The Violence of the Cut: Michael Haneke’s Caché and Cultural Memory

Abstract

Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005) treats the cut in a number of ways. There are the violent physical cuts that punctuate the film, violent cuts in the ties binding one character to another, the cuts that mark out the dividing lines between the protected zone of Georges’s bourgeois life and the outside world, and, finally, the filmic cut which splices up the world into disconnected images. In this article, I will argue that the cut is central to Haneke’s presentation of the real and of memory: cocooned in a world of dislocated images, we are cut off from our contact with the real and from our past. Exposure to the violence of the cut re-establishes connections that have been severed, returns us to an ethical position with regard to the other, and reinscribes human action within history.