Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Films

Caché (Hidden)

Babak Amou’oghli relates a tale of hospitality and hostility.

In his late sixties, and after a thirty-seven-year film-making career, Michael Haneke is now receiving more attention than ever. The number of books published recently about this controversial reflector of the failure of modern society indicates that the number of people who want to know about his work is growing rapidly. Yet it’s safe to say that though each of the ten theatrically-released films he has made is a distinctive work of art which captured the attention of film festivals around the world, it was only after his French film Caché (2005) that a wider audience came to know him. Here I’ll try to bring one of Caché’s themes to light. This hidden, and possibly unintended, theme is Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality.

…