The uncanny is that which eludes causality, that which does not return to the calming ground of the homely. The uncanny cannot be concealed… Even the title of Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005) refers to an absence that can no longer be hidden or concealed, but, as the repressed, must necessarily make a return. Alongside this Freudian association, the title can also be read more specifically as a paraphrase of Bazin’s concept of the cache (mask) – as that which is obscured by the cache. To briefly recapitulate: in contrast to the fixed frame of painting, Bazin conceives of the frame of the filmic image as a mobile cache or mask. Summarizing his argument, Deleuze writes: “sometimes the frame works like a mobile mask according to which every set is extended into a larger homogeneous set with which it communicates, and sometimes it works as a pictorial frame which isolates a system and neutralizes its environment.”

Of course, the boundary of this virtual appropriation of the relative hors-champ is from the perspective of suture theory the hidden camera itself as the point of the absolute hors-champ. This hidden cache, which does not extend into a homogenous off-screen space, structures the latent trauma in Caché. The film is thus clearly distinguished from Haneke’s earlier films, such as Funny Games (1997), in that the deictic address of the spectator through the look of the character into the camera is the central hallmark of its enunciation.