Today I watched Caché by Haneke for the second time. I was 21 the first time, so at first I thought that it wouldn't impress me as much this time, the second time, that its powers would be diminished by repetition. And of course I couldn't be more wrong. The impact that Caché produces grows up with you, the older you are the more multifarious and tentacled your guilt is, the fairer the punishment. The only difference is that the first time I was surprised by feeling guilty, and that now I'm so familiar with this mechanism that I am even daring to theorize about it.
The most intriguing shots (which is to say a lot) in the film are the ones that start like the one above: a still camera, watching for several minutes. We think that we are in the position of a surveillance camera, or later on we think we are in the position of the stalker. Then all of a sudden the shot gets contaminated by blurry rewinding lines: we are not watching the street, this is the tape that the characters got of the stalker spying on them. The amazing thing is that we realize we are not only watching the characters, but at the same time, the characters are watching themselves being watched. This is a tromp l'oeil, an instability between dimensions in an incessant shift: from extradiegesis to diegesis, from reality to fiction, from disembodied eye to incarnated victim. From unaware consciousness to consciousness thinking itself. Isn't this the most masterly formalization of guilt, of this awful splitting that allows us to be judge and judged at the same time? This is also we quoting Majid to ourselves: "I just wanted you to be present".
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