ABSTRACT CECI N'est PAS UN FILM: VISUAL PERCEPTION in MICHAEL HANEKE's CACHÉ by Kerry Polley the Purpose of This Thesis Is

Home , Code Unknown, Dog Day Afternoon, Michael Haneke, Time of the Wolf

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

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.

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. 5 The advent of digital video allows for infinite copies with no degradation of fidelity, which had previously been an issue in the media of film and video. 2

imaginer le moindre doute, afin de voir s’il ne resterait point, âpres cela, quelque chose en ma créance, qui fût entièrement indubitable. Ainsi, à cause que nos sens nous trompent quelquefois, je voulus supposer qu’il n’y avait aucune chose qui fût telle qu’ils nous la font imaginer.6

Descartes identifies a struggle between the individual and his senses; the senses create a veil that divides spectator and object, and prevents the former from fully understanding the essence of the latter. An individual’s relationship to the exterior is fundamentally linked to an internal (and thus personal) conflict. When an individual casts his gaze upon the object, he does not see its true nature; rather, his senses impart his personal biases upon it. The object in turn provokes the attempt to dismantle one’s delusory senses. In this sense, spectator and object enter into a reciprocal relationship, the stakes of which have since inspired discourses from intellectuals in the fields of philosophy, science, and art. Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, appearing a mere two decades after Descartes’ Discours, examines the complex sensory relationship that occurs upon the confrontation of spectator with object. Velázquez completed this work in 1656 after having been in service to the court of King Philip IV for 33 years; during that period, his output consisted mainly of portraits of the Spanish royal family.7 This particular painting, completed just four years before Velázquez’s death, reads as an anthology of the portraiture for which he was responsible, depicting the Infanta Margarita surrounded by her entourage (the maids of honor evoked by the title); Velázquez himself; the queen’s chamberlain Don José Nieto Velázquez; and even King Philip IV and his wife Mariana of Austria. The titular figures portray the Infanta and her entourage, illuminated by a large window found to her left. To her right, one finds almost hidden in the shadows an artist and the canvas he is painting; this represented canvas faces away from us so that we can only discern the wooden structures used to give it shape, rather than the image that is in the process of being applied to it. The exposed architecture that supports the canvas alludes to the ideas of constructing of an image, reminding us of the sensory bias that occurs simply by looking, and the consequent need to dismantle that impression in order to arrive at truth. The artist’s raised palette and brush fill the opposite side of this canvas, calling attention to the idea that an image is wholly caught up in interpretation, wherein the quest for truth is not accomplished by merely approaching the object from different angles. By shifting our focus from the canvas to the artist, we are permitted a hint as to the contents of this hidden canvas. Michel Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas, found in the introductory chapter of Les mots et les choses, identifies this hint: “Le spectacle [que l’artiste] observe est donc deux fois invisible : puisqu’il n’est pas représenté dans l’espace du tableau, et puisqu’il se situe précisément en ce point aveugle, en cette cache essentielle où se dérobe pour nous-mêmes notre regard au moment où nous regardons.”8 Indeed, following the artist’s eyeline, we discover that he is looking outside of the space of the painting toward us. In cinematic terms, he is the counter-shot to our shot—he occupies the same space in which we find ourselves, yet is separated by the physical form of the medium. Our reciprocal gaze transcends the materiality of paint upon canvas. Shifting our focus past the artist toward the back wall allows us an undeniable hint as to our place within the space of the painting: the frame hung at the vanishing point contains an image that is brighter than all of the others. Through its luminosity, contrasted with the shadows hiding the other frames, we are able to

6 René Descartes, Discours de la méthode (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 66. 7 “Las Meninas,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Meninas (accessed May 26, 2009). 8 Michel Foucault, “Les Suivants” in Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 20. 3

identify it as a mirror, and in this mirror we see our reflection—in the form of the Spanish king and queen. With this identification, we are able to complete the syllogism. The artist is looking at us; we are looking at our reflection; thus, the canvas depicts the king and queen—us. Three reciprocal gazes are identifiable across the space created by the tangible canvas: the gaze shared by the painter and spectator; the mirror reflection of the spectator; and the disjointed, implied reflection of the mirror and the represented canvas, which share a gaze insofar as they each depict the same thing (Fig. 1). This last trajectory is the most disturbing. The mirror reflects the represented canvas, though indirectly: by tracing the artist’s gaze, we have identified the subject of the hidden canvas as ourselves qua king and queen. By positioning the surfaces of the mirror and represented canvas in opposition to each other, Velázquez has created a shot/counter-shot relationship that mimics the one created by actual spectator and actual canvas. This relationship between actual and represented brings us back to the introductory quotation by Mitry: in the same way that cinema represents life through life itself, Velázquez represents the act of posing through poses.

Fig. 2. Trajectories of sight in Las Meninas (overhead view)

The specific relationship between mirror and represented canvas becomes disturbing when we realize that we as referents are excluded from a gaze that is being shared by our images. Within the space of the painting, these images contained on the surfaces of mirror and represented canvas take on an agency independent of us as observers exterior to the canvas. The boundaries between image and referent, normally upheld nicely by the horizontal plane of a representing surface, dissipate under the trajectories of sight that ricochet across virtual and actual space. With these trajectories mapped out, Velázquez’s work reads as an atlas of the problem laid out by Descartes: that the object of one’s gaze is not as it appears. What appears to be a neutral canvas reveals itself to be a conduit of visual information that, through its hidden representation, makes claims as to our nature as posing subjects—claims that are kept from us. In this way, each side of the canvas highlights the deceitful nature of our senses: from behind, we see the canvas as virginal when in fact it has been impregnated with representation; from the front, the canvas exhibits an image that is as subject to interpretation (and thus deviance from reality) as any constructed image. Foucault identifies four frames that allow for movement within the space of Las Meninas: the canvas, mirror, window, and door: Mais la fenêtre opère par le mouvement continu d’une effusion qui, de droite à gauche, réunit aux personnages attentifs, au peintre, au tableau, le spectacle qu’ils contemplent ; le miroir, lui, par un mouvement violent, instantané, et de pure surprise, va chercher en avant du tableau ce qui est regardé, mais non visible, pour le rendre, au bout de la profondeur fictive, visible mais indifférent à tous les regards…Enfin—et c’est la troisième fonction de ce miroir—il jouxte une porte qui s’ouvre comme lui dans le mur du fond.9

Whereas the canvas and mirror allow metaphorical movement, the door and the window are sites of physical movement, and are shown as such through the light that permeates the room and the visitor who is caught on the threshold that separates the room from the undefined space that is exterior to it. In “Phenomenology and the Film Experience,” Vivian Sobchack identifies the three metaphors for cinema that have prevailed since the inception of film theory: the frame, the window, and the mirror. She explains: The first two, the frame and the window, represent the opposing poles of classical film theory, while the third, the mirror, represents the synthetic conflation of perception and expression that characterizes most contemporary film theory. What is interesting to note is that all three metaphors relate directly to the screen rectangle and to the film as a static viewed object, and only indirectly to the dynamic activity of viewing that is engaged in by both the film and the spectator, each as viewing subjects. The exchange and reversibility of perception and expression (both in and as the film and spectator) are suppressed, as are the intrasubjective and intersubjective foundations of cinematic communication.10

