"The Realistic Off-screen"- A response to my classmates blogs about Cache

“I might never figure out "whodunnit" but that's what makes the film so compelling, not to mention realistic!”

 

Bel D 

Bel and other viewers most likely associate Cache with being “realistic” because it contains the whole of reality. Cache utilizes off-screen space because in reference to Pascal Bonitzer’s “Off-screen Space,” “it is the identity of off-screen space and screen space which assures the effect of reality in cinematic fiction and the possibility of all its dramatic manipulations,” such as knowing that when a character exits the screen space he still exists (296). This representation of what happens off screen extends our knowledge and reinforces the film’s realistic depiction. But where does Cache’s unconventional method to portray realism take us as an audience? Here is a quote from Laura K's blog. It is the description of Michael Haneke's establishing shot and it’s consequential affect:

There is minimal action in the frame, and we hear dialogue, but never see where it is coming from. The audience feels odd because they have been waiting to be sutured into the film for so long by now. Only after what feels like an eternity, do we realize we are watching a tape when the mysterious voices rewind it. The camera hardly ever moves. When we are (finally) let in the living room where they are watching this tape, we still do not get pulled into their conversation. 

The directors withholding of suture translates into a lack of inclusion between the audience and the happenings of the film. We as an audience are left feeling displaced and uncomfortable with the cinematic features of the film. The most profound understanding of Haneke’s intentions for the provocations of these feelings may be found when Bonitzer describes how “’[K]eeping a distance’ is a necessary moment in representation, one which allows us to anticipate, tolerate and overcome failures in ‘credibility’” (292). This holds true when we as an audience are challenged to accept the film as reality while we are constantly bombarded with flashbacks, dream sequences, and scenes that are not actually happening but just the revealing of the secret tape footage.

Cache’s distance from the viewer definitely “plays the game of a representative scene” (Bonitzer, 292). The film constantly straddles the line between the representative and the represented. The best explanation for this concept is apparent in how Michael J. talks about the absence of the shot reverse shot in his blog,  and how in classic cinema we trained to be unaware of the camera. However in contrast to the classic form, Cache conditions the audience throughout the entire film to be aware of the function of the camera, to be cognizant of off-screen interaction, and to question whether what we see is the “representative” of the film or just another “represented” apparition of the secret tapes. So is our sense of Cache’s realism a function of natural audience response and summoned affect by means of emphasis on off-screen space?  Possibly.