What is it about?
Bringing together film scholars such as Catherine Wheatley, Todd McGowan, Gilles Deleuze and Teresa Rizzo, we propose that Haneke’s techniques destabilize the spectator to evoke a sense of shared guilt leading towards the possibility of atonement. Haneke applies narrative devices to both engage and challenge the spectator to take account of the past. We conclude that Caché offers temporal cinema that punctuates or ruptures conventional structure to allow the spectator to enter the film and engage in a personal process of ethical reflection.
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Why is it important?
The various scholars and writers engaged is unusual for their different approaches. Together it offers a means of tackling questions of ethics and guilt not from a distance but in the bond between film and spectator.
Perspectives
The original draft of the essay was completed by Charlotte Hill. Through reading and through conversation, I recognized where she was going and felt I could contribute by offering an immanent cinema through Deleuze and Rizzo. Through immanence, distances give way to a shared experience that resonates what are often regarded as divisions between film and spectator. We shared revisions back and forth and found ourselves aligned all along the process.
Dr James Batcho
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An invitation to bear witness: collective guilt and the ethical spectator in Haneke’s Caché, Studies in European Cinema, April 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2018.1456189.
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