Surveillance And The Indifferent Gaze In Michael Haneke’s Caché

SFC 11 (2) pp. 151–163 Intellect Limited 2011 Studies in French Cinema Volume 11 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.11.2.151_1 JENNIFER BURRIS Whitney Museum of American Art (ISP) Surveillance and the indifferent gaze in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Michael Haneke’s Caché/Hidden (2005) has generated a level of critical discussion that has quickly established the film as a defining work of early twenty-first century French cinema. Noticeably absent from this wealth of analysis is an examination of how Caché’s formal experimentation with surveillance technology directly informs its treatment of the political and ethical issues of postcolonialism. Drawing from the practices of 1960s ‘surveillance art’, as well as the CCTV aesthetic of reality television, this article addresses this critical gap by focusing on how Caché’s filmic apparatus captures the alienation of emotion from phenomenological experience. Caché presents an alternative to Foucault’s visual economy of self-regulation (panopticisme) in that its protagonist Georges internalizes the disinterested and subject-less gaze of the ever-present camera rather than the interested gaze of the prison guard. This process results in a state of emotional indifference: Georges is an unmoved witness to traumatic events as well as his own history. In Caché, Haneke shows how this indifference helps produce the stratification and paranoia of a postcolonial society. Haneke Nauman surveillance art CCTV Algeria postcolonialism Michael Haneke’s Caché/Hidden (Haneke 2005) explores what happens when an educated member of the Parisian elite (Georges Laurent) is confronted with a traumatic event from his childhood. In 1961, two Algerians working 151 SFC 11.2 Burris_151_163.indd 151 4/7/11 6:35:45 PM Jennifer Burris 1. Even work that directly addresses the mechanisms of looking and vision in Caché attributes a temporal dimension to its filmic space. For example, for Libby Saxton, the visible is roughly equated with the present and the hidden with the past; this present is determined by a return of the past, the screen a window onto off-screen space (Saxton 2007). at Georges’s family’s estate are called to a protest in Paris by the Front de Libération Nationale. Along with the roughly 200 other Algerians who are killed and drowned in the Seine that day under the orders of then Paris police chief Maurice Papon, they never return. Georges’s parents decide to adopt the couple’s son (Majid), but a number of lies told by their own son – the false accusation that Majid killed a rooster in order to scare Georges, a claim that he spits up blood – convince them to change their mind. Majid is sent to an orphanage and Georges’s life continues as ‘normal’: conscience undisturbed, memory seemingly untroubled. That is, until the arrival of a series of anonymous surveillance videos and child-like drawings force Georges to recall these suppressed events. The undesired ‘gifts’ precipitate a series of confrontations between the now middle-aged Georges and Majid, and ultimately lead to Majid’s suicide. Caché has generated a level of critical discussion that has quickly established the film as a defining work of early twenty-first-century French cinema. It has an ability to touch ‘on questions of concern’ in ‘fields of inquiry ranging from cultural, social and literary theory to film aesthetics, history, philosophy and psychoanalysis’; it ‘elicits an unusually wide range of responses’ from an equally wide range of perspectives (Ezra and Sillars 2007a: 211). As seen in the 2007 Screen dossier on the film, these responses tend to fall into two categories: (1) A ‘fascination with Haneke’s formal and ontological experimentation via point of view, the video image and the inter