50.1.celik

"I Wanted You to Be Present": Guilt and the History of Violencein Michael Haneke's Caché

Ipek A. Celik

Cinema Journal, 50, Number 1, Fall 2010, pp. 59-80 (Article)

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On the unconscious plane, colonialism . . . did not seek to be considered by the native as a gentle, loving mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather as a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, from its physiology, its biology, and its own unhappiness which is its very essence.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth1

Michael Haneke explains that his French- produced Caché (2005) is “a tale of morality dealing with how one lives with guilt. Do I accept it? And if I don’t what do I do? And if I do, what do I do?”2 He evokes issues of colo-nial guilt and responsibility by revealing “hidden” territories of individual

and collective memory in France. Caché is advertised on a poster that shows a plain white surface slashed with a stain of blood which represents the climactic scene of a suicide. The French protagonist (Georges) has accused his Algerian childhood acquaintance (Majid) of “terrorizing” his family with surveillance videos of their private lives. Majid invites Georges to his house, where he calmly denies this charge saying, “I called you because I wanted you to be present.” He takes out a razor and slits his own throat in a split second. The camera shooting from behind Georges

1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de le terre, 1961), trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 211.

2 Michael Haneke, interview with Serge Toubiana, Caché DVD (Sony, 2006).

Abstract: The essay examines how Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) addresses contem-porary racism in France. After discussing the fi lm’s historical background and reviewing Anglo- American and French criticism, the article explores the connection between the fi lm’s “terrible realism” and the implications of colonial violence and guilt in today’s France.

by IPEK A. CELIK

”I Wanted You to Be Present”: Guilt and the History of Violence in Michael Haneke’s Caché

Ipek A. Celik is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her research explores theories of violence and the representation of minorities in contemporary European fi lm and literature.

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Cinema Journal 50 | No. 1 | Fall 2010

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situates the spectator and the protagonist side by side while they watch the shocking act. The long static shot emphasizes the unsettling nature of the suicide (Figure 1).

By this time (more than an hour into the fi lm) the spectator anxiously anticipates evidence of Majid’s responsibility for sending the videotapes. When the razor turns the alleged criminal into a victim, the immediacy of the question of who is sending the tapes is replaced by the question of who is being observed and what the videotapes reveal. The content of the surveillance videotapes in relation to both the protagonist and the spectator become as important as their source; the director, in the end, does not even resolve the original mystery.

The fi lm’s shift of focus, with the suicide scene, away from the resolution of the mystery accomplishes both a temporal and spatial extension of guilt and responsibility. Majid’s parents, who were farmhands for Georges’s family, were victims of the Octo-

ber 1961 massacre in Paris—a massacre that took place at the height of the French colonial era and was silenced for three decades. At the time, Georges tells lies about the orphaned Majid to dissuade his parents from adopting the Algerian boy, which leads to the carting off of Majid to an orphanage. Majid’s suicide protracts the fi lm’s temporal referentiality: Georges’s repressed childhood guilt is force-fully carried to the present day. His denial of responsibility for Majid’s current destitution and refusal to communicate with Majid has perpetrated more violence, leading eventu-ally to the suicide. Moreover, the act of sui-cide stretches the spatial referentiality of Caché from the diegesis that captures the protago-nist, to the historical context that extends out to the French spectator. The director forces both Georges and the audience to confront their repressed memory and its consequences,

since the roots of the injustice Majid suffers run as deeply as the October 1961 massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris.

Haneke admits that the suicide scene is fundamental for sustaining the reality effect of his fi lm: “This is the most important shot of the fi lm: if the suicide scene is not plau-sible then the entire fi lm is spoiled. . . . A static and fast- paced, terribly realist shot.”3 The bloody and disturbing physical violence made central to the fi lm—as the fi lm poster implies and the director admits—symbolizes the history of violence that has, until recently, been repressed in the French collective unconscious. Haneke establishes links between the personal and the collective conscience, the private and the public forget-ting, the protagonist’s denial and the French state’s refusal to admit to the perpetration of colonial violence. The manner in which this suicide is performed and shot aims to violate both the protagonist’s and the spectator’s vision with an explosive accusation.

3 Haneke, interview with Antoine de Baecque, Libération, October 5, 2005, 18. My translation and emphasis.

Figure 1. Caché is advertised on a poster that shows a plain white surface slashed with a stain of blood which represents the climactic scene of a suicide (Les Films du Losange, 2005).



61

This article investigates both the potential and the limits of Michael Haneke’s “ter-rible realism” in the treatment of the rupture between France’s colonial past and its postcolonial present. By providing explosive images of violence as the contemporary repercussions of repressed images, the fi lm ponders the politics of memory and forget-ting. Caché’s realism thus engages with the absence of colonial history, appropriating the narrative tools of objectivity (news images and surveillance videos) in order to scru-tinize the ethics and politics of media realism and to point to the incomplete nature of our vision. The fi lm reaches out beyond itself to grab the cool- headed spectator, as if to say: your indifference or willful blindness to certain forms of violence and forgetting makes you an accomplice. But how effective is the manner in which Haneke asserts the guilt of viewers? Does Caché’s discussion of guilt regarding colonial history and forget-ting involve the question of responsibility? What complications arise when French guilt toward Algerians is evoked through the allegory of a decadent bourgeois family? And does memorializing violence involve the risk of a self- centered fl agellation?

Historical Revisionism and Caché’s Timeliness. An escalating trend of histori-cal revisionism in France—a discourse that has moved from the far right of Jean- Marie Le Pen’s Front National to the center right of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP)—makes Caché a timely commentary on the issue of colonial guilt. Sarkozy’s much-debated 2007 campaign speech in Toulon is a recent example of the revisionist discourse that uses memory politics to dislocate the roots of contemporary social tensions and neo- racism in France. Then presidential candidate and now president, Sarkozy raised concerns among the public for his blunt disavowal of the crimes against humanity committed during the colonial period. Implicitly ad-dressing the ex- colonial migrants, he asked, “By what right do you ask the sons to repent for faults that often weren’t committed by their fathers other than in the imagi-nation of those who profess repentance!” Sarkozy’s denial of colonial crimes reposi-tions “the Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian” outside the French national body and suggests that, in order to become “French,” “he has to accept that the country to which he comes is an old country that started to exist long before him.”4 Sarkozy’s speech evokes an ancient and “authentic” French past and identity that exist separately from France’s colonial heritage and its contemporary vestiges.

Kristin Ross succinctly explains the conception of “history as rupture”—an ideo-logical source from which Sarkozy derives his brazen rejection of “repentance”—as it has shaped French offi cial discourse on the colonial era:

France’s denial of the ways in which it was and is formed by colonialism, its insistence on separating itself off from what it views as an extraneous period irrelevant to its true national heritage, forms the basis of the neoracist con-sensus today: the logic of segregation and expulsion that governs questions of immigration, and attitudes toward immigrants in France. . . . To understand contemporary racist slogans such as “France must not become Africa,” we must return to the era of “Algeria is France.”5

4 “Discours de Nicolas Sarkozy Toulon,” http://www.sarkozy.fr (accessed February 25, 2007). My translation.

5 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 196.



62

Compartmentalization of colonial history as an “extraneous period” and its deriva-tive historical revisionism effectively suppress continuities of colonial mentality and structures in today’s multicultural France. Denial of guilt quickly lends itself to trans-ference of responsibility to present- day migrants. Through an ironic repositioning of perpetrators and victims, Sarkozy holds France’s ex- colonial population of migrants themselves accountable for the contemporary social tensions in France: “To all the people of the Mediterranean who spend their time dwelling on the past and the age- old hatreds, I want to say that the time has come to look toward the future.”6 In a re-versed logic, Sarkozy blames the minorities’ obsession with the past for their exclusion from French society and their unsuccessful assimilation.

Sarkozy’s speech in Toulon is in line with his party’s revisionist turn, which goes hand in hand with its recently revived anti- immigration/anti- Muslim politics. The UMP victory in the 2007 presidential elections proves the appeal of this discourse for the majority of voters. In February 2005, UMP had proposed a controversial law regarding colonial repatriates to recognize their “sufferings and sacrifi ces,” providing them and Harkis (Algerians who served in the French Army during the Algerian War) a monthly allowance and enforcing school curricula to “particularly acknowledge the positive role of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa.”7 Later that year, the party’s support of harsh measures to suppress riots in the suburbs of Paris and their passing of a strict immigration law following the riots demonstrates how remem-bering, forgetting, recognizing, and denying the French colonial past are conditioned by continuing legacies and interests concerning the ex- colonial population of North African minorities. It is no coincidence that UMP’s revisionism follows September 11, when French Muslims (the largest Muslim population in Europe) became “a security concern” as well as an “immigration concern.”

Another signifi cance of the Toulon speech is that it marks a shift from the memory politics pursued by Sarkozy’s mentor and predecessor Jacques Chirac. As an Inde-pendent correspondent infers, with Sarkozy’s election, “Self- doubt and self- fl agellation is out. National pride is in.”8 The Chirac era corresponded to the aftermath of the cold war when reparations and apologies for historical injustices against former slaves, Holocaust victims, and indigenous and colonial populations were a globally wide-spread phenomenon defi ning a new internationalism.9 Acts such as the admission of the French state’s injustices to Jews during the Second World War (1995); the fi rst of-fi cial visit to Algeria, during which Chirac used the erstwhile controversial term “the Algerian War” (2003); and the declaration of Slavery Memorial Day as an annual

6 “Discours de Nicolas Sarkozy Toulon.”

7 The proposed law can be seen at http://www.admi.net/jo/20050224/DEFX0300218L.html (accessed April 15, 2007).

8 John Lichfi eld, “Patriotism and Pride Comes First as Sarkozy Takes Power,” Independent, May 17, 2007. Also, Patrick Crowley mentions several recent publications that argue against apology for France’s colonial past: Pascale Bruckner, La tyrannie de la pénitence (Paris: Grasset, 2006); Daniel Lefeuvre, Pour en fi nir avec la repentence colo-niale (Paris: Flammarion, 2006); and Crowley, “When Forgetting Is Remembering: Haneke’s Caché and the Events of October 17, 1961,” in On Michael Haneke, ed. Brian Price and John David Rhodes (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 267–280.

9 Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000).



63

holiday of commemoration (2006) marked Chirac’s contribution to the 1990s global trend of promoting morality with regard to historical injustices.10

Memory studies scholars, however, have been suspicious of the sincerity of French reconciliatory gestures. Sociologist Geoffrey de Laforcade observes that while he promoted the commemoration of the abolition of slavery, Chirac “angrily dismissed” Haitian president Jean- Bertrand Aristide’s call for reparations in 2003. Furthermore, Aristide was forced to leave Haiti soon thereafter, and then a French- American- Canadian coalition invaded the country. De Laforcade also notes that Slavery Memorial Day, ironically, has become an opportunity for self- praise rather than self- criticism, since the commemorations focus on “enlightened values [and the] generosity of French liberals in 1830” rather than anticolonial revolts and resistance movements in the Antilles.11 Thus, by declaring slavery “a crime against humanity,” De Laforcade suggests, legislators intend to divert minority public opinion from measures against contemporary issues of discrimination. Along similar lines, historian Karen E. Till underscores the neoliberal economic background that sets the commemoration of past injustices into motion: “[Slavery Remembrance Day] positions France as a moral leader in a global order with ‘good’ nations acknowledging past actions. As tied to a neoliberal agenda, acknowledging past crimes against humanity locates that legacy in the past, not the present, even in the face of stark anti- immigration laws and militant government responses to student and minority social unrest.”12

As ambiguous in their motives as Chirac’s memory politics and the international currency of governmental apologias in the 1990s were, they both refl ected and in-cited a wave of critical investigations of French history, an “identity crisis affecting fi n- de- siècle France.”13 Beginning in the late 1980s, a generation of historians endeav-ored to unearth “lieux d’oubli” of French history14—“sites that public memory has ex-pressly avoided because of the disturbing effect that their invocation is still capable of arousing,”15 silenced periods such as the Vichy regime, the colonial period, the Algerian War, and the October 17, 1961, massacres of Paris. In the majority of the most acknowledged theoretical works on memory (by Pierre Nora and Paul Ricœur, for instance), colonialism is relatively absent compared to abundant discussions of the

10 Declared an annual holiday in 2006, May 10 was chosen as Slavery Memorial Day in order to commemorate the 2001 passage of a French law declaring slavery a crime against humanity.

11 Geoffrey De Laforcade, “‘Foreigners,’ Nationalism and the ‘Colonial Fracture’: Stigmatized Subjects of Historical Memory in France,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 47, no. 6 (2006): 229.

12 Karen E. Till, “Memory Studies,” History Workshop Journal 62, no. 1 (2006): 339. My emphasis.

13 Charles Forsdick, “‘Direction les oubliettes de l’histoire’: Witnessing the Past in the Contemporary French Polar,” French Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2001): 335–350.

14 Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1998); Henri Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy: 1944–198... (Paris: Seuil, 1987); and Jean- Luc Einaudi, La bataille de Paris: 17 octobre 1961 (Paris: Seuil, 1991) are alternative historiographies that raise concerns about individual and national responsibility for the atrocities committed in the past, memory, and recognition of guilt. See also Les lieux de mé-moire under the direction of Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); Jean- Pierre Bacot and Christian Coq, eds., Travail de mémoire 1914–1998: Une nécessité dans un siècle de violence (Paris: Autrement, 1999); Michelle Perrot, Les femmes, ou, le histoire, critique et responsabilité (Paris: Complexe, 2003); Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000); Enzo Traverso, Le passé, mode d’emploi (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005); Marc Augé, Les formes de l’oubli (Paris: Payot, 1998); and Tzvetan Todorov, Les abus de la mémoire (Paris: Arléa, 1998).

15 Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (New York: Berg, 1999), 10.



64

Vichy regime.16 Yet, along with the trials of Klaus Barbie (1987), Paul Touvier (1994), and Maurice Papon (1998) for their crimes against humanity during the Vichy regime, colonial crimes have also become a part of the public debate. The trials were followed by the publication of General Paul Aussaresses’s account of state- backed torture in Algeria in 2001,17 Mandelkern’s 1998 investigation of the October 1961 massacre, and the offi cial acceptance of the Algerian War in 1999—which until then had been euphemistically referred to as “events in Algeria.”

History and the Present. A brief account of the 1961 Parisian massacre and the symbolic nature of this event in displaying the continuity of colonial structures in French administrative mechanisms will help provide an understanding of why Haneke chose this incident as integral to Caché’s ethical project. Caché is one of the few French fi lms to recall the October 1961 massacres in Paris. In 1961, the Front de Libération Nationale’s peaceful demonstration opposing the emergency laws and curfews against North Africans in Paris resulted in two hundred deaths, two hundred missing per-sons, and twelve thousand arrests, of whom two thousand were deported to the Beni Messous prison camp in Algeria.18 The event, at the time, was misrepresented and con-cealed by the media: the offi cial number of deaths reported was three. Decades later, the massacre came to public attention during Maurice Papon’s trial (October 1997 to April 1998) for human rights violations during the Second World War. Historian Jean- Luc Einaudi’s testimony against Papon brought up, as Papon’s lawyer claimed, “the case within the case,” Papon’s involvement with torture and human rights violations during his service in Algeria and during his prefecture in Paris. As a result of Einaudi’s testimony, Jean- Pierre Chèvenement, the minister of interior, formed a commission to investigate the October 1961 events. The resulting Mandelkern report, published in May 1998, shortly after Papon’s trial, concluded that thirty- two Algerians died dur-ing the event but refrained from publicly denouncing perpetrators. Papon was only convicted for his crimes during the Second World War against the Jews of Bordeaux.

