The White Ribbon

The White Ribbon

It's hard to know what to make of The White Ribbon (released as Das Weisse Band in Germany).

While we're used to seeing European cinema tackle abstract ideas and difficult concepts, it has rarely done so in such an attractively familiar package. The White Ribbon is presented as if it's a formulaic crime drama, but in fact it's not quite that simple. Instead we're encouraged to explore the concepts of violence, terrorism, and the origins of the World Wars - it's hardly an episode of Miss Marple.

Director Michael Haneke gained exposure in the US a couple of years ago for his shot-by-shot English language remake of his own movie Funny Games, but there seems little doubt that The White Ribbon is the crowning glory of his career to date. Mixing complex ideas with pop culture formula, and extended silences with moments of extreme violence, it provides a uniquely enthralling and thought-provoking experience.

That's not to say that The White Ribbon is easy viewing - it's anything but. And yet it proves almost impossible to tear your eyes from the screen as a community implodes under the pressures of mindless violence.

The action takes place in the fictional village of Eichwald during the years 1913 and 1914, and it's filtered through the later reminiscences of the village's schoolteacher. As his older self struggles to make sense of what happened in his youth, his younger self (Christian Friedel) is entangled in a series of unexplained crimes that change Eichwald forever.

The disruptions start with a tripwire that has the village doctor sent to hospital, but the violence slowly escalates to the point where a disabled boy is attacked and severely maimed. In between there are more deaths, a case of arson, and an attack on the Baron's cabbage patch. Together they form a crime wave unlike any Eichwald has seen before.

The cause of these events is never entirely clear, and if you're hoping for a tidy Poirot-style ending then you'll be disappointed. There are plenty of hints, but we're never allowed the luxury of an easy solution, and the final minutes only add an extra layer of mystery to the pile of intrigues. If the traditional crime story reassures us by restoring order at its conclusion, then The White Ribbon suggests that chaos cannot be restrained so easily.

It's here that The White Ribbon falters slightly, as its own themes mean that it's unable to come to a satisfying conclusion. It may illustrate Haneke's point perfectly, but it doesn't make for a very satisfying cinematic experience. As an audience we expect some kind of resolution. When it fails to come, it's hard to mask the slight air of disappointment.

While the open ending may frustrate our expectations, however, it does leave plenty of scope for discussion, and The White Ribbon is one movie that will stay with you long after the credits have finished rolling. What does it all mean? Well, that's open for debate - but you're unlikely to see a more unsettling treatise on the effects of violence in the community, or a more poignant metaphor for the rise of Nazism in early 20th century Europe. Even Miss Marple would be left scratching her head.

4/5

The White Ribbon: A Bleak Outing

Michael Haneke's award-winning film is at first an unsettling, then a numbing experience.
A quiet German village is plagued by mysterious acts of violence: the doctor's horse is felled and killed by a trip wire, injuring the doctor; a farm worker's wife dies falling through a hole in the sawmill; the baron's barn is burned down. On hand at every turn is a band of polite, stony-faced children.
Rather than investigate these happenings, the village is gripped with inertia and carries on with its business, which seems to be grinding the joy out of life. Only the schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) has room for love in his heart and his moments with the excessively shy governess (Leonie Benesch)provide the only ray of light in a bleak film.
The adults are outwardly god-fearing Lutherans, but inside they have become warped and cruel. The casual violence of child abuse and incest are depicted as normal occurences in this village. The children, victims of an unremittingly cold existence, bustle around in as gang of well-dressed zombies. They have had the life sucked out of them.
It is these children, The White Ribbon would have us understand, are the generation that cossetted Hitler. He is their revenge on the daily evil visisted upon them.
If you can stomach this as a theory, then you can read many layers of meaning into the icily beautiful cinematography. If not, this unlovely bunch of demons will drive you to wish them all swiftly meet their maker. 
It is overly long and the pacing is at times non-existent, but there is power and impact. 

