VII - Columbia University



THE CONTROL OF SCREEN IMAGES IN MICHAEL HANEKE’S CACHÉ

Abstract

This paper examines the use of various screen images in Haneke’s Caché. Coolly regarding his protagonist, Haneke interrupts regular scenes with recorded images and flashback, where one’s present gets embroiled with current events and guilt from the past. Caché, thus, collapses linear storytelling and presents with us a kaleidoscopic images that do not clearly reveal to us, not even till the very end. When reality, news images, daily activities and dream sequences all become undistinguishable, Caché not only investigates one’s perception and memory, but also challenges one’s sense of truth and reality. In crystallizing past and present, the unfolding of Haneke’s cinematic images illuminates the multiplicity of truths. Examining Caché through the lenses of Deleuze’s two cinema books, the paper stresses “the power of the false” and the “will to art” as mediated spaces and times continue to intrude our daily living where one can no longer be certain of the truth from the false or reality from fiction.

1. Hidden in plain sight

1.1 The ordinary people

The opening shot reveals the façade of a townhouse on a quiet street in Paris (fig. 1). With the scene lingering, accompanied by bird’s chirping and faint motor sounds,

[pic]

1. Michael Haneke, Caché, 2005; the opening shot (Image captured from Caché DVD)

the movie credits appear from left to right just as a man is walking from right to left. The scene persists, showing a woman leaving the house and a bicycle riding off the screen. About two-and-a-half minutes into the scene, a conversation of a man and a woman occurs: “Well?” “Nothing.” The scene continues with a man coming out of that house; he goes across the street and stares at a small lane named Rue des Iris. He stops, looks around and utters: “He must have been here.” Feeling perplex, a woman and a man go inside the house and shut the gate. The movie returns to the first shot, show in a rippling effect, a continuous forwarding and rewinding movement, until it pauses (fig. 2). It is

[pic]

2. Michael Haneke, Caché, 2005; the opening shot (Image captured from Caché DVD)

then one realizes that one has been watching a recorded footage. The audience is not actually looking at a townhouse, but at Anne and Georges Laurent examining the content of a videotape on a television set inside their house. We learn that this two-hour videocassette consists solely of a single and uninterrupted shot of their home that might have been captured from across the street, inside a car or from a window. Since it was sent to them without a note, they have no idea of who might have created this video or why, assuming that it might be someone’s, even a friend of their son, silly joke.

Anne and Georges occupy an elegantly decorated modern house filled with books. On the surface, the Laurents live a normal life: he is a TV host for a program on books; she, apart from taking care of her family, is a book editor; their teenager son Pierrot is a high-school student excels in swimming. Yet what goes on inside this house is less than perfect. Father, mother and son all but stop communicating with one another. They have retrieved to their own medium and means of communications: the father and his TV, the kid with his teenage friends, and the mother with her books and colleagues. Since the film offers little insight into each character’s psych, one supposes everything functions properly by the appearance of the Laurents household.

Soon after, another video, wrapped in a piece of paper that has a drawing of a child vomiting blood, arrives at the Laurents (fig. 3.1). By now, it is obvious that those tapes are designed to disrupt Anne and Georges’s lives by merely pointing out that they are being watched. The new tape contains basically the same elements as the previous one, except it was shot at night, showing Georges driving home and entering the house. As Georges forwards and rewinds the tape, a boy whose month is covered with blood emerges on the screen (fig. 3.2). Georges finally stops the tape and tunes to evening news. The image of a boy whose month is covered with blood appears again in a longer sequence, where he sits next to a window of an old house. Next, while Anne and Georges are entertaining their friends at home, a doorbell sounds, leaving behind another tape and another drawing— a violent slash of red exploding from a chicken’s neck (fig. 3.3). Assuming it would be just another recording of their house, Georges is astonished to discover that it was actually shot inside a driving car leading down a country road. It shows a windshield continuously sweeping back and forth on a raining day. The car stops soon after the camera makes an abrupt turn to the left, revealing a courtyard of a country house. We learn that it is the house where Georges grew up. Next enters Georges’s frail mother, who is confused about the name “Majid” when he mentions it. He explains that Majid was the boy she wanted to adopt a long time ago. When pressed, she does not want

|[pic] |[pic] |

|3.1 |3.2 |

|[pic] |[pic] |

|3.3 |3.4 |

3. Michael Haneke, Caché, 2005; images of child-like drawings and from Georges’s memory (Image captured from Caché DVD)

to be reminded of the past, a bad memory, she says. In return, she asks him if anything is wrong. He denies it, saying only that he has dreamt about Majid. The night he stays at his mother’s, Georges has a nightmare of a boy decapitating a rooster. While the rooster flopping on the ground and its blood splashing over his face, the boy menacingly moves forward with an ax still in his hands, as another boy looks on (fig. 3.4).

The film then portrays a car driving on a suburban street before it turns to a low-

|rent apartment building (fig. 4.1). Georges rewinds, |[pic] |

|pauses frame by frame, and is able to discern the street |4.1 |

|name from this videotape (fig. 4.2). From then on, he |[pic] |

|seems to have his mind set on who could have sent those |4.2 |

|tapes. Yet, just like he conceals his concern from his | |

|mother, he could not reveal his “hunch” to Anne. She is | |

|furious when he refuses to confide | |

in her. He simply adds that it does not concern her, even though it is their family that has been terrorized by faceless observers and anonymous calls and tapes.

|Next, we are shown a building that appears in an earlier |[pic] |

|tape (fig. 4.3). There are cars in front of the building,|4.3 |

|along with pigeons and residents from a window of a |4. Haneke, Caché, 2005; the actual scene and video images of an apartment|

|coffee shop before knocking on the door. The man who |building (Image captured from Caché DVD) |

|answers the door | |

recognizes him immediately, though Georges seems rather confused at first. As he enters a small living quarter, he realizes who that man is. They sit around a kitchen table where Georges rudely interrogates him, accusing him of intimidating his family. When

|presented with a drawing of a boy|[pic] |

|vomiting blood, the stranger is |5.1. Michael Haneke, Caché, 2005; scenes of Georges at Majid’s apartment (Image captured from |

|upset (fig. 5.1). He insists that|Caché DVD) |

|he knows nothing of the tapes or | |

|the drawings, and | |

keeps on inquiring about the well being of Georges’s mother.

