The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Michael Haneke · a film in French · 2005 · about 117 minutes · the one version as released
Mode
Thriller of threat and surveillance turned inward; family drama, inquiry and national reckoning in one
Mythos
The inquirer who is himself the cause; two boys meant to be brothers, one displaced by a lie about blood; a pursuit with no face
Phase
Some weeks of a Parisian family’s life, from the first tape of the house to a long shot of a school’s steps, with one return to a farm in 1961
Presentation
Feature film, about 117 minutes, in French; Christian Berger’s flat, even photography in static long takes, no composed score, editing by Michael Hudecek and Nadine Muse
Register
Level and cold through kitchens, offices, cars and rooms with books; dread at a low pitch, broken twice by violence held in a fixed frame
Scale
One man, a marriage and a child, an aged mother, a man in a suburban flat and his son, and a buried night of the nation
Governing Proposition
A man who makes a literary talk show for television begins to receive videotapes of his own house, sent with crude drawings of blood, and the inquiry into who is watching leads back to a lie he told as a child against an Algerian boy his parents meant to raise. The wager of the film is that a comfortable life can rest on a wrong its owner has organised himself not to know, that a nation can bury a night as a man buries a lie, and that a form in which any shot may be someone’s tape can make the audience search, as the guilty man does, without being told where the watching comes from.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a street and the front of a house, held in one static shot while the credits are typed over it. Nothing happens. People pass, the light does not change, and the shot goes on longer than any opening should. Then the image rewinds. What the audience took for the film’s first shot is a tape, and the people watching it are the couple who live in the house. Before there is a story the viewer has learned that any image in this film may be someone else’s recording, and that the watcher of it cannot see the one who made it.
The couple are Georges and Anne Laurent, played by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. Georges makes a literary talk show for television, books on its set; Anne works in publishing; their son Pierrot, played by Lester Makedonsky, is at an age to judge his parents. The house is lined with books. The tape has been left at their door with no word of who sent it, and it shows nothing but their own front, watched from across the street for hours. No crime has been committed. The threat is that someone has been looking.
Michael Haneke wrote and directed the film, photographed by Christian Berger and edited by Michael Hudecek and Nadine Muse, with no composed score. It was a French, Austrian, German and Italian co-production, led by Les Films du Losange (Margaret Ménégoz) and Wega Film (Veit Heiduschka). It runs about 117 minutes in French, in one version. It premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2005, where Haneke won the prize for direction, and was released in France that October; in English it was released as Hidden.
Movement II
More tapes come, and with them drawings: crude, childish, a figure bleeding from the mouth, a rooster with blood at its neck. The tapes move outward from the house to the house where Georges grew up. The drawings are the first accusation, and they arrive before Georges will say there is anything to be accused of. He tells Anne less than he knows. The film lets the viewer see him withhold before it lets anyone know what he is withholding.
Georges drives to the farm where his aged mother, played by Annie Girardot, still lives. He asks about the past, and her memory of it is vague. The farm is a rural France of the past, and her memory is where the past has gone soft: what was done there is not denied, only no longer held by anyone but the man who did it.
At the station, Georges edits his programme. A guest’s passage is too theoretical, and it is cut. The talk show is the bright, cultivated world the Laurents belong to, and the edit is the film’s law in miniature: what a comfortable order cannot bear to see is removed from the record. In the Laurents’ living room the television news runs, war and its dead, while they talk over it. The film never comments on it. It is simply there, in the room, unwatched.
Movement III
A tape follows a corridor to a door in a flat in the suburbs, and Georges goes there. The man who opens it is Majid, played by Maurice Bénichou. As boys, Georges and Majid were to have been raised as brothers: Majid’s Algerian parents vanished in the police killings of 17 October 1961 in Paris, and Georges’s parents meant to take in the orphan. Georges, a child himself, displaced him with a lie about blood. Majid was taken away from the farm, and the comfortable life of the man now standing at his door was built on that.
Georges leaves, and then a tape of the visit arrives. It shows what the camera saw after he went: Majid alone at his table, weeping, watched by no one in the film but the camera. Bénichou makes a whole life’s grief in a few minutes. The man the comfortable household feared as a threat is shown, by the threat’s own instrument, as the one who was wronged.
The marriage frays. Georges lies to Anne about what he knows and will not say what he is afraid of; her friendship with a colleague, Pierre, sits at the edge of the household’s mistrust. A dinner party, an anecdote, a guarded evening: the Laurents’ world goes on around a secret its owner will not name. One speech carries the national night of 1961 into the film. The film does not open that history further. It sets it beside Georges’s lie as the same structure: a France that buried the night as he buried what he did.
Movement IV
Pierrot does not come home one night. A stranger’s threat becomes the family’s own crisis, and Georges answers it as he answered the threat of 1961: he has Majid and Majid’s son, played by Walid Afkir, arrested, on no evidence. Pierrot’s night away ends, and the arrest stands as what it is, the state used again by the same man against the same family, and the childhood denunciation reenacted in an adult’s decent voice.
