“Be Here to See This”: Haneke’s Intrusive Images

Abstract

In the age of globalization and frenzied visuality, the battle over the possession of history, no less than that over representation itself, often takes the form of a contest of images. When rendered invisible, odious historical truths can sometimes be elided and buried. The unearthing and re-visualization of deliberately suppressed events is obviously a key task for historical scholarship, especially within postcolonial studies, but occasionally this subject is broached also by artists, writers, and filmmakers. In this chapter, I shall examine how Haneke re-imagines and problematizes a long forgotten scandal in French postwar history—the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961—and how he brings his viewers face to face with the enduring ramifications of this dark chapter in the narrative of the nation. My focus will be on the ways in which Caché implicates the viewer in the events described by the film and on the withholding, or even obliteration, of cinematic pleasure that Haneke’s games entail. The filmmaker’s iconoclastic project, I argue, revisits the figure of intrusion so prevalent in some of his earlier films like Funny Games (1997) and Code Unknown (2000) and aligns his work with a counter-cinema tradition whose antecedents include the likes of Buñuel, Godard, and Mulvey.