Velázquez’s door, previously ignored by film theorists, stands to be the ideal conduit through which the ‘exchange and reversibility’ of perception and expression may flourish. The painted man who stands on the threshold between the darkness of the room and the brightness of the nearly abstract hallway represents this oscillation that occurs between the darkness of the movie theater and the brightness of the movie screen. Rather than passively receiving visual input (such as from a window, mirror, or picture frame) which is by definition flawed by the unreliability of senses, the metaphor of

9 Foucault, 26. 10 Sobchack, 45. Emphasis hers. 5

a door allows a spectator to enter into a dialogic relationship with the image in order to lift the deceitful veil imposed by the senses. By opening up this door, one may begin the quest for the truthful nature of an image. Michael Haneke is one of the heirs to the Cartesian dilemma of the treachery of images.11 He transcends borders both in terms of the locations used in his films (having shot in Austria, France, and the United States) and in the themes explored in the films themselves. In this way, his films are representative of globalized, contemporary cinema, in that they arise from a collective unconscious shared by citizens of the entire world, rather than taking their influences from any one cinematic tradition in particular. The contemporary universality of his oeuvre is also derived from its medium: Haneke shoots in digital video, which is cheaper than film and which can be copied endlessly with no degradation in quality. One of the predominant themes in his work is the adulterated meaning forced upon an image by the deceit inherent to the sense of vision. His second feature, Benny’s Video (1992), examines the life of a teenager whose omnipresent video camera captures both the banal and disturbing events in his life—in effect, a character choosing to live vicariously through what is captured by the camera lens. In a pivotal sequence, the blurred similarity between real life and film that Benny experiences allows him to commit a murder. The Piano Teacher (2002) deals with an accomplished pianist who teaches at a prestigious conservatory. Her skill as a musician provides a counterpoint her personal life, which is populated with sexual fetishes that betray her frigid exterior. One of these fetishes involves a sort of voyeurism that goes beyond its usual visual connotation in order to make use of other senses: while in a private peep-show booth, she sniffs a dirty handkerchief left in the trashcan by the previous patron. Haneke’s 2005 film, Caché, is a close cinematic equivalent of Velázquez’s Las Meninas in that an individual is confronted with an image of himself that has undergone the adulteration created by another’s perspective. Caché examines questions of memory, guilt, and trauma within the context of the aftermath of the Algerian War of Independence. The main characters, Georges and Anne Laurent,12 receive a mysterious videotape on their doorstep, unaccompanied by any identifying information; this tape seems to be a surveillance video depicting the façade of their house. Georges declares the vantage point for such a shot impossible, since he is unable to find a camera, which intensifies their fear. The tapes continue to arrive, without any hint of motivation or source; as a result, Georges and Anne to seek police involvement, though the police are unwilling to take any action precisely because no explicit threat has been made. It soon becomes apparent that this unspecified threat is directed toward Georges when childlike drawings appear; the contents of these drawings allude to specific events from his childhood, though he is loathe to explain their significance to his wife and son. Georges’ quest for answers leads him to Majid, an Algerian man who was to become his adopted brother after the latter’s parents were killed in the Paris massacre of 1961. (Georges provides an explanation of these events to Anne after she has been introduced to Majid via surveillance tape. He says, “In October ’61, the FLN called all Algerians to a demonstration in Paris. October 17, 1961. Enough said. Papon. The police massacre. They drowned about 200 Arabs in the Seine. Including Majid’s parents, most likely. They never came back.”) Majid denies involvement, and the tapes continue to arrive. Georges becomes plagued by flashbacks to his childhood, which contextualize the childlike drawings that accompanied the tapes.

11 I am of course borrowing the title of Magritte’s famous painting that claims, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” underneath an image of a pipe. When looking at this painting, one thinks to see a pipe—but representation gets caught up in itself, and what actually exists is the careful application of paint to canvas that happens to depict the pipe. 12 Haneke appears to possess a particular affinity for these names, using variants (in French, German, and English) in Benny’s Video, Funny Games (1997), his own remake of Funny Games (2008), Code Unknown (2000), and Time of the Wolf (2003). Of particular interest is Code Unknown, in which Juliette Binoche plays a character named Anne Laurent—her character’s exact name in Caché. 6

The repeated image of a person spitting blood is mirrored in a short sequence in which an unidentified child coughs up blood. This sequence appears without explanation (in much the same way as the drawings themselves), and it is only through the succeeding flashbacks and Georges’ conversation with his mother that we are able to identify the child and his role in the narrative. These flashbacks portray the complex sequence of events that provoked Georges’ parents to send Majid away. Although Georges seems to provide an explanation to Anne, his explanation is complicated by a flashback showing the threat of violence made by one boy to another; the identification is ambiguous as to which one is Georges and which is Majid.13 Instead of exposing the reality of what actually happened, these incomplete interpretations only serve to confuse it. The arrival of the tapes and drawings cause Georges to confront this previously-ignored event from his childhood, an act which provides a scaled-down version of the French silence following the Algerian War, which proves to be an example of the “dark stains on the collective unconscious”14 with which Haneke prefers to work. The exposition given by Georges alludes to the nature of this silence: he evokes Papon and the date in telegraphic sentences deprived of predicates. He glosses over the primary facts, distancing himself by refusing to comment on them and leaving his interlocutor to fill in the gaps. His declaration of “Enough said” shows his resistance to elaborate upon the situation, as if he would take responsibility for the situation by virtue of enunciating it. Instead, he pares down his words in order to limit the degree to which he controls the event. By eschewing his interpretation of the massacre (in which he took no part), Georges seeks to distance himself from the actions he did commit as an indirect result of it. Georges’ resistance to narrative structure brings us back to our initial discussion of the legal code established through the medium of cinema: the unknown voyeur deflects his own crime by sending the tapes and drawings that prove George’s culpability for another crime. Georges, however, finds himself unable to deflect his own blame: he alludes to an event in which yet another crime has been committed, but the events of the police massacre are linked to the impetus for Georges’ own crime. Any elaboration he could give would only serve to incriminate himself further. As a result, he is trapped in a double bind where absolution seems impossible. At the time of its release, critics often compared Caché to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, citing the combination the radical violence against the spectator of Psycho with the threatening-yet- alluring voyeurism of Rear Window. The videotapes that the Laurents receive are embedded within the film as if they were seamless continuations of the narrative itself; just as these tapes are unaccompanied by identifying information for Georges, they are likewise unaccompanied by any sort of cinematic calling card for the spectator. Thus, every time a new tape is received, the spectator experiences it in its disturbing, context-less vacuum. This undifferentiated merger of object (the film watched by Georges) and narrative (the film titled Caché) projects a new destination on the path started by Velázquez and taken up by Hitchcock with regard to the dissolving boundaries that used to separate image, referent, and medium. This paper will attempt to define Haneke’s interpretation of montage with specific focuses on its incorporation of the spectator and the ethical consequences of the mise en abyme of video within video.

