On Loca­tion: The house from Michael Haneke’s Hidden

A beau­ti­ful white house, cov­ered in green ivy. Flats rise high in the back­ground and the road in front is trimmed with expen­sive cars. On the wall to the left are flower box­es filled with vibrant pink buds, while an old street­light hangs down from the wall oppo­site. But some­thing is wrong. The voic­es we can hear are wor­ried: what is this image of a house? Who has record­ed it? Why can one of the voic­es see them­selves leav­ing the house for work?

The image breaks down and crin­kles, a VHS tape is being rewound. The image is one of qui­et harass­ment, telling of even more uncom­fort­able secrets from the past. This is the open­ing to Michael Haneke’s Hid­den (Caché), the Aus­tri­an filmmaker’s pow­er­ful domes­tic thriller that won him the Best Direc­tor prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val. The film rev­els in the pos­si­bil­i­ties found in every­day shots of places, roads and build­ings, so revis­it­ing such places nat­u­ral­ly reveals how care­ful­ly Haneke chose his locations.

Hid­den fol­low – or, per­haps more accu­rate­ly, stalks – the lives of a bour­geois Parisian cou­ple, Georges and Anne Lau­rent (Daniel Auteuil and Juli­ette Binoche). Georges is the pre­sen­ter of an intel­lec­tu­al lit­er­a­ture pro­gramme on French tele­vi­sion, mak­ing him some­what renowned. How­ev­er, all is not well in their seem­ing­ly idyl­lic lives, as they begin to receive video tapes show­ing long lengths of time record­ed out­side of their home. They try to track down the assailant but, as they get clos­er to the truth of who is stalk­ing them and why, their lives begin to crum­ble. For Georges, child­hood mem­o­ries resur­face and it soon becomes appar­ent that these banal yet unnerv­ing actions are not as ran­dom as they first appear.

Var­i­ous Parisian loca­tions and build­ings play a key role in the film. Through their fram­ing, the still­ness of the images comes to poten­tial­ly denote footage record­ed by the stalk­er rather than Haneke. The view­er becomes the voyeur of these build­ings and roads, often mys­te­ri­ous­ly emp­ty and shot in such a reduced, min­i­mal style that it’s often dif­fi­cult to process what role they are play­ing. The open­ing cred­its play over the image of the house and it feels almost as if some­one has left the cam­era record­ing while off doing some­thing else. It only begins to take on con­text when the voic­es of the main char­ac­ters speak, rais­ing ques­tions about what they and the view­er are actu­al­ly witnessing.

Lat­er on, Haneke shows us more of the road, hav­ing most­ly shot it from the front to play with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a more sin­is­ter visu­al eye. By map­ping out the road in more detail at that point, views of the house from its open­ing angle become even more unnerv­ing as we know that poten­tial­ly this may be more evi­dence of harassment.

The house is sit­u­at­ed in the beau­ti­ful, cob­bled cross­road between rue Bril­lat-Savarin and rue des Iris in the 13^th Arrondisse­ment, just south of the Seine. Such is its ordi­nary ren­der­ing in the every­day sum­mer of the film that it seemed the most like­ly loca­tion to still retain an atmos­phere of dread. My vis­it was in win­ter and so the build­ing and roads nat­u­ral­ly looked bar­er. Tak­ing the Polaroid in the road, on a day when no one was around due to it being close to Christ­mas, it occurred to me that I was mim­ic­k­ing the efforts of the film’s unseen antagonist.

Win­ter had stripped the leaves from the trees and even the con­stant call of chaffinch­es – always a key mark­er for cin­e­mat­ic recre­ations of the city – were silenced. I felt for the char­ac­ter of Georges, seem­ing­ly always watched by cam­eras, either that of his stalk­er or even those of his tele­vi­sion stu­dio as well as Haneke’s of course. I quick­ly moved on, hav­ing cap­tured what I want­ed, though the own­ers of the house would not, in this case, have it post­ed omi­nous­ly through their front door.

One of the rea­sons why the loca­tions of Hid­den work so well is because of how authen­tic they feel. Vis­it­ing the loca­tion shows how lit­tle Haneke real­ly aug­ment­ed places for his films. In con­trast to a direc­tor like Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, who edit­ed his loca­tions heav­i­ly in order to find some sub­tle eeri­ness, Haneke makes the most of the nor­mal­cy of such locations.

Hid­den is a film built around the mys­tery of place and the over­all mys­tery of what such places sig­ni­fy. With­in all of this ten­sion is a pre­cise cri­tique of the under­ly­ing racism of the mid­dle-class. But to address such a com­plex issue cre­ative­ly, Haneke uses the deeply uncan­ny nature of every­day Paris. It’s a nat­ur­al lean­ing for a film that drinks in the omi­nous still­ness that marked the dis­tant yet omnipresent glob­al trau­mas of the ear­ly 2000s.