Haneke and Woolf

The worlds of Caché and Mrs. Dalloway are both defined by voyages into childhood memory and extreme intimacy between the viewer/reader and the protagonists. In Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, we are constantly drawn back in time to the childhood of Peter and Clarissa; drawn back to the house they grew up in. Haneke similarly takes us back to Georges childhood home. But what makes these recollections interesting is the second commonality between the two works: the flow. The flow of Caché is one of the most interesting and unique aspects of the film: we are left with long scenes of seemingly non action that result in the feeling of being actually present voyeurs into the characters’ lives. We are the strange video camera that records it all. We see life as it is, as slowly as it goes. In this way I found Caché to be reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway: we follow the threads of peoples lives in real time, not jumping around through their days, but rather staying with them even through long, uncomfortable moments. We are taken back in time to their memories, but even those scenes are uncut and unadulterated. We follow the flow of day to day life and day to day recollections just as in Mrs. Dalloway, we have uninterrupted access to each character’s thoughts as we move between them.  Of course, in Haneke’s film we are tied closest to Georges and Majid, and really only see their memories and their long, tense moments.

The affect this sort of narrative style has is to bring us exceptionally close to the characters—we are within Clarissa’s mind, within Peter’s memories, we are bound to Georges and we see his most intimate moments. The way Caché flows creates a narrative that messes with our conceptions of time in movies, and most closely resembles Woolf’s web of thought and memory in Mrs. Dalloway. We are used to following characters in movies throughout the most important parts of their story, we are used to have cuts to action scenes; Haneke messes with this perception by leaving us with Georges for long, agonizing minutes where seemingly nothing happens. In this way it is different in Mrs. Dalloway because the written medium allows us to truly get inside a character’s mind and follow their progression of thoughts, but while watching Caché, we still feel eerily omnipresent in George’s mind and life.