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SFC 11 (2) pp.

151163 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
Hanekes Cach (2005)

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Michael Hanekes Cach/Hidden (2005) has generated a level of critical discus- Haneke
sion that has quickly established the film as a defining work of early twenty-first Nauman
century French cinema. Noticeably absent from this wealth of analysis is an exami- surveillance art
nation of how Cachs formal experimentation with surveillance technology directly CCTV
informs its treatment of the political and ethical issues of postcolonialism. Drawing Algeria
from the practices of 1960s surveillance art, as well as the CCTV aesthetic of real- postcolonialism
ity television, this article addresses this critical gap by focusing on how Cachs
filmic apparatus captures the alienation of emotion from phenomenological experi-
ence. Cach presents an alternative to Foucaults 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 Cach, Haneke
shows how this indifference helps produce the stratification and paranoia of a post-
colonial society.

Michael Hanekes Cach/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

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Jennifer Burris

1. Even work that at Georgess familys estate are called to a protest in Paris by the Front de
directly addresses the
mechanisms of looking
Libration Nationale. Along with the roughly 200 other Algerians who are killed
and vision in Cach and drowned in the Seine that day under the orders of then Paris police
attributes a temporal chief Maurice Papon, they never return. Georgess parents decide to adopt
dimension to its filmic
space. For example, the couples son (Majid), but a number of lies told by their own son the false
for Libby Saxton, the accusation that Majid killed a rooster in order to scare Georges, a claim that
visible is roughly he spits up blood convince them to change their mind. Majid is sent to an
equated with the
present and the hidden orphanage and Georgess life continues as normal: conscience undisturbed,
with the past; this memory seemingly untroubled. That is, until the arrival of a series of anony-
present is determined
by a return of the past,
mous surveillance videos and child-like drawings force Georges to recall these
the screen a window suppressed events. The undesired gifts precipitate a series of confrontations
onto off-screen space between the now middle-aged Georges and Majid, and ultimately lead to
(Saxton 2007).
Majids suicide.
Cach has generated a level of critical discussion that has quickly estab-
lished 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 aesthet-
ics, 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 Hanekes
formal and ontological experimentation via point of view, the video image
and the interpellation of the audience, and (2) an interest in the politi-
cal and ethical issues dependent on the films postcolonial context and the
historical trauma it evoked (Austin 2007: 529). Noticeably absent from this
wealth of analysis is criticism that bridges these two categories by address-
ing how Cachs formal experimentation directly informs its portrayal of
individual agency in a postcolonial context. This absence is particularly
apparent in discussions of Cachs treatment of temporality. Where formal
responses focus on Hanekes groundbreaking use of high-definition video
cameras to shoot the entire film, a technique that enmeshes the virtual and
the actual into almost simultaneous presents that overlap in an uncanny
fashion (Beugnet 2007: 230), thematic discussions tend to invoke a psycho-
analytic framework. In these later analyses, the titular hidden is an issue
of memory rather than visibility, buried secrets rather than an obscured
present (Austin 2007; Ezra and Sillars 2007b; Khanna 2007).1
This disjuncture between the two categories of critique does a disservice
to the film that Catherine Wheatley calls Hanekes most complete attempt
to date at a harmonization of content and form (Wheatley 2009: 154). It also
ignores what is perhaps Cachs most compelling contribution to contem-
porary cinema: its ability to deal with the hidden in a non-temporal way.
Rather than translate a primarily chronological or temporally based account of
subjectivity into visual language, Haneke captures that subjects split psychol-
ogy with the spatial logic of surveillance technology. Georges is alienated
from his present rather than past self; he relates to the world as though it
were experienced from a distance. In this way, Cach presents an alternative to
Foucaults visual economy of self-regulation (panopticisme). Georges does not
internalize the imagined interested gaze of Benthams prison guard; rather, he
internalizes the disinterested and subject-less gaze of CCTV. Surveillance is a
visual model of intimate alienation in that, although it represents an intru-
sion of the camera into once private spaces, it is also characterized by bore-
dom, ambiguity and a lack of expression. Internalizing this perspective results

