Das weiße Band - The White Ribbon

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.

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.

The Nazi arm bands on the left; the boy wearing the white ribbon on the right

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:

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 21^st cinematic art, and I look forward to seeing the influence this has on future filmmakers.

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