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Austrian director Michael Haneke's masterful 2005 film Caché has much to teach about 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… Continue reading at AgainstTheCurrent.org