Pidgin, Creole, Dialect

Since the birth of cinema, filmmakers have created, structured, and improved film language to become a system that is elegant yet immediately accessible to even the youngest viewer. A new

13 Save the heavy-handed metaphor of the decapitation of a rooster, a symbol of France. 14 Richard Porton, “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke.” Cineaste (2005): 50. 7

medium, combining the mechanical reproduction of photography, the narrative and performative properties of theater, and the flexible and ever-changing tempo of music, required a new grammar by which it could be understood. Certain combinations of movement, distance, focal lengths, angles, et cetera, are used so often that they have achieved the point of becoming paradigms of montage. In order to more precisely define these paradigms, one may look to Christian Metz’s Grande syntagmatique de la bande-images, in which he identifies different codes of montage (which he calls syntagmas). One brief example is the descriptive syntagma: “the description of a landscape (a tree, followed by a shot of a stream running next to the tree, followed by a view of a hill in the distance, etc.). In the descriptive syntagma, the only intelligible relation of coexistence between the objects successively shown by the images is a relation of spatial coexistence.”15 Thus one uses the tool of chronology in order to create the effect of spatial relationship; the effortless translation of time to space is what renders the descriptive syntagma comprehensible in the discourse that occurs between filmmaker and spectator. Sergei Eisenstein provides a description of another phenomenon via Chinese ideograms: “By the combination of two ‘depictables’ is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable. For example: the picture for water and the picture of an eye signifies ‘to weep’; the picture of an ear near the drawing of a door = ‘to listen’; […] It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that are depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content—into intellectual contexts and series.”16 The chronological linkage of individual shots may also indicate a mood in addition to a spatial relationship. The classic example of the relationships inspired by chronology is Lev Kuleshov’s series of experiments, performed in the 1920s. In one, he alternated the same shot of an actor’s neutral face with counter-shots of a bowl of soup, a coffin, and a girl; the audience, provoked by the link between temporal relationships and emotion, saw each occurrence of the actor’s face as depicting a different emotion: hunger, grief, and desire, respectively.17 Another experiment was created through the juxtaposition of scenes shot thousands of miles apart: citizens on Moscow streets appear to be looking out the White House in Washington, D.C. by virtue of the successive editing.18 While Kuleshov’s first experiment demonstrates Eisenstein’s theory of montage (temporal relationships inspire moods), the second provides an example of what Metz identified as a descriptive syntagma (temporal relationships imply spatial relationships). The Kuleshov Effect is not just reserved for experimental cinema; Alfred Hitchcock used the same principle in Rear Window (1954): “In the same way, let’s take a close-up of Stewart looking out of the window at a little dog that’s being lowered in a basket. Back to Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But if in the place of the little dog you show a half-naked girl exercising in front of her open window, and you go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he’s seen as a dirty old man!”19 Hitchcock emphasizes the actions performed by the audience—Jimmy Stewart is seen as a dirty old man—and, in doing so, summarizes the ease by which the filmmaker’s manipulative discourse is understood by the audience. Contemporary avant-garde cinema often seeks to play with the codes of montage to deliberately mislead the viewer. Gaspar Noé’s 2002 film Irréversible employs a reverse chronological order in which disorienting camerawork creates a labyrinth out of ordinary space and nausea- inducing infrasound tests the physical limits of the spectator; as if that weren’t enough, Noé

15 Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 48. 16 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form (New York: Harvest, 1977), 30. 17 “Kuleshov Effect,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Effect (accessed May 25, 2009). 18 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 228. 19 Helen Scott and François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 216. 8

challenges the viewer to undertake a second viewing of the disturbing content in order to catch the detail on which the film’s meaning hinges. Michel Gondry confounds dreams, fantasies, flashbacks and reality in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and La Science des rêves (2006). Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985) blurs the lines between documentary and fiction through Varda’s reconstitution of Mona’s life through talking-head interviews with the people who met her before her death. The trend toward ambiguous narratives draws attention to what point film is capable of forcing its perspective, whereas traditional narrative film generally uses the convenient invisibility provided by classical montage. The main character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit soldat (1960) attests, “La photographie, c'est la vérité, et le cinéma, c'est vingt-quatre fois la vérité par seconde;”20 Haneke modifies this quotation in order to claim that “film is a lie at twenty-four frames per second”21— what is projected on screen has been mediated by director and camera lens before it can even be mediated by the deceitful senses of the spectator. All film, then, is necessarily fictional in nature. Even genres that are generally accepted to be truthful (i.e. documentary) present a carefully constructed point of view. Cinema creates its own version of truth that is separate from the ephemeral, absolute Truth of experience. Roland Barthes elaborates upon this distinction: “[I]n the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images.”22 In this quotation, we can see echoes of Mitry’s definition of film as “representing life with life itself”: cinematic truth is deceptive in that the similarity between referent and simulacrum allows it to masquerade as absolute Truth; however, the quality that appears to promote cinematic truth to absolute Truth is in fact the very same quality that negates all truth whatsoever. The algebraic path that leads us through Mitry and Barthes stabilizes the conclusion made by Haneke: the representation of life, by its very definition of movement through time, erases not only itself, but also all traces of the referent. Considered in this context, one might claim that Haneke uses Caché as a quasi-homodiegetic vehicle to comment on the power of deception in images; just as Velázquez paints himself and his subjects onto his own canvas, Haneke films his subjects via surveillance and includes that within the larger diegetic context, though in the case of Caché the artist has completely hidden himself behind his canvas. He sends video tapes that are ostensibly meaningless to a family supported and surrounded by a medium that attempts to create meaning: Georges hosts a talk show about books, Anne works for a publishing house, and the walls of their house are lined with books—even the coat closet has bookshelves. The apparent lack of discourse in the surveillance tapes proves to be problematic: Georges has no tools with which he could theorize its meaning. When Georges says he cannot find the camera used to create the tapes, his comment is not spatially motivated— obviously it must have been possible for a camera to film from that angle—but rather diegetically motivated: the tapes are coming from outside the plot. The first surveillance tape appears virtually undifferentiated from the narrative in its form, save for the opening credits which appear superimposed over a shot of the Laurents’ house. Bordwell discusses the nature of credit sequences: Typically, the opening and closing of the film are the most self-conscious, omniscient, and communicative passages. The credit sequence and the first few shots usually bear traces of an overt narration. Once the action has started, however, the narration becomes more covert, letting the characters and their interaction take over the transmission of information. Overt narrational activity returns at certain

20 “The Little Soldier,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_petit_soldat (accessed May 25, 2009). 21 Porton, 51. 22 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 78. 9

conventional moments: the beginnings and endings of scenes (e.g., establishing shots, shots of signs, camera movements out from or in to significant objects, symbolic dissolves), and that summary passage known as the 'montage sequence.23

This first tape appears sans introduction, constituting the first minutes of the film as if it were a long establishing shot. The image track is occupied wholly by the content of the tape—a static exterior shot of the Laurents’ house—while the sound track consists of Georges and Anne speaking about something that does not directly correspond to the image; moreover, the sound of a door closing does not align temporally with the image of a door closing. To the educated spectator, the juxtaposition of the seemingly unrelated image and sound tracks is not problematic; their simultaneity suggests a temporal and spatial relationship in spite of their misaligned contents, in much the same way as temporal juxtaposition alludes to spatial or significative relationships as in Metz or Eisenstein, respectively. This expectation, however, is shattered by the first indication of the image’s status as a prop: the fidelity of the image is suddenly changed by the characteristic tracking bands produced by fast-forwarding, and it is only then that the spectator learns that the image and sound tracks do not, in fact, inhabit the same space. Bordwell’s discourse on classical montage alludes to the fluidity of the transition from overt to covert narration: the narration lets the characters take over. The transition from overt to covert narration in Caché, however, is more jagged; the overt narrational activity (i.e., credit sequence and establishing shot) grasps obstinately to the image track while the characters must fight for control of the narrative, finally resulting to warping the image itself. This struggle reappears throughout the film with each introduction of a new surveillance tape; what seem to be establishing shots are instead revealed to be tapes only after the characters fight to seize control of the narrative. The first tape had arrived on the doorstep of the Laurents’ house in a plastic bag, unaccompanied by any material that might contextualize it. Anne explains that it runs for two hours while she fast-forwards through a good portion of it to show that the camera remains static. Indeed, the content of the tape is almost completely unedited, save for the decision to frame the scene from its particular standpoint. To edit is to direct attention; to direct attention is to speak cinematically. The unmoving, uncut work does not privilege any one action over the next; a man riding by on a bicycle is given the same importance as Anne leaving the house. This attempt at a panoptic focus does not lead to any greater meaning; in this way, this first tape portrays what one might call a fablua rasa (after the Russian Formalist term translated more or less as ‘story’)24: content whose meaning is still to be inscribed even after its creation. In Eisensteinian terms, a single, unchanging shot is “neutral in content,” incapable of “intellectual contexts.”25 The lack of commentary (e.g., voiceover, inter-titles) further contributes to the neutrality of the image. The surveillance shot is anarrational in that it is void of discourse. On the surface, this footage appears to be an attempt to break free from the mediation forced on an object as it undergoes the transformation from referent to filmic image. However, the surveillance sequence is soon revealed to inhabit the space of the diegesis rather than construct it; with this contextualizing information, the tape gains a new status as an exemplar of the treachery of images, as if it could be accompanied by the subtitle ceci n’est pas un film: it is not a film; rather, it is the representation of a film. The second surveillance tape appears on screen in the same manner as the first, which is to say, unannounced by the narrative. The framing is similar: a static camera captures the house from the same vantage point as in the first tape; the only pictorial difference is that the more recent tape is

23 Bordwell, 22-23. 24 Bordwell, 18. 25 Eisenstein, 30. 10

shot at night. There is, however, one important distinction: this time, the sound track corresponds with the image track, broadcasting the purr of engines as cars pass in the street and the footsteps taken by Georges as he approaches the house. This difference appears to contextualize this scene as part of the narrative itself, perhaps as an establishing shot; the spectator has already been trained by Haneke to identify material within the diegesis via a disjuncture between the sound and image tracks. Here, their correspondence seems to distinguish this shot from the first surveillance tape. The scene ends without commentary and without signifying distortions (as in the tracking bands created by fast-forwarding the first tape). Overall, the spectator is torn between the resemblances and differences of the two shots; we are confused by the standardized language of montage (which serves to condition the educated filmgoer) versus the language that Haneke has established thus far in the film (which is overtly recognized). The answer is not revealed until several minutes later, after a sequence of Georges at work, which itself references the treachery of images. The very next shot is of Georges signing off as host of his book program. He is framed head-on as he says, “Merci d’être de plus en plus nombreux à nous regarder.” Georges is aware that he is being watched and he confronts his spectators directly about this fact; the narrational motivation for this is, of course, his role as the host, but the juxtaposition between this sequence and the previous one pits Georges against the hidden observers who are responsible for the surveillance. Of course, nothing is as it seems, so Georges’ confrontation is in fact the representation of a confrontation. The book-lined backdrop on the set mimics the walls of Georges’ house; however, an assistant soon draws Georges away from the comfort and familiarity of the set, where he takes a phone call. He is imprisoned by a series of columns serving as the structure of the set. This shot provides a direct contrast to the assertive Georges seen on the book program; whereas artificial Georges in his artificial home (i.e., the set) confronts his observers and acknowledges their surveillance, actual Georges is unable to take action or even draw conclusions about the tapes—he is trapped and powerless. The change in lighting further supports this dichotomy: the powerful lights used for filming (that is to say, artificial lighting) reflect George’s confidence, whereas the dim light offstage serves as a metaphor for his ignorance. After this sequence, we see Georges and Anne at home, discussing the second tape while fast-forwarding it. The plasticity of the image is again made apparent via horizontal tracking bands, which contextualizes the problematic scene of the house at night that had occurred a few minutes earlier: it was, in fact, a surveillance tape. This conclusion serves to further manipulate the expectation of the spectator. Whereas disjunction between image track and sound track had been the tool by which the spectator could delineate scenes of the narrative from scenes of diegetic surveillance, this second tape obliterates this key due to the correlation between the image of cars and the sound of their engines. Its function as diegetic material having been revealed, Georges and Anne discuss this tape in voiceover. They also discuss a picture that accompanies the tape (something which was not provided for the first tape): a crudely rendered crayon drawing of a person spitting blood. Their hands are briefly shown touching the paper, but otherwise they do not inhabit the same space as Haneke’s material. The picture is filmed using the same techniques used by the surveillance tapes: a frontality captured via a motionless camera; this inspires the question as to whether the shot of the drawing was filmed by Haneke the director who films the narrative itself, or Haneke the voyeur who creates and delivers the surveillance tapes. The limits that normally separate lived experience from plastic creation are consequently starting to blur. No message has been made explicit as to the purpose of these surveillance tapes; as previously discussed, they are filmed in a way that deprives them of any meaning. Georges and Anne perceive the tapes and drawings to be threatening, although the police refuse to intervene, citing the lack of an explicit threat as their reason. In fact, it is this precise lack of a threat which is 11

