Salina Art Center

The films of German director Michael Haneke are not for everyone: in his most infamous film, Funny Games (he directed the original and the shot-for-shot American remake), a middle class family is inexplicably brutalized by a pair of clean-cut, sadistic thugs, with the filmmaker allowing them no possibility of escape, even subverting the “reality” of the film in order to keep them trapped inside this suburban nightmare.  Haneke has gained a reputation as a detached, academic filmmaker (he also teaches film directing at the Vienna Film Academy) who dissects audience response as mercilessly as he does the psychology (or pathology) of his characters.  Haneke once defined the feature film as “24 lies per second at the service of truth” and said that his own films were a conscious reaction to American cinema, a kind of moviemaking that enforces passive, complacent viewing rather than allowing viewers to construct the film’s meaning for themselves.  For those intimidated by the director’s provocative filmmaking aesthetic, The White Ribbon is a good film to test the waters.  Widely acclaimed as Haneke’s masterpiece and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, The White Ribbon exemplifies the director’s theories of “empowering” the viewer, requiring us to analyze how the film makes us feel while we’re feeling it.  If that sounds too cerebral, The White Ribbon can be appreciated as a slightly off-kilter, “dream-like” vision, comparable to the earlier work of David Lynch, though Lynch’s films are more overtly bizarre, less somber and philosophical, and with fewer discomforting implications for the “real” world (i.e., the one we enter when we leave the theater).  Like Lynch’s Eraserhead, Haneke’s film is in black and white (though actually shot on color stock and then desaturated, as though vampirically drained of life—a mesmerizing effect that won cinematographer Christian Berger top honors from the New York Film Critics Circle).  Lynch’s movies inhabit a kind of alternate reality where we don’t expect logic to apply.  The White Ribbon at least appears to have a specific, realistic setting—a small German village in the years prior to World War I.  But the film also seems like a fable, partly because it’s narrated by one of the characters several years after the events depicted, partly because the village seems to belong to a more distant past, early 19th century, perhaps, rather than 20th century.  Plus, the major adult characters are known only by their occupations: the Baron, the School Teacher, the Pastor, the Pastor’s Wife.  We sense a possible allegory, and certainly there’s a statement being made about the psychology of Fascism, a mindset that would infect the children who would grow up to become the adults who instigated World War II and the horrors of genocide.  The White Ribbon‘s children look normal, but when their little town is beset by a rash of mysterious, violent incidents, their appearances in silent, watchful groups—like the emotionless children in Village of the Damned—fill the audience with unease.  The onslaught of violence begins when the town doctor, on horseback, runs into a tripwire that seems to have been deliberately set for him. The incidents multiply: arson, assault, illness, accidental death, murder.  Each event is plausible but they erupt so quickly and inexplicably that paranoia and mistrust run rampant.  The film mirrors this hysterical atmosphere; everybody comes under suspicion, and even an innocuous word or expression seems charged with malevolence.  The “white ribbon” of the title is a badge symbolizing moral purity, an ideal that the village’s sanctimonious adults push their children to achieve—but what are the children really learning?  As Haneke looks into the private lives of the village’s prominent families, we see how reprehensible the adults’ behavior is.  Are the children “learning” evil from the hypocritical grown-ups around them?  In general outline, The White Ribbon is a “whodunit” (or a “who’s-doing-it”), and it’s as absorbing as a good mystery, but there’s no straightforward answer.  The film is open to many interpretations, but rather than being frustrating, it becomes more fascinating, more rewarding.  It’s the crowning achievement of what Haneke strives for in his art: a viewing experience that lets moviegoers think as well as feel.