Visual and Performing Arts
"Comment ça, rien?": Screening the Gaze in Caché
Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
Film theorists sometimes introduce their work as reading a certain cultural artifact "through a psychoanalytic lens." This essay reads the opening long take of Michael Haneke's Caché (2005) as a psychoanalytic lens, one that both magnifies the desire of protagonist Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) and exposes his actions as a catastrophic performance for the desire of the Other. As such, the opening shot (and others like it later in the film) can be understood as an invitation to look at, indeed to scrutinize, what Jacques Lacan calls le regard-"the gaze"-a crucial psychoanalytic concept that has suffered decades of misinterpretation by theorists of various stripes. Whether or not Haneke is familiar with Lacanian theory- and I make no such claims here-it is to the writer-director's great credit that Caché represents the gaze with all the complexity Lacan intended.
Publication Title
On Michael Haneke
Publication Date
2010
First Page
105
Last Page
125
ISBN
9780814336991
Keywords
Caché, Michael Haneke
Repository Citation
Manon, Hugh S., ""Comment ça, rien?": Screening the Gaze in Caché" (2010). Visual and Performing Arts. 6.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_visual_performing_arts/6