paradoxically so menacing: the professional and personal lives of the Laurents are bound up in meaning, perhaps even more so than the average person. The bookshelves that line their walls envelop them and act as a fortress; the omnipresence of books even prohibits the existence of windows. Symbolically, these books serve as a counterpart to the tapes, reminding one that the latter are meaningless. This juxtaposition is made explicit on screen when Georges receives a second illustration in the mail at work. He stands in the center of the shot; on the right of the screen, and closer to the camera, is a bookshelf. A long focal-length lens flattens the perspective of the shot to remove any indication of physical distance between Georges and the bookshelf while similarly obliterating the proximity between bookshelf and camera. He appears to merge into it: the angles of the side of the bookshelf complete the angles of Georges’ shoulder, which it hides. The eye is tricked into seeing the totality of Georges’ body, when in fact his shoulder is hidden from view. This forced perspective makes the books appear to be several times their actual size; they loom over Georges’ head, leaning towards him as if they were on the verge of toppling over and crushing him. This shot acts as a metaphor for the pressure from the influence of signification that Georges constantly suffers, and that renders the surveillance tapes so menacing to him. Later in the film we see that, in addition to hosting a literary talk show, Georges is actively involved behind the scenes as an editor. Through these two acts, he is shown to interpret meaning as well as ordain it. The sequence starts with a clip of the guests on the show discussing Rimbaud. In what seems to be Haneke’s characteristic, the discussion occupies the entire frame, and it is only several seconds later that it is revealed to be a prop of the diegesis via a voiceover track commenting on the image. Georges gives instructions to the editor to cut the scene so that the program refrains from being too theoretical; the image is then rewound. The resulting sequence overtly provides a look into editing and filmmaking, which adds another dimension to Georges’ roles: as a host, he is assertive and manipulative; as the recipient of surveillance videos, he is impotent and manipulated. This scene acts as an explanation for Haneke’s claim that film is a lie at 24 frames per second: this program seems to be truthful in that the dialogue is unscripted; the truth lies not in the content of the statements—that is, it is of no consequence whether or not Isabelle meddled in Rimbaud’s work—but in the fact that these statements were made by these particular people in this particular order. This scene clearly illustrates the contrary: Georges is able to manipulate the stock in order to distort his guests’ thoughts and make them say what he wants to hear. The manipulation inherent to narration, and specifically filmmaking, is made transparent in this scene. When rewound, the footage of the literary talk show lacks the tracking bands seen in the analog surveillance tapes; a contrast is thus created between the hi-tech, glossy television program shot in DV, and the low-tech surveillance tapes. The former is elaborately constructed and meticulously sutured in order to appear as something it isn’t, whereas the latter has no pretension as to what it is. Georges, intricately entangled in the machinations and illusions of editing, cannot reconcile this difference; film as he knows it presents one statement while hiding another. When confronted with a segment of film (i.e. the surveillance tapes) that makes no apparent statement, he becomes preoccupied with finding what is hidden. Georges’ function as an editor permeates his life in a way that is more pervasive than just his role as a viewer of film; it also fundamentally alters the way he speaks and interacts with those around him. We have already discussed his conversation with Anne in which he explains what happened to Majid’s parents: his telegraphic sentences contain the absolute minimum amount of information necessary to communicate an idea to his interlocutor. He pinpoints the elements essential to his story—the FLN; Paris; October 17, 1961; Papon; the police massacre—and lets them speak in their bare simplicity. Through the juxtaposition of these elements, he creates an eloquent series of images—or perhaps we should use Eisenstein’s words and say he takes images that are 12

neutral in meaning and combines them to create an intellectual context. Georges speaks the way montage works: the chronological association of these images produces a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Georges’ declaration of “enough said” is more than just his refusal to get enmeshed in his subject matter; it is also an affirmation that he has sufficiently edited the story he tells. Georges’ Eisensteinian manner of speaking is also present when he confronts Majid for the first time, though it is less successful in its eloquence. After appearing at his apartment, Georges asks a series of questions to which Majid cannot even begin to respond: “What do you want from me? Do you want money? What, then? It’s a game, is that it? I don’t want to play. I’ve grown up. So what’s the point of your actions?” Georges’ signature lack of exposition is at work in this conversation—his assumption of Majid’s guilt allows him to cut to the chase. Confused by this unprovoked interrogation, Majid only responds by repeating Georges’ words and by posing his own questions. The series of questions that Georges spits at Majid is bereft of the imagery that montage depends on; as a result, Majid is incapable of determining the nature of the accusation. When Georges realizes that his montage-speak is failing him, he produces one of the drawings he had received of a person spitting blood. In the absence of enunciated imagery, this actual image gains an eloquent agency that instantly clarifies the situation for Majid: this is the source of Georges’ rage; the shared personal context of the drawing is the source of Georges’ accusation. Once Majid has processed this final clue, Georges’ montage-speak becomes clear, and Majid is finally able to respond in a significant way. In this confrontation, Georges’ provocation is explained in the question, “Who’s been terrorizing my family?” Georges and Anne are clearly disturbed by the tapes and drawings that appear on their front step, a sentiment which is also felt by the audience: “We are left feeling as the characters feel, uneasy, violated, spied upon, surrounded by faceless observers.”26 What is it about the narrative form of the film that allows us to empathize so closely with its characters?

Funeral March of a Marionette: Michael Haneke Presents

Libby Saxton identifies one aspect of what makes the surveillance tapes so disconcerting: “What we at first read as a long shot turns out instead to have been a close-up of the screen on which Georges and Anne Laurent are viewing the tape. Finally regaining our bearings, we realize that we are inside the house we are viewing from the outside,”27 and later, “What we initially interpret as threats of future violence prove instead to be allusions to the past.”28 The tapes take the spatial and temporal clues normally used in montage and create inverse equations: far is close, outside is inside, future is past; the senses we have developed as educated filmgoers to orient ourselves are coerced to lead us astray under Haneke’s manipulative hand. Newly initiated into this world of inverse relationships, we find ourselves plunged into the ocean of misleading montage, at such a depth that we are unable to conceive of normal spatial relationships such as up and down. David Bordwell quotes Raoul Walsh: “‘There is only one way in which to shoot a scene, and that's the way which shows the audience what's happening next.’ Classical editing aims at making each shot the logical outcome of its predecessor and at reorienting the spectator through repeated

