White Paranoia: Michael Haneke's Caché reflected through Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel La Jalousie
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Inspired by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Jalousie (1957), the essay contends that Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) takes its viewers inside a postcolonial white paranoia which is, arguably, the root cause of the exclusion, segregation and racist discrimination that many immigrants from the former colonies – and their children – are experiencing in contemporary France. It suggests that the entire film be read as the protagonist’s paranoid vision that imagines white privileges to be menaced by some non-white conspiracy. His obsession, which hinges on a fear of a reversal of the power inherent in ‘the gaze’, as brought out in the central ‘stalking plot’, informs the entire film’s narration and audiovisual make-up and explains, among other things, the serial repetitions and variations of certain settings and objects as the protagonist’s desperate attempt to create order in a threatening world. The construction of the film, however, also allows Haneke to critically comment upon his protagonist’s paranoia and demonstrate its ill-foundedness, for instance by pointing to a possible ‘banal conviviality’ (Paul Gilroy) between people of different ethnicities, cultures and religions.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Studies in French Cinema |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 1 |
Pages (from-to) | 91-108 |
Number of pages | 18 |
ISSN | 1471-5880 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 6 Feb 2017 |
- Faculty of Humanities - Michael Haneke, Caché, postcolonialism, France, immigration, Alain Robbe-Grillet
Research areas
ID: 164796401