Caché (Hidden) (BFI Film Classics)
Catherine WheatleyThis hasn't stopped people trying. In an in-depth & illuminating account, Wheatley examines the key themes at the heart of the 'meaning' of Caché: the film as thriller; post-colonial bourgeois guilt; political accountability & lastly, reality, the media & its audiences, tracing these strands through the film by means of close readings of individual scenes & moments. Inspired by the director's claim that we might understand the film as a set of Russian dolls, each of which is complete in itself but together forms a whole in which layers of unseen depth are concealed, Wheatley avoids a single, unifying approach to understanding Caché. Instead, her detailed analysis of the film's shifting perspectives opens up the multiplicity of meanings that Caché contains, in order to understand its secrets.
This edition includes a new foreword in which the author reflects upon Caché in the context of Haneke's subsequent work, & considers the film's contemporary resonances in an era of omnipresent surveillance technology & doctored 'fake news' videos.
Catherine Wheatley is Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London, UK. She is the author of Michael Haneke's Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (2008) & the co-editor of Je t'aime… moi non plus (2010).