26 Roger Ebert, “Caché,” Movie Reviews, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060112/REVIEWS/51220007/1023 (accessed May 27, 2009). 27 Libby Saxton, “Secrets and revelations: Off-screen space in Michael Haneke’s Cachê (2005),” Studies in French Cinema 7, no. 1 (2007): 8. 28 Saxton, 9. 13

setups.”29 In Caché, however, one may note a trend toward the opposite: the ‘what’s happening next’ of each scene is never delivered; instead, one receives a deliberately disorienting push in the wrong direction. However, the first surveillance tape proves to be unsettling before it is retrospectively contextualized by the inverse relationships created by the subsequent scenes. Earlier, I suggested that the matter of space enhances the disturbing atmosphere that we already feel; thus, the question is: what is the source of that atmosphere? In fact, it is a matter of temporality. Conventions of storytelling necessitate a manipulated chronology; segments are stretched out in order to underline their significance, deleted for their lack of relation to the plot, or inverted so as to stylistically highlight or hide certain elements. The educated filmgoer understands this conceit without even recognizing it—a span of years may be traversed in a matter of seconds, or an instantaneous action may be repeated in order to offer a change in perspective—and is able to follow the average plot with little to no confusion. Montage is instinctual. But the spectator learns very quickly that Caché does not exhibit ‘the average plot’. The first shot lasts several minutes with no primary action; characters enter and exit the shot, exhibiting an indifference toward the camera that is reflected back at them with equal intensity. Within a matter of seconds after the disappearance of the opening credits, it becomes apparent that the exterior of the house is as it always is: inert and omnipresent. To return to Mitry’s quote, Haneke represents inertia with inertia. Or, more accurately, “for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were;”30 André Bazin identifies this as the element that separates cinema from the other arts, defining it as “objectivity in time.”31 Read in the context of Caché, this quotation becomes more focused in its scope, for the stretching and compression inherent to all montage relieves the ‘thing’ of its duration. The surveillance videos attempt to take cinema back to its very essence as ‘objectivity in time,’ a feat which is accomplished by paradoxically stripping the content of the accoutrements inherent to the medium (e.g., movement in space, movement in time). With the static shot of the house, we are confronted with a blatant lack of trickery, but since cinema is predicated on trickery and artifice, the stark, ontological reality of this house becomes disturbing—for it must be hiding something. Alfred Hitchcock provides a director’s insight on this phenomenon: “You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel they know what’s coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts…You turn the viewer in one direction and then in another; you keep him as far as possible from what’s actually going to happen.”32 What would normally be left on the editing room floor is instead projected as Caché’s opening statement. We may now add a fourth to our list of inverse relationships created by this enigmatic shot: insignificant is significant. Unlike the other relationships identified by Saxton, this relationship is not dependent on the succeeding context in order to be understood; rather, its jarring nature becomes apparent as the scene continues to unfold and expectations remain unfulfilled. Within the first few minutes, the spectator has already been deceived according to Hitchcock’s rules. In order to more properly contextualize cinematic deception, we should take a closer look at Alfred Hitchcock, to whom Michael Haneke is often compared. The most blatant example of radical violence against the spectator is Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which provoked the above

29 David Bordwell, “Classical Hollywood Cinema” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, 27 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 30 André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 15 31 Ibid., 14. 32 Truffaut. 14

quotation about establishing and denial of expectations. The murder of Marion Crane marks a sharp turning point in the relationship between montage and expectations. The spectator is initially conditioned to expect that the plot of the film is about the theft of forty thousand dollars; the sum has been enunciated several times by the client and by Marion’s boss, solidifying its place in the spectator’s subconscious; Marion has a clear-cut motive explained in the opening scene, namely to pay off the alimony of her lover’s ex-wife so that they can get married; through conversation with Norman at the Bates Motel, she appears to harbor second thoughts about her deed. These facts establish the importance of Marion’s crime; Hitchcock uses this careful attention to structure in order to profit maximally from the narrative hijack he then commits: the spectator is treated to the gruesome murder of the film’s main character (on the verge of repentance, no less), punctuated by the slow zoom out from Marion’s unblinking eye. The violence that has been committed on screen by Norman Bates mimics the violence that has been committed through the screen by Hitchcock: unexpected, personal, brutal. Similarly, what might have started out as an establishing shot of the Laurents’ house is subjected to the unblinking eye of the camera lens, temporally distorted to the point where it becomes unrecognizable as an establishing shot. Though the grisly death has been omitted (for now33), the Hitchcockian violence against the spectator remains present in this blatant repudiation of classical narrative montage. The spectator becomes caught up in his own expectations and must deal with the aftershock of having those expectations shattered. But we most take note of one stark contrast between Hitchcock and Haneke: whereas the former inundates the spectator with its mirror image, the latter denies us of it. In Psycho, the murder sequence ends with Marion watching us watching her; the violent sequence finds its cadence in the reciprocated act of looking between spectator and screen. Caché, however, does not contain a scene of complicit looking as punctuation for its violence; Georges and Anne refuse to acknowledge us as spectators. This trend continues throughout the film; upon receiving each new tape, Georges and Anne are shot either from behind or in profile, but with their faces always hidden. There is no counter-shot provided to complement the binary opposition established by the spectators in the theater; it is as if this unacknowledged spectator remains alone in the scene. The flouting of montage within the space of the film carries the consequence that the montage across the screen has also been flouted. We will return to this argument. One may find a more explicit contrast to this deflected gaze in another Hitchcock film: Rear Window (1954). L.B. Jeffries is the epitome of what it means to be a voyeur; employed as a photojournalist, he has been trained to observe, and when his broken leg prevents him from taking pictures, he focuses his voyeuristic tendencies toward the courtyard that faces his apartment building. Each shot of the courtyard, that is to say, each shot from Jeffries’ point of view, is bracketed by a counter-shot of Jeffries as he watches. This shot/counter-shot of courtyard and Jeffries leads to a dialogic exchange between Jeffries and the spectator; each time he is portrayed in counter-shot, the spectator is confronted with Jeffries’ gaze. A new shot/counter-shot relationship is formed across the screen, reaching into the theater. This counter-shot is proof that Jeffries is complicit with our voyeuristic act; we watch him and he watches us. He discusses this very problem with his girlfriend, Lisa: Jeffries: Do you suppose it’s ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens until you can see the freckles on the back of his neck, and almost read his mail? Do you suppose it’s ethical even if you prove he didn’t commit a crime? Lisa: I’m not much on rear window ethics.

33 Though it will inevitably arrive with Majid’s suicide. 15

Jeffries: Of course, they have the same chance. They can look at me like a bug under glass, if they want to.34