While there has been increased public interest in considering how the event has been misremembered, and this interest has been shared by a number of historians, social scientists, writers, and fi lmmakers,19 the perpetrators of the 1961 massacre have

16 Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Review: Paul Ricœur’s Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli,” Theory, Culture and Society 22 (2005): 135.

17 Paul Aussaresses, Services spéciaux, Algérie 1955–1957: Mon témoignage sur la torture (Paris: Perrin, 2001).

18 A collection of testimonies and analysis of the event by scholars in Le 17 Octobre 1961: Un crime d’état à Paris (Paris: La Dispute, 2001); and Jean- Luc Einaudi’s La bataille de Paris and Octobre 1961. Un massacre à Paris (Paris: Fayard, 2001).

19 With the exception of Maurice Panijel’s 1962 documentary Octobre à Paris, which was immediately censored, the event was addressed in fi lms and documentaries beginning only in the 1980s. See, for example, Denis Lévy’s Mémoires en blanc (1981), Okacha Touita’s Les sacrifi és (1982), Agnès Denis and Mehdi Lallaoui’s Le silence de fl euve (1992), Philip Brooks and Alan Hayling’s Drowning by Bullets (1992), Bourlem Gourdjou’s Vivre au paradis (1999), Ali Akika’s Les enfants d’Octobre (2000), Daniel Kupferstein’s 17 Octobre 1961: Dissimulation de massa-cre (2001), Virginie Delahautemaison’s 17 Octobre 1961: Retour de memoire (2001), Aude Touly’s La guerre sans nom dans Paris (2001), and Alain Tasma’s Nuit noire (2005) shot for French channel TV5. For further discussion on Octobre à Paris and Drowning by Bullets, see Crowley, “When Forgetting Is Remembering.”



65

not been punished, nor have the victims’ families been paid reparations by the French government. Another minor offi cial step toward the acceptance of the state crime is the silent apology on a plaque affi xed by the Municipality of Paris on October 17, 2001, on a bridge on the Seine dedicated “to the memory of the numerous Algerians killed during the bloody suppression of the peaceful demonstration on October 17, 1961.”20 The plaque, although a brave gesture of recognition on the part of Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanöe, displays a sentence deprived of an exact perpetrator, simi-lar to an earlier graffi to on the banks of the Seine written after the incident: “They drowned the Algerians here.”21

The context in which Caché was released has interesting parallels with the re-pressed history to which the fi lm alludes. Caché’s release date was October 5, 2005, only a few weeks before the biggest riots since May 1968 broke out in Paris. Riots started on October 27, 2005, in the Parisian suburb Clichy- sous- Bois following the accidental electrocution of two teenagers of North African origin who hid in a power substation while being chased by the police. Approximately one week later, President Chirac declared a state of emergency. Many reactions against Chirac’s declaration emphasized how this repressive extension of state control over suburban neighbor-hoods was emblematic of the persistence of the racist colonial heritage in the ad-ministrative mechanism. Moreover, such declarations played into a loaded history in Paris: enforcement of a “state of emergency” on the North African population of Paris, during the prefecture of Maurice Papon in 1961, produced the disastrous out-come of the October massacre. Uncannily, Caché was released immediately before the same laws that led to the massacre were applied again (after four decades) on the same underclass minority population of Parisian suburbs, most of them French citizens of North African origin.

The Film’s Reception. There was a curious disparity between Caché’s Anglo- American reception and its French reception. The Anglo- American press almost unanimously underscored Caché’s prophetic timing and deciphered the fi lm’s medita-tion on guilt and responsibility as a social commentary on colonial and neocolonial violence in France. French critics, while similarly underlining the fi lm’s inquiry into history and issues of responsibility and guilt, tended to frame Haneke’s work as refl ect-ing an ontological or psychological anguish tangentially attached to Caché’s national topography. While English- language sources emphasized the nationally embedded quality of the narrative, French sources were inclined to describe the “collective guilt” raised in the fi lm as a European or a universal concern.

A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reviewer suggested that “Georges’s ongo-ing nightmare clearly embodies France’s collective guilt over its colonial past. . . . Caché reveals that this [unresolved national shame] has long been hidden in plain

20 My translation. See plaque at http://www.hommes- et- migrations.fr/ articles/1244/1244p2.html (accessed April 17, 2007).

21 My translation. See the image of the graffi to at http://17octobre1961.free.fr/pages/Combat- oubli.htm (accessed April 17, 2007).



66

sight.”22 Similarly, in Sight and Sound, Catherine Wheatley noted that “in so far as Caché is an allegory of the French treatment of the Algerians, Haneke is not calling for the French to be punished for the events of 1961 but for them to acknowledge and apologise for what happened in the past.”23 Indiewire’s reviewer argued that Caché connects the French past and present: “Watching Caché it’s impossible not to think of the racially charged riots that recently swept through France. . . . What makes Caché so devastatingly critical . . . is how it details passive- aggressive oppression and its manifestation as a slow- building, unresolved societal tension.”24 Along the same lines, Brian Price has argued that Caché is about “the residue of colonial violence in an offi cially postcolonial Europe [and] the historical continuity of colonial violence: Georges’ racist incrimination in the present has roots in the massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris (1961).”25

The disparity between Anglo- American and French reviews is partly due to Caché’s earlier release in France, on October 5, 2005. In the rest of Europe and North America, the fi lm was in theaters during and after the November riots in Paris, which made the fi lm’s social commentary more immediate for non- French re-viewers. Therefore, it was understandable that English-language reviews agreed that Haneke calls for accountability in the neocolonial present by exploring the repressed colonial past and that the fi lm is Haneke’s most palpable sociopolitical commentary. What is still striking in French reviews is the complete rupture: any reference to Haneke’s connection of historical injustice to contemporary racism in France was absent in French analyses. Jean- Michel Duband’s justifi cation of the award of the 2005 Cannes Best Director prize to Haneke is representative of critics’ views on the fi lm’s pertinence regarding contemporary France. Duband, a Cannes jury member, explained that “it is at fi rst the complexity of this scenario that uncovers, for the char-acter but also for each of us, what is buried and can suddenly reappear, and overtake us. Then, the reference to History (Algerian War) and to contemporary events (Iraq and the Middle East).”26 Duband remarks on a brief shot of TV news coverage of Iraq and Palestine in the fi lm, but avoids mentioning Caché’s insistence that perceiv-ing the colonial past as a rupture in French history perpetuates social and political problems in the present.

Caché was well received in France27 and extensively reviewed in the press and in fi lm journals. Le Monde reviewer Jean- Luc Douin provided a typical example of how the

22 Jason McBride, “Hidden Agenda,” CBC News, January 27, 2006, http://www.cbc.ca/arts/fi lm/cache.html (accessed March 10, 2010).

23 Catherine Wheatley, “Secrets, Lies & Videotape,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 2 (2006): 32–34.

24 Michael Joshua Rowin, “A View to Kill,” Indiewire, December 19, 2005, http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2005/12/a_ view_to_kil.html (accessed April 7, 2007).

25 Brian Price, “Dossier on Michael Haneke,” Framework 47, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 4.

26 Jean- Claude Raspiengeas, “Festival de Cannes 2005. Le prix du jury oecuménique a été attribué à Caché, du réalisateur autrichien Michael Haneke,” La Croix, May 23, 2005, 23.

27 According to the Lumiere database, nearly 500,000 tickets were sold in France, more than half the total number of tickets sold in Europe; http://lumiere.obs.coe.int/web/fi lm_info/?id=23790 (accessed May 12, 2010).



67

fi lm was heralded in the majority of French sources. Douin suggested that the sociopo-litical issues Caché explores have a “universal dimension”:

This splendid and vertiginous fi lm is rich with refl ections on childhood wounds never to be opened, the solitude when facing interior demons, the ravages of a secret between a couple, the manner in which culpability eats away at an individual, the return of the repressed. Caché emphasizes a man’s need to undertake a therapeutic fl ashback, and by extension, for people to look their past in the face. This poignant personal drama takes on a universal dimension.28

The reviewer refrains from specifying the cause of the “wounds” or of the culpa-bility, the identity of the “demons” unleashed, or that of “the people” whose past is under scrutiny. The de- territorialized individual turns into “the universal man” whose drama is too extensive to be considered as a national allegory. Even when Douin later contextualizes the fi lm by hastily mentioning the theme of “the trea-son of the French petit- bourgeoisie against the Arab,” he suggests that the French- Algerian enemy brothers trope symbolizes “the hypocrisy of North- South dialogue,” a phrase that neutralizes the power differentials inherently underpinning the broth-ers’ “dialogue.”29

Words such as “colonial,” “neocolonial,” or “postcolonial,” which are abundantly paired with the theme of guilt in Anglo- American reviews, are ubiquitously absent in French commentaries. Although the issues of culpability and violence are discussed in most of the reviews, the social background that gives historical and contextual mean-ing to these terms is largely dismissed. Cahiers du Cinéma reviewer Jean Pierre Rehm, for instance, admits that violence in the fi lm is connected to the suppression of images and sounds. Yet the reviewer steers the meaning of violence in the fi lm from historical events and their larger repercussions to the postmodern crisis of representation and the cruelty of the quotidian in contemporary Western society:

Caché’s brutality resides elsewhere, or rather nowhere and everywhere: On the surface, there is generalized superfi ciality. Here, arguments are dissolved, anxieties, exchanges between friends and colleagues are smoothened, and family ties are muted. Finally, the horror of a grotesque suicide is suspended before us. If the characters are hovering so vaguely ghost- like—is there any worse inconsistency than that half- baked evanescence?—it is because they circulate before us in a universe where the sounds resonate muffl ed, where the picture is fl attened to the point of fi tting a TV screen.30

28 Jean- Luc Douin, “Regard forcé sur les démons de l’enfance pour un homme fi lmé à son insu,” Le Monde, May 17, 2005, 27. My translation.

29 Ibid.

30 Jean Pierre Rehm, “Juste sous la surface,” Cahiers du Cinéma, October 2005, 31.



68

While Emmanuelle Frois of Le Figaro links the theme of culpability in Haneke’s work to his national origin—“Doesn’t the fact that there is again in Caché the presence of the theme of culpability refer to his [Haneke’s] origins, his country Austria’s past?”—the Le Temps reviewer describes the director’s quest as an exploration of “European bad conscience.”31 Such reviews disregard the symbolic elements that embed Caché’s narrative within the French context: the literary show- host protagonist as stereotypi-cal high- cultured bourgeois; the Algerian nationality of the antagonist who, by his return from the shadow of the past, puts a silenced history of violence at the heart of civilization (Paris) center stage; the fractures in fraternité explored with the French and Algerian enemy brothers; and the national symbol of the rooster associated with blood frequently appearing on the screen—an Algerian boy killing a rooster, his face covered with the blood of the animal, and the roosters in the courtyard as the civil servants of the orphanage forcefully take Majid from the home. Although none of the French reviews question the fi lm’s “authenticity,” they detach it from its historical con-text, suggesting that October 1961 is only a pretext for a “universal,” that is, European or Western, guilt.

Such de- historicizing commentaries resonate with Code Unknown’s (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages [Haneke, 2000]) reviews. Code Unknown explores issues of multiculturalism and tolerance in Paris and was similarly reviewed as a fi lm not particularly French but rather European or Austrian: “The shots of Code Unknown ad-dress Europe’s tomorrow as much as Austria’s today. Governed with a coalition that features Jörg Haider’s extreme right.”32 The reviews discussed the acceleration of rac-ism, intolerance toward migrants, and the inability to talk about Nazism in Austria, while disregarding parallel issues in France.33 The research Haneke undertook among African and Romanian communities in France before the shooting was only brought up in the director’s interview with German fi lm scholar Jörg Metelmann.34

Regarding Caché, Haneke admits that he based his story on the 1961 massacres because he was shocked that the event was silenced in a country like France, but he quickly adds, “We all are inheritors of the sins committed by our parents. . . . Unfortunately, such is human existence.”35 Haneke is more direct when he gives an interview in the German press. Confronted with a question regarding the parallel between the riots and the fi lm’s depiction of social tensions, he explains, “What this is really about is the primal legacy of colonialism and the nations involved labour-ing with the consequences. . . . Instead of addressing the problem, we ask ourselves how best to stave it off, in order not to have to confront it.”36 In the interviews with

31 Le Temps, “Dix fi lms qui nous ont aidés à aimer le cinema en 2005,” December 27, 2005; and Emmanuelle Frois, “Haneke, maître des manipulations,” Le Figaro, May 14, 2007. My translations.

32 Stéphane Goudet, “Code inconnu: La main tendue,” Positif 478 (2000): 23. My translation.

33 Pascal Mérigeau, “Le choc Haneke,” Le Nouvel Observateur, May 18–24, 2000, 52–53.

34 Haneke, interview with Jörg Metelmann, in Metelmann, Zur kritik der kino- gewalt: Die fi lme von Michael Haneke (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2003).

35 Michel Cieutat and Philippe Rouyer, “Entretien avec Michael Haneke: On ne montre pas la realité, juste son image manipulée,” Positif 536 (October 2005): 22. My translation.

36 Haneke, interview with Dominik Kamalzadeh, Die Tageszeitung, January 26, 2006, trans. Lucy Powell, http://www.signandsight.com/features/577.html (accessed March 12, 2010).



69

the French press, however, the director is reserved and refrains from contextualizing colonial guilt in France:

This fi lm speaks of forgetting and repression, of this refl ex that we have of hiding things that hurt when they are recalled. I think everyone can recognize this, in his or her own private life, or on a more collective level. I could have situated this story in Austria, in Switzerland or elsewhere, with slight time lags: every country has its black stains, a moment of History where individual and national culpability converge. . . . Considering our Judeo- Christian origins, I think that it is impossible not to confront this theme of culpability.37

Haneke’s description of his fi lm underlines the inherently European appeal of its overarching theme—culpability. He associates “our” origins, in this case “coinciden-tally” the origins of the French, with the tradition of Judeo- Christian culpability in its positioning vis- à- vis the outsider, the Algerian, the non- French, the Muslim. The director’s statement implies an exclusion of the inherently non- European from the “native” European. Moreover, it obfuscates the object of the feeling of guilt, under-scoring the subject of guilt whose age- old tradition (the Judeo- Christian tradition) is the source of morality.

Caché’s framing of guilt emerges from the white European self- and family- centered critique of French society. Thus, the journalistic response, I suggest, echoes the logic of the fi lm itself. As fi lm scholar Patrick Crowley suggests, “Even as the fi lm evokes the events of October 17 it contributes to their ‘forgetting’ by folding the events into a signifying structure that is built upon, and entombs, those same events.”38 Haneke’s fi lm does detect the problem that the rioters were revolting against: the ways in which the appearance of objectivity in all of its social forms—in media and daily life in the suburbs—is largely a result of the unbroken repetition of colonial values. But then again, the fi lm’s “terrible realism” and its domestic center bring about a narrative clo-sure that buries what it successfully captures—the perpetuation of historical injustice in present- day France—once again, in the dusty archives.

