Haneke, a Sadist?

After winning tons of awards like Cannes’ Golden Palms, the Cesars, the Oscars… one wonders whether everyone is blind to the fact that Haneke seems to focus on the obscene (what should be ob-scena, off stage?).
He seems to delight in subjecting his audience to pain and worse; from the graphic slashing of one character’s throat in Caché (Hidden) to the slapping of an older woman in Amour, the casual, motiveless murder in Benny’s Video, the indiscriminate shooting of a crowd in 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, the list goes on.

It is possible to fight clichés (like Elfriede Jelinek) or voyeurism (like Pasolini’s Saló – one of Haneke’s 10 favorite films) without cutting into one of art’s major asset, to trigger the imagination. When everything is shown, very little is left.

From The Guardian:
Huppert had a tantrum when he refused to allow her to decide on the motives of her character in his apocalyptic fable The Time of the Wolf. Naomi Watts, whom he directed in the American remake of Funny Games, broke down in tears and protested that she was not a marionette as he bossily choreographed a scene in which she bustled about the kitchen. Haneke’s ideal interpreter was the late Susanne Lothar, who played Watts’s role as the excruciated wife in the original Austrian version of Funny Games. “She must have been masochistic,” said Haneke approvingly, remembering that Lothar spent half an hour sobbing in her dressing room to prepare for one scene of abuse.

Exhibit X?

Exhibit XX?