It’s
not very frequently that a film elicits such strong reactions from me, so I
must write this as the colors of the film are still fresh in my memory. Yes, it’s a black-and-white film, but I mean
‘colors’ metaphorically here.
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| Michael Haneke and his humorless face |
Metaphors
incidentally play a central, almost sacred role in the 2009 Palm d’Or-winning
German film, The White Ribbon, starting with the very title of the film. But
before I cough up my interpretation of the abundant symbolism in the film,
there’s something about director Michael Haneke’s style of filmmaking that
needs saying. He has a simple,
unpretentious approach to storytelling that I can only wish others would
emulate. Most directors force their own
worldview upon the film, turning the film more into an Op-Ed piece than a work
of art; even the best of them are guilty as charged, sometimes. However, Haneke,
a well-aged filmmaker, disposes of any claims to cocksure pronouncements on
human nature when he says: Cinema can
only offer questions, not answers.
In
that one, eloquent statement he has summarized his philosophy that he
ruthlessly reinforces in every film he makes, sometimes to the annoyance of the
viewer. My first experience with Haneke
was with 2005 French film, Cache, a movie so radical in its narrative technique that I was by
turns bemused and amazed. I saw it some
four years ago, only once, but the plot of the film is still vividly burned
into my memory: A couple living in
France starts to receive on their doorstep strange videotaped recordings of
their own house at first, followed by more footage of directions to an
apartment somewhere. You wait for the
suspense to unfold, craving to find out the perpetrator and their
motivation. The lesser half of the
couple, pulled by the irresistible gravity of his own curiosity, follows the
directions to the apartment, wherein awaits the darkest secret of life, and his
past life he has conveniently swept under the rug is brought bleeding back to
life and put under the microscope for him to look at – LOOK at what
you’ve done! It is never revealed who
made the videotapes nor how/why – which is kind of the point, really; such
details are the sole driving forces of conventionally made whodunit films, but
not here. It’s not important who did it;
how those videotapes were made is a mere abstraction, a glitch in the logic of
reality, a piddling detail that doesn’t undo the main theme of the film, which
is a dispassionate examination of guilt and selfishness, but only an
examination that asks questions without providing judgmental answers as to what
is right, what is not.
This
type of whodunit template is also the basis for The White Ribbon. It reportedly took Haneke 10 years to make
this film, which had failed to secure funding when originally conceived as a
television mini-series, so you can be damn sure that he has put in a lot of
thought into sculpting the characters and their wretched secrets. The film is set during the years leading up
to World War I in a small German village with a population that inherited their
lands and professions from their ancestors settled here centuries ago. But the story doesn’t really have so much to
do with World War I as it has to do with the sequel, World War II. The reason Haneke chose to set the film in
1910s is so that he could focus on the children who grew up to become adults by
the time the Second World War broke loose.
Many a film have been made focusing on
the Second World War and the consequences
of it, but hardly any that go into the root causes
of it: A type of authoritarian indoctrination
that produced the dictatorial regimes which brought the whole world at war by
midcentury.
The
film opens with an accident: Someone has
maliciously tied a thin, rigid string between two trees on either side of a
road that the village doctor rides his horse on. The imaginable consequence ensues, with no
perpetrator caught. Another strange
incident happens, and another a few months later where the son of the village
baron goes missing and is found in the middle of the forest in the middle of
the night, bleeding from his waist down. More strange events occur with
worrying frequency.
Between
each episode of horror, the diabolical lives of the inhabitants are unwrapped
frame by frame, and the tone of the film gets darker and darker, meaner and
meaner. Small-town/countryside films are
usually a delight to watch – the sense of community that exists among a people
who all know each other on a first-name basis, the slowness of their lives, the
merry celebrations after harvest, a place for everyone and everyone in their
place. Not here. Haneke shows us just how tourist-like such
wishful thinking really is. But the point isn’t so much about country people as
it is about the “roots of evil” in general. What causes men to lash out when
given the official license to lash out?
The
metaphor of the white ribbon mentioned earlier is hard to miss in its
connection to the Hebrew Star of David arm bands that the Nazis made the Jews
wear during the Third Reich. The
metaphor itself is explicitly reinforced throughout the film through the
village pastor who insists on severely punishing his children in the name of
discipline while concurrently making them wear a white ribbon on their arms to
remind themselves of the “purity and innocence” they were born with at birth.
(You can connect this metaphor to the fact that much of the film is shot in
pitch-black color with very little white or grey.) The pastor is a profoundly
unsympathetic character who radiates such an air of starchy solemnity that his
children literally shiver and silently weep in his presence. Punishment is his only instrument of control
and restraint. It should hardly be
surprising, then, that when these kids grow up to inherit the seats of power
later in life, they lash out against the next generation with the same kind of
severity that was meted out to them. It
is even suggested by a character later in the film that it could perhaps be the
children who have committed all of the unsolved crimes, but only a suggestion.
It’s
true that The White Ribbon is a very
anti-religious film, but it is not against faith itself or even against all
aspects of religion or true religion, as Haneke puts it. It is against the idea
of “absolute values” and how absolute values poison the mind by instilling a devouring
confidence in one’s ability to know right from wrong. Such absolute values are the foundation of
every religion. There’s no religion that
says “maybe God knows right from wrong.” No, God is always the all-knowing, omnipotent
authority, and doubt has no place in His kingdom. His authority is derived from His unequivocal values and categorical
distinctions. Religions
are the vectors of authoritarianism that transfer it from God to men. In fact, Haneke wanted to name the film God’s
Right Hand, as he explained in an interview:
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| The Nazi arm bands on the left; the boy wearing the white ribbon on the right |
I wanted to present a group of children on whom absolute values are being imposed. What I was trying to say was that if someone adopts an absolute principle, when it becomes absolute then it becomes inhuman… It’s one of the sources of radical thinking. Once I thought about another title for the film, which was GOD’S RIGHT HAND, which means that these children take themselves for God’s right hand because they know the difference between good and evil and they have the right to judge others. This is always the beginning of terrorism… I wanted to depict the children who in their adult life would play a role in the fascist period, and these people were determined by Protestantism. If made in Italy, of course it would be a different influence… But I don’t want people to just see the film as a film about a German problem. It is about the roots of evil. Whether it’s religious or political terrorism, it’s the same thing. That’s what it’s about because in France, people say it’s a German problem. But it’s a problem for everyone. You do not have to look very far to see a comparison to things going on today. Islam is the same: obsessed with a certain idea, a certain vision of religion, which has nothing to do with real religion.
The technical supremacy with which this film has been made is another
matter of praise and approval. Haneke’s
signature directorial style has kind of simplicity to it that is almost
deceptively unsophisticated on its surface but with many layers of subtlety
that would easily escape the viewer if you are not completely submerged in the
film’s aesthetics. The entire film feels
like one fractureless continuum, without so much as a smudge at the wrong place
on the wall. The black-and-white cinematography,
which was nominated for Oscar, is what gives the film much of its thick
exoskeleton, all neatly tied together with flawless editing that completely
dispels the notion that the film is in fact a period piece.
The White Ribbon goes into my book as one of the finest works of
21st cinematic art, and I look forward to seeing the influence this
has on future filmmakers.
