71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

Infobox Film
name = 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
(71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls)


image_size =
caption = Poster
director = Michael Haneke
producer = Veit Heiduschka
writer = Michael Haneke
narrator =
starring = Gabriel Cosmin Urdes
Lukas Miko
Otto Grünmandl
Anne Bennent
Udo Samel
music =
cinematography = Christian Berger
editing = Marie Homolkova
distributor =
released = 1994
runtime = 96 min.
country = flagcountry|Austria
language = German
Romanian
budget =
gross =
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website =
amg_id = 1:134247
imdb_id = 0109020

"71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance" (German: "71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls") is a 1994 Austrian drama film directed by Michael Haneke. It has a fragmented storyline as the title suggests, and chronicles several unrelated stories in parallel. Separate narrative lines intersect in an incident at the last of the film: a mass killing at an Austrian bank. The film is set in Vienna, October to December 1993.

The film opens with intertitles which introduces the mass killing in detail. So it chronicles in flashbacks a last few months of Vienna.

The drama consists of varied characters in each storyline: a Romanian boy who immigrated illegally into Austria and lives in streets of Vienna; a religious bank security worker; an old man staring at TV screen; a childless couple considering adoption; a frustrated student and so on. The film depicts their fragmented lives without any prejudice.

The film is divided into a number of variable-length "fragments" divided by black pauses, and apparently unrelated to each other. The film is characterised by quite a lot of fragments that take form of video newscasts unrelated to the main storylines. News footages of real events are shown through video monitors. Newscasts report on Bosnian War, Somali Civil War, South Lebanon conflict, terrorist's bombing in Turkey, and molestation allegations against Michael Jackson. These sequences emphasize the film's cynical and nihilistic stance on Vienna's urban life and the incident.

The director Michael Haneke refers to "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance" as the last part ofhis "glaciation trilogy", whose other parts are his preceding two films. [senses|id=directors/03/haneke|name=Michael Haneke]

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