Tom Levin: "Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Haneke's Caché."

Tom Levin: “Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Haneke’s Caché.”I propose a reading of Hanecke’s Caché, which looks at the narrative function of its surveillant aspects, in particular what I argue is the moralism of its surveillant narration. For it is in the subtle vicissitudes of what I demonstrates a panoptic formalism over the course of the film that a huge a mount of work takes place–a shift that is best indicated by considering the formal similarity of the first and last scenes (of the house and of the entrance to the schoo1, respectively) which, despite the seeming similarity of their surveillant stasis in fact have utterly different emotional/narrational connotation. Why is this? How does this occur? What is at stake in what I call the moralist formalism of the film’s metaleptic indexicality? This is what I explore in a very close reading of Caché, as I indicate in the paper’s title: “Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Haneke’s Caché”