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Miss Amazon

Das Weisse Band un film de Michael Haneke

Nominated for Best Foreign film at the Oscars,  winner of the Palme d'or at the Festival de Cannes in 2009, winner of  the Best Foreign film at the Golden Globe Das Weisse Band (The  White Ribbon) is the obvious choice for the predictions of the  winner of its category at the Academy Awards. Praise by international  critic, mostly european, because Haneke is better apreciated in the old  World. Known for Caché, The Piano Teacher, Funny Games and Time of the Wolf Haneke is always  near horror, thriller, psychological drama and always on the dark side  of humans. I really like his films even if I haven't seen enough of  them, Funny Games is an  experience in itself.

Das  Weisse Band depicts a story narrated by the school teacher of a  small village in Germany at the dawn of the Great War. Many crimes are  committed in the village and the hypocrite villagers are too afraid to  denounce anyone. We follow the school teacher, the reverend's family,  the baron's family and the family of a servant. In all these families  there are hidden shame, inner problems, and the presence of teenagers.  While the story takes place and goes on we suspect everyone of the  crimes committed. The story is very dense and reminded me of the great  films of Ingmar Bergman especially his Fanny  och Alexander.

On the directing side, the images are shot  in a classy and pure black and white. The images even felt too pure and  it was probably done intentionally to disturb the viewer. The camera  doesn't move a lot and when it does it goes slowly as Dreyer's Ordet. The composition of the images  are as amazing as Ordet too.  Haneke directs here with the hand of a master. He let the scenes flow  and he's not afraid of long scenes where the caracters go out of the  camera and come back later in the same shot. At some point it reminded  me of Andrei Tarkovsky's style of contemplative cinema without being too  distant.

All these elements with an amazing ensemble cast that  offers righteous performances gives us one of the best film of 2009. It  took third place in my Top 10 of the year! This is the kind of film that  is not gonna feel old in 30 years like the films of Dreyer, Tarkovsky,  and Bergman because they all bring something unique, intense, grand, and  immortal to films.

http://cinephiliaque.blogspot.com/2010/02/das-weisse-band-un-film-de-michael.html

Recommendations: Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Duel

Last updated: 2010-04-27 15:38:13 by MichaelParent

THE WHITE RIBBON

****½

A stark, magisterial, beguiling polemic wound around the moderately eerie goings-on in a sequestered German village in the 1910s. Pointedly, it’s set on the cusp of World War I, though it is just as concerned with the mentality that went on to inflict World War II. Although nominally ambiguous and open-ended, it reads like a storybook compared to the rest of Haneke’s oeuvre. And although much of its pleasures are of the [dreaded] conceptual, thought-provoking, not to mention formalist kind, it is very easy to get lost in its odd stories of odd people as well as its peerless evocation of a time and a place.

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The White Ribbon

This is the second film I watched that was directed by Michael Haneke. The first was the US remake of FUNNY GAMES. A pattern has emerged: it seems Haneke is a filmmaker with a message to express, but the message normally isn’t very insightful. Which is okay; the message doesn’t need to be revolutionary, only expressed in a good, well-directed story. And this is where Haneke fails; in a terribly pretentious decision, he sacrifices all the other aspects of his films (at least the two I’ve watched) to point out a message that isn’t worth the sacrifice.

Take FUNNY GAMES. The movie literally speaks to the audience, manipulating us directly and constantly frustrating us by reversing our expectations. It breaks the immersion all the time, reminding us we’re watching a film, which obviously sabotages our involvement with the characters and the film in general. Why?

Because it wants to point out our fascination with violence and desire for revenge.

So I’m not sure if Haneke believed this message to be genius, or if he’s too much of a misanthrope to think the audience could have gotten the point unless he had the villains break the fourth wall and tell us the point. Regardless of his reasons, that’s patronising. A message can be very organically inserted into a good story with intriguing characters and intelligent dialogue. TAXI DRIVER is one of many films that absolutely succeed at this.

In THE WHITE RIBBON, Haneke once again adopts a style that hurts every aspect of the story with the exception of his message. This film paints childhood in dark, bleak tones; set in a German village in the early 20th century, it illustrates the damage opressive parents did to their kids, raising an enraged generation that would eventually become the Nazi generation. Of course, that’s just the historical setting — the film is about the dangers and horrors of repression in general, the way authority generates rebellion as a part of human nature.