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in the emotional indifference of an ever-present camera: an unmoved witness 2. Other critics who have
noted the irrelevance
to traumatic events. of this question include
This formal analysis of Cach answers the driving question of the Wheatley (2009: 163)
narrative (Wheatley 2009: 163) who is sending the tapes and why and Ezra and Sillars
(2007a: 212).
by rendering that question irrelevant. 2 No one is sending Georges the
tapes because they are nothing more than visual manifestations of his 3. This is the title of a
book by Eric Conan
paranoid self-surveillance; what Beugnet calls the disincarnated pres- and Henry Rousso on
ence [] that the films apparatus creates (Beugnet 2007: 228). Cach representations of the
is neither ghost story nor realistic thriller, but a Bergmanesque tale in Vichy occupation in
1990s France (Conan
which theoretical mechanisms take on a material reality. As will be and Rousso 1994).
discussed in greater detail throughout this article, this interpretation Translated as an
ever-present past, this
is made explicit by the film itself. The impossible angles from which phrase is also used
the surveillance tapes are shot, the exact repetition of the first surveil- by Blanchard, Bancel
lance tapes soundtrack within a scene that occurs in Georgess memory, and Lemaire (2005) to
describe the crossing
Georgess professional role as manufacturer and editor of television over of memory from
video, and the overlapping of camera perspective with Georgess physi- Algeria then to France
cal actions at central narrative moments all suggest that the surveillance now [] the ongoing
haunting of French
videos represent the internal economy of his self-alienation. In short, society by its colonial
Cach deploys formal innovation in the service of a philosophical exami- past (Austin 2007:
530). Furthering this
nation of affective disconnect. correlation between
This disconnect has both political and ethical implications: Georgess the Vichy occupation
childhood crime is directly tied to Frances colonial past. While, as has and the Algerian
war is the figure
been previously mentioned, the six-year-old Georges cannot be held of Maurice Papon.
legally or ethically responsible for his selfish act (Ezra and Sillars 2007b: Directly responsible
219; Gilroy 2007: 235), the adult Georges can be held accountable for for the 1961 massacre
of Algerian protestors,
his unwillingness to recognize the disastrous consequences of this act. Papon was also tried
Georgess professed absence of guilt mirrors the French governments and convicted in 1998
for his crimes under
failure to publicly acknowledge its 1961 massacre of Algerian protestors, the Vichy regime.
allowing the film to be seen as a metaphor for Frances history of involve-
ment with Algeria: un pass qui ne passe pas.3 Majids suicide, the suicide
of the repressed, is not only an expression of despair or the absence of
hope, but is also an act of attempted self-assertion: the desire to project
guilt upon those who have harmed him. This act is ultimately shown to
be futile, for even Majids extreme gesture of self-violence does not wake
Georges from his anaesthesia. Locked within paranoid self-surveillance,
Georges perceives Majid as nothing more than an image composed from
his own fear.
Cach, a film that inhabits the visual economy of Georgess self-alienating
perspective, similarly denies the character of Majid any opportunity to
develop a psychological gravity and complexity akin to its white, bour-
geois counterparts (Gilroy 2007: 234). As Guy Austin writes, what
remains almost entirely unspoken, a structuring absence at the heart of
the film, is the trauma suffered by Majid (Austin 2007: 534). While this
one-dimensionality has been critiqued as evidence of Cachs shallow,
pseudopolitical, or perhaps more accurately antipolitical engagement with
profound contemporary problems (Gilroy 2007: 233), it is perhaps more
accurately understood as Hanekes most incisive critique of political and
emotional disengagement. By confining the film to the internal landscape
of one privileged member of a postcolonial society, Haneke reveals how
this solipsism reduces the Other to nothing more than the projection of
ones own paranoia and fear, thereby eliminating any hope of compassion
across social boundaries.

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SURVEILLANCE ART AND THE CCTV AESTHETIC


Haneke employs techniques developed in early surveillance art as a way
of capturing a subjects internal fragmentation through a manipulation of
the visible. In the late 1960s, artists like Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Bruce
Nauman and Andy Warhol used closed-circuit video and real-time footage
to explore ideas of paranoia and control. One example of this type of art is
Naumans 19691970 work entitled Video Surveillance Piece: Public Room,
Private Room. Two identical rooms with variable dimensions are placed
side by side. Both are empty and devoid of detail, save for a monitor placed
on the floor in one corner, which screens a camera pan of the room, and a
video camera suspended from the ceiling in the diagonal corner. Entering the
public room, the visitor soon discovers that their appearance on the television
monitor is only via another monitor placed on the corner of a room they are
not in; At this point things start to grate with customary perception for the
experimentation with simultaneous transmission evolves into active obser-
vation and being under surveillance (Zbikowski 2002: 66). By switching the
closed-circuit video-streams, Nauman presents a video of the private room
on the public rooms monitor and vice versa. Unable to reconcile the ocular
knowledge that derives from watching their image on-screen with the spatial
knowledge of where they are in the room, the visitor undergoes a phenom-
enological experience of self-displacement.
Producing a similar effect on the visitor is Naumans Live-Taped Video
Corridor from 1970. Two vertically stacked monitors are placed at one end of
a corridor that is ten metres long and 50 centimetres wide. The lower screen
shows a videotape of the corridor and the upper screen shows a closed-circuit
tape recording of a camera at the installations entrance. Approaching the
monitor equals a walking away from the camera; the closer you are to seeing
your image on-screen, the smaller you become, and thus the more difficult
you are to see. As described by Drte Zbikowski,

the feeling of alienation induced by walking away from yourself is


heightened by your being enclosed in a narrow corridor. Here, rational
orientation and emotional insecurity clash with each other. A person
thus monitored suddenly slips into the role of someone monitoring
their own activities.
(Zbikowski 2002: 66)

The experience of Naumans installation work foreshadows the experience


Georges (Daniel Auteil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) undergo in
Cach. The film begins abruptly with a prolonged, still shot of a typical
street scene in central Paris. Nothing much seems to happen: a car drives
by, a kid rides his bike and a woman exits the front door of a fortress-like
house dominating the frame. Over three minutes have passed when we
first hear two voices projected over the screen: and then [] nothing.
The voices are later identified as belonging to Georges, a literary talk-show
host, and Anne, a book editor. The shot we have been watching, which
filled the opening cinematic screen, is a video playing on their home televi-
sion set. When watching the anonymous surveillance videotapes, Georges
and Anne find themselves in the position of being both observer and
observed. The lack of knowledge regarding where the camera was located
in the street (according to Georges, there is nowhere it could have been

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Surveillance and the indifferent gaze

Figure 1: The opening shot of Cach (courtesy of thefilmyap.com).


located), or when the filming occurred, add to the perceptual and cognitive
confusion about what is happening; all that the characters are left with is a
sense of unease that results from visual self-displacement.
This self-displacement is emphasized by Hanekes use of non-syn-
chronic sound in certain scenes. While Cachs absence of musical score,
digital quality and non-descript mise-en-scne all emphasize the reality
of the image, the films internal inconsistency between seen and heard
fractures this illusory real. The verbal projection of Georgess and Annes
conversation over previously filmed surveillance footage in the first scene
both undoes temporal consistency, overlaying present sound onto past
image, and also suggests their lack of internal coherence. This technique is
repeated throughout the film: an unidentified voice barks instructions over
down-angled shots of swimming practice, the pools artificial blue water
saturating the frame; Georges and Anne carry out another conversation
over a still shot of a drawing placed on a glass coffee-table.
Such constant fracturing between image and audio is a technique of
emotional manipulation that Haneke also uses in a scene from his earlier
film Code inconnu: rcit incomplet de divers voyages/Code Unknown: Incomplete
Tales of Several Journeys (Michael Haneke, 2000). A striking couple in their
mid-thirties (the woman played here, as well, by Juliette Binoche) frolic
in an apartment-roof pool, happy with abandon until near-tragedy strikes
when their young son almost falls over the balconys edge. Amidst tears
and heightened anxiety, the voices suddenly break with the image, and
we cut to a shot of a recording studio. The scene was from a movie star-
ring one of Code inconnus central characters, and we have been watching
a fictional post-filming dubbing exercise. The anguish and fear projected
on-screen the anguish and fear we, as viewers, were just seconds ago
asked to feel is now manifestly artificial. Induced emotions suddenly
appear useless, displaced, and we are no longer sure of how to react. This
overlapping of the opposing frameworks of Hollywood convention and