Jeffries comes to the conclusion that a mutual gaze satisfies the ethical dilemma created through voyeurism. This discussion on ‘rear window ethics’ may be applied to the space of the theater as well: it is permissible for the spectator to watch as long as the object of his regard is given an equal opportunity to watch him back. In Caché, however, there is no reciprocal gaze shared between the Georges and the spectator. They never face us, and consequently never approve of our action in the way that Jeffries does. We watch without permission, hidden from their view and shut out from their actions. This cinematic ostracism magnifies the inappropriateness of our voyeuristic action: we are outlaws, committing a crime against the ethics normally established by the language of classical narrative montage. We watch unethically because we watch without being watched. The denial of a counter-shot creates a missing element in Hitchcock’s equation of looking. Surveillance in the historical context of Caché is more threatening than in the historical context of Rear Window; with newer, smaller technological apparatuses, the voyeur is at a distance and thus unidentifiable. In the space of the film, the ‘rear window ethics’ that Jeffries defined is breached, because there is no opportunity to reciprocate the gaze. These rivalrous treatments take us back to our initial analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas wherein one may trace the trajectories of visual exchange between spectator and object. The spectator takes his place outside of the frame, yet continues to participate in its representation, as the lines of sight transcend the material boundary of canvas or screen. In graphing the trajectories of vision in Rear Window, one finds a tidy isosceles triangle of mutual exchange among the spectator, courtyard, and Jeffries; each watches the others, and by doing so, establishes his complacency in the role of being watched according to ‘rear window ethics.’ The map of Caché is more complex, its deflections more closely resembling those of Velázquez’s painting. The surveillance tapes are confronted with the gaze of both Georges and the spectator, yet just as the spectator cannot directly view Velázquez’s represented canvas, he cannot directly view Georges. As one must follow the reflection from canvas to mirror to spectator in Las Meninas, one must similarly follow a trajectory of deflections in Caché in order to attempt to establish a reciprocal gaze with Georges. The principal theme of hiding, from which Caché draws its title, is reflected in more than just the visual topography of the film: Georges hides his despicable past actions from Anne; the source and purpose of the tapes are hidden from the characters and spectator; the aftermath of the Algerian War is hidden by French guilt. Slowly, however, the smokescreens constructed in the space of the film begin to disintegrate. The fifth surveillance tape portrays a conversation between Georges and Majid that had already been shown as part of the diegesis; now, as a diegetic prop, the scene continues on the tape and shows Majid breaking down after Georges has left. Upon viewing this tape, Anne realizes that Georges has lied to her about his direct involvement in the content of the tapes and confronts him about it. This surveillance tape, the first to portray any indication of emotion, opens up the cycle of deflection. The lie has been revealed; nothing is hidden. The resulting conversation between Georges and Anne is shown in classical shot/counter-shot. This sequence, paired with the surveillance tape that inspires it, causes the map of deflected vision to unfold. Majid, Anne, and Georges are all framed with a frontality that opposes each of them to the spectator and to each other; with the twin revelations of Majid’s innocence and Georges’ lie, the trajectories of vision establish themselves in the form of a square with mutual regard between the following: Georges, Anne, the spectator, and the tape.

34 Rear Window. 16

The pivotal event on which both the narrative and Georges’ guilt hinge is portrayed in the penultimate scene: Majid is sent away from Georges’ childhood farmhouse. This scene is shot in the same manner as the surveillance videos: a long shot that refuses to get involved with the characters, a long take that refuses to distort the action. Both techniques point to the quality of objectivity: the scene unfolds without the interference of camera’s complementary actions of masking and exaggerating. By selecting and deleting elements of a given situation, the camera controls and adapts it for human possession and consumption—effectively domesticating it. In this particular scene from Georges’ memory, the camera attempts to defy these domesticating tendencies as much as possible (for the camera will always mask certain elements, and every scene must begin and end with cuts) in order to let the sequence speak for itself. This combination of long shot and long take has disturbing consequences for the scene of Majid’s literal ostracism as well as for the surveillance tapes, though for opposing reasons. The difference lies in each sequence’s function within the narrative. This penultimate scene in which Majid is sent away is a flashback that ostensibly resides within Georges’ memory: it is preceded by a sequence in which Georges takes a nap; thus, as Eisenstein and Metz have theorized, with the juxtaposition of these two scenes, we infer some sort of causal relationship to bridge this jump in time and location. In a portion of narrative cinema purporting to be a subjective moment, the distance that the camera takes drains this sequence of its emotion. We are led to believe, according to the chain of events, that this is the defining moment in Georges’ life; this is the reason why the anonymous person decided to send the surveillance tapes. Yet, in spite of the overwhelming evidence for the subjectivity and personal importance of this scene, it is devoid of any information that might allude to Georges’ feelings. Close-ups are avoided: there is no attempt to read the emotions that are no doubt inscribed on the faces of Majid and Georges’ parents. The surveillance tapes are filmed with these same techniques of long shot and long take, yielding a similar unsettling atmosphere, yet for a different reason entirely. The lack of emotion that rendered Majid’s ostracism so disquieting does not come into play here; the goal of surveillance is to cast an eye upon as wide a perspective as possible, with utmost importance being placed on objective fact. What makes these tapes disturbing to the Laurents is influenced by the masking and exaggerating effects of the camera, although we must approach this set of circumstances from the opposite end of the spectrum from the scene of Majid’s ostracism. In the mere act of focusing a camera in a particular direction, a filmmaker highlights its importance while eliminating anything outside the periphery of the frame. Even in surveillance, certain elements are ignored by the limitations of the camera’s lens, while others are magnified. The tapes effectively convey to Georges the message that an anonymous source has decided which fragments of his life are necessary, and which are disposable. The parallel sequences of the surveillance tapes and Georges’ flashback echo each other in an inverse way: the objective is filmed subjectively, and the subjective is filmed objectively. By attempting to rid this flashback scene of its emotion, Haneke is depriving them of Georges’ perspective, but instead of creating a truthful, unbiased representation of this event, the result is a scene that continues to be mediated by sensual unreliability. With this discovery, we can add yet again to the set of inverse relationships laid out by Libby Saxton at the beginning of this chapter: objective is subjective, and subjective is objective. The manipulation inherent to montage is a tool by which the treachery of images may be deliberately achieved.

“Separated from Us by Physics and Glass”35

Caché bears more than a passing resemblance to an American film that preceded it by nearly a decade: David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) opens with a surveillance tape that arrives upon the doorstep of Fred Madison and his wife, Renée, accompanied by a mysterious phrase over the intercom: “Dick Laurent is dead.” This information bears no significance for Fred, since he is unfamiliar with anyone by that name.36 This surveillance tape resembles the first one that arrives at Georges’ doorstep in that it shows the façade of the house, though the important distinction here is that the tape that Fred receives zooms in on his door before ending. The agency of the voyeuristic tape continues: the second tape they receive moves through the hallway of their house, arriving at their bedroom to show them sleeping. The third tape initially appears to be the same as the second, although the arrival at the bedroom is punctuated by the image of Fred crying over Renée’s bisected body. Fred is convicted of her murder, despite his pleas that he is innocent, and sentenced to death via electrocution. Already, one can see the deviance between Lost Highway and Caché, though these differences paradoxically serve to identify the similarity between the two. Lynch’s voyeur is permitted a far greater degree of movement, whereas Haneke’s voyeur never breaches the threshold of the Laurents’ house. As a result, Lynch’s voyeur is able to directly and successfully portray the crime that will absolve him of his own; Lynch’s police are impotent (as are Haneke’s) when confronted by Fred with regard to the voyeuristic tapes; as soon as the third tape appears, however, they swiftly convict and sentence Fred. The first act of this film clearly illustrates the legal code created by cinematic voyeurism. Haneke is more subtle in his approach: the crime captured by the surveillance tapes is hidden, and it is only through Georges’ reaction to it that we realize his culpability. Whereas Lynch’s evidence is clearly shown on screen and disputed by Fred, Haneke’s is implied in his images and further elaborated by Georges. Georges’ and Fred’s reactions to their crimes are also similar in nature. While on death row, Fred suffers debilitating headaches and seizures. One morning, the guards examine his room to find that Fred has inexplicably escaped, and in his place is a young mechanic named Pete who is unrelated to Fred in every way (including superficial physical resemblance). While this switch is never explained (in typical Lynchian fashion), the implication seems to be the exploration of a man’s bifurcated psyche, which echoes Renée’s bifurcated corpse. As with the majority of Lynch’s oeuvre, the sequence of events create a path of endlessly divergent forks which never meet up again; thus it is impossible to neatly categorize the Bill/Pete dissociation as a case of multiple personalities. However, the presence of Patricia Arquette in both storylines (Fred’s blond, bisected wife; a gangster’s redhead moll who takes more than a passing interest in Pete) provides a clue which links both men in more than a superficial way. The difference between Lost Highway and Caché is maintained in terms of overtness and subtlety. Lynch explores his character’s bifurcated psyche through the use of two different actors (Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty). Caché is more restrained; Georges is shown in a variety of situations that illustrate the dual roles between which he oscillates: (1) Child / man: Flashbacks to Georges’ childhood reveal him to be silent; when Majid approaches him with the axe, he remains dumbfounded. As an adult, he has learned to wield the power of his words: the role of narration in responsibility and ownership; the ability to deceive his wife. This transition from child to man is clearly demarcated by the defining incident around which

