Visual competence and reading the recorded past: the paradigm shift from analogue to digital video in Michael Haneke's film Caché

Abstract

The production of entertainment images used to be the privilege of corporations and institutions: media conglomerates, multinational corporations, the film industry, the television networks. The reception of these images was part of consumer culture and would often take place in the private sphere. The paradigm shift that we are currently experiencing in society is the reversal of this dichotomy between corporate production and private consumption. What happens instead is that amateurs are turning into producers of widely distributed messages via Internet, and sites like YouTube and MySpace. The acceleration of visual competence has to address the shift from the media producer onto the individual and the change of reception possibilities that the world wide web and the Internet highway offer. The German‐Austrian Filmmaker Michael Haneke has articulated the use of media production, video and television already in his early films of the 1990s. He is very interested in the notion of production competence. Haneke has fiercely questioned the optimism that technology produces better communication and interpersonal understanding. He demonstrates a cinema of glaciation and addresses the paradigm shift in contemporary society: the move from analogue to digital technology that enables even more access to the global community but impoverishes interpersonal communication as demonstrated in his film Caché (2005).