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Jennifer Burris

4. Beugnet (2007: 229), modernist reflexivity creates a tension between the spectators rational
Khanna (2007: 241) and
Wheatley (2009: 169)
awareness of the film as a construct and their emotional involvement in
have also observed this the world that this construct presents (Wheatley 2009: 153).
similarity. Haneke uses this tension to highlight the issue of real versus arti-
ficial life, emotions performed versus emotions felt, images created for
the camera versus images the camera seems to have caught unaware.
He proposes that such opposites are in actuality not that distinct: merg-
ing together, it is often difficult to tell them apart. In Cach, this folding
together of fictive and real life is a central theme, structuring not just the
form of the film, but also the lives of its characters. The white minimalism
and book-covered walls of Georgess living room is recreated in a more
abstract visual language as the set for his television show.4 In both cases,
the use of books as dcor suggests that their importance lies not in what
they contain, but in their use as signifiers of cultivation; well-chosen wall-
paper that projects an image of intellectual depth (Silverman 2007a: 247).
Round-table discussions of authors and books that take place on Georgess
television show are uncannily similar to dinner parties held at his home:
a lack of distinction highlighted in a dinner party scene in which a house-
hold guest performs the story of his day, an account eventually revealed
to be no more than an elaborate lie told for amusement. And in case we
miss the point, attendees at the cocktail launch for Annes book on globali-
zation (itself a reference to the attempt to smooth out the fractures of a
postcolonial society via generalizing language) are heard discussing Jean
Baudrillard, a prominent theorist of simulacra.
This intermingling of artifice and documentary also evokes, and appears to
take inspiration from, the recent avalanche of reality television. The post-war
avant-gardes interest in surveillance has been co-opted as a form of popular
entertainment; the knowledge that we are being filmed is no longer disarm-
ing, but often expected, and, in some cases, even desired. A defining char-
acteristic of this CCTV aesthetic is its poor image quality. Hanekes decision
to use digital cameras for the whole of Cach replicates this low-tech style.
He uses the mediums so-called limitation to suggest meaning in this relative
obscurity of the visible: In the postmodern climate of contemporary France,
the device par excellence for screening out the real is the image (Silverman
2007a: 247). A scene from the middle of the film shows Georges and Anne
repeatedly rewinding and then pausing one of the anonymous videos in an
effort to read a street sign. Despite Cachs thematic focus on vision, neither
the characters nor we, as viewers, ever really seem to see or understand what
is going on; our conceptual confusion reflects the tapes material quality.
A second defining characteristic of this CCTV aesthetic is the cameras
absolute indifference to what it films. Unlike traditional narrative film,
which visually follows a course of action, the surveillance camera pre-exists
any notable event. This reversal of cause-and-effect overturns the usual
rules of mise-en-scne (Blouin 2004: 33); in short, the paradigm of staging
disappears (Lestocart 2004: 41). As previously attempted by Jean-Marie
Straub and Danile Huillet, as well as by Warhol, the angle, placement and
composition of Hanekes shots all appear to be haphazardly positioned.
This inconsequential aesthetic, when combined with the virtual absence
of notable action, is almost astoundingly dull. Haneke chooses loca-
tions that are deliberately nondescript and without architectural distinc-
tion. The cameras apathetic gaze echoes the blandness of the places it
depicts. As with many of Hanekes films, we are never sure of what video

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Surveillance and the indifferent gaze

we are watching, when the scene took place, or who was meant to film it.
Time and date lose their importance in Cach; what seems to matter is a
sense of waiting, a sense of being removed from the present and an indif-
ference towards what is seen.

