Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Caché
2005 · Michael Haneke · Caché on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice that the camera almost never moves. (camera)
Berger works from a tripod, frontal, deep focus, across a rectilinear room or a long Parisian facade. No pans, no point-of-view shots, no zooms. The image watches instead of following anyone.
Payoff: You are never placed inside a character's head. The frame observes the way a security system observes, and you observe alongside it.
Watch the opening shot and how long it holds. (structure)
The street holds far past the point a film would cut, and nothing in the frame says who is in control of it. Haneke shoots the rest of the film in the same flat, frontal way.
Payoff: After that you cannot tell whose image you are looking at. In the reading: crystalline description. Recording and reality becoming hard to tell apart is what the reading calls crystalline description.
Listen for music and notice that none ever plays. (sound)
There is no score anywhere in the film. What fills that space is street noise, a television murmuring in another room, the ambient hum of Georges's talk show. The tapes play in silence.
Payoff: Nothing tells you how to feel. The silence is not suspense. It is the film declining to do your reacting for you.
Watch how calm Auteuil stays while he refuses to answer. (performance)
Georges performs reasonableness. He is fluent at dinner, measured with his wife, patient with questions he has no intention of answering. Auteuil plays the calm as a technique rather than as innocence.
Payoff: The composure is the evasion. Notice when he chooses to be reasonable and you will see what he is steering away from.
Compare the Laurent apartment with the rooms Georges visits. (staging)
High ceilings, walls of books, a salon built for hosting. Then bare, underlit suburban flats with nothing on the walls. Haneke shoots both frontally and lets the difference sit there unremarked.
Payoff: The gap between the furniture is the film's argument. Two lives shaped by one history, and only one of them has the option of forgetting.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Ask of every shot who is holding this camera. The film will not tell you, and it is counting on that.