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Michael Haneke's new(s) images.

Article Excerpt
To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts. Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions--there the dialectical image appears.

--Walter Benjamin.

This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the processes of contemplation.

--Walter Benjamin

His precision reminds me of music: he likes brief pauses, and long breaths.

--Juliette Binoche, on working with Michael Haneke

Those who have seen Michael Haneke's 2005- film Cache will recall the opening sequence. In what is experienced as an extremely long take, the camera, remaining still, stares down a domestic Parisian street. Centered in the distance of a crowded composition is the fortified facade of a "two-story" town house. The sun is shining, we can hear birds chirping, and after a full minute has passed we see a pedestrian leisurely traverse the frame from right to left. Were it not for this minor event, the idyllic, durational image that we confront here, as the credits unroll, could very well be a photograph.

After two minutes without a cut, as the stillness of the scene begins to weigh on us, we see a woman leave the house in the distance, only to scurry out of the frame after she closes the gate behind her. The camera stoically lingers in its position, showing no indication of interest in this or anything else that happens. A man on a bicycle rounds the corner, the wind blows, and the chattering birds continue to chirp with irreverence. And then suddenly, after two-and-a-half minutes of staring at this innocuous image, we hear the hushed, acousmatic tone of a man's voice, and after a moment, a woman's. (1) The origin of these voices is unclear; their emergence from outside the field of vision is uncanny: both are disembodied, both are elusive, yet both provide us with the hope that we're now in the company of a talking cure to our emergent sensation of spectatorial confusion. "Where was it?" he asks. "In a plastic bag on the porch," she says.

At this point the disjunction between sound and image becomes evident, as we hear indistinct movements from a heterogeneous acoustical environment. Then, finally, there's a cut. It's now dusk, and we are still outside the house, only now we're much closer, and at a forty-five- rather than a ninety-degree angle. To the left of a massive decorative shrub that doubles both as a domestic barrier and as a signifier of a fortified ego (if not a fortified Europe), we see a man, whom we will soon learn to identify as the primary character Georges Laurent, exit one set of doors and then, with some hesitation, another: his residential security gate. As he walks into the street, the camera pans right, steadily following his movement from a distance. With its nervous physical pauses--a gesture that I underscore since it foreshadows the formal procedure that follows--his movement articulates a sense of insecurity that is echoed by the way he looks backward over his shoulder, in the direction of the past tense, as if someone might be following him.

After slowly crossing the street, Georges comes to a stop and looks offscreen in the direction of where the camera was positioned for the establishing shot. He stands still long enough for the attentive spectator to note that the initial camera set-up was positioned on the Rue des Iris--an unmistakable reference to the iris (or eye) of the camera, the hidden camera that gazes upon his household. This sign might remind us of Dziga Vertov's defamdiarizing "kino-eye," the mechanical camera eye that, like Walter Benjamin's formulation of photography's optical unconscious, Vertov "conceived as 'what the eye does not see,'" as "the documentary decoding of both the visible world and...

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