white ribbon/ruban blanc

Austrian director, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon was the much-deserved winner of the Palme d'Or in Cannes, May 2009. And I'm delighted to have it open our winter Cinémagique season. It is one riveting hypnotic - and tough - movie - its full translation from the German is The White Ribbon: A German Children's Story. And most of the Children are members of a small rural village Lutheran choir - reared in repressive puritanical ways. Those perceived to have been bad, wear their own version of the scarlet letter, in their case, a white ribbon - to remind them of their own fall from purity and innocence. Those who are defiant - male and female - are brutally caned. Haneke's original working title for the movie was The Right Hand of God.'

My point was to show the consequences of absolutism if applied to an ideal, then that ideal, either political or religious, becomes inhuman.... These children believe they are the right hand of God: they have understood His laws, and follow it to the letter. This makes them punishers of the others, who do not obey the same ideals.

White Ribbon is a meditation on the origins of evil. Beneath a bucolic veneer of sweet innocence lies a reign of terror. In a feudal German village just before World War I, great malevolence is being perpetrated - the murder of a child, canings for minor infractions, incestuous molestation, blinding. An old man (whom we never see), decades after the events, unravels a series of horrific atrocities in the small village in which he taught. We're in Hannah Arendt's banality of evil territory here. Arendt wrote, Adolf Eichmann himself was not evil , he obeyed orders, but did not feel guilty. This long course in human wickedness had taught us ' the lesson on the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Yeah, banality of evil. Not just freak accidents, as is first suggested - and you get a pretty good idea by whom, early on. Yet no one will believe what everyone suspects - we, the audience included. Two cops have no clue. Amongst the village powers that enforce the social moral strictures - the Baron, the Lutheran preacher, the town doctor - only the schoolteacher voices any suspicions. And he admits his version may not reflect "the truth in every detail. Much is hearsay and "a lot of it remains obscure to me even today." Many questions are unanswerable and yet the strange events that occurred in our village . . . may cast a new light on some of the goings-on in this country. Both the movie and some reviews hint at an exploration of the genesis of naziism as well. Mebbe!

How such an extraordinary film could have won this year's Golden Globes as Best Foreign Language Movie is beyond my powers of explanation.

Some caveats are in order:

• White Ribbon is long - 2h30 minutes, so bring nibblies;
• the horrific descriptions might scare some mavens off, but most of the violence occurs off screen. This is a whodunit spellbinder, not a horror flick;
• some of the material is deliberately confusing
• like Hurt Locker and the Hunger, you may find some parts disturbing to watch, but will appreciate having made the effort after.

Michael Haneke

***

Le ruban blanc, un film franco-germano-italo-autrichien du réalisateur autrichien Michael Haneke, a obtenu la Palme d'Or du Festival de Cannes 2009. Et je suis ravi que ce film fasse l'ouverture de la saison d'hiver de Cinémagique. C'est un fascinant film hypnoptisant, mais dur sa traduction intégrale de l'allemand est Le Ruban blanc: une historie des enfants allemands. Et la plupart des enfants allemands sont membres d'une chorale luthérienne au sein d'un petit village rural; élevés dans un rigorisme corseté. Ceux perçus comme ayant été méchants, portent leur propre version de la lettre écarlate, dans leur cas, c'est un ruban blanc pour leur rappeler leur propre pureté et innocence. Les rebelles, homme ou femme, sont brutalement punis. Le titre initial de ce film de Haneke était La Main Droite du Dieu.

« Mon but était de démontrer les conséquences de l'absolutisme lorsque collé à un idéal, qu'il soit de nature politique ou religieuse, devient alors inhumain…Ces enfants croient qu'ils sont le bras droit de Dieu : ils ont compris ses lois et les obéissent à la lettre. Ceci leur permet de sanctionner ceux qui n'obéissent pas à ces lois. »

Le Ruban Blanc est une méditation sur les origines du mal. Derrière une apparence bucolique de douce innocence se retrouve un règne de terreur. Dans un petit village féodal germanique d'avant la Première Guerre Mondiale, plusieurs méfaits s'y commettent: un enfant est assassiné, des punitions corporelles sont infligées pour de légères infractions, agressions incestueuses, aveuglement. Un vieil homme (que l'on ne voit jamais), des décennies après ces événements, révèlent une série d'atrocités ayant eu lieu dans ce petit village où il a jadis enseigné. Nous sommes dans le concept philosophique de la banalité du mal proposé par Hannah Arendt. Elle écrivit, Adolf Eichmann lui-même n'était pas méchant, il obéissait aux ordres et ne se sentait aucunement coupable. Ce long parcours dans la méchanceté humaine nous a appris sur la terreur et sur le défi de la parole et de la pensée de la banalité du mal.

