Abstract

Michael Haneke’s film Caché explores the psychological and social effects of the intrusion of the immigrant Other into privileged Western capitalist society. Caché allegorises the intrusion of the immigrant Other through a series of intrusive and threatening non-diegetic surveillance tapes delivered to a wealthy Parisian family’s home, the subject of the surveillance. Haneke’s film undertakes a significant critique of the increasing right-wing anti-immigrant sentiment driving neo-liberal politics and ideology in the capitalist West. Here, Caché confronts the viewer with their complicity in the disavowal and subjugation of the immigrant Other within their own social edifice. The significance of Caché is the film’s potential to facilitate the viewers’ confrontation with the disavowed and repressed truth of the social edifice. This confrontation enables the viewer to assume an emancipatory subjectivity which extends beyond Caché’s cinematic frame into the viewers’ own social edifice. I argue that Haneke’s film has the potential to radically alter the way viewers relate to the diegetic reality and, through the figuration of cinema, to their own social edifice. Ultimately, Caché brings to the fore the disavowed truth of both capitalist society and of privileged subjectivities, demanding a new politics based on the excluded immigrant Other