Coming back to the coffee shop, Georges calls Anne, telling her that there is no

|one living in that particular |[pic] |

|room. When he returns home, he is|5.2. Haneke, Caché, 2005; scene from the video sent to Georges after his visit to Majid's home |

|confronted with another tape |(Image captured from Caché DVD) |

|showing his contemptuous | |

treatment of the stranger. It also shows that man crying for an hour after Georges left (fig. 5.2). Georges then reveals the identity of the stranger: His name is Majid, whom, when he was a little boy, Georges’s parents considered adopting but decided not to proceed, probably owing to Georges lies about Majid coughing blood or he persuaded Majid to cut off a rooster’s head, pretending it was his father’s request. Later, Pierrot disappears, setting up Anne and Georges’s frantic search, police integration, and the arrest of Majid and his son. Yet, nothing comes out of it; Majid and his son are released and Pierrot safely returns home the next morning. Then comes a scene of Majid asking Georges into

|his home. As soon as he walks in, |[pic] |

|Majid, with his back to the door, |5.3. Haneke, Caché, 2005; a scene of Georges witnessing Majid's suicide (Image captured from |

|says, “I want you to be presented,”|Caché DVD) |

|and steadfastly slashes his throat | |

|(fig. 5.3). | |

Shocked by what he witnesses, Georges goes to a movie before returning home. He tells Anne that Majid has committed suicide and explains that Majid’s parents were once employed by his family. They were perished on 17 October 1961 during a protest against French policy in Algeria when 200 demonstrators died in the hand of Paris police.

Next, Majid’s son seeks out Georges, who maintains that he is not responsible for Majid’s death. Georges then returns home, draws up the curtain and curls up under the

|bed sheet. The last scene regards the |[pic] |

|staircase outside a school building. There |6.1 |

|are many people going in and out of the |[pic] |

|building while others standing with their |6.2 |

|back at the viewer (fig. 6.1). As one’s eye|[pic] |

|wanders, searching for any clue or meaning |6.3 Haneke, Caché, 2005; the final scene (Image captured from Caché DVD) |

|of the shot, many will not notice that a | |

|meeting is taking place right in front of | |

|the school building (fig. 6.2). With the | |

|shot lingering, the film credits start | |

|rolling (fig. 6.3). In the end, nothing is | |

|tied up; no conclusion is drawn; nor is | |

|there an | |

explanation of the author or the motive of those surveillance videotapes.

1.2 The lives of others

In the beginning, I felt like a detached observer watching those recorded video unfold. As they entwine with Georges’s memory, Haneke’s Caché delivers a creeping sense of mystery and urgency that engrosses the viewer in a web of suspense. Witnessing the secret unravels and Georges’s live precipitously crumbles, I anticipated a final outcome that never arrives. What accumulated in the end was a sense of disruption and dislocation that make one wonder: Who send those tapes to the Laurents? Why? What does the ending of the movie mean? I looked around the movie theater and found other people equally confused. I did overhear others mentioned that two of the characters who should not have known each other were meeting outside the school building. That ignited my curiosity; yet, unlike Georges has videotapes in his possession, I could not rewind or pause what has been shown at the theater. So I left, surrounded by an intense feeling of disquietness, probably not unlike what the characters of Haneke’s film have experienced.

It was not until a few months later when Caché DVD came out did I get another chance to see that film. The second viewing illuminates the extent to which the mixture of media blurs the boundary of truth and fiction, perceptions and memories. For instance, the scenes of young Majid vomiting blood and him slicing off a cockerel’s head echo the child-like drawings sent to Georges. We learn that some of them are not the true representation of real acts but are only young Georges’s lies. But, does he really think those were truly of his memory? Although I knew a bit more about the movie after a second viewing, I was unable to pinpoint the truth of Georges and Majid.

Knowing that I must have missed something during the first viewing, I paid attention to details and patiently waited until the final scene, determining to search for any possible clue. As the film credits roll, I, again, failed to discern what was right in front of my eyes. It was not until reviewing the DVD’s bonus material, an interview with the director, did I realize that two characters, Majid’s son and Georges’s son, were having an impromptu conversation on the upper left of the screen. Why does this occur at the very end of the film? Do they know each other? It seems that had one missed those two, one would find the ending perplexing; yet, even if one does notice them, one will likely to have more questions than answers.

Indeed, this prolonged closure that lasts more than three minutes does not offer any solution. Unlike most mainstream movies solve all the puzzles at the end, Caché offers an unsettling experience when one cannot just sit back, relax and enjoy the show. The life of a middle-class family is plainly shown to us as we observe their engagement with professional and personal matters; yet nothing is spelled out entirely. On the other hand, the Laurents’s ideal existence is turned into turmoil largely owing to their awareness of being watched; I, the viewer, am not unlike a Big Brother observing their every move, and, thus, an accomplice in shattering the lives of a seemingly perfect family.

Meditating the interconnection of art and reality, Haneke presents mundane daily activities pregnant with depth of time and memory. He shows his characters wandering through rural and urban streets searching for truth while filling their daily living with saturated media and technology; all the while, he gives us an alienated family where one cannot reveal one’s feelings, fear or guilt. Walking out of the movie theater, the images on the screen stayed with me and spilled out into real life. Noticing the ubiquitous surveillance cameras on about every corner of urban environment, I wondered if these recorded images, created without their subjects’ consent, unknowingly contribute in destroying an individual’s life. Representing a contemporary society in such bleakness, Caché reminds me of Italian neorealism. Unlike The Bicycle Thief that pierces the human condition with tenderness and poignant emotions as father and son traverse through their town in hope of finding his bicycle and justice, Caché presents a nightmarish world when things are swept under the rug as one deliberately denies one’s own past.

2. Spectacles and spectators

2.1 Spectacles of violence

Even with a second viewing, the scene of Majid’s suicide, his blood splashing on a white wall, is still shocking. From his earlier works, Seventh Continent (1989) and Benny’s Video (1992), Haneke has been employing gruesome nature of violence in film. In Seventh Continent, a family of three living in an urban area decides to end their lives without any reason; a teenage boy shoots an innocent girl just so see “what it’s like” in Benny’s Video. And in Funny Game (1997), two young men go to visit their neighbor in a country retreat, subsequently terrorize, torture and murder the whole family. Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, along 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), constitute Haneke’s “trilogy” that centers on the life of affluent families from the highly industrialized West. They come to symbolize the “cold indifference, breakdown in communication, and the increasing violence in the immediate living space of each one of us” (Haneke in Riemer, 2000, p. 175). These films all illustrate the randomness of violent acts where anger, despair and aggression seem to have rooted from nowhere and the killers express no remorse. In Caché, the director shows both physical and psychological terrors, as one individual inflicts to other people, an individual to himself and one country to another. Particularly, he parallels the French occupation of Algeria and the suppression of demonstrators with Georges’s lie, to manifest how one, or a nation, deals with guilt.