Oui, la banalité du mal et pas simplement de bizarres accidents tels que suggérés : et vous avez une très bonne idée dès le début par qui ils sont perpétrés. Personne ne veut croire en ce que tous les autres se doutent et l'auditoire non plus. Deux policiers n'en ont aucune idée. Parmi les gens du village ayant le pouvoir de faire respecter et d'appliquer des restrictions tant sociales que morales, le Baron, le pasteur luthérien, le médecin du village, le seul professeur de classe unique. Il admet que sa version ne reflète peut-être pas « la vérité dans tous ses détails ». Ce n'est en majorité que du bouche à oreille et « beaucoup me demeure toujours inconnu encore aujourd'hui». Il admet que plusieurs questions demeurent toujours sans réponse mais « les étranges événements arrivés dans notre village…apporteront un jet de lumière sur ce qui se passe dans ce pays. » Autant le film que quelques critiques suggèrent que c’est une exploration sur l'origine du nazisme. Ceci est très possible.

Recherche:
http://www.lerubanblanc.com/

Un peu d'avertissements s'imposent :

• White Ribbon est d'une durée de 2H30…apportez des grignotines;
• Les descriptions horrifiantes peuvent faire fuir certains cinéphiles, mais les ébats de violence se passent hors projection. C'est un ensorcelant roman policier, pas une tragédie d'horreur;
• Certains faits portent volontairement à la confusion;
• Tout comme Hurt Locker et the Hunger, certains passages sont troublants, mais l'effort en vaut la peine.

Saturday, Jan 2, 2010 21:01 EST
Michael Haneke's "White Ribbon"

The enigmatic Austrian director on his chilly, gorgeous new period piece exploring the rural roots of fascism

By Andrew O'Hehir


I don't know whether Michael Haneke ever plays chess or poker (the former seems a lot more likely). But either way, he'd be a deadly opponent. Mild-mannered, formal and professorial, the bearded Austrian filmmaker is not a difficult interview subject in any ordinary sense. He was neither grouchy nor combative in our half-hour conversation. He was unfailingly polite, never refused to answer a question and even cracked one or two quiet jokes.

But I gradually became aware that the director of "Caché," "The Piano Teacher" and the new international sensation "The White Ribbon" -- winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes and best-film and best-director prizes at the recent European Film Awards -- was steering our discussion exactly as he wished. Beneath his calm and courteous demeanor, Haneke exerts an inexorable, iceberg-like confidence, which you can also see in his films. With minimal effort, he brushed away my attempts to link his work to his background or his private life, and calmly insisted that the unanswered questions and unfinished narratives in his films -- the very ingredients that fascinate viewers -- are unimportant and superficial.

Now, if you've seen any of Haneke's films (others include "Time of the Wolf," "Code Unknown," "Benny's Video" and two different versions -- one in German, one in English -- of the horrifying "Funny Games") you know that they have the uniquely unsettling quality of operating on several different and perhaps contradictory levels. Haneke generally wants to draw you into a compelling story, draw a political or philosophical parable, and remind you that what you're watching is just a fiction -- "an artifact," as he puts it -- all at the same time.

In Haneke's notorious "Funny Games," a pair of amoral and sadistic killers, who are less like characters than imaginary specters, address winking asides to the audience -- and at a crucial juncture rewind the film with a remote control. "Caché," Haneke's biggest hit, appears to focus on the question of who has been making sinister videotapes of a middle-class Parisian family and leaving them on the doorstep. As in David Lynch's somewhat similar "Lost Highway," the mystery is both unsolved and (I believe) unsolvable. But Haneke isn't just trying to undermine the narrative stability of conventional cinema, although he's doing that too. He's shining a spotlight on the atmosphere of paranoia and submerged guilt in which the middle-class family's entire life has been constructed.

