a rueful grin. He pauses. “You can imagine, it was hell.” He shrugs and gives the table in front of him a little bang for emphasis.

Today, Korine’s back in Nashville, Tennessee, where he grew up. He’s married with a baby, and when he talks about family life it’s with zeal of a reformed man. ”Living there, you have space,” he says of his hometown. “That was one of the things that was missing from my life for a long time.” And Southern hospitality was a boon during the filming of Trash Humpers: “It would be really late at night and one of the characters would be fucking a trash bin, like really fucking it hard. And then a guy would come out of the house and see it and ask if we wanted the porch lights on.”

As for right now, Korine’s just finished work on a comedy script, and he’s got back the drive that saw him through the youthful burst of Kids, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. “At that time I was literally exploding. Internally I couldn’t contain my thoughts, my energy. At the same time, when I would close the door, I didn’t have much left. I was spent. Now I try to pace myself a little more.” Which reminds me of something said by Harmony Korine the quixotic wunderbrat, at the time of Gummo’s release: that great artists have 10 years in them at best. Was Korine’s decade back in the 90s? Or is it yet to come?

Harmony Korine is the one-man awkward squad of indie cinema, and his new film Trash Humpers, a tale of delinquent seniors, looks to be his most off-putting yet

On stage during a Q&A after the London premiere of his new film Trash Humpers, it’s as if Harmony Korine has become a character in one of his movies: a bad-taste bar mitzvah comedian, perhaps. Someone in the audience asks how he cast the film’s trio of suburban prostitutes. Korine replies that one of them was his high-school girlfriend: “I admit she doesn’t look that great today.” Ba-boom. Where did he get the idea for the film? Well, there was this house in his neighbourhood when he was a kid where people would dump their elderly relatives for $90 a month. The old folks were fed undercooked meat and forced to listen to Herman’s Hermits. With a final flourish, answering who knows what question, Korine declares, “I’m the most American director making movies today.” He’s beaming wildly.

That last line has the audience in stitches, not least because the film they’ve just watched is Korine’s least accessible (some would say least watchable) to date. If you have seen his 1997 directing debut, Gummo, then imagine its glue-sniffing teenagers 50 years down the line. They’ve become gonzo OAPs, suburban winos who prowl Nashville back alleys at night, dry-humping dustbins and bridges, cackling insanely and committing the occasional murder. There’s no plot, little comprehensible dialogue and no suggestion of a world outside the humpers’ network of miscreant buddies (whose number includes a cross-dressing poet in a French maid’s outfit). What’s more, the actors aren’t even old people: Korine cast himself, his wife Rachel and a couple of buddies, all wearing masks and looking like retirement home Freddy Krugers. Filmed on crappy VHS in the style of a home movie, Trash Humpers is the cinematic equivalent of listening to black metal: most people hate it, some can stomach 10 minutes, only the devoted will go the full 78 minutes.

After the Q&A I bump into a friend of Korine’s who worked on the film. How much of what he said on stage was true? “Some of it,” he says laughing. “A lot of it was complete fantasy.” In the past newspaper features about Korine were littered with his self-mythologising tall tales (there was the one about the time he found a piece of a guy’s shoulder in a pillowcase). A mutual acquaintance who has known Korine since around the time Kids was released in 1995 (he wrote the script at 19) tells a good story of the director being in Los Angeles in the late 90s. This was around the time Werner Herzog was calling him “the future of American cinema”. A big Hollywood actor, hearing Korine was in town, summoned the young director to the studio where he was filming. Korine showed up in blackface and took off his trousers before being chased off by security. There’s a video of it somewhere, apparently. Or is it just one of the fibs that Korine likes to circulate?

But during our interview proper, the day before the premiere, American indie’s enfant terrible keeps his answers more or less straight. Now 36, with grey streaks in his beard, he’s a darn sight more sprightly than when he was a few years ago, when he lived in London and shuffled around looking twitchy. The only trace now of his once-distinctive jitters is the non-stop gum-chewing.

Others on Team Trash Humpers make up for Korine’s seeming lack of nerves; you get the impression they are uncertain how to plug the film. A publicist calls it his detox film (Korine is a former heroin user), a purging of all those nasty toxins. That would explain the paranoid tone, but in truth he has been clean for a few years. Korine says the film is more of a reaction to Mister Lonely, last year’s comeback. His first film in eight years, Mister Lonely was a rich and touchingly old-fashioned melodrama set in a commune of celebrity impersonators. But with an $8.2m budget, he says he found the backroom wrangling crippling: “The people involved, the logistics, the bureaucracy. So much energy is put into capitulating. It just chops your head off.” Korine thrusts himself into the back of his seat for effect. Trash Humpers was more of a wham-bam production. Shooting – practically on his doorstop – started four months ago and he was done editing in time for the Toronto film festival in September.

So far the film has divided opinion – nothing new for him there. Experimental art film or sub-Jackass goof-off? Korine seems to be hedging his bets ever so slightly on its place in his body of work. Maybe it’s not even a movie at all, he suggests: “I wanted to make something that replicated an artefact. Or a found object.” At one point there was talk of presenting it as a VHS tape that had been found in a ditch or in a box in someone’s attic.

In perhaps his only lapse into interview whimsy, Korine claims that when he was making the film he was convinced of its commercial appeal: “I was actually thinking it would be the kind of thing someone like Miley Cyrus might like.” What would Miley Cyrus like about it? The man fellating a twig? “I just thought it was so base and, in some ways, so on the surface, that it’s something that someone like her could identify with.” He’s beaming again. As usual, he doesn’t give a twig himself for criticism, or for the charge that Trash Humpers is nothing more than boring provocation: “I don’t give a fuck if people think that or not. I honestly don’t care.”

Korine refuses to be drawn on his private life. He spent a handful of self-destructive years between New York, London and Paris. Anyone familiar with his work probably has a fair idea of the rest of it: break-up with on-off muse and girlfriend Chloe Sevigny, teeth falling out, houses burning down, drugs, near homelessness. Then there was Fight Harm, the abandoned film in which he picked fights with strangers, filmed by David Blaine. “I was quite unhealthy,” he says with a rueful grin. He pauses. “You can imagine, it was hell.” He shrugs and gives the table in front of him a little bang for emphasis.

Today, Korine’s back in Nashville, Tennessee, where he grew up. He’s married with a baby, and when he talks about family life it’s with zeal of a reformed man. ”Living there, you have space,” he says of his hometown. “That was one of the things that was missing from my life for a long time.” And Southern hospitality was a boon during the filming of Trash Humpers: “It would be really late at night and one of the characters would be fucking a trash bin, like really fucking it hard. And then a guy would come out of the house and see it and ask if we wanted the porch lights on.”

As for right now, Korine’s just finished work on a comedy script, and he’s got back the drive that saw him through the youthful burst of Kids, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. “At that time I was literally exploding. Internally I couldn’t contain my thoughts, my energy. At the same time, when I would close the door, I didn’t have much left. I was spent. Now I try to pace myself a little more.” Which reminds me of something said by Harmony Korine the quixotic wunderbrat, at the time of Gummo’s release: that great artists have 10 years in them at best. Was Korine’s decade back in the 90s? Or is it yet to come?