Yet, many of the grisly acts take place only off-screen in Haneke’s films. The viewer is shown only the sounds of torture, which is sufficient of filling the absent visual image with dreads. That Haneke’s sounds “relay” the visuals than duplicating them can be attributed to his hero, Robert Bresson, whose principles of “non-redundancy” and “non-coincidence” maintain that sound alone can suppress or neutralize an image.[1] Therefore, even though the violence is not visualized, it induces fear in the audience’s imagination so it is excruciating to watch violence unfold on screen. In a way, it is Haneke’s reaction to Hollywood’s spectacular and dramatic treatments of violence that simply exhibit the spectacle of violence or detail physical acts. He, instead, he explores the pain and suffering of violence by directly exposing the viewer to violent acts and their representations rather than sequester us from the process. Showing violence “as it really is,” including “the suffering of a victim,” so one realizes what it means to act violently, Haneke avoids the formula of “literary psychology” that lets the viewer identify with the psychological motivation of the perpetrator (Haneke, in Wray, 2007). Though his his films are categorized as psychological thrillers and often compared with those of Hitchcock, critics have noted that he is anything but.[2] There is no manufacture of stereotypical heroes or villains, nor do his characters return to normalcy like most Hollywood movies. The sense of fear and suspense derived from his films never gets resolved or accumulated to a climax, but, like the lingering shoot of Caché, spills out of the screen to the real life.

So Haneke deconstructs violence, showing its pain, chaos and aftermath. All the while, the viewers sit in the theater as the mixtures of video images and portrayal of daily activities instigates fear and paranoia. Since the director does not provide sufficient explanations or sociological and psychological insights into the killing,[3] and because some of the violent acts occur unexpectedly without much warning, they stay with us long after the films end. The viewers, in turn, are forced to search for reasons that the film is reluctant to oblige. The real horror, then, materializes when the spectators are confronted with an understanding that the supposedly irrational acts could have their logical roots “in our life style” (Haneke, 2000, p. 174).

2.2 Spectator participation

A scene of a menacing-looking boy walking toward us with an ax in his hand ends abruptly in a black screen. This black screen prompts the viewer to imagine as though a violent act has been inflicted on us. When Majid’s blood slashes on the wall and him lying listlessly on the ground, we watch helplessly as the indescribable violence unwinds. At the moment of horror when two young men force a family to participate in sadistic Funny Games, they periodically step aside and directly talk to the camera. Haneke almost never spares his viewer by including us in the brutal acts. On the other hand, the viewers observe the murderous act of Benny’s Video only on a television when Benny shows his recording to his parents. The shock of first encountering the gruesome killing on screen slowly reveals its absurdity as images on the video start registering to the viewer. By reminding us of who is watching and by placing the viewer in the participatory position, Haneke’s violent acts not only denies the viewer the complacency often associated with the cinematic spectacles, but also jolts the viewer into self-awareness. In the process, he emancipates the viewer from being a passive observer and positions us in active participation, to be an accomplice to an act, where the viewers are at once the victim and the guilty party.

For Haneke, a movie is about “manipulation” (Wray, 2007; Sharrett, 2003). In his attempt to minimize it, he avoids using jump cuts, excessive editing or montages, but employs long sequences, wide angle and steady movement, to provide a broader canvas that can reveal the world and action as they are happening. The “long take” lets the viewer assume a more participatory position in deciphering the representation of reality. It is then, according to Bazin, that the spectator understands facts are merely “fragment[s] of concrete reality, in itself multiple and full of ambiguity” (Bazin, 1971, p. 37). Haneke plainly describes than dramatizes a reality. Especially when the sequences of Laurents’s lives and video images are presented with a neutral color tone and naturalistic soundscape, the director makes no explicit reference to the relevance or significance of each scene.

Thus, unlike the theme of communication breakdown, Caché engages the viewers in active participation where one is subjected to it and asked to take responsibility. For instance, we see Georges’s live disintegrating owing to the anonymous tapes and drawings while witnessing Majid’s suffering and downfall. As Georges uncovers truth bits by bits, his guilt and self-deception are only made apparent incrementally. We are offered the paradoxical scenarios of Georges and his past, as personal stories resurface and historical events loom. Coupling with empty frames inserted between actual scenes and video sequences, these “blank spaces” allow the viewer to bring their thoughts in the scene where one is open to the sensitivity of the character (Haneke in Frey, 2003). When one cannot assume a single point of view, empathize with a character or determine the importance of different scenes, or when evidences reveal themselves seemingly independent of one another, Caché pulls the viewer into a whirlpool of sensations where one interprets the vast encounters from one’s own understanding and imagination.

In the end, it is the media, the videocassettes suggesting Georges that he and his family have been watched, that is “the message” for him. Haneke’s tale, then, is a moral one: the one that is not spelt out explicitly, but, as stories meander and intersect, its ambiguity is entangled with the viewer’s consciousness. Caché, thus, provides a “construct” where “the recipient” integrates into a “value” and “belief system.” As much as this “construct” asserts the director’s authority, it does not simply remain or contain on the screen but the mystery is integrated with one’s cognitive and emotive frameworks in deciphering the outcome. By asking the viewers to confront and to deal with the consequence of guilt, Caché comes to exist “in the minds of the spectators,” and constitutes “the productive center of an interactive process” (Haneke, 2000, p. 171). Echoing Majid’s unsolved childhood trauma, the inconclusive ending becomes an arena where the viewers wrestle with the images. Caché, then, calls upon a collaborative process where the mind of the director meets that of the beholder: the former lays down suggestive elements while the latter assembles them, during which the director and the spectator create a reality, or a fiction, together.

3. Visionality and memory

3.1 Tele-vision and visionality

Television and video images play a prominent role in Caché, when they are unexpectedly interjected with actual scenes and seamlessly mixed with the Laurents’s life. According to its cinematographer, Caché was shot using high-definition video camera to give a “video look” (Oppenheimer, 2006). Regardless of video images or actual scenes, both maintain a detached mode and present minimal actions. This realistic portrayal of daily activities limits the manipulation of times and images, fulfilling Haneke’s desire of engendering an aesthetic that is “open,” “transparent,” and can be “read” like a book (Haneke, Caché DVD). Also, the integration of videos and scenes from the Laurents’s lives prevents one from discerning the difference between taped images and reality. Often, one cannot determine if one is witnessing Georges’s life, events being filmed or recorded images being played back. The video images, then, become the central character of the film. Especially when assorted scenes flow from one to another, it is as if one is watching a continuously shuffling television programs. By obliterating the border between mise-en-scène, news footages and surveillance tapes, Haneke interrogates the natures of reality, which are endlessly collided with dreams and memories in Caché.

