DRIFT X De Uitkijk: Funny Games (1997)

The annual collaboration between De Uitkijk and Wijsgerig Festival DRIFT is back! This time, Film & Philosophy explores the space between dream and deed. On four consecutive Monday evenings, we invite you to map out and climb, or even tear down, the mysterious wall that separates ideas from reality. From violent murder to meditative reflection, everything is explored as we cover the distance between dream and deed. And all while you sit back and relax in the comfortable seats of the old De Uitkijk cinema.

The word is put into action by a philosopher who gives a short lecture before each screening.

We start on Monday evening, 30 March, with Michael Haneke's satirical thriller Funny Games (1997), introduced by Yaniv Hagbi. Welcome at 9 p.m.

Yaniv Hagbi on Funny Games (1997):
Funny Games (1997), a psychological horror film by Michael Haneke, follows a bourgeois family on holiday who are visited by two friendly yet sinister young men who soon begin a deadly game. Play and error are inextricably linked: without the possibility of error, there is no play, only a mechanical system of rules. This reading therefore distinguishes between mistake (the visible transgression of a rule) and error (the living spirit of the game itself, which encompasses all possible mistakes). Homo errans, then, rather than homo ludens. As soon as error disappears and that boundary vanishes, horror reigns. Funny Games (1997) is a perfect paradigm for this idea, and for a much broader phenomenon: it surfaces in literature, theatre and culture wherever play and seriousness come dangerously close to one another.