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The Chimalpahin Conference 2007: Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness October 16 - 18, 200 7
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Michael
Haneke’s New(s) Images and the Politics of Counter-Memory Jonathan
Thomas Comparative Studies in
Discourse and Society University of Minnesota/ Whitney Museum of American Art Michael Haneke’s films
currently constitute one of the most important critical articulations of
cinematic research into the mass-mediated forms that govern our collective
perception. Acutely aware of
the politics of representation, his is a cinema that uses images to
question images, to problematize the relationship of images to one another,
and to destabilize what Viktor Schklovsky once described as the
habituation of perception, thereby revitalizing film spectatorship as a
critical and pensive enterprise. In
this paper I will show how this aspect of his project operates by
analyzing the opening sequence of his most recent film, Caché (Hidden,
2005), which was released just weeks before the violence that exploded
among the marginalized immigrants in the banlieus of France.
Caché is a film about
history, memory, and repression. As
a psychological thriller set in contemporary Paris, the film functions
allegorically as a sustained examination of one society’s refusal to
sufficiently historicize its past, or at least those elements of its past
that problematize its current quest for self-definition. In this sense, the film mounts a critique of what France’s
effective dominant culture has constituted as its selective tradition.
In this paper I will argue that this critique – a
metahistoriographical argument – is embedded in the film’s rendering
of time, its poetics of the pause. What the existing critical
literature has neglected to engage, and what I want to emphasize in my
presentation, is the way in which Haneke disarticulates news images from a
spectacularized image economy and détournes them in the service of
counter-memory. More to the
point, my argument will be that in Caché this redeployment of news images
– specifically images of the occupation of Iraq, the Abu Ghraib torture
trials, and the ongoing struggle in Palestine – functions to construct
what Walter Benjamin described as a “dialectical image,” especially
insofar as these contemporaneous images of political urgency enter into a
constellation with a narrativized salvaging of the colonial past. |