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Review: Hidden

Hidden (Cache) by Haneke, is a great film.

However, in this time of great debate - conflict - between West and Islam, over visual depiction, the film takes on a sombre, further reflective surface, a layer, as its forensic examination of the idea of what is an image, what a memory, and what a history - in terms of pain, regret, and finally, repressed desire - is further determined by the political mistreatment of Algerians at the hands of not just French police, or policy, but French society as a whole.

Hidden is very much what would happen if Alfred met Edward (Hitch and Said) - a hybrid genre-piece that plays with voyeurism and visual dread, as much as with the idea of the orientalized other - indeed, terror here is figured explicitly as the other (not fear of the other, but the other itself, just as, for Sartre, hell was other people).

Seeing is terror, then - and so is being seen, observed. Therefore, the most shocking scenes of violence, of violation, which occur in this hyper-real film (and when, where, how are they seen is key) - on many textured levels (and they are up there with the tromped on eye of Chien Andalou in terms of cutting and editing) - to reiterate, the most shocking scenes - are from an other, to an other.

Terror is what is done to us by someone else, or is it what we do to someone else - or the uncanny film between.

Mediating between a literary culture, and a visual one (see image above), between man and woman, son and mother, and friend or foe, this is one of the most hurtful and enigmatic essays on the re-run of the repressed (not a typo) - the unconsicous as a video, a TV show, the mind a tape that can unwind, rewind, unravel, and wound.
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