Haneke’s The White Ribbon: An allegory on terrorism

Languidly, the infernal dark screen lights up as an old man’s warm gruff voice sets the ominous tone I don’t know if the story I am about to tell you is entirely true.. But I must tell of the strange things that happened in our village. It could clarify some things that happened in this country. We are lead into the bucolic black and white landscape of Eichwald, a fictitious village set in Pre-World War I Germany. As the screen comes to life a horse moves fast with its taut reins, the subtle snort, and faint sound of the hooves on the ground. The village doctor riding the horse with a command as sharp as the whip is knocked off to the ground with a tripwire strewn obscure above the ground. The horse dies and the doctor hurts himself writhing in pain. Malice smothers the quite little town from that day on.  Mysterious deaths and torturous incidents disturb the tranquility of the village. The White Ribbon is not an easy film to watch. It’s not something you could watch over your afternoon Merlot on a Sunday. The film concludes the crescendo of Michael Haneke’s filmmaking craftsmanship.  It’s a film about inner demons unvanquished and flourishing from the pubescent times, a whodunit with no eventual catch, an ontological study on class consciousness of oppression without a lesson, a philosophical bastion that probably became the foundation of fascism and could now be interpreted as a socio-political allegory of our times plagued by Terrorism.

The White Ribbon takes place in a menacingly protestant society set in North Germany in the year 1913. It begins with the village doctor ( Rainer Block) stumbling over the tripwire. A woman dies in a saw mill accident. Her son blames the village baron ( Ulrich Tukur ) and in rage destroys the Baron’s cabbage crop. A child mysteriously gets his buttocks lashed to death and hung vertical in the barn. A barn is set on fire on a cold night.  A mongoloid kid is found in the woods with bleeding eyes. There is no common thread that weaves these incidents into a coherent source yet they all seem connected. The movie is narrated through a voice-over by the local teacher (Christian Friedel), now an old man who begins the film in a premonition narrated earlier.

As these incidents unfold we see the children of the village suffer from parental oppression, austere cynicism of the protestant protectionist society. The village pastor (Burghart Klaussner) inflicts severe punishments upon his children Klara and Martin for trivial reasons. As a disciplinary action, the pastor ties a white ribbon for sanctity and peace around them. The village doctor physically abuses his own daughter.  The baron’s son is growing restless of the bourgeois life as the baroness feels uncomfortable with his walk around her piano lessons. The children of the village are made to practice discipline and fanatic adherence to the protestant rules. Defying those would only mean cruel punishments. The children form a fraternity out of their co-existing oppression and tyranny leashed by the elderly of the village.

The White Ribbon creates the squirmy atmosphere through understated yet powerful performances. The director abstains from showing the children being lashed instead shows the white door behind which they are being punished for their trivial offense of coming home late. We are eager to find out and see what’s happening on the other side of the door but Haneke doesn’t let you in. He makes you wait, stifle you with a still camera gazing at the door. It’s like the feeling of being stabbed and the killer won’t let go of the knife just so you feel queasy in anticipation of death. All you hear are the loud lashes and the kids squealing in pain.  The children are led into psychological degradation by existential thoughts of death, as the little kid asks his sister “What is death?” only to discover his mother was not on a “long trip” but was long dead.  The tiny kid smashes his meal in rage. Martin, the pastor’s son is walking on a fence which is way above the ground only to test “if god wants him to live”. The protestant fundamentalism is cultivated in them by the village pastor and the elderly. Martin’s hands are tied to the bed in the night in order to let him understand that Masturbation is a sin. The scene where the pastor interrogates is acted out brilliantly by the kid where he has to hide his guilt and still show indifference to the horrid story the pastor is narrating about the death of a child because of masturbation.  Haneke doesn’t take the easy route of explicit abuse sequences as in his earlier films. You feel like you’re not watching a character but a mirror that is flipping images of your wicked alter egos. For instance , there is a  single shot sequence showing a small kid touring around the house searching for his sister in the middle of the night because he is afraid. We are consumed by the innocence of the child and immediately pounded by a visual of the child opening a door to his sister being physically abused by his father. The expressions are unimaginable, how the sister still shows fierce loyalty to her tormentor, her father and informs her tiny brother she is getting her nose ring fixed.  The father says “Beauty has to suffer”.  Deep inside you know what is happening to the psychology of the little kid yet what you see is the comfort that the kid probably doesn’t understand any of it. Haneke only exposes us to the circumstances that the village children go through. He never reveals the sinister plot that they are conspiring against the people. We are never lead to confirm, but to only deduce.