A NEW PANOPTICISME
While Cachs formal experimentation is characterized by the cameras
indifference and poor image quality, its visual style is often dominated by
doors, windows and exterior structural facades. Characters are encased in
this box-like environment, recalling both camera lens and television set.
The built environment saturates almost every frame, implying that there is
no outside to this endless proliferation of boxes within boxes, windows
within walls and rooms within other rooms. There is no real depth to each
frame because both foreground and background are shot in equal focus.
This aesthetics of dread permeates the image through the claustrophobic
effect of its immobile gaze and thwarted perspective (Beugnet 2007: 227).
Key to this argument is Cachs opening shot, repeated throughout the
film. Homes, cars, windows and apartments buildings stack on top of one
another. With no glimmer of sky or central perspective to give the appear-
ance of spatial depth, the street appears as flat as a stage set. In discus-
sions of this shot, numerous commentators have noted that this framing
helps give the home the appearance of a fortress or prison: Georgess and
Annes house is raised off the ground, barred by a high gate and obscured
by a large bush at ground level, with only a side door as exit and entrance
(Silverman 2007a: 246). This home as prison motif is:

Driven home visually and sonically: the composition of shots of its exte-
rior puts its vertical barred windows centre frame; horizontal bars cut
across shots; the iron gate clangs. Georgess and Annes grey, shape-
less clothes are reminiscent of prison uniforms [] These characters are
shown literally behind bars.
(Ezra and Sillars 2007b: 216)

In this context, the thousands of books lining the living rooms windowless
interior are more than mere simulacra of knowledge: they are a blockade
against the world, a buffer against the intrusion of unedited external reality
(Beugnet 2007: 229).
Hanekes combination of prison imagery with surveillance technology
recalls Foucaults discussion of the panopticon (Foucault 1975). In 1787, British
legal philosopher and utilitarian Jeremy Bentham proposed an architectural
model that could be used as a means of social control. Intended for prisons,
the panopticon is a multi-level circular building with cells spanning the outside
walls. At its centre stands a watchtower wherein a single guard has the stra-
tegic advantage of being able to oversee all cell inmates without being seen.
Because the prisoners are unable to determine whether this central watch-
tower is occupied, the guards gaze does not have to be real in order to be
effective. Through imagination and fear, the inmate projects his own surveil-
lance, and in so doing effectively watches him or herself. The disciplinary eye
of the other is internalized as the subject self-disciplines in accordance with
behavioural norms. For Foucault, Benthams panopticon spatially represents a
distinctly modern form of social control over human subjects (panopticisme).

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Jennifer Burris

In Cach, these techniques of surveillance, previously used for the marginal-


ized and socially deviant, are now used to protect the people in control of
the cameras. The paranoia of the Parisian upper-middle classes transforms
them into prisoners of their own design. Except rather than the imagined gaze
of the prison guard, the gaze with which these prisoners watch themselves
belongs to the depersonalized security mechanisms of CCTV.
Much as Benthams imagined prisoners would internalize the eye of the
prison guard, Georges internalizes mechanized surveillance as his preferred
ontological status, experiencing the world with the indifferent gaze of an ever-
present camera. Ursula Frohne describes this as the anticipated project of a
total recording of intimacy [which] transforms the affects and passions into a
remote-controlled automatism that in itself refutes the promise of authenticity
(Frohne 2002: 273). As Naumans surveillance installations forced their partic-
ipants to realize viscerally what was already their way of being the other
to themselves in a modern economy of self-surveillance Cachs anonymous
videos merely illustrate the self-displacement that is already Georgess stand-
ard mode of existence. In this way, Haneke manipulates the camera as a way
of making a subjective state seemingly inhabit the visible; Cach is the visual
expression of emotional indifference.
This apathetic vision is nowhere more evident or disconcerting than in
the two primary scenes of trauma, both of which fail to elicit the cameras
interested response that we, as viewers, have come to expect. In the first
scene, Georges arrives, disgruntled and impatient, in Majids humble apart-
ment located somewhere in the postcolonial space of the Parisian banlieues.
He enters the room and the camera cuts to a straight-angle shot that includes
dining table, doorway and kitchen cabinetry. As the two men face each other
in mid-conversation, with Georgess back to the camera, Majid pulls a knife
from his pocket and slits his own throat in one deft move. While the mode
of killing evokes his childhood beheading of a rooster, Majids body does not
resist or extend its own execution, but instead slumps silently and almost
instantaneously to the floor. The camera does not pan away, and the shot
does not cut. It remains still for 30 seconds, allowing us to soak in the scenes
visual details, and the barely-audible gurgle of blood.