At first glance, "The White Ribbon" is the most mannered and most beautiful of Haneke's films, and you could describe that fact as a calculated gamble on his part. Set in a village in rural northern Germany in 1913, with World War I looming on the horizon, it's a gorgeously photographed and oddly riveting chronicle of a late-stage feudal society running on fumes. Shot in spectacular black-and-white by cinematographer Christian Berger, and marvelously acted by a first-rate German ensemble, "The White Ribbon" captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence as a series of brutal but apparently unrelated events -- vandalism, fires, accidents and abductions -- turn the people of the village against each other and shatter what remains of a fragile social consensus.

If Haneke's most obvious point is that the hierarchical, aristocratic society of peasant Germany was replaced by something much worse -- by the "New Order" created by its mistreated children, a generation later -- it definitely can't be reduced to a fable about the roots of fascism. "The White Ribbon" is a dense account of childhood, courtship, family and class relations in a painfully repressed and repressive society, which seems to channel both early Ingmar Bergman and the "Bad Seed"/"Children of the Corn" evil-tot tradition.

Haneke's title refers to a ribbon parents of the period affixed to the sleeves of preadolescent children suspected of "impure" thought and behavior (i.e., masturbation). On one level, this story is about a very simple notion: The physical and psychic violence inflicted on one generation by another is always passed along, often in heightened and more dramatic form. But this severe and striking period piece is also a story that subtly but constantly reminds us that it is a story, and as such cannot be trusted. Even at the risk of undermining his own film, Haneke wants us to see history as a problematic and partial narrative, one that has more to teach us about the present than the past.

I met Haneke in his Manhattan hotel suite during his visit here in September for the New York Film Festival. We sat at a round table with an interpreter between us, which only heightened the atmosphere of competition and/or negotiation. Although Haneke understands English pretty well (or at least much better than I understand German), he waited for translations in both directions. Occasionally he corrected the interpreter or broke into brief snatches of English; I've marked those passages, as they seemed like important moments in the poker game.

All your earlier films have had contemporary settings, so it's striking that you've done a period piece. I suppose there are some obvious reasons why you picked this time and place, rural Germany just before World War I. But I'd like to hear you explain it.

Unfortunately, Germany is the place and time in which ideological radicalism is most prominent, and that's why I chose to set the film there. But it would be a mistake if one were to reduce the film to a German example.

"The White Ribbon" is also your first film in black-and-white. Were your reasons for that primarily aesthetic or, I don't know, primarily philosophical?

There are two reasons for choosing to shoot in black-and-white. The first is that all of us, if we think back to that period, know it almost exclusively from photographs. Photography had been invented shortly before, and we all know the period from photographs we've seen. I thought it would be easier to enable the spectator to enter the story by shooting it in black-and-white.

That's the first reason. The other reason, however, is that shooting it in black-and-white automatically produces an element of distance for the audience, in the same way as does the use of a narrator. The film opens with the narrator saying, "I'm not sure if the story I'm about to tell you corresponds to what actually took place. I can only remember it dimly. I know a lot of the events only through hearsay." So both those elements, then, raise mistrust in the audience as to the accuracy of what they're going to be seeing, and the reality of what they're going to be seeing. Both the black-and-white and the use of a narrator lead the audience to see the film as an artifact, and not as something that claims to be an accurate depiction of reality.

Do this period and this place have any personal significance for you? You've spoken about the political importance, but you were born in 1942, the heyday of Nazism. I wonder, for example, whether your parents were young people in a similar time and place?

I think that most of my films have very little to do with me or my family. I was more interested in the theme: How are we ideologically conditioned?

All right. For film buffs, it's hard to avoid thinking of Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer when you see this beautiful black-and-white photography, the rural Northern European setting, a story that's about child-rearing and young love and religion.

Of course I admire the directors you mention, but there are any number of directors I admire. I've heard the comparisons of my work, or this film at least, to Dreyer, and for that reason I recently watched "Ordet" again. I have to say that I see very little in terms of connections or similarities. In terms of the aesthetics, Dreyer's staging and lighting are very theatrical, whereas I was looking for more realistic light. If there was any specific influence, it was much more the photographs of August Sander, who was the great German photographer of that period. If we oriented ourselves to anything, it was his work.

You're depicting the 20th century here, but this doesn't look anything like the age of industrial capitalism. Was it really still the feudal era in rural Germany at that time?

At the time, 85 or 90 percent of the population lived in villages. So the vision of society that I present is a mirror of a feudal society, in which there was the baron at the top of society, going down to the farm workers. In between them, you had the teachers, the professional classes, the pastor. The film in that sense reproduces the classes that were present in society at the time. Had I chosen to locate the film in the city, then social relationships would have been far more complicated and far less easy to discern.

I suppose what you're showing us is the feudal order at exactly the moment it breaks down. I mean, the baron [played by Ulrich Tukur] is the most powerful man in the village, at least in theory. But we see his fields destroyed, and his son abducted and abused. His power is broken.

Yes, that's precisely what you see in the film.

One of the hallmarks of your style is that you withhold acts of violence from us. Horrifying things occur, in this movie and in others, but we generally don't see them. What interested me in "The White Ribbon" is that you withhold other kinds of intimate or emotional acts as well. When the farmer sits with his dead wife's body, the camera remains behind the wall. We can tell he's grieving but we literally can't see it.

I'm always trying to enable and arouse the imagination of the spectator. Especially when you're dealing with powerful emotions and tragic situations, I avoid using close-ups. First of all, the close-ups are always false. It's unrealistic. They're indiscreet and they're kitschy as well. I think it's far more powerful if you see this expression of pain indirectly. You hear a sigh, and that's far more evocative than if we'd shown a shot of him.

In this film you also express emotions that are -- how can I say this? -- not strongly associated with the work of Michael Haneke. [Laughter.] There's the relationship of the young lovers, the schoolteacher [Christian Friedel] and his girlfriend [Leonie Benesch], which is very tender and tentative. There's the heartbreaking scene in which a little boy gives his father a caged bird, and even though the father is a cruel and unsympathetic figure, we see his humanity at that moment. It's like you're throwing us a lifeline, a way out of this place: The terrible things that happen are not the only things in life.

The film depicts the story of so many people that I think it's realistic. In real life, not only catastrophes happen, but also pleasant things as well. There can be relationships that are positive. It's also economic in dramaturgical terms. If it were a film about couples and there were only two or three leading roles, then it would be different. You concentrate on the conflict, and that's more than enough to keep you busy in the film. Here I think it's important to show positive as well as negative energies. That corresponds to our experience of daily life, in which not only terrible things happen. There were love stories in concentration camps as well.

One of your principal subjects here is education and the treatment of children. Can I sum it up by saying that you think the methods of child-rearing in this time and place had disastrous consequences?

I think that education is one of the decisive points in human experience. When I was making the American version of "Funny Games," there was a word I discovered that I find is so indicative. There's a scene in which one of the two boys pees himself, and the other one says, "Please forgive him. He's not housebroken." I think that word is so illuminating: It suggests that we have to be broken for the house. We have to be broken to be acceptable socially, and that's the dilemma of every educational system.

You have to partially destroy or restrict the freedom of the individual in order for him or her to function in society. That's the dilemma of every generation, and I'm not convinced that current approaches to educational theory are necessarily the ideal solution either.

You want people to perceive this as more than a parable about the roots of Nazism, isn't that right?

The question that I'm asking is: What conditions have to be in place for people to seek to grasp such ideological responses? In a position of hopelessness, humiliation and despair, people clutch at any straw, and those straws usually take an ideological form, whether religious or political. Out of hopelessness, they turn to ideology -- the model is always the same, although the external forms may be different.

You spoke earlier about using the black-and-white photography and the narration as a distancing mechanism, a way to remind the viewer that the film is an artifact. There's another sense in which you are challenging the audience. As you did in "Caché," you lead us part of the way toward a solution of the central mystery: Who is committing these violent acts, and why? And then you seem to suggest that solving the mystery is not actually important.

Those are the least important questions. In my previous film, "Caché," the question of who sent the videotapes isn't important at all. What's important is the sense of guilt felt by the character played by Daniel Auteuil in the film. But these superficial questions are the glue that holds the spectator in place, and they allow me to raise underlying questions that they have to grapple with. It's relatively unimportant who sent the tapes, but by engaging with that the viewer must engage questions that are far less banal.

