“I was interested in presenting a group of children who are taught absolutist values, and the way they internalize this absolutism. My point was to show the consequences – that is, all sorts of terrorism.”
– Michael Haneke
The White Ribbon marks the high point of a journey that Haneke began over twenty years ago with his remarkable first feature film, The Seventh Continent. This latest work, set in a small farming village in northern Germany on the eve of the First World War, is shot in sparkling, iridescent black and white, a film of shimmering surfaces that conceal a much darker reality. True to his style, this reality is hinted at but rarely shown, and it gradually informs every moment of our watching.
Haneke has always had an eerie ability to unsettle, and this quality is in full force during the opening scenes of The White Ribbon. Beneath the sun-dappled fields lurks a series of disturbing events recounted by the local schoolteacher: a horseman has a strange accident, a worker is killed in the nearby sawmill, a young boy is kidnapped and beaten, a man savagely takes his scythe to a crop in a field, a barn is torched. This provides the backdrop to Haneke's brilliant and ruthless examination of a society that admits to nothing and hides everything.
As the young schoolteacher begins to court a shy governess, the brutalizing reality of village life is slowly laid bare. The local children play a key role; as they gravitate toward every violent incident, it soon becomes apparent that they are members of a society that prizes discipline as a virtue, even if it borders on abuse. Their elders, Protestant to the core, are committed to a value system based on obedience and punishment. As the schoolteacher attempts to assert his principles, he finds that they inevitably collide with the strict, harsh rules of the village.
All this is accomplished with utmost rigour and control on the director's part. Though an analysis of the roots of Nazism can be read into the narrative, the film has a more universal reach. Haneke maintains that the work is as much an investigation of terrorism as it is of fascism. Both provocative and elegantly executed, this is essential viewing – an examination of how violence can perhaps unwittingly take root in a society that ostensibly believes in other values.
Piers Handling
Michael Haneke was born in Munich and grew up in Austria. He made his first film,
The Seventh Continent, in 1989. His other films include
Benny's Video (92),
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (94),
Funny Games (97),
Code inconnu (00),
La Pianiste (01),
Le Temps du loup (03),
Caché (05),
Funny Games (07) and
The White Ribbon (09).