Figure 2: Majids suicide (courtesy of 3.bp.blogspot.com).

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Surveillance and the indifferent gaze

The phrase Majid utters before slitting his throat is I asked you to come
because I wished you to be present. Majids desire for Georgess presence
signals his longing for an emotional response, a subjective witness for the suffer-
ing he has endured, and perhaps, as well, a desire to indicate or at least frame
Georges as his murderer. It is a wish that ultimately remains ungranted. Like the
unflinching, unmoving camera, Georges freezes upon the sight of blood; utter-
ing no cry or sob, moving neither away in fear nor forward in aid, he appears
devoid of any knowledge as to what this situation requires. It is at this climactic
moment that the surveillance cameras hidden identity becomes apparent. Both
camera and Georges react to Majids suicide with the same immobility, each one
a reflection upon the other. The mechanistic and depersonalized gaze recording
the scene is the same gaze with which Georges watches Majids death.
Cachs second trauma, while chronologically predating the first, is the
films penultimate scene. Against a dark screen the quiet sounds of chickens
introduce a straight-angled shot of a country house that remains unaltered for
the scenes entire three minutes and ten seconds. The camera is placed inside
a barn that stands across the gravel courtyard from the house: the frontal fram-
ing includes the barns shadows, a square of blue sky to the upper left and a
few scattered birds. The arrival of a car containing a man and woman inter-
rupts the peace. As the man loafs idly smoking a cigarette, the woman enters
the house before quickly exiting with a young boy and an older couple. While
being led to the car the child attempts to run away, crying to stay, and we
realize he is Majid: we are watching his displacement from Georgess child-
hood home. Turning away from the boys anguish, the parents re-enter the
house, and the car drives away with Majid locked inside. The scene returns
to its original condition as though nothing has happened. Neither death nor
childhood separation effect any change in the shots composition; we might
as well be watching a car drive down a nameless street.
Ezra and Sillars observe a critical aspect of this penultimate scene:

In the films opening shot of Georgess and Annes house, we hear what
is apparently the ambient sound of birdsong [] What initially seems
like white noise, however, turns out to be very significant. The birdsong
from the films opening shot is identical to the birdsong in the penulti-
mate scene, the flashback to Georgess boyhood home when the young
Majid is taken away by force; in the farmyard, we see chickens but we
hear sparrows. In fact, the soundtrack in these two scenes sounds the
same (including footsteps crunching and car doors slamming) but for
one thing: Majids screams have been removed from the opening shot.
(Ezra and Sillars 2007b: 221)

This uncanny repetition of sound in the opening and penultimate scenes


strongly suggests that both are shot from the same point of view. Immediately
preceded by a scene in which Georges takes two sleeping pills cachets,
pronounced just like the title of the film (Ezra and Sillars 2007b: 220) and
lies down in his darkened bedroom, this penultimate scene clearly seems to
take place in Georgess mind. Its point of view is Georgess internal gaze as
he watches his own memory. Cach thus ends by providing an answer to the
question of who filmed the opening surveillance video. These videos are
material manifestations of Georgess fractured self. Television presenter and
video editor, he is behind the lens, terrorizing himself with his own paranoia
and fear.

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5. In his review of the A POLITICS OF INDIFFERENCE


film for Cineaste,
Christopher Sharrett Max Silverman compares Hanekes decision to focus on Georgess gaze to
similarly argues that the type of analysis deployed by Frantz Fanon in Les Damns de la terre/The
Cach is a commentary
on post-9/11 Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1963). In the final section of this classic text,
neocolonialism Fanon summarizes the scientific finding of psychiatrists working in Algeria
(Sharrett 2005).
during colonialism:

So it was that unusual behaviour the Africans frequent criminality, the


triviality of his motives, the murderous and always very bloody nature of
his brawls raised a problem in observers minds. The proposed expla-
nation, which has come to be taught as a subject in the universities,
seems in the last analysis to be the following: the layout of the cerebral
structures of the North African are responsible both for the natives lazi-
ness, for his intellectual and social inaptitude, and for his almost animal
impulsivity.
(Fanon 1963: 303)