Realism and the Temporal Index. When talking about his fi lms, Haneke usually points out their documentary aspects. The director emphasizes that he makes fi lms out of anonymous news items that his audience watches on the go, re- representing them to draw attention to these events. His fi rst feature fi lm, The Seventh Continent (Der siebente continent [1989]), is based on an article he read in the German news magazine Stern about a Viennese family collectively committing suicide. For Benny’s Video (1992) and Funny Games (1997), he indicates that the motivation of these stories came from the news items he read and collected on young middle- class murderers, while 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls [1994]) brings together two distinct headlines: a student’s motiveless killing spree of people in a Viennese bank and a Romanian kid’s escape to Austria. About his fi rst three fi lms, which are

37 Haneke in Norbert Creutz, “Je veux déstabiliser les gens,” Le Temps, October 8, 2005, 12–14. My translation and emphasis.

38 Crowley, “When Forgetting Is Remembering,” 269.



70

popularly known as the “Glaciation Trilogy” (Vergletscherungs- trilogie), Haneke says, “All three fi lms show an act of violence that lacks suffi cient sociological and psychological explanation. Cases as they are sometimes reported with the pretense of horror in il-lustrated magazines or the local pages of newspapers. The real horror about them, however, is the suspicion that the supposedly irrational acts could have altogether ra-tionally discoverable roots in our life style.”39

Caché is similarly a critique refl ecting on how media make an event and the per-sonalities involved invisible. As fi lm scholar Libby Saxton notes, “Caché’s images are haunted by the memory of this [1961] atrocity and the media’s role in its repression, as the victims’ ghosts return to survey the living from off- screen space—and to hold them to account.”40 The fi lm is based on a documentary Haneke watched on the French TV channel ARTE about the 1961 massacres, an event unknown to him before then. The hiding of the event “irritated [him] to such an extent that [he] decided we must address this.”41 This historical event, its concealment, and the contemporary repercus-sions of such violence (both of the event and its silencing) are central to Caché’s struc-ture. The fi lm’s temporal index suggests that Haneke is blending fi lm and video images to evoke multi- temporality in the present, and also to evoke the history of injustice as a continuity presented to us as rupture.

Haneke’s realism in Caché constructs itself against the repression of its images, as a search for truth within, and despite the manipulation of images. He situates images as suspect yet simultaneously claims their testimonial value. Haneke’s layered representa-tion of truth recalls and reveals images that have been dismissed, memories that are “hidden.” Producing images that refer to the denial and silencing of a historical event becomes a meta- narrative interrogation of the meaning, function, and representative quality of the image, as well as the nature of reception. Haneke asks how our beliefs prevent us from seeing what is happening. The director’s exploration of the truth claims of the image continually brings up the question of audience reception, of “fail-ures of perception and forms of blindness.”42 In Caché, Haneke tracks and exposes the unwillingness to see and “how the limitations and expansions of our vision are often politically situated.”43

Caché opens with a long and wide shot of a peaceful Parisian house captured from across the street. After watching this static shot for over two minutes, we hear a man’s voice in the background: “Well?” A woman replies, “Nothing.” The man questions further: “Where was it?” “In a plastic bag on the porch.” The cut to a closer shot of the house as a man leaves reveals that the earlier image was from a surveillance video-tape received by the owners of the house, the literary talk show host Georges and his editor wife Anne. The opening long take of the house proves to be a surveillance video

39 Michael Haneke, “71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance: Notes to the Film,” in After Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition, ed. Willy Riemer (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2000), 172. My emphasis.

40 Libby Saxton, “Close Encounters with Distant Suffering: Michael Haneke’s Disarming Visions,” in Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, ed. Kate Ince (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 32.

41 Haneke, interview with Serge Toubiana, Caché DVD.

42 Haneke, “Press Kit,” Code Unknown DVD (Kino, 2002).

43 Brian Price, “Dossier on Michael Haneke,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 47, no. 2 (2006): 6.



71

image, and because both the fi lm itself and the surveillance video are shot with a high- defi nition digital camera, the transitions between the two kinds of images is seamless, distorting the spectator’s sense of space.44 While spectators believe that they are look-ing at the house from its outside, in fact they are watching a video image of the house from inside that same house, along with the two protagonists. The spatial arrangement immediately puts the spectator side by side with Georges and Anne—the stereotypical bourgeois couple who appear under the same names in all Haneke fi lms. In opposition to this proximity with the fi lm’s characters, the spectator is distanced from the image by the invisible presence of another camera, which shoots the tape. Thus, we are closer to the fi lm characters than we had perceived, while more distant from the image itself. This spatial disorientation is complemented by a confused sense of time. The image of the house on the video belongs to the fi lm’s past, the past of the diegesis. While the spectators think they are situated in the present time of the narrative, they are, in fact, watching the past as if it were the present. What we see is a previously recorded scene on a videotape within the fi lm, a rupture in temporality perceived as continuity.

The second tape the couple receives is another one showing their house, shot at night and accompanied by a disturbing childish drawing of a rooster whose throat is cut and bleeding. Then, Pierrot, their son, receives a card at school with a similarly childish image of a boy gushing blood from his mouth; Georges receives the same card at his offi ce. The suspense is augmented not only by the decentering and spatial expan-sion of the threat posed by images, but also temporally: the violent childish drawings aim to unveil the darker territories of childhood. The third tape reveals personal in-formation about Georges, showing a car driving to the family farm where he spent his childhood. Thus, the tape points to Georges as the target (it is his past, his childhood that the tape tracks) and directs him to follow its clues (he visits his mother after seeing the tape and tries to provoke her memory about Majid, the Algerian orphan). Next, the fourth tape shows a run-down apartment in a Parisian suburb. Tracing the clues on this tape, Georges fi nds his childhood foe, Majid. The surveillance videotapes thus gradually change function, from capturing the protagonist’s present to traveling to his past, from stalking him to forcing him to visit the places shown on the videos. The tapes thus start to foreshadow his movements. The video images simultaneously target the past and the future: they are intended both to provoke memories of Georges’s past actions and to direct his future moves. The tapes’ dual trajectory—provoking the past and foreshadowing the future—continue to rupture the diegetic continuity to show other temporalities that are lived simultaneously with the fi lmic present.

The last tape records the confrontation between Georges and Majid, which the spectator has already witnessed. The surveillance camera records the meeting and its traumatic effect on Majid, which has remained, until then, unknown to the audience. Moreover, the surveillance videotape informs Anne of Georges’s confrontation with Majid, a fact that her husband had spared her, and thus it enforces the unveiling of the

44 The opening sequence and later incorporation of video images within the narrative have generally been considered as Haneke’s warning against the manipulation of the image; from the very beginning “every image becomes sus-pect.” Saxton, “Close Encounters with Distant Suffering,” 86; Matthias Frey suggests that this seamless transition between types of images “destabilizes the spectator by presenting a desubstantiated image.” Frey, “Benny’s Video, Caché, and the Desubstantiated Image,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 47, no. 2 (2006): 33.



72

protagonist’s past: Georges is obliged to confess to Anne (and the spectator) about Ma-jid’s parents’ death in the 1961 massacre, his parents’ subsequent willingness to adopt the orphaned boy, and his own lies about Majid to dissuade his parents from adoption.

The confrontation scene, which contains the only verbal interaction between Majid and Georges, is symbolically located at the center of the fi lm, halfway through the script.

Georges: Who has been terrorizing my family?

Majid: I don’t know. Why do you talk like we’re strangers? . . . How did you wind up on TV? You didn’t take over the estate?

Georges: Tell me what you want.

Majid gestures to the past while Georges wants to keep their exchange in the present. As the conversation proceeds, Georges and Majid are gradually distanced from each other and placed into separate frames. The camera is tighter on Georges, framing him in medium close- up—a camera perspective rarely used by Haneke, who prefers to draw his camera away from his characters (Figure 2). Conversely, Majid is captured

Figures 2 and 3. The confrontation between Georges and Majid in Caché (Les Films du Losange, 2005).



73

in a long shot situating him in his surroundings, shot from Georges’s point of view (Figure 3). The camera’s distance from Majid emphasizes his destitution and provides material for comparison between his house and that of Georges, his would- be brother. Different camera perspectives on the two also show Georges’s anxiety and childish incommunicativeness in opposition to Majid’s visibly calm disposition.45 The interro-gator (Georges) gradually becomes interrogated by the camera, and he makes a tepid confession: “You were older and stronger than me. I had no choice.” Georges leaves the house after threatening Majid. He calls Anne but hides his confrontation with Majid: “I went round, nobody was in. . . . No, it was just one in a row of doors, it was locked. . . . I did, he said it was unoccupied, it must be a storeroom or something like that.” Georges’s desire to “lock” this confrontation, the memory of Majid, and his past up in “an unoccupied storeroom” proves to be impossible when the videotape of this meeting reaches Anne.

What sets the videotaped image of the Georges- Majid meeting apart from that of the fi lm’s original record of their encounter is the wide angle, which erases the mark of Georges’s subjective perspective. Furthermore, the spectator sees the meet-ing’s traumatic effect on Majid; he bursts into tears soon after Georges departs. The video camera’s extension of the scene is crucial since it takes this central scene away from Georges, the protagonist, and makes it the antagonist’s, Majid’s: now Majid is the person with whom we end the scene. The climactic confrontation is restaged from an alternative perspective to show Anne what took place in the apartment that Georges claimed was an “unoccupied storeroom.” Georges is pressed from the two sides: after witnessing Majid’s suffering the spectator too interrogates him, with Anne, to extract the truth, and gradually, like Anne, we come to think less of him.

After a long, interrogating gaze by Anne, Georges tells Majid’s story, omitting the lies he had made up to prevent his parents from adopting Majid:

Georges: It was only an interlude of a few months.

Anne: An interlude?

Georges: What should I call it, a tragedy? Maybe it was a tragedy, I don’t know. I don’t feel responsible for it. Why should I? It’s all so absurd.

Like Majid in the previous scene, Anne too is gradually placed in a separate frame from Georges. First she is visibly angry but curious; then her curiosity is replaced by anxiety, heavy breathing, disbelief, and fi nally nausea: she looks at her husband with repugnance. The confrontation with Majid leads to a confession and confrontation between the couple and raises issues of trust and problems in their own relationship. The shift of focus from the Georges- Majid confrontation to the confrontation between Georges and Anne transforms Anne’s role from mediator to plaintiff. This change of position, however, diminishes the recently acquired centrality of Majid’s story.

The video footage of Georges’s confrontation with Majid produces a fl ashback that reiterates the reality of the meeting, reproducing the fi lm through the video. This forced fl ashback not only refreshes Georges’s memory of the meeting and of his past

45 Haneke mentions that such representation builds itself against mainstream cinema’s depiction of the victim- perpetrator dynamic in racially informed confrontations. Interview with Serge Toubiana, Caché DVD.



74

but also displays a previously invisible perspective: it extends Majid’s side of the story. This extended perception in the last video is crucial, as it adds a critical function to the surveillance videos. In the beginning, surveillance is presented as the source of suspense while also disorientating the audience in spatial and temporal terms, point-ing to ruptures in space and time, from the past to the present. Surveillance videos, then, lead the story and the characters in their search for a solution to the mystery. The tapes take the protagonist to his parents’ house and then to the suburbs of Paris, two rides that force him to confront his past. And, fi nally, the surveillance tapes acquire the function of chronicling the unseen, providing a perspective that differs from the pro-tagonist’s point of view. The mediating video images document what the protagonist and the spectators fail to see, but the historical/racial confrontation quickly turns into a critique of bourgeois family life that overshadows the scene.46

Thomas Levin claims that ingraining real or fi ctional surveillance videos within a fi lm’s narrative is a way to compensate for unreliable fi lm images with a supposedly objective and live referentiality, an attempt to get ever closer to reality: “If the unprob-lematic referentiality of cinematic photograms is under siege, it makes great sense to start appropriating a type of imaging characterized by defi nition . . . in terms of its seemingly unproblematic, reliable referentiality.”47 Haneke, who is familiar with both fi lm and television semiotics,48 has endowed space in Caché with the temporal “reality effect” of the videos. The director makes “the image a suspect” and also, in dialectical contradiction to that, claims it as a witness, thus implying the reliability of his image. Haneke’s appropriation of the temporal indexicality of surveillance video enables a nar-rative in passé composé (present perfect, literally a “compound past” that stretches to the present) rather than a narrative cloistered in the passé simple (simple past); he thus shows historical injustice as a continuity presented to us as ruptures. But the spatial indexicality that aims to create a link between the protagonist and the Western art house audience, and thus to some extent to seek the bourgeois spectator’s identifi cation, at some point contradicts and obfuscates the temporal indexicality that captures the past in the pres-ent, the historicity of the narrative that the audience rejects (or fails to see). Thus, video images’ witnessing remains limited to a comment on the nature of image, on how fi lm can structurally incorporate subversion and self- refl exive devices into its lexicon.

To clarify this point, we must examine the problems that arise from the dilemma that Caché’s fi lmic reality faces in its focus on audience affect. Reviewer Catherine Wheatley explains that “part of Haneke’s project in [Caché ] . . . is to restore shock- value to the image. . . . The real victim is not on screen but sitting in the darkened theater. . . . At its heart, Caché functions as a refl ection on the power of images and their ability to

46 Patrick Crowley points to a similar scene in his analysis of Caché: “When we listen to Georges and Anne anxiously discuss Pierrot’s apparent disappearance we attend to their domestic drama at the price of listening to news of the world broadcast in the background.” Crowley, “When Forgetting Is Remembering,” 273.

47 Thomas Y. Levin, “Rhetoric of Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of ‘Real Time,’” in Ctrl [space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 585.

48 Haneke has worked for both German and Austrian television, both before and for some time after he started making feature fi lms. In fact, his fi rst feature fi lm came late in his career; he fi lmed Der siebente Kontinent (1989) when he was 47.



75

generate guilt.”49 Wheatley specifi cally points to the suicide scene. Haneke depends strongly on the shocking power of the suicide scene to generate guilt in his specta-tor. The scene also vividly projects Haneke’s philosophical stance on fi lm violence. His representation of violence is always intended to push the audience to question its affective relationship to the image: “The question—regarding VIOLENCE—is not: How do I show violence, but rather: How do I show the spectator his own position vis- à- vis violence and its representation.”50

Thus, the suicide scene has to be credible but also has to accomplish a “terrible re-alism,” most shocking for intense audience affect and reaction. Haneke explains, “We can even consider that this suicide is a special effect!”51 Indeed, the blood on the wall becomes the poster of the fi lm, like a surrealist painting that aims to reach out, grab, and shake its viewer. Haneke assaults the spectator to attain affect, which the director believes stimulates mental processes and propels thinking on violence.

Brigitte Peucker’s careful analysis of Haneke’s work detects two interrelated ten-dencies in the director’s fi lms: disturbing acts of violence and the tableaux of bour-geois melodrama. However, as the fi lm scholar suggests, the director’s treatment of violence is far from Brechtian intellectual provocation; it forces its audience “into the realm of programmed emotion” and creates melodramas obsessed with heightened emotions, guilt, and fears.52 Haneke’s aesthetics of violence is that of Dadaism and futurism where “the relation of art to an audience understood to be passive, inert, surfeited, can only be assault.”53

Taking Peucker’s argument one step further, one needs to examine the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim of violence in Haneke’s work and the develop-ment of the perpetrator and victim as characters throughout the fi lm. Caché’s focus on provoking guilt in its bourgeois audience inherently limits this very possibility since it pushes the director to the limit of sacrifi cing the victim to force out affect. The irony in the way the director deals with his obsessive themes (bourgeoisie and violence) is that he denounces violence by representing violence; similarly, his fi lms denounce the bour-geoisie yet produce representations of bourgeoisie for the bourgeois art house audi-ence. With the focus on French bourgeois guilt and affect, the Algerian Other becomes an inaccessible text, or a pretext to contemplate guilt, a guilt whose very existence is void in the illusion of presence of a subject that is inherently incapable of raising audience empathy and responsibility. This absent presence, and thus inherent incom-municability of Majid and his unnamed son, form the basis of my critique here. The fact that Majid and his son have limited psychological depth as characters limits the suicide’s effect on the audience to refl exive shock and disbelief. Do shock and disbelief have the potential to extract guilt? More signifi cantly, is it necessary to produce one more Algerian victim, one more death to commemorate the October 1961 victims?

