THE WHITE RIBBON
Michael Hanaeke’s strangely disturbing and beautiful film takes on the question of the German character, a subject that filmmakers will continue to explore because of Hitler and the systematic annihilation of the european Jewish population. Haneke, whose reputation as a director was mainly made in Austria, is actually German by birth and born in 1942, of the generation that probably has had the most trouble and need to come to terms with that character.
But the film is presented as a meditation of sorts, in a seemingly quiet, slow moving, rural village just before World War I. There is a baronial estate which, in one way or another, is responsible for the livelihood of most of the residents. The main character/ reflective voice-over narrator is the the one teacher in the village, the observer of the curious characters and events that disrupt the surface calm. Although all seems tidy and rational, it seems to come at great cost: almost every adult from the local parson to the doctor is stern to the point of abuse.
Many directors and writers, Germans and others, born during or immediately after the war continue trying to grapple with how a culture that produced Beethoven, Goethe, and Kant and many more could have gone so crazy. Did God betray them or did their own psyches? Since the children of the village are central to this particular examination, one possible, although simplistic conclusion to be drawn is that it is brutality masked as discipline which partially explains the wholesale complicity and participation in the Third Reich. Yet Hitler was a psychopath and the political structure was definitively totalitarian: everyone wasn’t a murderer.
So then how specifically German is this character? Where does that requirement to so control human impulses that they go haywire come from. Haneke seems to be pointing the finger in the direction of religion, specifically the form of Christianity delivered via the punitive pastor and his particularly frightening (Children of the Damned) offspring. But class hostility is also a significant piece of the puzzle of what goes wrong in this village and that is of course much of what fuelled the emergence of the National Socialists. In the film these points and parallels are made subtly: we are given the smallest stage on which this is all acted out. A farmer’s son destroys a patch of cabbages owned by the baron in retaliation for his mother’s death in work accident. The doctor’s horse is tripped by a wire, causing serious injury.
The White Ribbon won the Palme D’Or at Cannes mostly likely because of the combination of this unique approach to this, unanswerable, question. Shot in light filed black and white with very little extremes of contrast, the effect is to make the film seem remote and icy: there is no sepia toned romanticism of carriages, long skirts and high collars. This visual style is the perfect vehicle for Haneke’s slow revelations as he peels back the layers of the human response to brutality: that place where discipline and conformity require violent participation and silence. And although the context is clear, this is, as we know, much more than a German problem.
The White Ribbon opened December 30, 2009.
Written and directed by Michael Haneke; consultant on screenplay Jean-Claude Carrière; produced by Stefan Arndt, Veit Heidushchka, Margaret Menegoz and Andrea Occhipinti; cinematography by Christian Berger; edited by Monika Willi. Released by Sony Pictures Classics.
With: Christian Friedel (The Schoolteacher); Rainer Bock (The Doctor); Ernst Jacobi (The Narrator); Leonie Benesch (Eva); Ulrick Tukur(The Baron); Ursina Lardi (The Baroness): Fion Mutert (Sigmund); Burghardt Klaussner (The Pastor); Maria-Victoria Dragus (Klara); Leonard Proxauf (Martin); Rainer Bock (The Doctor); Susanne Lothar (The Midwife); Roxane Duran (Anna) and Miljan Chatelaine (Rudolph.)