By focusing his discussion on these absurd stereotypes, perpetuated as scien-


tific fact, Fanon trains the eye of the colonizer in the process of looking at
the colonized in order to expose the psychosexual fears and fantasies on
which that gaze is premised (Silverman 2007a: 245). His text forces its read-
ers to examine their own gaze as well as the way in which this gaze creates a
false image of the Other. Silverman writes that Cach operates, loosely,
in a way similar to Fanon in that it reverses the gaze of the western colonizer
and exposes the hidden fears and fantasies still at play today in a postcolo-
nial rerun of the colonial encounter (Silverman 2007a: 245). While Georges
perceives Majid to be the source of violence and threat, it is Georges who is
the aggressor throughout.
Cachs evocation of colonialism in Algeria does not, however, confine
its political and ethical implications to Frances postcolonial legacy. As
Wheatley writes, Haneke has long railed against his films being seen as
treatments of specific national situations (Wheatley 2009: 156). This advo-
cacy is necessary, for indeed,

the dominant critical response to this film in the UK and the US has
been the attempt to limit its exploration of colonial culpabilities to its
French setting [] a symptomatic acting out of the films themes of
displacement, avoidance and the refusal to look close to home.
(Ezra and Sillars 2007b: 215)

This critical impulse towards the displacement of responsibility, both


geographic (it happened in France) and temporal (it happened in the
1960s), is all the more notable because of Cachs implicit and explicit refer-
encing of contemporary political situations. In fact, the films treatment of
Algeria seems at times almost a cipher through which to critique the manu-
facture of paranoia for political ends in post-9/11 neocolonialist ideology.5
In this way, as both Beugnet and Silverman assert, Cach appears in the
direct lineage of Alain Resnaiss Holocaust film Nuit et brouillard/Night and
Fog (Resnais 1955), which established a parallel of sorts between the then-
distant Holocaust and the unspoken advent of the Algerian war. Released
almost 50 years after Nuit et brouillard, Cach invokes this earlier film at the

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Surveillance and the indifferent gaze

moment when Georges shouts at Majids son je ne suis pas responsable


(I am not responsible), a stark echo of the concentration camp guards in
Nuit et brouillard (Silverman 2007b: 249). Deploying Resnaiss sensitivity to
the play between similarity and difference, reference and transformation
(Beugnet 2007: 228), Cach connects the now-distant Algerian war to the
unspoken advent of the neocolonial war on terror currently in play
throughout Central Asia and the Middle East.
This implicit legacy (from the Holocaust and Vichy to Algeria to
Afghanistan and Iraq) is made explicit in the scene in which Georges and
Anne mistakenly believe their son Pierrot has been kidnapped. Convinced
Majid is the imagined abductor, Georges and Anne ask the Parisian police
to arrest him: a simple case of miscommunication becoming paranoid perse-
cution of the terrorist. While anxiously discussing Pierrots disappear-
ance, Georges and Anne are backlit by a wide-screen television located in
the exact centre of their living rooms bookshelves. Dominating the frame
both visually and sonically, the television broadcasts war images from
Afghanistan and Iraq. The trauma of these contemporary war zones, like the
trauma suffered by Majid, is reduced to mere image or spectacle. Stripped of
emotional complexity, Majid becomes a screen onto which Georges projects
his own paranoia: Algerians in the film can only deny their part in a narra-
tive that has already given them roles that justify accusation and criminal-
ization (Khanna 2007: 242). This diegetic embedding of televised images
of todays so-called terrorists, a paranoia embodied by the nameless figure
of the Islamic male, establishes a clear parallel between Georgess anxious
projection of guilt onto a guiltless Majid, and the justificatory rhetoric of
todays pre-emptive wars.
Understood as such, Cach leaves its viewers with a dismal outlook. As
the cameras gaze cannot escape the solipsism of Georgess self-alienating
perspective, the characters seem unable to escape the colonial paradigm. That
is, perhaps, until the final scene: a static surveillance shot of Pierrots school
that shows Pierrot and Majids son holding an indecipherable conversation in
the frames lower corner. Numerous commentaries on the film have seized
upon this last shot as a small fragment of liberating hope (Gilroy 2007: 235)
that the colonial barriers and atavistic reflexes of previous generations may
be loosening through dialogue and a new attitude to difference (Silverman
2007b: 249). Unfortunately, this closing-call redemption that Cach suppos-
edly offers seems to reflect the hopes of its viewers more than the structure
of the film itself. Just as the first shot is a visual manifestation of Georgess
mechanized self-surveillance, the final shot is a similarly paranoid fantasy of
penetration. Never given a name, Majids son is pictured as the ambiguous
threat to Georgess vulnerable child, a child Georges previously imagines to
be at risk. What Cach documents is not change, but the absence of it: obvi-
ous beginning and end are replaced by a meaningless constancy laced with
ominous threat. Cachs dialogue underscores this sensation of incompletion;
connecting words take the place of nouns and verbs in fragmentary sentences
of confusion and uncertainty. And what then? Anne asks: and what, and
what, I have no idea is Georgess reply.