Which isn’t particularly insightful. It’s not a new message. Regardless, it is an important message that could have resulted in a great story. And instead, Haneke sacrifices the story for what he seems to consider a great message.

THE WHITE RIBBON is an incredibly dull film. The script is comprised of mundane scenes and boring conversations. Empty, shallow exchanges that take several minutes to get to the point, repetitive lines such as “I don’t understand”. Worse, some scenes immensely lack subtlety, like the moment the doctor points out to a woman everything he dislikes about her, in such a cruel, cold tone that it becomes unintentionally funny, as if Haneke is trying to hammer into the audience’s skull how evil humanity (and particularly men) can be.

With a terrible (and unnecessary) narration from the protagonist played by Christian Friedel, the film follows the life of uninteresting characters for 144 minutes. There is no comedy or emotional involvement; the drama rarely feels real, possibly because of the lack of comedy and emotional involvement. Scenes go from one to the other with dry cuts that often feel too abrupt; ironic, since the film has many, many unnecessarily long scenes, but when it needs to let a scene linger a little while further, it doesn’t.

This has to do with the style Haneke adopted as director: he rarely cuts, usually choosing a single angle or camera movement for an entire scene. This is something THE WHITE RIBBON, to a point, does very well. The cinematography is absolutely superb, with an ingenious use of shadows and brilliant placement of actors in the frame. Problem being, Haneke rarely cuts and so the scene tends to very long. This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue; in a movie with boring scenes and shitty dialogue, though, it is.

There is, however, a moment when Haneke extends a scene for a very good reason: when a boy and his sister are about to be physically punished by their father, Haneke fixes his camera on the closed door beyond which is the room where the punishment will take place. The door opens, the boy leaves, enters another room, returns with a whip in his hand and goes back to the room, closing the door behind him. Seconds pass. We hear the sickening sound and a pained moan from the boy. Then another. And another.

Sadly, for most of the film, Haneke seems to hold his frames because he thinks they’re brilliant, rather than for a good narrative reason such as the one described in the previous paragraph. He has a good eye for composition, but a bad notion of pacing; the scenes fail to reward the time invested in them, and the only interesting human moment in this film is the dance between the protagonist and his loved one during a party.

The cast is completely sabotaged by their shitty characters, so they failed to provoke an impression on me because I wasn’t interested in any of them. The actors don’t have much to work with. You can cry convincingly onscreen, or say a line of dialogue perfectly, but there isn’t much point when the effect this has on the viewer is none.

So mostly, THE WHITE RIBBON is a cold, soulless film. It has something to say, but it’s nothing new or nearly worth the movie’s shortcomings. It’s like the dullest person in the planet taking 144 minutes to explain something to you, in the blandest way possible. And personally, my reaction when the person was finally done was just a disappointed “well… yeah.”

http://andrenavarro.wordpress.com/

Last updated: 2010-02-20 11:48:35 by andre_navarro

A Masterly Tale on the Circulation of Violence

White Ribbon focuses on a pre World War I German town and surveys the evolution of violent, wild incidents resembling punishments indicted on certain individuals. We are provided access to the story from the point of view of the town teacher, whose recollective voice-over interposes throughout the film. The narration competently obscures the culprits, thereby attributing the responsibility for the rage, and its (hypocritical) social incorporation to the whole society rather than certain "abnormal" characters.

In movie circles,White Ribbon is widely regarded as depicting the evolution of a microcosm of a proto-fascist society (which is to a certain extent viable by the way). However, the movie is a less Germany-specific and more universal parable on the socialization of rage and violence, on the evolution of the social circulation of rage and violence. The film follows a route from local (Germany) to universal, coming up with far reaching arguments, just as Foucault focuses on 18-19th century France and presents arguments on the evolution of prison and punishment systems.

Considering Haneke's entire filmography, it is evident that the director has always been interested in philosophical takes on pschology and human interaction, without historicizing his filmic arguments strictly, i.e., without attributing time spans/societies to them. If we leave the mediocrity of the enterprise aside, Haneke's recent remake of Funny Games shot-for-shot, yet in a different society (USA rather than Germany) fittingly illustrates the point.

After a span of work disappointing for many Haneke fans, the auteur returns with an influential and aptly argumentative film.

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Vincent Snavely