The White Ribbon [DVD] [2009] (film on DVD)
from Artificial Eye
Directed by: Michael Haneke
Starring: Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesh, Burkhart Klaussner, Steffi Kühnert
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Audience Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
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DVD Box Price: £5.93
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outstanding  Sent: 03 September 2010
Another example of a German artist attemting to come to terms with the the country's descent into barbarism. A very successful and illuminating film which I will watch again and probably again.
A bird in the hand Sent: 22 August 2010
The White Ribbon,based as it is on old black and white photographs by Sander of farmers and peasants in rural old German communities,has crisp white and black cinematography and a voice-over narrative by the school-teacher(Christiane Friedel),looking back from his old age,this enhances the archaic aspects of the film.The dominance of the bourgeois hierarchy in charge is emphasised by their titles-Baron, Pastor,Doctor, Teacher,Steward,Farmer-and hence the rigidity of the status quo and the patriarchal Protestantism,with its repressive mechanisms of social control.The children who suffer under this are known by their individual names,but they are at times depicted as a swarming brood of evil menace with the collective malice of psychopathy.The film steps back in time to a pristine world of pre-industrial farmlands,snowscapes,wheat fields,beyond sight or sound of our modern media-bombarded environment in the year before WWI in Eichwald in northern Germany.Though fascism is never directly addressed, we are made aware that the utopian agrarian idyll which formed the basis of so much Nazi fantasy was always a lie.
This is an even-paced film depicting slowly the passing of the seasons. Meanwhile the film's more sinister events -a malicious attack on the town doctor, the death of a farmhand, the kidnap and torture of two small boys - are interwoven with the delicate progression of a relationship between the narrator's younger self (the school-teacher is the closest thing the film offers to a protagonist) and a buxom young nanny, Eva (Leonie Benesch),depicted in a warm,humourous and tender way.The question of who is responsible for the suffering echoes throughout as well as the passage of social maladies over the generations.The film is done in parable form.The narrator says that some of the things he's going to say he heard from hearsay and he doesn't know exactly how true this all of this is... We never really know who committed the crimes,although the teacher thinks that the groups of children are probably the culprits.The narrator is also reflecting on what has come to pass in the modern world from his old age.Hanneke uses deconstruction to show the possibility of many interpretations.We may be seeing the seeds of National Socialism,the Red Army Faction or religious fundamentalism being sown.The evil is symbolic, potential,enclosed in ritual.There is an atmosphere of punishment and abuse from the male elders of the community towards the children and women.The Baroness wants to leave her husband and take her children away from `the malice,envy,apathy, and brutality' of these surroundings.
The films offers us goodness,self-sacrifice and love in the form of a grieving husband,the two young lovers's courtship,the filial bond between a son and his mother,the young boy offering an injured sparrow to his indifferent father to replace the killing of the parakeet by malicious siblings.The schoolteacher is our guide through the tale,but events are viewed from the children's perspective. The scene in which Anna's tiny brother, wandering the house wakefully in the middle of the night, stumbles upon his father and sister together, is a masterpiece of ambiguous horror.The village's young are as much victims as perpetrators.The acts are not those of a `sick person', rather that the guilt is collective, and that the children's rebellion against us is the inevitable consequence of our own actions.There is the idea of innocence being victimised and lost,thedisplacement of simmering resentment and revenge upon those targets that will not fight back.Hanneke consulted mannuals of child- rearing in the country-side,and the white ribbon was used as a reminder of innocence and a mark of shame.In a Nazi context this symbol could become the yellow star that Jews have to wear at all times or the black armband of the Nazis.The schoolteacher's attempts to expose the seamy underbelly lead to his expulsion.The attacks on the status quo by the children is followed by the announcement of WWI.We get the idea that the suppresion of small things leads to the outbreaks of wars.' All the big wars can be traced back to all these small ones between all of us. I always try to build models to show the big picture with the small model.' thus Hanneke in an interview.Truth is never simple and everyone is suspect.Hanneke offers his films up like wounded sparrows for our gaze.
Haneke does Thomas Hardy Sent: 12 August 2010
I studied German at university, so I found this film to be familiar - the seriousness of the drama, the social hierarchy and the upright milieu of the baronial class, set against peasants and professionals. I'm used to Haneke creating contemporary drama, so this period piece was a bit of a surprise, it unfolds quite slowly, some of it doesn't make sense, there are lots of characters to follow.
Twice while I was watching this film, I had somewhere else to go, but I couldn't move. I found the tale to be spellbinding. You've got to have a taste for angst, horror and depravity, which tend to be Haneke's signature themes, but as in Cache or Code Unknown, Haneke evokes something painful about the human condition, the misunderstandings, the brutality and the lack of knowledge of other people's motives and actions.
I can see why some people would hate it. The film shows you of the cruelty of parents, the shame of childhood sexuality, adult sexual abuse of children and the reality of profound unhappiness, and Haneke does it in very raw ways. It's very like a Thomas Hardy story, which remains unsatisfyingly unresolved. Like Ravel's Pavane pour une infante defunte, this film leaves you with a depression that lingers for days. But good depression, which leads to a more profound understanding of life.
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Associated dvd film / movie categories: World Cinema, Drama |
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