Caché Film Reflection: From which camera do we see this world
Caché shows the film viewers that how the family of Georges and Anne is ruined by several anonymous surveillance video tapes about their lives. It seems that somebody has put a static camera to shoot their house and then these video tapes are mailed to them with a painting of a bleeding boy and a dead chicken. These things remind Georges of someone he was familiar in his earlier life. With prejudice and hatred, Georges starts to find the “murderer.”
One thing that I never thought before viewing this film is that how people are suspicious about people around them. In Caché, Georges does not want to share the video tapes with his friends in the first place. He also casts doubt upon Majid due to his selfish behaviors he had done decades ago. Anne criticizes his husband of hiding his discoveries on one side, while lying about her extramarital affair to her family. Even their son, Pierrot, fail to believe both his parents. When the shelter is removed and what we always try to hide are exposed, one way people express their fears is to doubt whoever knows their secret. For most people, the first thing to do after their privacy is violated is finding out, stopping or even revenging those who have already known it. However, if some of our private posts are leaked to public, who are we gonna blame? The digital company? Your friends that you open the post to? Or the god knows who hackers? Today, the thing that people are highly relied on digital social networks makes relationship less firm, since true proofs are hard to find and we kind of live in a virtually safe world, but nobody can be sure that the private information is not being infringed.
Another thing that includes in the contradiction between Georges and Majid is race. From the perspective of Georges, a middle-class French people, a large part of the reason that he insists that Majid is the initiator is the fact that Majid is an Algerian. However, it is this uneducated ragtag that he is so afraid of taking away his family when he was young. Whether people now with noble position and decent job really contribute more to the society and worth more to live a life? Or they just take the resource of those who they categorized as lower class, like what Majid’s son said, “you deprive my father’s right of education”? So, what can people do to change this situation, or in other words gradually bridge the gap between different races? For me, digital media is a field that seems more equal to everybody. Nobody could deny that most media outlets today are controlled by the authorities and elite class. On the contrary, digital media are open to people, regardless of their race, religion and social class. There are no restrictions for who can be presented and who cannot, yet the only difference is that who’s words can grab people’s attention. This is also a reason about why digital revolution becomes popular now that we have discussed in class.
From these two angels, privacy and race, we can clearly see that digital media sometimes create potential dangers in our lives, but also provide new opportunities for us to make our world better. All in all, digital media is a brand new field that people ought to utilize for a better life.
