Starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, Michael Haneke's Caché ( 2005) is a film about troubled or distorted vision. Centrally concerned with how we "turn a blind eye to the world around us," it also questions the status of the film image: what are we seeing? What is its temporality? Who is witnessing what? The film's protagonist is a French media personality, Georges Laurent, who—along with his privileged family—is terrorized by videotapes that indicate that he is under surveillance. Georges is also haunted by his past, by the return of repressed memories concerning someone he mistreated as a child. Caché incorporates racial and political issues into its plot, in addition to an exploration of Oedipal conflict.

In the context of family shame, what develops in this film is a running metafilmic pun on first versus second generation imaging (35mm film versus video), even as it articulates the political ambiguities of two generations of immigrant consciousness. The film's hero is a spectator who must recognize his actions from the outside, and see the point of view of the Other in the mode of surveillance. What is the nature of the oblique relation Haneke seems to establish between an image and what it might imply? This roundtable will consider theoretical questions in relation to Franco-Algerian politics, the "cinema of cruelty," the use of off-screen space, and the Freudian scenario of the bourgeois family.

Brigitte Peucker (moderator) is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Film Studies at Yale University. Her books include Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition, Incorporating Images: Film and The Rival Arts and The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film. She is currently working on a book on Fassbinder.

Garrett Stewart has held long-term teaching positions at Boston University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as visiting appointments at Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). Since 1993 he has been James O. Freeman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. With several books and dozens of articles on Victorian narrative and literary theory, he has published more recently on the visual arts, including Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text, and Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema.