In his 1975 essay on the apparatus of cinema, Jean-Louis Baudry argues that understanding of the medium’s ontology demands “the viewpoint of the apparatus that it constitutes, [an] apparatus which in its totality includes the subject” (17). Such a contextualization may help frame the subject-object relationship present in auteur Michael Haneke’s Caché. Viewing spectatorship through the lens of technology, the film interrogates the objectivity of perspective, whether diegetic, technological, or spectatorial. Formal elements like the long take, a technical trope of cinematic realism, function here to instead disrupt immersion and activate the viewer’s self-awareness of their spectating agency.

In this way, Haneke’s awareness of his spectatorial address implicitly invokes a certain horizon of experience as defined by Miriam Hansen, who underlines the subjective uniqueness of the cinematic experience. Reflective of an emerging, heterogeneous mass public, this horizon includes what the dominant public sphere omits, distorts, or abstracts (Hansen 203). In the case of Caché, it’s the collective guilt and repression of French-Algerian tensions post-1960. This historic subtext, however, remains largely hidden, emerging only in the characters’ — as well as the viewer’s — periphery via diegetic and discursive tangentiality. By subverting the indexical properties of film, the dispositif of the long take thus functions as a matrix for challenging the space between spectacle and spectator.

The long take as a means of world-building as seen in ‘Atonement’ (2007).

Consider the formal dimension of the long take in classical cinema. In his examination of its role in exacerbating the artifice of realism, André Bazin argues that its use “is based on respect for the continuity of dramatic space and, of course, its duration” (35). As with films like Atonement (2007) and Children of Men (2006), the long take paradoxically acknowledges the staged construct of its choreography for the intent of immersive world-building. For practical purposes, the viewer’s function is that of a voyeur, one whose cinematic gaze is immersed not in their relationship to the image, but the image itself.

Thus the use of the long take in Caché departs from this Bazinian model by subverting, not securing a relationship with the real. Haneke’s camera loses sight of objective knowledge through a bifurcated approach to cinematography, one wherein stasis and movement indicate surveillance footage or a profilmic aesthetic, respectively. Composition and mise en scène are figuratively relegated to the background of the shot, shifting the viewer’s gaze from the diegetic spectacle to self-awareness of their spectatorship.

This distancing between film and audience, spectacle and spectator, is not unique to Caché — or Haneke’s oeuvre for that matter. The director’s 1992 film Benny’s Video also confronts the viewer with a formal bricolage that includes surveillance tapes, news programming, dream sequences, and “traditional” 35mm film. The strict division of visual mediums here vanishes in Caché, however, whose continuous use of the digital camera destabilizes the spectator with a materially consistent image. Perhaps the most compelling example from the film is the opening sequence.