Sculpting in Time: Michael Haneke’s Caché

Abstract

In this essay I inquire into the way visual arts intervene to disclose and unsettle perspectives on the inequalities within the metropolitan venues in which immigrant populations from former colonies dwell and provide the historical context of the hegemonic structures that such interventions seek to challenge. The inquiry proceeds through a reading of Michael Haneke’s film Caché, which follows a family whose personal memories of a wrong perpetrated on an Algerian foster child is an allegory of France’s willful amnesia about the security forces October 1961 attack on Algerian demonstrators.