49 Wheatley, “Secrets, Lies & Videotape.”

50 Haneke, in Metelmann, Zir kritik der kino gewalt, 32. My translation, original emphasis.

51 Cieutat and Rouyer, “Entretien avec Michael Haneke,” 23.

52 Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 132.

53 Ibid., 142.



76

Suicide and Guilt. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs indicates that a suicide becomes less impressive if we cannot perceive the motivation or formulated thought behind it.54 Halbwachs argues that most suicides have a societal basis, and points out that there are close analogies between a suicide and a sacrifi ce. Especially when “the des-perate person seems to wish to provoke a scandal by the outrageous or unexpected nature of his act to terrify and torture his survivors, to crush them beneath the weight of remorse, to project on to them clearly the responsibility for his death,” he commits suicide in front of a particular person who, in his eyes, represents society at large. Such suicide, according to Halbwachs, recalls “certain forms of sacrifi ce of impreca-tion and vengeance.”55 Halbwachs’s description illuminates the function of Majid’s suicide: Haneke sacrifi ces Majid to imprecate the audience with guilt by staging a public self- prosecution with a mute accusation: “You all are my murderers.” Majid exists in his death and suffering (dying on the fi lm, crying on the videotape after the confrontation), which are “programmed conditions” to provoke guilt in Georges, and possibly in viewers as well. Majid’s narrative is incommunicable, as it lacks more vi-able visual and textual language. His story is closed and removed from the fi lm as a passive- aggressive death whose only meaning is the imposition of affect/guilt, if not recognition of his innocence by the audience. Majid’s more reactive son, too, is incapable of telling his father’s story, or his own. The nameless son, in his confronta-tion with Georges after Majid’s death, seems to approach Georges only because he “wondered how it feels, [to have] a man’s life on [his] conscience. That’s all.”

Majid’s violent suicide places him in the position of masochist while both Georges and the spectators, in a mediated sense, become sadists. A Deleuzean reading of Majid’s masochism, like Jean Ma’s analysis of Erika Kohut’s self- mutilation and mas-ochistic fantasies in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste [2001]), would separate this masochism and sadism as fundamentally different positions, since “while sadism draws out the violence of the world in order to multiply it . . . masochism refl ects the excess of violence in order to reconstruct it in a different format that nonetheless still preserves this excess.”56 Ma mentions the diffi culty of disregarding the power dynamics in play when it is a female victim whose body is objectifi ed in the masochistic aesthetic. What are the problematic connotations of representing the female, in The Piano Teacher, and the postcolonial minority, in Caché, as bodies that “preserve” the “excess of violence”? Does not Haneke confer upon the bourgeois art house audience the right “to draw out the violence of the world to multiply it” and, in turn, to map the position of already subordinated subjects as doomed to containing violence within themselves, thus assur-ing an aesthetic and narrative closure? A Deleuzian explanation of masochism as “an ascent from the human body to the work of art”57 is pertinent here in the sense that Majid’s suicide, in Paul Gilroy’s words, “is an exclusively aesthetic event, devoid of all meaning apart from what it communicates about Georges.”58 Majid’s act, in Sartre’s

54 Maurice Halbwachs, The Causes of Suicide (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

55 Ibid., 300.

56 Deleuze, in Jean Ma, “Discordant Desires, Violent Refrains: La Pianiste,” Grey Room 28 (Summer 2007): 17.

57 Ibid., 18.

58 Paul Gilroy, “Shooting Crabs in a Barrel,” Screen 48, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 234.



77

terms, is “a perpetual effort to annihilate [his] subjectivity by causing it to be assimilated by the Other,”59 while producing sadists who are entitled to “treat the Other as an instrumental object, seek[ing] to utilize the Other’s body as a tool to make the Other realize an incarnated existence.”60 Eventually, both masochism and sadism are only “assumptions of guilt.” The position of the masochist is a self- deception, a futile effort to eliminate the subject position and turn oneself into an object: “The more [the mas-ochist] tries to taste his objectivity, the more he will be submerged by the consciousness of his subjectivity.”61 Thus, Majid’s masochism may only produce an inert, enclosed, self- centered, subjective conception of guilt rather than exerting an existential guilt that emerges from reciprocal human recognition: “It is before the Other that I am guilty.”62 Majid’s suicide rejects a feeling of guilt that opens one’s heart and eyes to the Other’s pain by enclosing it in the antagonist himself.

It is the inaccessibility of Majid’s subjectivity throughout the fi lm that erases any possibility of recognition of the Other. Caché, a narrative about denial of guilt, at some level, and true to its own main theme, denies its victim any communication with the perpetrator. In this respect, the fi nal wide shot in front of the high school where Majid’s son and Pierrot have a mute and barely visible dialogue is symbolic of this communication void.63 Does the meeting of the two sons propose the possibility of a dialogue for future generations? The ending does point to that possibility, but the fact that the sons’ meeting takes place only after Majid’s death raises another question: Does the past need to be buried to open the way to future communication—an idea eerily reminiscent of Sarkozy’s suggestion to “look toward the future” rather than “dwelling on the past”?

My wariness of the optimism of the fi nal scene is due to the fl ashback scene that precedes it. Majid’s absent presence in the fi lm is most striking in the fl ashback/dream sequence scenes that recall the past through Georges’s point of view. Haneke, who has unremittingly refrained from using fl ashback and consciously rejected the heavy subjectivity connoted in the technique in his previous fi lms,64 portrays Georges’s psy-chopathological memory of Majid in the form of dark nightmares stained with blood. Presenting the past in Georges’s fl ashbacks/nightmares prioritizes the history through his lens. Majid is sent to an orphanage where “he learned only hatred and suffering,” his son tells Georges. Beneath the son’s calm but defi ant tone, there is a hint of what he and his father endured, but we never see his fl ashbacks, nor do we see the story from his or from Majid’s eyes or perspective.

59 Jean- Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant, [1948]), trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 492.

60 Ibid., 518.

61 Ibid., 529. Original emphasis.

62 Ibid., 531.

63 Haneke admits that most spectators did not even discern the two sons among the large crowd of people. Although he wrote dialogue for that scene, later he decided to make it an ambiguous fi nale.

64 Refl ecting the past in Benny’s Video is persistently “objectifi ed” through the use of videotapes, while in La pianiste Haneke consciously omits the fl ashbacks to Erica Kohut’s childhood in Jelinek’s novel, of which the fi lm is an adaptation. In Seventh Continent the director underlines his rejection of the technique of telling the family’s past through fl ashbacks. Haneke, interview with Serge Toubiana, The Seventh Continent DVD (Kino, 2006).