In the late nineteen and early twentieth century when film and photography were the dominated “technologies of the spectacle,” the hegemony of these two techniques helped creating the myth that vision was “incorporeal, veridical, and realistic” (Crary in Foster, 1988, p. 43). In examining the contemporary “technology of the spectacle,” Haneke is critical of television and media not just for their representation of violence. He questions their roles in the erasure of conscience, sensation and emotion, and in installing a false sense of reality that contributes to the “collective loss of reality and social disorientation.” Because when the world is seen through television or other media, one no longer perceives reality but the representation of reality, “a derivative of reality.” It is then one’s experiential horizon is truncated and the world becomes a mediated one, or merely “the image.” Haneke notes that the faster a thing is shown, the lesser one is able to perceive it “as an object occupying a space in physical reality.” It becomes impossible for one to have a palpable sense of “the truth of everyday experience” when one is surrounded by images takes as reality. Therefore, one needs time to understand what one sees both intellectually and “emotionally,” especially when images and information are readily available at all time (Haneke in Sharrett, 2003, p. 30, 31).

As much as his film addresses the lack of interaction in a family, Haneke’s video images function as ways of bridging or breaking down communication. By including news footages from current Iraq War and historical footage of the French army in Algeria in the 1960s, he parallels the American occupation of Iraq with the French suppression of Algeria, showing how modern-day politics are shaped by events represented on television. Also, the viewers witness the lives of a family through a surveillant system, where the state of the Laurents is severed from history, emotions and interactions. As the difference between video images and actual scenes becomes indiscernible and real events meddle with mediated images, Haneke aims at producing “fresh and perceptible” images that would restore their potentiality of “critical engagement” (Haneke, 2000b, p. 172). So the viewers are immersed in his disquieting constructs and absolute authority, when Caché is not so such much as to reflect the reality but as to show the prism of reality.

3.2 Memory and the aesthetics of sensation

Paralleling Georges’s search for the purpose of those videocassettes is the involuntary remembrance of his guilt, the lies that he told when he was six. The resurfacing of Georges’s past is not done with flashback, which Haneke considers to be a form of recollection that is simultaneously blended with selection, imagination and false memory, and often “oversimplifies and disambiguates reality” (Haneke in Saxton, 2005, p. 10). Instead, he infuses Georges’s recollections with realistic renditions of daily activity by joining a series of real scenes with imagined ones or video images. For instance, he follows a drawing of a boy vomiting blood with a sequence of a boy whose mouth is covered with blood so that he can join Georges’s past and present together. Also, by compounding realistic depiction of daily activities with recorded images, nightmares and recollections, he questions his protagonist’s perceptions of memory, history and truth on one hand, and challenges the viewer’s understanding of memory and sensations on the other. So we journey through Georges’s past, witnessing his refusal of the past that brings about a traumatic present, as his guilt is illuminated through video and as he sorts through the mesmerizing rubble of memory.

Haneke claims that he does not know more than what is written in his screenplay. Often, he withholds information until later so the viewers are not in possession of the secrets to decode his images. For instance, one might not know that a boy coughing blood does not really happen since that is only young Georges’s lie, or a scene of young Majid cutting of a rooster’s head actually did exist; whether that is Georges’s nightmare or recollection remains uncertain. Or, just when we thinks the director has completed the last piece of a puzzle, he reveals yet another thread possible of expanding in all directions and encompassing all sorts of possibilities. Naturally, the viewer is forever shawled in obscurity, struggling to conjure up meanings from glimpses of fragments.

Haneke also never discusses the meaning of plots with his actors, since he wants them to remain “in blissful ignorance” or “unlearned” in given contexts (Haneke, 2000a, p. 165). Thus, the actors are in a position of little self-knowledge for their surrounding when extraordinary things happen to them. As seen in Georges’s reaction to Majid’s suicide that completely undoes his capacity, Haneke conveys a kind of “void” or “emptiness” where Georges fails to perceive the event happening to him. Like those of Italian neorealism, Haneke’s the characters “experience and act out obscure events which are as poorly linked as the portion of the any-space-whatever which they traverse” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 213). The disturbance of conventional sensory-motor linkages allows Haneke to break with the cliché so that an autonomous mental image can be extracted. Bergson argues that we never perceive the thing or the image in its entirety but perceive what we are interested in. One normally perceives only “cliché” when the image regularly sinks to the state of cliché via conventional sensory-motor linkages. According to Deleuze, if one wants to break with the cliché and to find the whole again, it is necessary “to restore the lost parts, to rediscover everything that cannot be seen in the image, everything that has been removed to make it interesting.” Equally as importance is “to make a division or make emptiness,” “to make holes, to introduce voids and white spaces, to rarify the image, by suppressing many things that have been added to make us believe that we were seeing everything” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 20-21). It is only when the sensory-motor schemata, the links that connect and extend all the events, break, can a different type of image, the whole image without metaphor, emerge.

With video images crosscutting events, actions and hallucinatory recollections, the truth ultimately escapes our grip. Haneke, recalling Godard’s comment on film as “a lie at twenty-four frames per second in the service of truth,” regards film as an artificial construct of reality, “a lie with the possibility of being in the service of truth” (Haneke in Porton, p. 51). For him, truth, like the image within the image, is always hidden in its infinite variations. He avoids the closure of recollection and assembles Georges’s past in different ways so that his images remain open. Slipping between images and times, Caché navigates through a perpetually revolving landscape of ambiguity where one has to incorporate one’s shifting perspectives. It is, then, up to the viewer to, not so much as to choose possibilities, but, know that “there are many possibilities, that this story may or may not come to an end, there are still works to be done” (Haneke, Caché DVD). As the viewer fill the gaps with our anticipation and our experiences collide with that of the characters, Caché compels us to “think with” and to “feel with” the film, rather than simply consuming it (Haneke in Frey, 2003). It is also then that memory stops to be static or willingly goes back and forth like recorded video images, but collapses with one’s consciousnesses, perceptions, sensations and imaginations.

