Abstract

This paper considers Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 2004 film Caché within the remit of Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘constitutive blank’. Haneke’s film exploits the well-known film device of the ellipsis, but goes much further in that the use of the blank is structural. Not only does that which is ‘hidden’ taint human relations throughout the film, but Caché, in its radical indeterminacy, illuminates Iser’s contention that it is through blanks that negations gain their productive force, such that negativity is transformed into an enabling structure. A secondary theme will be to consider Haneke’s particular use of the blank in Cavellian terms, as a ‘staged’ withdrawal of acknowledgment. Here, Cavell’s mechanism of empathic projection is ‘staged’: a laying bare made apparent through Haneke’s foregrounding of the conditions of the films existence. We are again and again forced to question the ‘staging’ of scenes in relation to a fixed camera position, where an uncertainty persists as to whether this apparatus is, or is not, internal to the film’s diegesis.