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The last fl ashback/dream sequence of the fi lm, immediately preceding the fi nal scene, is a wide, very distant shot capturing a car parked in front of a scenic French country house. The camera/the spectator/Georges is hidden in the shadows, under the roof of the barn across from the house. A child around the age of eight is carried to the car; he tries to escape, fi ghts back to avoid being taken away, but eventually is locked up in the car that quickly drives off. The would- be adoptive parents who have given the child away withdraw into the house so as not to see this unpleasant scene. The spectator has no access to what happens to Majid until he meets Georges again, nor do we follow the car to the orphanage where we know they are taking him. At this point, in the present time of the fi lm narrative, Majid is already inaccessible, dead. We know little about his life in a fi lm on guilt and responsibility, a fi lm ostensibly con-cerned about his life. To Georges’s and the spectator’s relief, the object of discomfort, already eliminated in the present, is carted off through force once again in the past. For both the protagonist and the spectator, the last fl ashback ensures narrative closure of the past. As Maureen Turim explains, “Flashbacks in most cases terminate at pre-cisely the point at which they must be sealed off, in which the imperatives of fi xing interpretations and reaching judgments in the present must be imposed. Made aware of the past, the spectator is freed to forget it once again.”65

Yet, even if Majid’s character were more accessible, the problem of representing the Other would not necessarily be solved—hence the last videotape. Producing the Other as a speaking subject might very well have meant containing him. In this sense, I do not propose that incorporation of fl ashbacks from Majid’s or his son’s perspective would have signifi cantly shifted the balance or that “balance” should be a principle or goal to be aspired to in the fi lm. Would the fi lm be more successful in proposing a path to progressive political solutions if Georges were able to fully acknowledge his guilt and act on it? This critique does not target the fi lm’s lack of a progressive political agenda but rather the inconsistencies that undermine its progressive agenda. As Paul Gilroy’s brief analysis of Caché sums up, the fi lm is “raising history only to reduce it to nothing more than a piece of tragic machinery in the fatal antagonism that undoes Caché ’s protagonists.”66

Conclusion. Before reaching a conclusion on the limits of Caché’s commemoration of the past, it is helpful to reiterate the problems of memory politics. The recognition of historical injustices is crucial in establishing the fi rst step to “validate . . . victims’ memory and identity,” to “transform [the] trauma of victimization into a process of mourning and [to] allow for rebuilding.”67 In her articles on the fi ctional accounts of the October 1961 massacre and the Algerian War, however, Anne Donadey sug-gests that, when dealing with colonial history in postcolonial France (i.e., when re-membering state violence and guilt), mourning for the dead or asking for forgiveness is not enough. She claims that simultaneous with memorialization one should always be aware that “at least at the unconscious level, [today’s] racist acts can be seen as a

65 Maureen C. Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989), 12.

66 Gilroy,”Shooting Crabs in a Barrel,” 233.

67 Barkan, The Guilt of Nations, 323.



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continuation of the repressed, lost colonial war.”68 Charles Forsdick, on a similar note, warns that a period of a positive “identity crisis,” as in 1990s France, may be unpro-ductive, even counterproductive, unless it involves a self- refl ective contextualization and responsibility that extends to the present. Memorialization of violence involves the risk of becoming an end in itself, “mummifying processes of museology that risk dif-fusing the active.”69 The emergence of memory may become a “duty of memory,”70 fulfi lling only in itself if not accompanied by a historicizing of this “duty” (“Why remember now?”). Thus, as Benjamin Stora points out, remembering repressed pasts should accomplish not solely mourning but passing from guilt of the past to commit-ment of the present: “Will the current mobilization around the exactions committed in Algeria be reduced to an agitation without a future, or, on the contrary, will it set in motion an important change in the French political scene, making it possible to attenu-ate the fears toward the Other, the foreigner?”71

Stora’s critique of possible abuses of the memorialization of historical injustice is directed toward the French political establishment. Still, Stora’s discussion of the ambiguity of the discourse of colonial memory with regard to its contemporary reper-cussions—a problem similarly underlined by sociologist De Laforcade and historian Karen Till—is illuminating for a better understanding of Caché’s public reception in France. As we have seen, French-language reviews of the fi lm have generally reduced the fi lm’s reference to historical violence solely to a mnemonic function. Mainstream French press and cinema journals have detached the fi lm, the issue of guilt, and si-lencing of the past from their national and temporal context, interpreting the fi lm’s references to the October 1961 massacre as a tangential pretext for “universal” guilt. The fi lm has elements that feed the social forgetting performed by those reviews. It successfully represents the absence of the Algerian from collective memory or guilt but, in doing so, reproduces this absence.

The narrative focuses on forcing out the protagonist’s, his family’s, and the specta-tor’s guilt, so much so that depicting their decadence defi nes the setting and theme, as in all previous Haneke fi lms. Caché locates the situation of violence in the pillars of French civilization, the highly cultivated bourgeois household. The crisis—the inher-ent decadence and repressed violence of a family, as in Benny’s Video—becomes an allegory of the national history of violence. The fi lm deals with morality, responsibil-ity, and denial on various levels within the family (Anne’s interrogation of Georges, Anne’s denial of her special relationship with her boss Pierre, the couple’s denial of the decadence of their relationship). Eventually, the allegory dismisses the two Algerians

68 Anne Donadey, “‘Une certaine idée de la France’: The Algeria Syndrome and Struggles over ‘French’ Identity,” in Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth- Century France, ed. Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (Minneapo-lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 221.

69 Forsdick, “Direction les oubliettes de l’histoire,” 340.

70 While forming the Mandelkern commission that investigated the October 1961 events, the interior minister of the Socialist Party, Jean- Pierre Chevènement, declared that he was “fully ready to try to get the facts about (the repres-sion of the October 17th 1961 protests) in accordance with the duty of memory.” The resulting report was not satisfactory, as some archives remained closed, and perpetrators were not brought to justice. Forsdick, “Direction les oubliettes de l’histoire,” 345.

71 Stora, “Guerre d’Algérie: 1999–2003, les accélérations de la mémoire,” LDH Toulon, September 30, 2005, http://www.ldh- toulon.net/spip.php?article900 (accessed March 12, 2010); my translation.



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in the narrative altogether, and the Other emerges in the text as an impossible brother who is left out of the French family structure. Majid and his son, two generations of mother- deprived Algerians,72 recall Fanon’s trope of the untutored, suicidal, or at least confused “native children” unable to prevent themselves from self- harm or eternal un-happiness, having lost the protective French mother. Fanon underscores the perverted logic through which the colonizer imposes his power on the native through the claim that his absence rather than his very presence will cause the native to lapse back into “bestiality.” Thus, drawing a parallel between Fanon’s description and Majid’s suicide, one could say that by killing Majid, Haneke implies the effects of postcolonialism are similar to the effects of colonialism; it is again the presence, not the absence, of colo-nial conditions, of a colonial gaze, that leads to violence. Then again, the emphasis on Georges’s colonial guilt removes his parents’ responsibility (again similar to the Sarkozian discourse claiming the innocence of parents). Georges’s parents, in the end, were “good” colonizers meaning to be protective of their foster son; they did search for their Algerian farmhands (Majid’s parents), they did treat Majid gently, and they had every intention of adopting him, if only Georges had not prevented this plan with his lies. In Gilroy’s words, while it is a pleasure to see a work of art that invites the audience to consider the link between “racism and the pressure of unresolved colonial violence . . . the relationship of the colonial past to the postcolonial present is perverted and confused by the idea that today’s complacent and indifferent adults bear no more responsibility for their resignation, inertia and poisonous choices than a confl icted six year old.”73

While the Algerian characters are obsessed with the recognition of their suffering, audience members, who initially identify with the bourgeois couple, fi rst feel guilty for their alliance and then feel morally superior to Georges for being able to recog-nize and fulfi ll their “duty of memory.” As in all bourgeois melodramas, watching the fi lm is in itself an experience, evidence of being the good liberal postcolonial French citizen capable of remembrance and repentance. Funding, producing, awarding, and seeing the historical injustice now makes up for not having seen it in the past and not seeing the continuing legacy of this injustice. The fi lm offers an arbitrary narra-tive solution to active social contradiction since it remembers the dead safely: without bringing them out of silence, the narrative closes on the Algerian victims. This is the source of “structural limitation and ideological closure” in Haneke’s narrative.74 ✽

I am grateful to Kristin Ross, Vangelis Calotychos, and two anonymous Cinema Journal reviewers for their insightful sug-gestions on an earlier draft of this article.

72 There is no mention of Majid’s son’s mother, so he too seems to be deprived of a mother like his father, Majid.

73 Gilroy, “Shooting Crabs in a Barrel,” 234–235.

74 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 52.


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