Caché, Colonial Psychosis and the Algerian War

Abstract

Lies propagated at the national level were an important tool of colonial exploitation. If France was enforcing a race-based segregation in the colony of Algeria, similar practices within France were leading to the violent subjugation of people of Algerian origins. In Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), a film about France's official denial of colonial crimes of the Algerian War, the presence of multiple cameras reminds us that colonial truth is perspectival. Spatial analyses reveal Georges Laurent participating in a colonial psychosis that produces Majid as the orphaned product of France's war on Algeria. The space between the viewer and the film performatively reminds us that just as the colonizer and the colonized form a mutually inflecting relation, we, too, shall forever remain implicated in the subject of our gaze.