REFERENCES
Austin, G. (2007), Drawing Trauma: Visual Testimony in Cach and Jai 8 ans,
Screen, 48: 4, pp. 52936.

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Jennifer Burris

Blanchard, P., Bancel, N. and Lemaire, S. (eds) (2005), La Fracture colo-


niale: la socit franaise au prisme de lhritage coloniale, Paris: La
Dcouverte.
Blouin, P. (2004), Le miroir indiffrent: vidosurveillance et mise en scne,
Art Press, 303, pp. 327.
Conan, E. and Rousso, H. (1994), Vichy: un pass qui ne passe pas, Paris:
Fayard.
Ezra, E. and Sillars, J. (2007a), Introduction: The Cach Dossier, Screen, 48: 2,
pp. 2113.
(2007b), Hidden in Plain Sight: Bringing Terror Home, Screen, 48: 2,
pp. 21521.
Fanon, F. (1963), The Wretched of the Earth (trans. C. Farrington), New York:
Grove Press.
Foucault, M. (1975), Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison, Paris:
Gallimard.
Frohne, U. (2002), Screen Tests: Media Narcissism, Theatricality, and the
Internalized Observer, in T. Y. Levin, U. Frohne and P. Weibel (eds),
CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother,
Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass/London:
MIT Press, pp. 25277.
Gilroy, P. (2007), Shooting Crabs in a Barrel, Screen, 48: 2, pp. 2335.
Khanna, R. (2007), From Rue Morgue to Rue des Iris, Screen, 48: 2,
pp. 23744.
Lestocart, L.-J. (2004), Aporie sur lenfermement, Art Press, 303, pp. 3842.
Rehm, S. (2005), Juste sous la surface: Cach de Michael Haneke, Cahiers du
cinma, 605, pp. 302.
Saxton, L. (2007), Secrets and Revelations: Off-screen Space in Michael
Hanekes Cach (2005), Studies in French Cinema, 7: 1, pp. 517.
Sharrett, C. (2005), Cach, Cineaste, 31: 1, pp. 602, 84.
Silverman, M. (2007a), The Empire Looks Back, Screen, 48: 2, pp. 2459.
(2007b), Horror and the Everyday in Post-Holocaust France: Nuit
et brouillard and Concentrationary Art, French Cultural Studies, 17: 1,
pp. 518.
Wheatley, C. (2009), Michael Hanekes Cinema: The Ethic of the Image, New
York: Berghahn Books.
Zbikowski, D. (2002), Bruce Nauman, in T. Y. Levin, U. Frohne and
P. Weibel (eds), CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to
Big Brother, Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass./
London: MIT Press, pp. 647.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Burris, J., (2011), Surveillance and the indifferent gaze in Michael Hanekes
Cach (2005), Studies in French Cinema 11: 2, pp. 151163, doi: 10.1386/
sfc.11.2.151_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Jennifer Burris is a 20102011 Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of
American Art Independent Study Program. She holds a BA from Princeton
University and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Kings College.
Her recent publications include an article in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art

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Surveillance and the indifferent gaze

Criticism entitled The Urban Photognie of Architainment as well as a


monographic essay on the artist Godfried Donkor.
Contact: Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program,
100 Lafayette St., 5th floor, NY 10013, New York.
E-mail: jburris@alumni.princeton.edu.

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