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105 Hugh S. Manon “Comment ça, rien?” Screening the Gaze in Caché L’écran n’est pas un cadre comme celui du tableau, mais un cache qui ne laisse percevoir qu’une partie de l’événement. —André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma The gaze looks at me, but I can never catch sight of it there where it looks; for there is no “there,” no determinate location , no place whence it looks. —joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation 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. Caché screens the gaze on two levels. First, for Georges Laurent, the gaze appears as an impossible black hole that must remain foreclosed for everyday reality to retain its consistency. Second, for the film’s audience, 106 H U G H S . M A n O n the gaze becomes evident at those gaps in representation where the film self-reflexively “looks back” at the viewer—acknowledging, among other things, how cinematic desire is constructed. By conflating these two gazes at crucial points in the narrative, especially through the trope of the video camcorder, Haneke makes clear that Georges’s problem with the gaze belongs to all of us. In such moments, form and content become indistinguishable , and it is here that Haneke’s film most pointedly functions as a work of theory, rendering a final verdict on the positivistic oversights of 1970s apparatus theory, especially its tendency to position the gaze on the order of the imaginary (that is, in the content of the image or its framing) rather than on the order of the real (that is, where the image fails, decomposes , becomes nonsensical) as Lacan would have it. As I go on to argue, the opening shot of Caché is an example of the gaze par excellence, provided we understand the gaze, contra the primary tenet of apparatus theory, as “mark[ing] a disturbance in the function of ideology rather than its expression .”1 As a point of entrance into this discussion, it may be useful to consider a nuance in the film’s title that is glossed over in its English-language translation as “Hidden.” In French, the word cache (without the accent aigu) has direct implications regarding film style and can refer to the cardboard “mask” that cinematographers, especially during the silent era, employed to block out one portion of an image and lend emphasis to another. The term also appears in one of the most repeated aphorisms of film theory: André Bazin’s famous claim that the cinematic screen must be understood not as “a frame like that of a picture but a mask [cache] which allows only a part of the action to be seen.”2 In both of these cases, the word cache is less indicative of a material object than a psychic tendency, present in all human subjects; the “mask” of cinema is not a disguise or cover but an act of part-concealment that, in its partialness, reorients our relation to what remains visible.3 The keystone concept in Lacanian theory is the objet petit a, of which the gaze is one “paramount embodiment.”4 Although the term resists easy definition, if asked to sum up the structure of the gaze in a single word, we would be hard pressed to find a better approximation than “maskedoff -ness.” When Todd McGowan rightly states that the gaze “promises the subject the secret of the Other, but this secret exists only insofar as it remains hidden,” we can be sure that his use of the word “hidden” does not mean “unnoticed” but rather “masked off,” partially obscured, caché.5 Accordingly, it will be...

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