Caché, Colonial Psychosis and the Algerian War

Abstract

Lies propagated at the national level were an important tool of colonial exploitation. If France was enforcing a race-based segregation in the colony of Algeria, similar practices within France were leading to the violent subjugation of people of Algerian origins. In Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), a film about France's official denial of colonial crimes of the Algerian War, the presence of multiple cameras reminds us that colonial truth is perspectival. Spatial analyses reveal Georges Laurent participating in a colonial psychosis that produces Majid as the orphaned product of France's war on Algeria. The space between the viewer and the film performatively reminds us that just as the colonizer and the colonized form a mutually inflecting relation, we, too, shall forever remain implicated in the subject of our gaze.

Keywords:

• Algerian war of independence
• French colonialism
• lies
• 17 October 1961
• Maurice Papon
• psychosis
• space
• suicide
• violence

Notes

1 I base my understanding of Arendt on Young-Bruehl’s (2006) work.

2 Such is the complexity of spatial engagement in Haneke's oeuvre that McCann and Sorfa (2011) devote an entire section (titled “Space”) to questions of space and spatiality in Haneke's work. From the relevance of travel as a means of evading one's location (Justice 2011), to the interaction between the space of the city and the ethics of hospitality towards others in Code Inconnu (Geyh 2011), these chapters open up various ways of situating Haneke's cinema along spatial matrices.

3 In the context of Haneke's Code Inconnu, Geyh (2011) briefly deploys similar spatial dynamics to explain the relationship between the inside and the outside of the human subject: the relationship between the “internal otherness” and the “external Other” (111–112).

4 House and MacMaster contextualize this demonstration by explaining it as part of the FLN's desire to exert pressure on de Gaulle's government. For further information on the background and history of October 17, 1961, see House and MacMaster (2006, 1–31).

5 Bayraktar (2016) also points out how “multiple temporalities and spaces get interwoven in these sequences, expanding into the colonial past and to various geographical locations beyond the borders of France” (88).

6 Caché's “terrible realism” serves as a cinematic reminder of the spectator being an accomplice to the colonial crime. For an interesting analysis of Cache's realism as a means of engaging with the “absence of colonial history” and with the “incomplete nature of our vision,” see Celik (2010, 61).