Georges goes to the flat once more. Majid, before him, cuts his own throat. The film shows it in a single unbroken static frame, held past the act, and nothing in the frame moves to soften it. The shock is total because the film has trained the eye, through every long take before it, to expect that nothing will happen in a held shot. Here, at last, something does, and it is the cut thing returning in blood.
The investigation has become a confession withheld. Georges has found the cause of the threat, and it is himself, and he will not say so. The film does not judge him in words. It has already shown what his refusal to know has cost, and to whom.
Movement V
Majid’s son comes to the television station and confronts Georges. The film gives the encounter in substance and no more, and its argument is in what Georges will not give: the scene is the whole of the film’s disclosure in one exchange. The man on whose life the wrong was done stands before the man whose life rests on it, and the comfortable man’s refusal holds, not as a lapse, but as his method.
At home in the afternoon Georges takes pills and draws the curtains. In the dark comes the farm in 1961, memory or dream: a long shot of a yard, and the boy Majid dragged to a car, struggling, seen from far off, without music. The past is seen as the guilty would see it, from a distance and in silence, as something that happened over there to someone else.
The last shot is a long take of the steps of Pierrot’s school, a crowd moving on them. At the edge of the frame, unmarked, Pierrot and Majid’s son meet, and their words are not heard. The possible answer to who sent the tapes is in plain view, and most viewers miss it on first sight. The film does not mark it. It ends as it began, with a held frame and a watcher who has to choose to search it, and leaves the audience where it has left Georges: unable to say where the watching comes from.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the one version, and it is lean: the subtractive test meets resistance almost everywhere. The opening long take is required, since it teaches the viewer that the film’s own image may be the watcher’s tape. The drawings are required, carrying the buried accusation before Georges admits there is one. The visit to the mother is required, because her vague memory is where the past has gone soft. Pierrot’s night away turns a threat into the family’s crisis, and Georges’s answer, the arrest of Majid and his son on no evidence, reenacts the childhood denunciation. What gives: the dinner-party anecdote and Anne’s friendship with Pierre restate the mistrust without moving it, and the talk-show set makes its point once and returns to it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a comfortable man’s life rests on a wrong he did as a child, and his adult self, cultivated and decent in its own eyes, is organised to refuse to know it. The refusal is not a lapse of the comfortable but their method. A second disclosure is national: a boy whose Algerian parents vanished in the police killings of 17 October 1961 in Paris, and a France that buried that night as Georges buries his lie. The film makes the two one structure and never preaches it. Held below the top because the national history is carried by one speech and by analogy, not opened, and because the unnamed sender lets some viewers take a puzzle for the disclosure.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is cold and comes as dread, rationed by design. The summit is Majid’s suicide: in his flat, before Georges, he cuts his own throat in a single unbroken static frame, and the shock is total because the film has trained the eye to expect nothing to happen in its long takes. A second height is the farm in 1961, the boy dragged to a car, struggling, seen from far off without music. The rooster’s beheading is a third, and the last shot, which lifts the film into a question, a quieter fourth. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: between these points the film is deliberately level, kitchens, offices, cars and rooms with books, and its heights are high at two places only.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The deep patterns are present and partly built. The structure is Oedipal: a man investigates a threat whose cause is himself, and every step of the inquiry leads back to his own act. The core is Cain and Abel made domestic and colonial: two boys meant to be raised as brothers, one displacing the other by a lie about blood, a rooster sacrificed, a blood-mark in a child’s drawing. The anonymous sender works as the Furies do, a pursuit with no face. These are load-bearing. Held below the gate because the film keeps its world strictly secular and particular, and nothing in its images enlarges a Parisian house into the archetype as the water of Chinatown or the sewers of The Third Man do.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is the thriller of threat and surveillance, from Hitchcock to The Conversation (1974), and the anonymous-letter film, Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943) above all. The turn is to take the genre’s engine, the question who is doing this, and refuse to answer it, so that the investigation stops being a plot and becomes the viewer’s own: the frame of the film and the frame of the tape are made indistinguishable, and the last shot hides its possible solution in plain view. The stake was real in reception, a thriller with no payoff and an ending most viewers miss on first sight. Held well below the gate because the path was Haneke’s own and proved: Benny’s Video (1992), Funny Games (1997) and Code inconnu (2000).