4. Cinematic space and time

4.1 The fragmentation of spaces

The cryptic ending of Caché is carefully constructed with a series of barricades placed at the bottom third of the frame, incidentally barring the viewers from directly accessing the scene. In front of the barricades is a car on the side of the street; behind them are people either standing with their backs against us or running up and down the stairs. At the center of the frame is a woman carrying a shoulder bag; her position catches our attention though she might be of little relevance to the story; whereas, Majid’s and Georges’s sons chatting under the canopy of the building easily escapes our gaze. When young Majid slowly walks toward Georges with an ax in his hand, or when a video shows windshields of a car waving back and forth, it is as though young Majid is attacking the audience or we are physically inside a moving car. When Anne has a conversation with

|her friend in a café or calls |[pic] |

|Georges at a bookstore (fig. |7.1 |

|7.1), Georges calls Anne in front|[pic] |

|of Majid’s apartment from a cell |7.2 |

|phone (fig. 7.2), or Anne and |7. Michael Haneke, Caché, 2005; camera captures other people’s movement in the background (Image |

|Georges cheer for Pierrot in a |captured from Caché DVD) |

|swimming competition, we are | |

|keenly aware of the movement of | |

|other people in the | |

background. By showing just portion of a car, extending a character’s space into ours, and including the movement of people who are not essential to particular scenes, Caché suggests an extension of the horizontal, vertical and depth of a screen space, an “out-of-field” presently not seen nor understood.

According to Deleuze, all framing determines an out-of-field. It designates an elsewhere that exists to one side or around the frame and that which is basically a “closed system.” Another aspect of out-of-field symbolizes a disturbing presence, a radical “Elsewhere,” that cannot be said to exist but to “insist” or “subsist” outside the homogeneous space and time (Deleuze, 1985, p. 17). In addition to assembling a space that embodies a continuous visible experience beyond the border of a frame, Haneke shows a disjointed space cutting between reality and fiction. For instance, right before or after the nightmare sequence, there is a black screen, a kind of “absence of image,” which according to Deleuze, not only breaks with the association of images through metaphor or metonymy, but also constitutes “irrational cuts” through the interstice of two images. It is then that “the series of anterior images has no end” and “the series of subsequent images has no beginning” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 200). When Georges’s recollections and nightmares dissonantly connect with his daily activities and video images, they form a new series of image, or a new kind of montage that has no beginning or an end. Furthermore, with the intercutting of video images, dream sequences, blank screens and daily scenes, each of them creates a new system of rhythm, a strip of time in relation to Georges’s past and present, and simultaneously interrupting one another. Therefore, the irrational cuts allow for the relinkages of one image plus another, rather than one image after another, and for one shot to “deframed”[4] in relation to the framing of the following shot.

In a series and “atonal” cinema where the narrative is constructed with variable connections and irrational cuts, the unity of an author is replaced with “the diversity, the deformity, the otherness” of a “free indirect discourse” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 184). As one scene leads to another, Georges’s quest to solve a mystery involuntarily sheds lights on his past. At times, he is angry for the intrusion; more often, he desperately tries to hide his guilt. Since his lies are revealed overtime than being presented to us all at once, it seems Georges is facing these situations for the first time, trying to figure a way out for himself. A “free indirect discourse,” thus, renders Georges, who has a “nature,” an “I,” an “automaton” that reacts to the author than being set by the author.[5]

These linking and relinking of fragmented scenes and objects in Caché reaffirm Bresson’s use of “fragmentation” as a way of avoiding falling into the trap of “representation.”[6] For one thing, the lacunary layering of video images, dreams, recollections, news, and daily activities make apparent the functionality of visual images beyond visibility and fixed spans of times and spaces. As the viewers engage in the construction of a space, fragments by fragments, virtually conjuring up all the elements

|of a disconnected visual world, |[pic] |

|space is no longer organized by |8. Haneke, Caché, 2005; TV footage (Image from Caché DVD) |

|its coordination and relations but| |

|takes place in many directions. It| |

|has | |

become a purely optical, audio or even tactile “any-space-whatever.” For another, Haneke shows a space intersticed with the coexistence of heterogeneous durations through irrational cuts, non-commensurable relations, free indirect discourse, the relinking of actions and reactions, and the collapse of the accordance with the sensory-motor schema. When daily scenes, recorded videos and ever-present TV programs (fig. 8) scramble linear sequences of events and crisscross storylines, the audience, in turn, is unable to construct a definite chronology or to tell fiction from reality.

4.2 The crystals of time

|In Pierrot’s swimming competition, Anne|[pic] |

|and Georges are surrounded by people |9. Haneke, Caché, 2005; a life through the eyes of digital cameras (Image captured from |

|looking at the event through camcorders|Caché DVD) |

|(fig. 9). Since a camcorder | |

simultaneously captures and records an event, it shows an actual image crystallizing with its own virtual image. The present is in turn being recorded and played at the same time, as moving images on the LCD screen constitute the still present and the already past, instantly displaying the present as it passes. It is as though there are two presents: “one is endlessly arriving while the other is already established” (Deleuze, 1985, p. 106). The actual image, then, is manifested in the present on screen, while the virtual image of the contemporaneous past does not exist outside the consciousness but is being preserved through time. At each present moment, time splits itself in two directions, setting out and unrolling itself at the same time: “one makes all the present pass on, the other preserves all the past” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 81).

With images being constructed like the constellation of the actual and virtual images, Haneke’s camera screens and TV monitors recall Welles’s mirrors in Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai, Truffaut’s crystal in The Green Room, Herzog’s red crystal in Heart of Glass and Alain Resnais’s crystal interior in Last Year in Marienbad. In Cinema 2, Deleuze discusses the significance of a crystal and mirror in films. The multifaceted crystal-image shows not only the coalescence of the actual and the virtual but the operation of time. Whereas the movement-images are constructed with an “organic” or “kinetic” regime that represents the indirect images of time, the time-images appear in a “crystalline” or “chronic” system in accordance with pure optical and sound situations. In an organic regime, the real is made apparent by the “continuity” or linkage with “localizable relations,” while the unreal, including recollections, dreams and imaginary, is constructed with discontinuous forms. Thus, there exist two poles of existences in an organic system: the actual from the point of view of the real, and actualization in consciousness from the point of view of the imaginary. In contrast, the crystalline regime renders the actual image and virtual image undistinguishable when “the actual is cut off from its motor linkages or the real from its legal connections, and the virtual detaches itself from its actualizations” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 127).

