Surveillance and the indifferent gaze in Michael Haneke's Caché (2005)

Abstract

ABSTRACTMichael 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.