Revisiting Caché

Robert Jackson Wood

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AUSTRIAN DIRECTOR MICHAEL Haneke’s masterful 2005 film Caché (Hidden) has much to teach us about colonial repression, and the Gaza genocide.

When I first watched Caché around the time it came out, it struck me as an impeccably crafted, formally mind-bending, and yet merely superb thriller. I took it to be a film about surveillance, about bourgeois fragility and paranoia, and about its own ingenious narrative devices, which exploit the camera’s gaze to destabilize that of the viewer. The film was powerful but not transformative.

When I watched it again recently, it struck me as an uncannily prescient, nearly incapacitating masterpiece. It was less about surveillance or paranoia than about something much more below the surface: the repressed truths of colonialism and their inevitable and devastating return. What had changed in the intervening time was my closer proximity to a certain politics, lit up as from a flare by the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. From that more politicized vantage point, what had formerly been a film about invasive forms of seeing became a film about impotent forms of knowing. The unconscious had come to light.

There is a sense in which Caché is also about this very process of revelation. As a film about repression and buried truths, it is also about the conditions of its own possible illegibility to us, about what can be hidden of these colonial histories outside the film in our everyday lives as much as inside — whether by school curricula or papers of record — and about what unknowingly structures our perception as a result. In a way, it is a film that proves its points even when we don’t realize, or have the means to realize, that it has.

Comforts Unravelled

But in holding to the mandates of the unconscious, Caché also keeps much in its own narrative unspoken and unsaid. We meet Michael (Daniel Auteil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), a cultured French couple who live in their book-lined Parisian apartment with their son. When they begin to receive VHS tapes in the mail indicating that their family is being surveilled, things start to unravel The comfortable middle-class life they maintain, filled with wine and literature, suddenly feels vulnerable and susceptible to collapse. Our empathy remains with them for much of the film. The dominant note is suspense, not politics.

Yet gradually, something resembling the truth begins to emerge. We learn that when Michael was young, his wealthy family had considered adopting a working-class Algerian child, Majid, whose parents had worked for the family but died in the 1961 Paris massacre Michael, annoyed at having to share space with the child, tempted him into committing a violent act that led to the child being sent away, and subsequently, to a life of immiseration and sorrow. In the context of the recent history of Palestine, it is a familiar story: the powerful betray the trust of the powerless, of those whose lives they administer and control, by provoking the latter to acts of violence that are used to justify disproportionately punitive responses. On and on the cycle goes.

And then, of course, the forgetting. “Who?,” Michael’s mother wonders when asked if she ever thinks about Majid. We are led to believe that Michael had forgotten him, too, until Michael secretly begins to suspect that the VHS tapes are from him. After a confrontation between the two, our sympathies begin to shift, assisted by a brilliant cinematographic sleight of hand. Standard camera shots that move the narrative along sit side by side with long takes that seem to be of a similar kind, yet turn out to be those from the surveillance camera inside the narrative. The effect is to elide the viewers gaze unknowingly with Majid, with the colonized other.

The Past Returns

But are the tapes really from Majid? It doesn’t matter. On a deeper level, their purpose in the film is to represent Michael’s unconscious, that voice of inner scrutiny so often misrecognized — projectively, defensively — as something threatening coming from the outside. In essence, they are Michael’s past coming back to him as enigma, as symptom, as things that disturb the workings of the life that is nonetheless built around them, a life that takes them as its disavowed core.

Forgetting, that is, is not just the cause of the occasional annoyance, Caché suggests. It is an absence that forms the very center, albeit inaccessible, of our being, helping to determine why we desire as we do, to say nothing of our destinies. To convey this, the film gestures not to Algeria but to Gaza, in the news then nearly as much as now. In a memorable scene, shot with suggestive symmetry, the territory appears in the form of a map on a TV newscast, framed in the precise middle between Anne and Michael as they discuss their ongoing drama, completely oblivious to it. The suggestion is that of a truth that is constitutive — structural even — yet mute and hidden. It is that our lives take the form they do not in spite of what has been pushed aside and forgotten but because of it.

Gaza Then, Genocide Now

There is much that Caché has to suggest about Gaza itself in this regard. The film was partly shot in 2004, the year that Israel, under prime minister Ariel Sharon, announced it would be “withdrawing” from and ending its nearly forty-year occupation of the territory. Israel framed the move as a gesture of peacemaking, using it to extract concessions from the United States and others that would define their permissive relationship to this day. Yet the move was not about peace. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has written, Israel withdrew its settlers from the territory so that its bombing there could be more indiscriminate and it could better control it from the outside. Truly relinquishing Gaza was out of the question. The Israeli state needed Gaza, aided by the provoked violence of Hamas, to be hostile so that it could justify postponing the question of Palestinian statehood indefinitely.

In other words, Israel knew and still knows that, at this point, without at least a trace of what it deems the Palestinian threat, something about the Zionist fantasy would cease to exist. Rooted as it is in a sense of eternal victimhood and innocence, inimical to closure and ingrained from birth into the psyches of Israeli citizens as a kind of debt to them that can never be repaid, Israeli Zionism understands that the best way for its fantasy to be perpetuated is to preserve the very thing that makes it impossible. That means preserving hostile territory as well as a steady supply of those who make it so, including the children currently being radicalized by the steady rain of Israeli bombs.

But Caché, with its themes of surveillance, poses simpler questions as well. What, for example, would it mean for Michael to see himself from the perspective of Majid? Or, more generally, what would it mean to assume the perspective of the other who, in being cast out by us, we unconsciously cast within? By the time the film ends, at least the viewer can answer these questions. We start out identifying with Michael, seeing him as a cultured family man under threat. We end identifying with Majid as we watch Michael drink straight from the faucet and sleep naked like a dog. The real “human animal” is revealed. We also end with this critical eye cast on ourselves as spectators: We too are guilty, because we too have misrecognized the nature of Michael’s plight and of these videotaped messages from the other.

As for Michael himself, he remains unmoved. He is determined that what haunts him is not his own guilt but an Algerian man who refuses to forget how his life was ruined, and who ruined it. There should be a time limit on the bitterness of the oppressed, he implies. Majid has a new home now, even if he was kicked out of his old one. Time to move on.

Yet if Caché has a lesson for right now, it is that there can be no moving on. It is that the repressed will always, in one form or another, exercise its right to return. And it will do this even at the expense of zero-sum colonial fantasies that are coextensive with forgetting, with raising up a nation-state’s founding myths only by pressing others down. In the Israeli context, Edward Said called this “the concealment by Zionism of its own history” — its perennial denial of the fact that its founding gesture was precisely one of ruining lives by kicking people like Majid out of their homes. Insofar as the current tragedy is perpetuated by the merchants of that denial, from Congress to Knesset, and by those for whom the time for Palestinian grieving long ago expired, Caché remains essential viewing.

November-December 2025, ATC 239