Review: The White Ribbon
In an early scene in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, a German schoolkeeper spies from a distance one of his students, a young boy, walking along the handrail of a bridge perched precariously above a modest but no doubt potentially fatal ravine. The teacher runs over to the boy to berate him, demanding answers: Have you gone mad? Didn’t you hear me shout to you? Were you trying to impress me? The boy is quiet with sunken inscrutable eyes. He tells the teacher, “I gave God a chance to kill me. He didn’t do it. So he’s pleased with me”. The teacher is stunned by the answer. “Why would God want to kill you?” There is no answer from the child. In fact, Haneke goes out of his way to never directly answer this question during the film’s runtime.
It’s a common Haneke trait to include such an ellipsis in his films: Who is filming the bourgeois couple in Hidden? What motivates the home invaders of Funny Games? The mysteries of The White Ribbon are abundant. Set in a German village before the outset of World War I, the townspeople are faced with a set of mysterious violent occurences: a wire stretched between two trees causes the village doctor to fall from his horse the baron’s eldest son is kidnapped, beaten and left hanging in the sawmill; the pastor’s parakeet is murdered. The White Ribbon is a film of intrigue. However, there is a danger in all this; that audiences and critics will mistake ellipsis for ambiguity, mystery for nuance.
For an ambiguous cinema is what Haneke at least wants to be seen to be achieving. “My films are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions,” the filmmaker once wrote. But a cinema of “insistent questions” would require images that mediated co-existent/contradictory truths, that let the audience live with these contradictions. There are no contradictions in The White Ribbon, only withheld answers. The White Ribbon’s ellipses are meaningless unsolved, and once solved lead only to one truth: Haneke’s truth. The film is a cliché with a few sentences erased to make the film seem like art. And the cliché is this: A person oppressed will always turn to violence; will subscribe to whatever available fascism promises them their salvation. To spoil the movie completely, (consider this a warning), the film portrays children as the most vulnerable, violated people in their society and their response as following the religious ideology of their pastor to extremes unimagined even by the pastor, cruelly punishing the adults who have committed the most grievous sins. Not the very worst cliché as far as clichés go, but wrong nevertheless. Let’s take the example of Iran (I could do a film about modern-day Iran and ask the same question: how does fanaticism start? said Haneke in an interview with The Guardian). Iran was not a simple case of the people being oppressed by an autocratic Shah and wilfully accepting a repressive Islamic theocracy as an alternative. Democrats and Marxists were also instrumental in the Iranian revolution. Even those who supported Khomeini did not necessarily subscribe to his brand of theocracy. I mention all this merely to make the point that the way people respond to the circumstances of their oppression is always complicated and varied. But Haneke’s characters are not granted that level of humanity. Let’s say that it’s reasonable that the children in this German village accept the religious dogma of their pastor. Would it not also be reasonable to expect there to be moments in which the children resist that dogma; moments where their desires exceed ideology?
This is perhaps the real reason for Haneke’s ellipses: that if we were granted more time with his characters, allowed to follow the children through their daily lives and through the violent actions central to the film, we would realise that they are nothing but crude caricatures, mere arthouse iterations of the children from Village of the Damned.
Yosh
23/05/10 - 9:08 PM
I agree with the thrust of your review, especially that the “mystery” is almost entirely transparent.
Despite that, I know that I personally found the movie extremely entertaining, almost electrifying, due to the superb cinematography and acting. And, I thought, a pretty good screenplay. I agree that the children are caricatures and that Haneke restricts our perspective so that we won’t notice that, but I still couldn’t help admiring the overall artistry involved.
Brad Nguyen
25/05/10 - 12:24 AM
Yeah you’re right. The film is very well shot and directed. But Haneke is not just making entertainment. He’s making a Statement. And, as I’ve argued, an intellectually damaging one. The interesting question might be: how does the classical black and white photography, the technically proficiency of the screenplay, effect how we receive Haneke’s Statement?
jessie
03/06/10 - 2:37 PM
How much can a statement be controlled by an artist/film maker? And is art the right place to try and make explicit statements about things? I find this a really interesting question. As you pointed out a while ago Brad, often the meaning is created by the audience. More so in visual arts like film, than in writing. So if a film fails at it’s own stated aims, but still creates a strong experience for other reasons, resonates on other levels, does it matter that it isn’t very good at what the director claims it to be?
Brad Nguyen
03/06/10 - 11:37 PM
I think all/most art has an idea/statement/ideology. An artistic work that attempts to convince us of its neutrality, its ability to represent an objective reality, is only more successful at obscuring this point. More to the point, I think that the value of art is in these ideas/statements. So my criticism is not that there is a Statement in this film. My criticism is that this Statement is fairly crude.
As for the audience making meaning out of texts, I would not say that audiences are all powerful. Meaning is created in the act of reading a text but it does not mean the audience can make of it what they will.
That said, it is possible to read against the grain of a film, but what of this new meaning? It is still confined to the subject matter of the film and the filmmakers’ particular system of signification.
The other route would be to say, “sure it’s a silly film but I was really engrossed by the prettiness of the cinematography” which is fair enough, but then we’re talking about wallpaper and not art.
jessie
04/06/10 - 9:38 AM
Yeah, I getcha, it’s just interesting to me where an artist/film maker sits on that line: how much control they believe they have over the final outcome. Some will build their whole practice on premise of an explicit lack of control, and others on the idea of total control over that statement.
Taps into another discussion we had about the role of the director- they have the road map, but as a viewer you just have no idea how the end result relates to what they originally had in mind- how much has been compromised in process. Sometimes a work just starts doing it’s own thing- you can work against or with that.
Anyway, I’m not contesting anything you’ve said- I’m just self-indulgently musing! I should get back to work!
Lauren Bliss
14/06/10 - 11:11 PM
WTF Brad. I love Village of the Damned (both versions)!!
Brad Nguyen
14/06/10 - 11:19 PM
I saw the remake I think when I was a teenager and thought it was hilarious. So maybe, to put a a positive spin on it, The White Ribbon is as hilariously entertaining as Village of the Damned.