Natural light and light from Oil lamps used by Berger

The bleakness of the film is woven with switchblade sharp precision by Haneke’s long time cinematographer Christian Berger.  The film is in black and white monochrome (achieved by shooting in color, then draining it away) accentuating our memory of the era, now only in black and white corrugated pictures that make our history textbooks. Berger is also the famed inventor of an innovative illumination system by the name of Cine Reflekt Light. This special system of lighting uses reflectors in order to dramatically influence the shape and structure of light that actually reaches the scene being filmed on set ( From the official The White Ribbon press release).  The vast sun bathed fields, the snow fields that hurt the eye, to the rugged interiors of the farm life are carefully shot. Even the fences and houses are fleeced off the cement and the brick show in all their jagged honesty. Usage of light is natural and in most cases usage of artificial light is kept minimal. Carefully shot long sequences with a steady camera are used to make us become the house dwellers, to become one with the cultural microcosm.   Most of the scenes derive light from oil lamps and daylight. The double reflection from the lamps was corrected in post while the organic evolution of the shots is kept intact.

Michael Haneke

Haneke’s films are marked by the pleasure of cerebral catharsis that one goes through. He examines themes of violence, guilt and internalization of the debris of memory that one carries through. In his films The Piano TeacherCache, he creates claustrophobic breathlessness with scenes of extreme shock. They are not easy but many of us go through them and don’t express. The White Ribbon is similar in spirit to Cache. Haneke mocks at the viewer’s intelligence by not exposing the puppeteer of the story who is carefully handling the strands of the complex characters. Instead he hands those strands over to the viewer, completely stricken and hapless. The film then evolves within us in a quest to unravel the mystery. He is Hitchcock with a psychological penchant and his characters suffer from more than just death.  A popular critic quipped that The White Ribbon is a film that Manoj Knight Shyamalan always wanted to make. In its treatment I was reminded of  Bergman’s Jungfrukällan and  Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid. In the credits Jean-Claude Carrière is listed as giving dramaturgische beratung i.e. as being script consultant, a longtime collaborator with Buñuel. The film is a strong contender at the Oscars competing for the best foreign film 2010.  It had earlier won the Palme D’or at the Cannes festival.  Un Prophet is a strong competition and is a very good film. I want this film to win because films like these come in decades.  The White Ribbon has been in production for more than ten years.  Haneke had interviewed more than 7000 children to arrive at the cast of children working in the film. Here in this interview, Haneke is discussing the film with Darren Aronofsky. and

In a way Haneke’s The White Ribbon is a historical prologue on the evolution of Nazism in Germany but it has got a lot to do with terrorism that we see in contemporary times. Bit by bit the sporadic bouts of repressed anguish is what makes a terrorist right from childhood. The history of political and fundamentalism lead terrorism is replete with examples of repressed angst leading to menacing personalities. Adolf Hitler had a strained relationship with his father, who would beat him up. He wanted his son to follow in his footsteps as an Austrian customs official, and this became a huge source of conflict between the father and the son.  In his childhood years, his relation became even more rebellious. For young Hitler, German Nationalism became an obsession, and a way to rebel against his father, who proudly served the Austrian government. Coming to contemporary times, Ajamal Kasab had troubled relationship with his father and he left home as a revolt against his authoritarian father.  Terrorism is something that is cultivated in the formative years, from forced ideals, fierce fundamentalism, curbing freedom, abusing individual identity and consistent degradation of inner spirit.  To say that The White Ribbon scrapes the surface of the ominous origins of Fascism is merely being reductive.  A mongoloid child in the film has his eyes gouged and a white cloth is tied around. A metaphor of the village people  turning blind to what the village children will pass on in generations, what will bequeathed on to us at the  dawn of 21^st century. Will it be the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo or the genocide of 6 million Jews or the 3000 people who died in the 9/11 series of attacks by Al Qaaeda or the 175 people killed in Mumbai on 26/11?

for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation

- Exodus 20:5, Also the note on the bruised mongoloid child in The White Ribbon

Homage Art Work on The White Ribbon

The Origin of Nazism: Martin from The White Ribbon sporting a Swastika on his white ribbon ( official emblem of the Nazi Party and the Third Reich)

A character from the film is mowing down cabbage fields. Shown here is the debris of dead bodies at the Auschwitz Nazi camp

Post originally appeared on Passion For Cinema.  Homage art is not available anymore.