Hidden in plain sight: bringing terror home

Abstract

In a world where turning a blind eye has become an art, Michael Haneke's 2005 Caché/Hidden explores the ways in which being made to look – and to think – can be experienced as forms of terror. Both fascinating and profoundly banal, it is a film about waiting and watching – and then not seeing what is right in front of you. The film's deceptively narrow depiction of a world of material privilege corroded by psychic unease opens up broader questions of the political deployment of fear and paranoid fantasy, and the dishonesties and displacements of postcolonialism. The film's narrative unfolds in a European city, showing us members of a bourgeois family who appear to have taken refuge behind the walls of their own home, yet who remain unable to shut out the past and their own feelings of paranoia and persecution. They see themselves as victims of a campaign of terror, which initially takes the form of videotapes pushed through the door. These tapes appear to show little more than the unexceptional surface of their everyday lives, yet they serve to unlock a secret from the past, a hidden story of colonial suffering – and in doing so expose the structures of oppression and complicity on which their lives are built.

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