Policing Paris1: Private Publics and Architectural Media in Michael Haneke’sCaché

Abstract

Locating Paris as a central site to explore national anxieties surrounding the immigrant subject in France, this article turns to Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché (Hidden), which offers an important counter‐narrative of the state’s desire to depoliticize the continuation of colonial practices in the present. While the private space of the home and the public space of the media are often seen as opposing spheres in dominant imaginaries, Haneke collapses these distinctions by highlighting colonialism’s present violences through the multiple home spaces of Paris. Turning to various home spaces in the film allows the viewer to enter the more hidden territorializations of colonial violence often relegated as “private” matters within nation‐state narratives of a coherent national “public” culture. Moreover, by politicizing more dominant political boundaries/borders between public and private space in the home itself, the film offers a radical critique of the privation of privacy and modern architecture as media. This move, the author suggests finally, provides an additional critique of the ways in which national ideas of the French “family”, “security”, and immigrant “other” are highly policed categories of knowledge enacted in part through the individual.

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