Haneke's forgotten two-part gut-punch: the generation that inherited silence and learned to scream.
Season 1 • Episode 2
Latest"Part 2: Injuries" depicts the group of characters from "Arcadia" twenty years later as they have grown up to become dysfunctional and suicidal adults.
This two-part drama examines the fate of the generation of Austrians which came of age after World War II. The first part, "Arcadia," depicts the generational gap between 1950s teenagers and their parents, while the second part, "Injuries," shows this same group of characters twenty years later as they have grown up to become dysfunctional and suicidal adults. Regarded as the most significant of Michael Haneke’s early works, "Lemmings" contains incipient treatments of many of the themes he would later elaborate on in his theatrical features.
Writing
The structural mirror of 'Arcadia' and 'Injuries' is devastating architecture.
Acting
The same cast aging 20 years—watch hope curdle in real faces.
Direction
Haneke's early cold formalism already fully formed, merciless.
Creator
Michael Haneke
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Made for Austrian television in 1979, Lemmings confronted the nation's 'Gründerzeit' myth of prosperous post-war innocence decades before this reckoning became mainstream.
The title refers not to mass suicide but to conformity—Haneke's lemmings follow consumerist comfort toward destruction. The later 'Funny Games' and 'The Seventh Continent' are essentially remakes of these episodes.
AT
