ABSTRACT CECI N'est PAS UN FILM: VISUAL PERCEPTION in MICHAEL HANEKE's CACHÉ by Kerry Polley the Purpose of This Thesis Is
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ABSTRACT CECI N’EST PAS UN FILM: VISUAL PERCEPTION IN MICHAEL HANEKE’S CACHÉ by Kerry Polley The purpose of this thesis is to examine the ethical implications of voyeurism as a diegetic construct within cinema within the specific context of Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché. The first chapter uses works by René Descartes and Diego Velázquez to frame the question of the deceitful nature of the senses, which contextualize the way we look at film as an entity distinct from lived experience. The second chapter examines theories of montage in order to elaborate upon the difference between narrative and lived experience. The third chapter looks at films by and interviews with Alfred Hitchcock to elaborate upon the previous chapter’s discussion of montage and explain the ethics and the legal code of voyeurism as presented in Caché. CECI N’EST PAS UN FILM: VISUAL PERCEPTION IN MICHAEL HANEKE’S CACHÉ A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of French and Italian by Kerry Ann Polley Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2009 Advisor: _____________________________ Dr. Elisabeth Hodges Reader: ______________________________ Dr. Jonathan Strauss Reader: ______________________________ Dr. Claire Goldstein TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I. Unlocking Velázquez’s Door 2 II. Pidgin, Creole, Dialect 7 III. Funeral March of a Marionette: Michael Haneke Presents 13 CONCLUSION: “Separated from Us by Physics and Glass” 18 BIBLIOGRAPHY 20 ii LIST OF FIGURES Page Fig. 1. Trajectories of sight in Las Meninas 4 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to express her appreciation to Dr. Elisabeth Hodges, Dr. Jonathan Strauss, and Dr. Claire Goldstein for their support and kind words. iv Ceci n’est pas un film: Visual Perception in Michael Haneke’s Caché The threat of surveillance became a preoccupation in American cinema on the heels of the Watergate Scandal with films like Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet, 1975) and The Conversation (Coppola, 1974). The former deals with the media circus surrounding a bank robbery gone awry, with omnipresent cameras and microphones capturing and broadcasting the robbers’ every step—in fact, the main character’s parents and wife learn of his actions from the real-time broadcast on the television and radio, respectively. The latter details the descent into paranoid rage suffered by an audio surveillance expert who thinks to find himself as the object of government surveillance; his profession has permeated his personal life to the point where he is loathe to provide more than the bare minimum in his conversations with friends and acquaintances. During this same period, the domain of film theory became inundated with treatises incorporating psychoanalytic principles into the questions of what it means to watch and to be watched, inspired foremost by the writings of Jacques Lacan.1 The filmic and theoretic treatments of watching converge to enunciate the question that is inherent to cinema: what does it mean to watch? Careful attention must be paid to the wording of this question, for asking “what does it mean to look or see?” would yield a response that would necessarily be based within another medium, one not predicated on the passage of linear time. As Jean Mitry explains, “Whereas the classical arts propose to signify movement with the immobile, life with the inanimate, the camera must express life with life itself. It begins there where the others lead off. It escapes, therefore, all their rules as it does all their principles.”2 Cinema is constructed upon the idea of movement that unfolds over a period of time; the spectator must watch, rather than merely look, in order to follow that movement and track changes. The lines between model and art, steadily maintained in the classical arts, become blurred in the cinema as a result of this movement. The confluence of referent and simulacrum creates a troubled form of art caught in a state of constant struggle between unification and attempts to define and separate itself from its model. The cinematic product is intensely personal, its model and inspiration exposed by lack of metaphor: on the surface, it seems that the camera captures a truth that is unmitigated by translation from life to artistic form. The question of watching leads to the complementary role of being watched. What does it mean to be the body dismembered and decapitated by the male gaze as defined by Laura Mulvey? This question is asked implicitly by the very medium of cinema itself, wherein the common mode of consumption places rows upon rows of people in a darkened room in which these spectators have no choice but to look at the interplay of light upon a screen. Cinema allows for a means in which the perverse act of voyeurism becomes a victimless crime, condoned and encouraged by a multi- million dollar industry. This leads in turn to a discussion of the ethics of cinema: what is it about this medium that decriminalizes the act of voyeurism and absolves its repercussions? Since the 70s, when the fear of surveillance proved to be an undercurrent of artistic and critical thought, the mode of cinematic consumption has changed due to ongoing technological advances; smaller, less expensive cameras and virtually unlimited web space democratize a previously oligarchic medium. The average person may capture and project an event, however overtly or covertly he wishes.3 As a result, it is no longer a question of visually dismembering a character; rather, 1 And promulgated by Laura Mulvey, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Christian Metz, who each published seminal articles on the topic in the early- to mid-70s. 2 Vivian Sobchack, “Phenomenology and the Film Experience” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams, 38 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 3 This is perhaps best exemplified by the camera as a now-standard feature on many cell phones, a tool which encourages the possibility of covert (and spontaneous) filming. 1 the average person is now at risk of being subjected to this treatment. As potential subjects of clandestine videos, we are watched first by the eye of the camera and second by the eyes of anonymous spectators around the world. Simply by virtue of being citizens in a society, we run the risk of being filmed, which, as a consequence, implicitly subjects our lived experience to that which defines cinema, namely its capacity to manipulate, distort, hide, stretch, link, and so on. As a result, the complex and indefinable interaction of missed connections, near-misses, coincidences, being in the right place at the right time, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and good, old-fashioned hard work—in short, the elements that define life—when seen through the camera’s lens is reduced to a simple cause-and-effect relationship. This relationship of causation necessarily projects statements of responsibility, which in turn carries the possible side effect of guilt. What is perhaps the most fearful about this declaration of responsibility is that it is made by a party exterior to the participants in the filmed experience. In a juridical sense, one may say that the object of filmed surveillance is deprived of the nature of accusation and the chance to confront his accuser.4 This conclusion, coupled with the decriminalization of voyeurism that cinema provides, creates a legal system in cinema wherein the criminal (the voyeur) makes an allegation against his victim (the object of regard) in order to justify his innocence; he deflects culpability by deferring attention to a different crime. The physical presence of the camera is what allows this deflection of responsibility; the lens is the tool by which the voyeur’s testimony is carefully crafted, and the medium of registration allows the testimony to be repeated ad infinitum.5 The potential for endless replication and repetition creates its own brand of truth in regard to the contents of the narrative, a truth which is proved empirically by the precise stability of the recorded events. The camera’s lens is a physical barrier that separates the verifiable truth of the medium from the vague but absolute Truth of the fleeting event. The lens causes the convergence and diffraction of truth in addition to the convergence and diffraction of light. This correlation between light and truth is not coincidental or specific; rather, this association has been traced throughout history, with the most notable example being the retroactive christening of the Enlightenment. Unlocking Velázquez’s Door The second half of the seventeenth century marked the start of a journey into the relation of spectator to object; significant advancements in lens technology allowed scientists and philosophers a glimpse into the microscopic and the galactic—realms which had been previously inaccessible. With the advent of cinema, and its aforementioned entanglement of light and truth, the heirs to the Enlightenment continue to pursue this question several centuries later. The act of focusing one’s gaze calls into question more than just the physiological process of lens accommodation. René Descartes’ influential Dioptrique and its preface Discours de la méthode, published in 1637, call into question what it means to cast one’s gaze upon an object, an action which is necessarily marred by the unreliability of the senses. To look entails an effect which is always already illusory; personal biases impede any sort of “truthful” conception of the object of one’s gaze. Descartes reasons: J’avais dès longtemps remarqué que, pour les mœurs, il est besoin quelquefois de suivre des opinions qu’on sait être fort incertaines, tout de même que si elles étaient indubitables, ainsi qu’il a été dit ci-dessus ; mais, pource qu’alors je désirais vaquer seulement à la recherche de la vérité, je pensai qu’il fallait que je fisse tout le contraire, et que je rejetasse, comme absolument faux, tout ce en quoi je pourrais 4 Both of which are rights provided for by the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution.