Film Review: Toward a Nazi Prequel
by Matt Lau
The White Ribbon directed by Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke’s latest film, The White Ribbon, is easily his least controversial and most audience-friendly work. It has already earned many honors including the Palm D’Or at Cannes, three European Film Awards, and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign picture. It is also the favorite for the Foreign Film Oscar next month. Set in a remote German village, the film follows the lives of its villagers at an auspicious moment, the year leading up to the First World War. But that traumatic event is hardly a concern to them. Their trouble is that someone in their midst is committing violent crimes seemingly at random. A doctor falls from his horse when a trip-wire is set outside his home. A peasant-woman dies in a purported accident at the mill. Months later the Baron’s son disappears and is found traumatized from a sadistic torturing. The police are summoned but the crimes continue. The film’s interest resides in solving the mystery. Its mood is sometimes menacing, occasionally comic, and for the most part austere in the way that cineastes have come to expect from the Austrian auteur.
The White Ribbon’s stated purpose, and Haneke is nothing if not an oppressively didactic director, is to examine the origins of Fascism. To this end it features a first for a Haneke feature film, a prominent voiceover narrator, in the form of the village schoolteacher vaguely recalling the film’s events in his old-age. This accounts in large measure for the film’s accessibility if also for its presumptuous moralization. We get a tentative hypothesis to start: maybe the generation born around the turn-of-the-century turned to Fascism after studying and experiencing the hypocrisy and depravity of their forefathers. The secret message of the film, however, seems to be that these children are at bottom unaccountably evil.
The film is beautifully rendered in monochrome, achieved by filming in color and then reducing the picture to black-and-white. Call it, if you will, an unwitting metaphor for Haneke’s oversimplified account of the rise of Fascism. Or is it instead a programmatic choice made to correlate with Haneke’s first foray into historical period drama? Perhaps it’s both: history in the film is distorted by the narrator’s memory; yet this distortion comes across as an authoritative distillation of the moment rather than the product of an inaccurate recollection.
The dialogue in the film is some of Haneke’s finest, ranging from ribald to brutally honest, and it has the happy effect of counteracting the film’s too general historical claims. Particularly memorable is an exchange between the village midwife (played by Haneke ensemble mainstay Susanne Lothar) and the local doctor (Rainer Bock). The latter undergoes the most dramatic transformation of any character in the film and could be called its antihero. In an early scene he plays the victim and receives our sympathy when he falls from his horse. His children are also probably the most likeable characters in the film. But after this argument he is no longer the victim if not wholly the perpetrator either. The two have been carrying on an affair for some time, but it is hardly the kind Emma Bovary and her disciples dreamt of. The midwife loves him and in addition to working as his personal assistant has looked after his children since his wife’s death.
The nominal reason for their argument is a proverbial one. He can’t get it up and uses this as the tipping point to call it quits. His strategy is aggressive if not effective: tell her in the starkest possible terms that she disgusts you. The dialogue is some of the frankest I can remember in a recent movie. He tells her his imagination isn’t strong enough to conjure other women during sex anymore. She tells him she’ll do something desperate. He says he could care less. She accuses him of molesting his daughter and behaving more cruelly to his wife than he does to her. He gets the final word, which is all the crueler because of how bored and casual he seems when he asks, “Why can’t you just die?”
The Doctor isn’t the only abusive patriarch in the village, although his particular faults –incest, pedophilia — make him something of a team standout. Indeed, each village elder has a fault to match their position. The pastor (Burghart Klaußner) seems to relish punishing his children a little too much. For their part, his oldest two tend to give him a reason. The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) endangers, neglects, and then patronizes his workers. His steward (Josef Bierbichler) viciously attacks one of his boys, which passes for normal by the time it occurs in the film. The only authority figure who doesn’t seem to appreciate a little of the old ultra-violence is surprisingly the school teacher. He’s too young and distracted by love to care as much as he should about beating, molesting, and generally tormenting his students. But in the end he has perhaps the most violent idea of anyone about the identity of the criminal, an idea which even the draconian parson recoils from.
The white ribbon of the film’s title is worth examining here. Early in the film the parson punishes his two oldest children for not being home in time for supper in part by forcing them to wear a piece white ribbon on their person for the foreseeable future. It is something he had them do when they were younger, so that they would be reminded of purity and innocence. He had thought they no longer needed such prompting. Clearly he is unfamiliar with teenagers. But these teens are not ordinary adolescents. Their burdens are both heavier and lighter. Of course, on the one hand, when they come under their father’s cold gaze, they have the audience’s sympathy. But there is also something disquieting about them throughout the film. For them morality seems to be strictly an external institution, not something they feel within. In this sense the ribbon comes to stand for the fact that a message can fail to reach its destination. The only thing the ribbon seems to remind the children of is that they are still treated like children, in the worst sense. But ultimately perhaps the ribbon stands for not purity and innocence, nor even their opposites, but for the superficiality of concepts such as these in the face of a grinding and exploitative social order.
The irony here is that while The White Ribbon condemns purity to oblivion, Haneke’s whole program as a filmmaker up to this point has been in some sense to purify the contemporary cinema of its worst political distortions and technological pretentions. Indeed, Haneke’s output could be said to consist of a three-part logical form. His film’s perform a critique of some aspect(s) of existing cinema practice (usually a genre or an element of film language); but this essentially negative process of critique generates an ambiguous remainder in the form of a fascination with sensational violence; finally, his films, or the better ones at least, redeem this fascination with sensational violence by attempting to make viewers conscious of other more fundamental modes of economic and semantic violence.
The White Ribbon, indeed, contains one of Haneke’s greatest examples of this movement from sensational to economic and semantic violence. When the tenant farmer’s wife is killed in an accident at the mill, he is obviously distraught. But the cruelty of the situation is further compounded by the fact that he cannot complain about her death, let alone demand some kind of inquiry, given the extent of his family’s dependency upon the Baron, on whose property the accident occurred. The farmer’s silence is, as one might expect, drowned out by the righteous indignation of his son, who fights with his father over whether they should take action and later uses his scythe to the destroy the baron’s lettuce patch as revenge. The result of the son’s action is not justice, but its distortion. The baron fires the farmer’s daughter from her steady job and the family can be assured of losing its seasonal employ in harvesting his crops. They go, in other words, from bad to worse; from only motherless to near starvation. And the only act in the whole exchange that society considers a crime is the destruction of the lettuce.
But all this is merely the set-up for a punch in the gut. After his oldest son returns from prison and all seems to be returning to its place, history repeats itself. One of the farmer’s sons opens the door to the barn in the midst of his daily chores and finds his father hanging from a rope. And like his father before him he is unable to outwardly grieve. He turns around to see his younger siblings laughing and playing. He doesn’t interrupt them. He walks back into the house and we see his older sister, looking tired and anxious, busy preparing a meager dinner. Again he doesn’t interrupt. He sits down at the end of the room and the scene ends.
When Haneke accepts the Oscar next month, it will not be for this kind of inexorably logical storytelling. But it should be. He will get it instead for having made a subdued prequel to the cinema of the Holocaust, the Academy’s preferred genre. Yet Haneke’s explanation of the rise of Fascism is hardly historically grounded, nor for that matter is it psychologically convincing, as it needs to rely on an almost mythic criminality that is tantamount to nihilism. The achievement of this film lies not in its stated relation to events outside itself, but in its details. The story of the tenant farmer’s decline is perhaps Haneke’s finest depiction yet of the violence inherent in an economic system.
