Introduction

Abstract

Michael Haneke's Caché/Hidden (2005) is a film that seems to generate endless discussion. Part thriller, part mystery, part ghost story, it seems to haunt people long after they see it, prompting them to talk about it to the point at which one would normally expect the interpretive possibilities to be exhausted – but still, new interpretations keep bubbling up, sometimes unbidden. And yet, although this film is certainly puzzling in many respects, it resists attempts to read it as a puzzle to be decoded. Perhaps it is compelling not because it has great deal to say (in the sense that its silences are just as informative as its utterances), but because it elicits an unusually wide range of responses from so many different perspectives. Having found the film so generative ourselves, we were keen to extend this conversation and conceived of a collection of pieces drawn from writers with whom we had previously collaborated, or whose work we had drawn on or had simply admired from afar. In keeping with the film's transnational pedigree (Haneke is an Austrian director working in France and the film addresses the Franco-Algerian War and its aftermath), this dossier crosses boundaries, both geographical and disciplinary, and touches on questions of concern to fields of inquiry ranging from cultural, social and literary theory to film aesthetics, history, philosophy and psychoanalysis.

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