In Deleuze’s analysis of contemporary cinema (1989), there exist four crystalline states. The first is the perfect and complete crystal, like Ophűls’s oblique mirror, that constitutes the prism where the split image runs after itself to connect with itself and gives a seamless interchanging of spectacle and life. The second is the cracked crystal that owns a line of flight, a “flaw,” where something is going to flee in the background “through the crack.” For instance, Renoir’s flowing water, as opposed to mirror-like frozen water, indicates a point of flight that “pours out into life” and leaps towards the future until it escapes “the eternal referral back of the actual and the virtual, the present and the past” (p. 87). The third is the crystal in the process of formation. It is made with a seed that incorporates the environment that forces it to crystallize. For example, the “wandering” of Fellini’s film provides an entrance of a crystalline seed, when “the crystal is only the ordered set of its seeds or the transversal of all its entrances” and life as a spontaneous spectacle (p. 89). Finally, the decomposing crystal is exemplified by the films of Visconti, whose uses of crystal are driven by a synthetic crystal, a crystalline environment caught in history and time.

Placing recorded videos within regular sequences, Caché shows the actual image crystallizes with its virtual image. When a video footage of Anne and Georges entering and leaving their house is inserted to their daily scene, it disturbs the present with the coexistence of past and present. When a drawing of a decapitated rooster emerges, it not only reminds Georges of his guilt but also foretells what is to come. A meeting with Majid at his shady apartment is supposed to be a secret that Georges keeps from Anne. But, their meeting and fierce argument come back to haunt him in yet another anonymous video that he and Anne watch together. It is then Georges’s immediate past is collided with his present. It is also then that the viewer is taken back to the scene, witnessing what happened after Georges closed the door behind, what we thought was the end of a scene, and observing Majid’s sobbing uncontrollably, was in fact a prolongation of that scene.

That Haneke uses drawings and videos to arouse Georges’s past recalls Deleuze’s first time-image: “the coexistence of sheets of past.” The “sheets of past” slices through Georges’s life, when he, his mom, Majid, even the latest news of Iraq war that lacks the testimony of the Iraqis, all contribute to the different accounts of the 1961 event. On the other hand, when a fleeting past maintains multiple presents, a simultaneity of a present of the future, a present of the present and a present of the past are all rolled up in one single event, it becomes comparable to Deleuze’s second time-image: “the peaks of present.” As Georges confronts his past resurfacing in the present, the “peaks of present” are “revived, contradicted, obliterated, substituted, re-created, fork and return” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 101). They reveal the way in which the past is correlated to the ongoing actualization of time in the present moving toward the future. At the sight of video images on a flat screen TV, Georges sinks into his past and is gradually awaken by his guilt. The video images trigger the sheets of his past and foreground Georges’s past crystallized in the peak of the present. As this “liquid crystal” reveals Georges’s past and present, his future seems increasingly unpredictable for it continues to be shaped and reshaped by actualized memories. Haneke’s video screen, thus, alludes to “the mobile and reversible mirror” that makes presents past and preserves all the past, at the same time, “endlessly reflects perception in recollection” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 81).

5. Belief in the world

5.1 The powers of the false

In Deleuze’s discussion of the time-image, in addition to the sheets of past and the peaks of present that deal with the order of time, there exists the third time-image, “the coexistence of relations or the simultaneity of the elements internal to time,” that concerns the series of time. By fusing “the cinema of fiction” with “the cinema of reality” to a point where the differences between them are no longer decipherable, the third time-image sets storytelling in motion and shatters “the empirical continuation of time, the chronological succession, the separation of the before and the after” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 155). Without a chronological timeline, Caché is illuminated beyond the logic of linear causality. As the camera hovers and observes its subjects from an icy distance, the viewer cannot assume a single perspective but ceaselessly displaces the previous one with what comes next. Yet, the film does not so much as to tell the story according to subjective variations as to show images appear in the crystalline system of pure optical and sound situations. For instance, Georges’s selfish act is represented in child-like drawings, recollections, possible nightmares and video images. These different images create an indiscernible boundary between the real and the imaginary, or an image and a memory. As each series of image is charged with its distinct meaning, fluctuating between the fluxes of memories and amnesia, the truth regarding the past is never fully revealed.

|Caché, thus, forgoes narrative clarity through |[pic] |

|interweaving diverse images and compounding |10. Haneke, Caché, 2005; the ever-present news images at the Laurents (image |

|heterogeneous durations. In Laurents’s living room,|from Caché DVD) |

|a TV set perpetually out | |

world news, indicating a life of parallel existence and rhythm (fig. 10). From time to time

|the video images remind Georges of his child acts, |[pic] |

|which might or might not have contributed to Majid’s |11.1 |

|misfortune but definitely explain the source of |[pic] |

|Georges’s agonizing nightmares. When present and past|11.2 |

|collide, and when fictional characters intertwine |[pic] |

|with real events, the convergence of fiction and |11.3 |

|reality leaps into the viewer’s consciousness. It |[pic] |

|becomes difficult to determine where one scene ends |11.4 |

|and another begins. For instance, Georges regularly |11. Haneke, Caché, 2005 (images from Caché DVD) |

|interviews his guests at a studio where their | |

|discussion is taped (fig. 11.1). That sequence is | |

|easily mistaken for a program on TV, when Georges | |

|faces the camera and addresses to the audience | |

|directly (fig. 11.2). Or, just when we think | |

|Georges’s guests is | |

|talking on a live program, it turns out to be a |[pic] |

|recorded footage played back on an editing machine |12. Haneke, Caché, 2005 (image from Caché DVD) |

|(fig. 11.3). In a scene of a car comes to take young | |

|Majid away from Georges’s family farm, the camera | |

|stays with the empty courtyard long after the car | |

|exits the frame (fig. 12). By prolonging the shot, it| |

|shows an empty space without any character or | |

|movement. The length of the shot begs the question of| |

|whether that scene is derived from Georges’s memory, | |

|video playback or a real event. As the scene | |

|persists, an empty space becomes almost like a still | |

|life. Deleuze differentiates an empty space from a | |

|still life in film, noting that an empty space owes | |

|its importance to “the absence of a possible content”| |

while a still life is defined by “the presence and composition of objects which are wrapped up in themselves or become their own containers” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 16). Drawing examples from Ozu’s long shots of a vase in Late Spring, Deleuze describes Ozu’s still life contains in itself a sense of becoming, change and passage. Rather than hollowing out, Ozu’s still life is that of the full, the duration, “a little time in its pure state,” a direct time-image. In Haneke’s empty space that marks both the before and the after images, the present is no long just the interval between the past and the future but is in the crystalline state with the past and future, “an unchanging form in which the change is produced” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 17).

When each scene contains no beginning or an end, each moment potentially gives rise to false movement by linking and relinking with irrational cuts. In discussing truth with respect to time, Leibniz proposes the “incompossibility” of parallel worlds. He notes that it is not the impossible that precedes the possible but the “incompossible,” that which is not possible at the same time in the same world; and, it is possible that the past may be true without being necessarily true. In Caché, we see events and accounts being offered by Georges, his mom and Majid, and by Georges’s past manifested in recollections and video. Those reflections, events, accounts, confessions, dreams and videos might or might not all be true. Coupling with Haneke’s resistance of providing a closure, Caché offers a reticent truth that ceases to be truthful or claims to be true but becomes fundamentally “falsifying.” The “power of the false” supersedes the form of the true with “the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true past” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 131). When Georges’s present is entangled with his past, his reality becomes inseparable from the imaginary and remembrance. The story continues to shift, as the past entwines with the present and as the true and false of the past is never made explicated. A narrative is at once temporal and falsifying, when “the formation of the crystal, the force of time and the power of the false are complementary,” implying each other “the new co-ordinates of the image” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 132). Thus, there is no more truth in one life than in the other, but only the becoming, the power of the false of life and “the will to power” (p. 141). Ultimately, this power of the false is “adequate to time,” as opposed to any form of the true that would control time. Within a labyrinthine time and the metamorphoses of the false where heterogeneous durations challenge the truth, which can no longer be achieved, formed, or reproduced, but has “to be created.”

5.2 To have thoughts with cinema

Cinema combines movement with image and puts movement in the mind. Deleuze argues that only the automatic movement of the image has the capacity of “producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 156). As the automatic image correlates to an “automatic subjectivity” and is possible to “go beyond the real,”[7] it is necessary to re-examine the thought, the whole and unthought. Haneke often complicates his images not only by fusing recorded images with actual scenes, but also by utilizing ambiguous camera angles. In Majid’s suicide scene, the sequence is shot from an angle similar to that of the anonymous tape sent to Anne after Georges’s first visit to Majid, as opposed to from the position where Haneke captures Georges and Majid’s first meeting. In doing so, the suicide scene is presented to us as if it has already happened or being observed by someone else. As the scene lingers, the camera does not move for close-up or show Georges’s reaction, but simply remains at the same spot. Like Georges standing there speechlessly, unable to think or move, the viewer is agitated by a violent shock that seemingly undoes our capacity for further action.

This “terror” or “shock” recalls Deleuze’s “sublime conception of cinema,” when the imagination suffers a shock that pushes it to the limit and forces thought to think the whole as intellectual totality that “goes beyond the imagination” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 157). Presenting Majid’s suicide in such a way, Haneke reduces Georges to a seer who can merely receive images in front of him. This powerlessness to think the whole or to think for oneself illustrates how thought is “fossilized, dislocated, collapsed.” What force us to think, then, is “the inpower of thought, the figure of nothingness, the inexistence of a whole which could be thought.”[8] The fossilization of thought, like the sensory-motor break of images, points to the realm of the outside. This relation with the outside reveals to us not simply “the whole was the open” but “the whole is the outside,” when the power of thought departs from association with the world and gives rise to “the unknown,” “to an unthought in thought, to an irrational proper to thought, a point of outside beyond the outside world” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 181). Rather than making thought visible, the unthinkable in thought of cinema is “directed to what does not let itself be thought in thought, and to what does not let itself be seen in vision” (p. 168). With Haneke’s anonymous tapes signaling a world beyond, one’s thoughts are seized from the outside to confront “the unthinkable in thought.” It contradicts natural perceptions and achieves a suspension of the world, affecting the visible with a fundamental “disturbance.”

As thought veers between images, thoughts, the unthought and the whole as the outside, there lies the thought that is immanent to the image. In A Thousand Plateaus (1994), Deleuze and Guattari argue that the plane of immanence is a pure immanence, a pure plane, or an infinite field exists within. In contrast to transcendence, immanence is not immanent to substance but is substance, immanent to itself, as all distinctions are collapsed into a plane without opposition. The plane of immanence eliminates any forms or “developments of forms,” subjects or the formation of subjects, agency and structures, since there are only “haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages” (p. 266). In Haneke’s film, images are not just pictures like those child-like drawings but are seen as they are read. And the primary characteristics of those images are no longer space and movement but “topology and time” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 125). The reading of the image, then, becomes the “stratigraphic condition,” when the reversal of the image, the corresponding act of perception, regularly converts the empty into the full, “right side into its reverse” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 245). In producing a coalescence of the perceived with the remembered, the imagined, and the known, Caché’s “image of thought” collides with one’s perception, action, memory and emotion, and, in doing so, engenders “the unthought in thought.” As images reverberate with the viewers “from image to thought” and “from thought back to image,” Caché equates images with thought and forces one to think from the outside.

5.3 A will to art in any-space-whatever

That things are not nicely tided up at the end is resonant with Haneke’s view of reality that is as contradicted as it is multiple. He often depicts situations as they are—non-communications of a family, the over-saturation of technologies and media, the readily availability of surveillance—by plainly presenting the mundane activities on tapes and by coolly demonstrating how the Laurents go about their lives. It is only when the family is threatened and the past is evoked by video images, their regular actions take on special meaning. While excavating truths and hidden emotions, Haneke provides his viewers with scenes and moments filled with multivalent significances. Frequently, the viewers are reminded of a world outside or the potentiality of off-screen spaces, as one consciously thinks and reflects upon the situations on screen. The purpose of his realistic depiction, then, is not to tell fables, but, like Italian neorealism, as suggested in Zavattini’s Some ideas on the Cinema (1966), to “recall” it “as it is,” when it has to be “evaded,” “betray,” to give it “a power,” a “communication,” “a series of reflexes.” When each moment is “infinitely rich,” charged with intensity and responsibility, the banality never really exists (p. 225).

Like the spectators caught in the web of suspense, the actors no longer know how to react when facing unendurable situations. That Georges’s inability to act evokes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “the idiot.”[9] Deleuze refers to the character who reaches a purely optical world and becomes a seer as a perfect “Idiot,” who makes us see beings and objects according to their opacity, during which the connection between thought and seeing sets the thought “outside itself, outside knowledge, outside action” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 176). When the orientation and coordination that determine a space all but melt away, there exist not infinite numbers of virtual conjunctions but the “any-space-whatever” that manifests the instability and the heterogeneity upon which singularities emerge. The richness of “any-space-whatever,” thus, lies in its potentiality for “all actualization, all determination” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 109); similarly, the screen becomes “the cerebral membrane,” “an idiot” and a creative brain, where the past and future, the inside and outside, the fiction and reality, collide (Deleuze in Flaxman, 2000, p. 366).

As fiction eclipses reality and reality overlaps with fiction, Caché demonstrates the belief in art and in the world. Deleuze argues that when the thought comes in contact with irrational points like “unthought,” “the unsummonable,” “the inexplicable,” “the undecidable,” “the incommensurable,”[10] cinema no longer gives us the illusion of the world but restores our reason and our belief in the world. After witnessing Majid’s suicide Georges wanders into a movie theater, as if that is the way for him to come to his senses again. It recalls Deleuze’s affirmation that “if the world has become a bad cinema, in which we no longer believe, surely a true cinema can give us back reasons to believe in the world and in vanished bodies” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 200). It is also a testimony to Deleuze’s idea on the new automatism of images, which would be worthless unless it is put to the service of a powerful, obscure, condensed “will to art” (p. 266).

With long take minimizing the manipulation of time and fragmented images interrupting coherent narrative, Haneke’s film renders weak sensory-motor connections of daily activities. The viewers, in return, are given the responsibility of contemplation and construction. When the viewers are confronted with “picture and sound,” a kind of pure audio and visual situations, Haneke envisions that the content is to be “felt” rather than being merely registered as “information to be checked off” (Haneke, 2000b, p. 174), so that the cinema has the capacity of experiencing the world anew (Haneke in Sharrett, 2003, p. 31). As much as the spectators and the actors are remained in the scenes, both, like the final shot that contains so many echoes and reverberations, are no longer held in the confinement of the frame but become porous to the surroundings where fiction is found in reality.

References

Bazin, Andre (1967). What Is Cinema? Trans by Hugh Gray. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.

Crary, Jonathan. (1999). Suspensions of Perception: Attention, spectacle, and modern culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

______. (1988). Modernizing Vision. In Foster (Ed.), Vision and Visionality. Seattle, WA: Bay Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis, NM: University of Minnesota Press.

______. (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis, NM: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1994). What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.

Flaxman, Gregory. (Ed.) (2000). The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.

Frey, Mattias. (Fall 2006). Benny’s Video, Caché, and the Desubstantiated Image Framework. 47, 2; p. 30-36

______. (Sept-Oct 2003). A cinema of disturbance: the films of Michael Haneke in context in Sense of Cinema. Retrieved October 22, 2007, from contents/directors/03/haneke.html

Haneke, Michael. (2000a). Beyond Mainstream Film: An Interview with Michael Haneke. In Riemer (Ed.), After Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, p. 159–170.

______. (2000b). 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance: Notes to the Film. In Riemer (Ed.), After Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press.

Naqvi, Fatima. (2007). A Melancholy Labor of Love, or Film Adaptation as Translation: Michael Haneke’s Drei Wege zum See, The Germanic Review, Heldref Publications, p. 291-315.

Oppenheimer, Jean. (January 2006). Lives on Tape American Cinematographer, 30. p. 30-33

Peucker, Brigitte M. (2000). Fragmentation and the Real: Michael Haneke’s Family Trilogy. In Riemer (Ed.), After Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, p. 176-88.

Porton, Richard. (Winter 2005). Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke Cineaste, 31 no1 p. 50-51.

Riemer, Willy. (Ed.) (2000). After Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press.

Saxton, Libby. (2005). Secrets and revelations: Off-screen space in Michael Haneke’s Caché, Studies in French Cinema 7:1, doi: 10.1386/sfci.7.1.5/1, pp. 5–17.

Sharrett, Christopher. (Winter 2005). Caché (Hidden) Cineaste 31 no1, p. 60-62 and 84.

______. (Fall 2006). Michael Haneke and the Discontents of European Culture. Framework 47, 2 p. 6-16.

______. (Summer 2003). The World That Is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke Cineaste 28 no3, p. 28-31.

Wood, Robin. (January 2006). Hidden in Plain Sight: On Michael Haneke’s Caché Artforum, v. 44, iss. 5, p. 35-37.

Wray, John. (September 23, 2007). Minister of Fear New York Times, retreated 9/25/07.

Zavattini, Cesare. (1966). Some Ideas on the Cinema. In MacCann (Ed.), Film: a montage of theories. New York: Dutton.

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[1] The connection between Haneke and Bresson is drawn in Naqvi, 2007, Locke, 2007, Frey, 2003, and Peucker, 2000. A discussion of Bresson’s principles of sound and visual is in Deleuze, 1989, p. 235.

[2] “what he has taken from Hitchcock amounts to little more than basic plot features, from which he embarks on journeys fundamentally different in aim and nature” (Wood, 2006).

[3] Haneke describes his films being “unpsychological” (Haneke, 2000a, p.164) or “anti-psychological” with which they become “projection surfaces for the sensibilities of the viewer.”

[4] “the taking of one shot is the framing, the shooting of another shot is the deframing of one shot in relation to the framing of the following one, and the montage is the final reframing” (Bamberger on Godard, in Deleuze, 1989, p. 319).

[5] Automata or “model,” according to Bresson, is not at all a creation of the author; in contrast to the role of the actor, they have a “nature,” an “I,” which reacts on the author, “They allowing you to act in them, and you allowing them to act in you” (Bresson in Deleuze, 1989, p 313, note 48).

[6] “On fragmentation: This is indispensible if one does not want to fall into representation. To see being and things in their separate parts. To isolate these parts. Render them independent in order to give them a new dependence” (Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography, p. 46, cited in Deleuze, 1985, p. 232, no 9).

[7] “…the automatism of the image or the mechanism of the camera have as correlate an ‘automatic subjectivity’, able to transform and go beyond the real” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 308, note 1).

[8] Here Deleuze cites Maurice Blanchot, who diagnoses in literature that can be applied in cinema: on the one hand the presence of an unthinkable in thought, which would be both its source and barrier; on the other hand the presence to infinity of another thinker in the thinker, who shatters every monologue of a thinking self (Deleuze, 1989, p. 168).

[9] “The Old idiot wanted truth, but the new idiot wants to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought – in other words, to create” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 62).

[10] “This irrational point is the unsummonable of Welles, the inexplicable of Robbe-Gillet, the undecidable of Resnais, the impossible of Marguerite Duras, the incommensurable of Godard (Deleuze, 1989, p. 182).

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