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that the guilty man cannot tell where he is being watched from, and neither can the viewer. The static long take serves both the tapes and the film’s own scenes, so that any shot may be surveillance, and the opening rewind turns the first image into evidence. The viewer becomes a watcher who also cannot see, and is asked in the last shot to search the frame for an answer the film will not mark. The absence of a score removes the instruction to feel, leaving judgement to the watcher as it is left to Georges. Told in conventional coverage, with a revealed sender, it would be a thriller about a stalker. Held below the top because the marriage and station scenes fall into ordinary shot and reverse shot.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over twenty-one years. The questions have stayed open and argued: who sent the tapes, whether Majid, his son, Pierrot, the two sons together, Georges’s own conscience or the film’s author, a reading Haneke encouraged by refusing to answer; what the two sons say on the school steps; whether the farm scene is memory or dream; whether Anne’s confidant is a lover. Readings have accumulated along distinct lines: colonial memory and 17 October 1961, a subject the film’s release helped carry into wider view; the image as evidence; a portrait of the liberal intellectual class; the West and the Arab world in the years of the Iraq war. The last shot is reseen once one knows to look. Held by span, and because the sender is partly a withheld fact rather than a depth.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 2005, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film reorganised the thriller of surveillance into an inquiry into collective guilt, and showed that a European film with Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche could carry an unresolved structure, a hidden ending and no score, and be widely seen. But it refines its maker’s programme more than it reorganises possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the prize for direction at Cannes; a place in the discussion of 17 October 1961 beyond cinema; and a share in the decade’s turn of art cinema toward the static long take, the camera as witness and the unresolved ending, a share arguable in its detail and not this film’s alone. The reach is wide among critics and film-makers, and narrower than the gate requires.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across twenty-one years. The film survives whole: one version, nothing lost, no replacement by altered cuts. Its presence has been continuous and wide for an art film, in exhibition and circulation since 2005, on home release, and in teaching, in film studies and French colonial history alike, with a standing among critics that has held. Twenty-one years is a short span beside the centuries behind the oldest works on the desk, and even the widest presence at that span earns no more than this. The surface charge is small: the videotapes and the cathode-ray television date the objects to their moment, but the theme they carry, the domestic image as surveillance, has grown more current. The gate is missed by span, not by fabric.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The making is load-bearing. Christian Berger’s photography holds a flat, even light in which the tape image and the film image cannot be told apart, which the form requires. The long takes are timed exactly: the suicide frame is held past the act, the school steps held long enough that the eye has to choose to search. With no score, traffic, footsteps and the television news are the only weather. Daniel Auteuil plays a man whose decency is a performance he believes, and lets the irritation show before the guilt; Maurice Bénichou makes Majid’s grief in a few minutes, and his weeping alone in the visit tape is among the most exact things in the film. The costs: Binoche’s Anne is given more anger than interior, and the station and dinner scenes are exposition in conventional coverage.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bright literary talk show, books on its set, where Georges edits out a guest’s too-theoretical passage, and a throat cut in a bare flat in the suburbs. One law governs both: what a comfortable order cannot bear to see is cut from the record, and returns. The talk-show edit is that law in miniature; the suicide is the cut thing returning in blood. The tapes, the drawings, the lies to Anne, the arrest of the two, the mother’s vague memory, the pills and drawn curtains and the news on the living-room television obey it without exception, across media, marriage, childhood, the suburbs and the national past. The strain is slight: the dinner anecdote and Anne’s confidant run a parallel of mistrust the law permits rather than requires.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 117 minutes holds. Georges’s consciousness, in denial, seen from outside; the marriage and its trust; Pierrot, at an age to judge his parents; the aged mother and the farm, a rural France of the past; labour, in television and publishing; class and space, the book-lined house against the suburban flat; the state, in the police of 1961 and of the arrest; history, the Algerian war in Paris; the wider world, in the news on the television. They are integrated: the national past and the family secret are one lie, and the arrest is the state used again by the same man. What holds the axis: the world news runs as a frame, not a held order; the sacred and the natural order are absent; Majid’s life and his son’s are seen only at their thresholds.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.8, then The Inner Law at 8.7, then The Unconcealment and The Made at 8.6. A form in which any shot may be surveillance, so that the viewer searches as the guilty man does; one law, what a comfortable order cuts from the record returns, from a talk-show edit to a throat cut in a bare flat; a disclosure joining a personal and a national guilt in one lie; and a making in which the light, the timing of the long takes and two performances bear the weight.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.6: the suicide and the farm in 1961 are true heights of terror, but the film is deliberately level between them and rises at two places only. Above it, The Encompassed at 7.7, where many orders are joined by one lie but the sacred and the natural order are absent and Majid’s world is seen only at its thresholds, and The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, where the Oedipal inquiry and the displaced brother are built but kept secular and particular.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, The Made at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Unconcealment at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Imperishable at 8.4 falls a tenth short, Pressure on Tradition at 8.1 four tenths short, The Swerve at 8.0 five tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 six tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.3, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Caché (released in English as Hidden) as premiered at Cannes in May 2005 and released in France in October 2005, in its one version of about 117 minutes (listings give 117 or 118), from the long take of the house to the school steps: written and directed by Michael Haneke, photographed by Christian Berger, edited by Michael Hudecek and Nadine Muse, without a composed score, a French, Austrian, German and Italian co-production led by Les Films du Losange (Margaret Ménégoz) and Wega Film (Veit Heiduschka). No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the French film; English renderings are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No line of dialogue can be certified to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is given in substance. The maker’s earlier films are context only, and nothing from them is credited or charged here. Particulars that could not be verified are not given: among them the medium the film was shot on, the exact number of tapes, the order of the minor scenes, the details of the dinner party and the street, how the deaths of Majid’s parents are described in the dialogue, prizes beyond the direction prize at Cannes, critics’ rankings of the decade, whether every sound in the film has its source on screen, and the scene and shot counts, the average shot length and the share of the dialogue.