35 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Back Bay Books, 1997), 64. 36 Note the similarity between the name of the mystery man in Lost Highway and of Caché’s Georges Laurent. 18

his guilt revolves: he lied to his parents in order to prevent them from adopting Majid. This is Georges’ first taste of the power his words elicit. Though this power comes back to haunt him forty years later, he is slow to learn his lesson; instead, he continues to repeat the same pattern of deception in order to cover up the guilt he feels as a result of his initial, formative lie. (2) Editor / viewer: Due to his professional responsibilities as a television personality and editor, Georges realizes the power of manipulation inherent to cinema, specifically its capacities to hide and invent. When he finds himself on the other side of the screen as a viewer, however, this power terrifies him. He is aware to what extent the medium of cinema is capable of deception; he suspects the tapes possess a hidden meaning, but he is incapable of decoding it. (3) Strong / impotent: Georges’ arsenal of words and cinema only serves him so much. He hides his personal involvement in the tapes’ content from his wife; he bullies Majid and, in doing so, pushes him to his breaking point. However, neither of these actions brings him any closer to finding the voyeur and learning the motivation behind the threat he perceives from the tapes. As a detective, he is ineffectual. We also see that the lexical power he exerts enacts its karmic retribution against him: his initial lie about Majid provokes a cycle of guilt and terror; his lie to Anne causes her to seek comfort in the arms of another man; his ill-motivated accusation against Majid causes Majid to take his own life in front of an audience of one. For all of its Lynchian oddity, Lost Highway provides a clear road map of the stakes and implications of voyeurism and surveillance. Caché follows the same path, though Haneke sets his focus on exploring the terror that permeates a setting so bland in its realism that it could easily stand in for any European or North American town. He deprives Paris of the exoticism given to it in a multitude of other films; instead, the bleak grey of the architecture provides a backdrop suitable for dredging up the “dark stains on the collective unconscious.”37 The trauma felt by Georges as a reaction to the tapes is horrifyingly generic; as participants in the 21st century, we are all equally subjected to the deception inherent to montage. Cinema, moreso than any other medium, is the embodiment of the treachery of images, due precisely to the similarity it projects between referent and simulacrum—depicting “life with life itself,” to repeat our refrain of Mitry’s words. The absolute Truth of the referent is carefully hidden beneath a carefully sutured series of projected images that obliterate absolute Truth in favor of cinematic truth. The truth of the film finds itself not in our organic world of proximal warmth, but in a distant quilt first stitched in celluloid, then polyester, and now electrons—in short, it is “separated from us by physics and glass.”38

37 Porton, 50. 38 Wallace, 64. 19

Bibliography

Austin, Guy. Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Vol. 1, translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Bordwell, David. “Classical Hollywood Cinema” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 17-34. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, eighth edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.

Descartes, René. Discours de la méthode. Paris: Flammarion, 2000.

Ebert, Roger. “Caché,” Movie Reviews, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060112/REVIEWS/ 51220007/1023

Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form, translated by Jay Leyda. New York: Harvest, 1977.

Foucault, Michel. “Les Suivants” in Les mots et les choses, 19-31. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

Goldhill, Simon. “Drama and the city of Athens” and “The Oresteia” in Aeschylus: The Oresteia, 1-53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Goldhill, Simon. “The audience of Athenian tragedy” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P.E. Easterling, 54-68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Goldhill, Simon. “Greek drama and political theory” in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, edited by Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield, 60-88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Goulet, Andrea. “Introduction: The Epistemology of Optics: Seeing Subjects, Modern Minds” in Optiques, 1-15. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Grossvogel, D.I. “Haneke: The Coercing of Vision.” Film Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2007): 36-43.

Jameson, Fredric. “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film” in Movies and Methods Vol. II, edited by Bill Nichols, 715-733. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Jameson, Fredric. “Lacan and the Dialectic” in Lacan : The Silent Partners, edited by Slavoj Zizek, 365- 398. New York: Verso Books, 2006.

Judovitz, Dalia. “Vision, Representation, and Technology in Descartes” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michael Levin, 63-85. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Kemp, Martin. “Linear perspective from Rubens to Turner” in The Science of Art, 99-162. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

“Kuleshov Effect,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Effect

Lacan, Jacques. “L'essence de la tragédie: Un commentaire de l'Antigone de Sophocle” in Le Séminaire: Livre VII: L'Ethique de la psychanalyse (1959-1960), 285-333. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986.

“Las Meninas,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Meninas

“The Little Soldier,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_petit_soldat

Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1993.

Metz, Christian. “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 35-65. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Porton, Richard. “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke.” Cineaste (2005): 50-51.

Powrie, Phil and Keith Reader. “1970-1980: Psychoanalysis and Post-Structuralism” in French Cinema: A Student’s Guide, 68-71. London: Arnold Publishers, 2002.

Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

Rancière, Jacques. “Le cinéma, art contrarié.” Cahiers du cinema (2002): 57-63.

Rancière, Jacques. “S’il y a de l’irreprésentable” in Le destin des images, 125-153. Paris: La Fabrique Éditions, 2003.

Saxon, Libby. “Secrets and revelations: Off-screen space in Michael Haneke’s Cachê (2005).” Studies in French Cinema 7, no. 1 (2007): 5-17.

Scott, Helen and François Truffaut. Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Sobchack, Vivian. “Phenomenology and the Film Experience” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams, 36-58. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Thompson, Kristin. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 130-142. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Wallace, David Foster. “David Lynch Keeps His Head” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 146-212. New York: Back Bay Books, 1997. 21

Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 21-82. New York: Back Bay Books, 1997.

Zizek, Slavoj. “A Hair of the Dog That Bit You” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, edited by Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn and Ronald Corthell, 46-73. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

Zizek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007.

Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991.

Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. New York: Verso Books, 2002.