There are so many different things that take place in "The White Ribbon" that there are any number of possible explanations. It may not be that the acts have been committed by someone intentionally. For example, when the barn burns down, it's possible that was simply caused by an accidental spark. Perhaps the hay had been stored when it was too wet, and spontaneous combustion happened. Perhaps the farmer's wife who died simply fell. It was an accident, and she was not murdered. The explanations, in fact, are so unimportant. In real life, there are any number of events that take place that we don't understand. It's only in mainstream cinema that films explain everything, and claim to have answers for anything that happens. In reality, we know so little about what happens. It's far more productive for me to confront the audience with a complex reality that mirrors the contradictory nature of human experience.

It strikes me that in "Caché," and perhaps in this film as well, there literally is no answer that explains what is happening.

[In English.] There could be an answer!

Well, we can point back at you, the director of the film. Who is making those videotapes and sending them to the family? You are!

[Laughter.] Every interpretation is right.

[In German.] I always say that a film is like a ski jump. The film constructs the jump and enables the spectator to jump. It's up to each member of the audience to jump, and they're all going to jump differently. I create tension. I raise certain questions. That's my intention, but it's to give the audience a chance to respond.

[In English.] The film ends in the head of the viewer, not on the screen.

On the simplest level, you want to leave us asking: What happens next? What will the events we have seen lead to, and how do we think about them?

[In English.] Yes, and why? Why do things happen like this? Everybody has to find his own explanation.

[In German.] It's important to always try to tell a story in a way where there are several credible possible explanations. Explanations that can be totally contradictory!

I know you want this story to have present-day relevance. But you're running a risk, aren't you? Viewers can watch this beautiful, stylized film that's set almost 100 years ago in a society that no longer exists and think, "Well, that was then. Things are different now."

Yes, absolutely. It wasn't my intention simply to warm up an old subject for itself. I think the problems that existed then are the same today: Are we conditioned to accept and embrace certain ideologies? That is as relevant today as it was back then. I'm not simply trying to re-create a certain age. I'm not a history teacher.

I remember with my first film that was shown in Cannes, "The Seventh Continent" [in 1989], there was a screening and afterward we had a discussion. The first question came from a woman who stood up and asked, "Is life in Austria as awful as that?" She didn't want to accept the difficult questions being raised in the film, so she tried to limit them to a specific place and say, "That's not my problem." You could make the same mistake with this film, if you see it as only being about a specific period.

***

Peter,

Thanks for this interview. I have seen Caché and Funny Games and both of these along with White Ribbon did, more or less, the same thing to me as a viewer, They used a setting, characters and a story in a manner I admire, something quite different from the mainstream. In mainstream film everything is knitted together for you, while in these types films you know the narrative is a repository of ideas or concepts that you are free to, or are compelled to, linger over during and after the screening. European cinema seems more comfortable with this arrangement, this relationship between the director and the audience.

I know you have heard me say this before: Hollywood films are often like a pleasure house but then again they are like prisons. You know what to think and feel at every moment because of the way the films are constructed. Some, but not all, European cinema lets you out of that prison, trusting you to form your own ideas about the film. I dare say that sometimes a prisoner, when set free and standing at the door of the prison as he is about to leave its rigid yet perhaps comforting structure behind, might feel the fear of stepping outside. The parallel here is with an audience who is set free. The fear of leaving the known and comfortable behind often makes audiences nervous, not trusting their own ability to navigate the world outside the confines of the usual narrative structure. I actually saw a man get up and kick the screen during Godard's "Vent d'est" while studying at the British Film Institute in the 70's. I never forgot that image because it so graphically illustrates the intense frustration an audience can feel when deprived of the usual comforts of bourgeois narrative. Film, as a medium, seems to many to have the obligation of telling a coherent story whereas any other medium seems freer to have a large variety of natural purposes. When I pick up a pencil someone watching me might think I was about to doodle or do a math problem. They wouldn't necessarily demand that I write a story. With a camera it seems that nearly everyone wants you to tell them a story. I relate this to bedtime as a child when a story was soothing and a medium of comfort. It seems that Hollywood or western cinema-goers are looking for that same comfort and when someone like this director comes along and subverts that then the audience is uncomfortable.
Enough of that!

John