'You Never Look at Me From Where I See You': Postcolonial Guilt In Caché

Abstract

Abstract Michael Haneke's much-discussed film Cache (2005) explores the psychodynamics of postcolonial guilt as they are made manifest in the specific arena of the field of vision. To the puzzled consternation of many a critic and viewer, Cache objectifies the return of the colonial real in the form of a gaze, a gaze indexed by videotapes left anonymously for Georges on his doorstep. These tapes contain images shot from a camera the status of which is eminently paradoxical. Both included within and banished from the film's diegesis, this camera torments Georges with memories of his childhood, memories that we see in the form of harrowing flashbacks or dream sequences. The video footage is also the film's principle means of creating suspense: it incites our desire as viewers to solve the perplexing enigma of its 'impossible' hidden camera. Through a reconsideration of the gaze through the lens of Lacan's analysis of Diderot's Letter on the Blind (1749), this essay draws out how Georges' desperate attempt to control the conditions of his own visibility reflects a refusal to acknowledge his complicity in the shameful colonial history of France. Keywords Film theory, psychoanalysis, Lacan, Haneke, Cache, gaze, Diderot, Algeria, shame, colonialism. On 17 October 1961 French-based leaders of the FLN (Front de liberation nationale), the political wing of the main Algerian anticolonial group, organised a peaceful demonstration against an 8:30pm curfew imposed by police on 'Muslim French Algerians' in the Paris region. An estimated 30,000 people, mainly of North African origin or descent, assembled at the event. By this late stage of the Franco-Algerian war, all but the most delusional among both the pied noir community and their metropolitan supporters had recognised, without of course accepting, that the Algerians had sided decisively with the revolution and would refuse to lay down arms until all remnants of the French administration had been ousted from national territory. Tensions between police and France's Algerian population had escalated sharply during the preceding year. Overwhelmingly invested in the idea of a French Algeria, the forces of order had looked upon President Charles de Gaulle's efforts to smooth over relations with France's North African population ahead of the Evian negotiations that would lead, the following year, to formal Algerian independence as a subversion of their authority and an outright betrayal of the republican interest. Shaken by a record twenty-two deaths at the hands of FLN activists in nine months, police had mounted a campaign of harassment and humiliation against French Algerians. That murderous October night saw the culmination of this campaign: 1 2,000 demonstrators arrested and between 50 and 350 killed. The fact that the bodies of most victims were thrown into the Seine, many never to be found or acknowledged on the public record, explains the shock value of these estimates, which can be qualified without overstatement as wildly divergent.1 The prefect of the Paris police force at the time was none other than Maurice Papon, the notorious French administrator who died in February 2007 while serving time for crimes against humanity. Papon's record of public service presents a shameful litany of racist and reactionary administrative sadism. As Secretary General of the Bordeaux region during the Second World War's collaborationist Vichy regime, he authorised the deportation of 1,690 jews to the Drancy internment camp. As prefect of the Constantinois region of eastern Algeria during the war in that country, he oversaw the brutal suppression ol numerous anticolonial demonstrations. And in 1962, less than a year after the massacre of the previous October, Papon instigated another deadly police attack, this time in Paris' Charonne metro station in the aftermath of a Communist Party-organised demonstration against the OAS (Organisation armee secrete), the pied noir guerrilla operation that had been terrorising both the Algerian insurrection and the Gaullist forces sent across the Mediterranean to effect decolonisation. …