Michael Haneke ~ Hidden

We’ve just been to see Michael Haneke’s Hidden (Caché). It was a very impressive film, successor to Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher and a film I haven’t screwed up the courage to see, Funny Games. I’m sure there are excellent critiques out there of Caché. I avoided reading them beforehand, but may seek them out now. I hummed to myself as I filed out of the auditorium so that I didn’t have to hear others’ opinions even before the air of the film had dissipated. We discussed it a little as we walked back to the car and as I talked I wondered whether or how I might write about it. Instead of directly doing so, I’m going to post this quote from the director (lifted from a profile - that I’ll read next time I get a moment - published on the ever-excellent Senses Of Cinema):

“My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.”