隐藏摄像机

“Television accelerates experience, but one needs time to understand what one sees, which the current media disallows. Not just understand on an intellectual level, but emotionally.”

—— Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke is one of the famous Austrian directors, his films often use media as the means that is similar with the function of language to social construction, reflecting the post-modern society of the middle class filled with media violence and void caused by material piling. Television as the typical representation of medium, it uses anthropogenic editing visually and auditorily accelerates the experience subject’s presence. However, the real happening only exists in one place, technology makes it possible using medium as physical object to create countless simulacrum of reality with a compressed time. In the interview of Haneke, he mentioned about the danger of media several times, especially the violent moving-images included in television.

It seems easy for audiences only watch the image and take the information conveyed by media, but it hardly can create an empathy and replace the real presence in real time and space. It the constantly played videos that shows violence and pain in distance on television leaves a vague feeling of guilty and incompetent (2005, as cited in Saxton, 2007, p13). In this case, does the reality attached to the physical media no longer pose a stimulation or a threat to the audience, but gradually become an item that can be examined, so we become numb and rigid filled with such empty realistic derivatives to some extent? The surprise when people first time see the images has gone. According to Yuan (2017), with the fast development of technology, the flood of information and also the large proliferation, modern media can cause the implosion between the reality and the virtual. Being the product of human being, modern media like television and content included inside gradually convey and then even represent the spiritual world of one. In the life surrounded by multiple media, the alienation of human is almost inevitable.

In Caché (Haneke, 2005), the video tape is one materialized physical convey of Georges’ emotional experience, which is the guilty he cannot forget when he deliberately uses lies to get rid of Majid in his childhood. The video tapes lead Georges in to the infinite maze of memory and escape. What is interesting is that the identity of Georges is the host of a television show, the producer of the medium society. Frame start with the scene in video tape, which is can be recognized as the present reality at first, and then frame jumps to another scene that turns to be seen as happening in progress. Each video tape sent has occupied the full screen for a while, which is equal with the ongoing film scene. Counting the film as a medium itself, there almost is no a certain space for audience to be present except the truth, being in front a screen, that may already had been forgotten. Georges keeps trying to find where the camera is by walking around the same place recorded in video tape. However, it is impossible for him to find the camera since the source of tapes are actually from director’s sight or audience’s sight. Alienation happened before all the people realized it, the “video tapes” had controlled us.

Word count: 514

Reference List:

Heiduschka, V. (Producer), & Haneke, M. (Screenwriter/ Director). (2005). Caché [Motion Picture]. French: Wega Film etc.

Saxton, L. (2007) Secrets and relationships: Off-screen space in Michael Haneke’s Caché. London: University of London.

Yuan, X. (2017). Michael Haneke’s film studies: The sin that be shadowed and highlighted. Wuhan: University of Wuhan.