The White Ribbon
Das weisse band
Michael Haneke (2009)
It starts with a dark screen and the voice of a man – he sounds like an elderly man – saying:
‘I don’t know if the story that I want to tell you is all true. Some of it I know only by hearsay. But I think it explains some of the things that have happened in this country.’
Then the first image fades in – a field, wide, flat and deserted until a man on horseback begins to emerge from the background. The voice tells us that it all started with an accident involving the village doctor. His horse, when it reaches the foreground of the frame, stumbles and throws its rider. (It has tripped over an unseen wire.) The doctor is taken to hospital and his mount is mortally injured. This is the first of a sequence of incidents, all unfortunate, some horrifying. Many of the villagers work on land owned by the local aristocrat, a baron: a tenant farmer’s wife, not sufficiently robust to continue with harvesting work, is assigned instead to a job in a saw mill, where she dies as a result of what appears to be an accident. Then the baron’s son, Sigi, goes missing and is discovered in circumstances that suggest some kind of quasi-sexual assault. Someone sets fire to a barn on the estate. The tenant farmer hangs himself. The mentally handicapped son of the village midwife is tortured and may lose his sight as a result. The pastor’s pet bird is taken from its cage in his study, skewered with scissors and placed on the owner’s desk, the death weapon protruding from its body to make the shape of a crucifix. The pampered Sigi, playing a little pipe to admittedly irritating effect, is thrown into the river by one of the sons of the baron’s steward, although another fishes him out before he drowns. (This and the tenant farmer’s son’s destruction of the baron’s field of cabbages in reaction to his mother’s death are the only incidents which we see as they take place.) The identity of the perpetrators of the other deeds is occasionally pretty clear (the pastor’s daughter takes scissors from her father’s desk and moves to the birdcage) but sometimes remains a mystery. For those of us who disliked Michael Haneke’s Hidden, in which we never learned conclusively who was video-recording the main character or why, this synopsis of the plot of The White Ribbon will make the heart sink. But that would be the wrong metaphorical-physiological reaction: this new film, very different from Hidden in ways that matter, makes your blood run cold but its artistry raises the spirits too.
It’s not immediately clear exactly when the narrator’s story is taking place or how the narrator is involved in that story – whether he’s part of it at all. But we can see we’re in the early twentieth century and that the village being described is in rural Germany. The village’s name is Eichwald. Our realisation that the storyteller is the young village schoolmaster – he turns out to be 31 years old – is important in two ways. First, we know that one of the people we’re watching has lived to tell the tale. Second, we sense from his voice that he’s reminiscing from some years hence – his reference to ‘things that have happened in this country’ naturally makes us think he may be speaking from the perspective of someone who’s experienced the Nazi regime. It transpires that the events the narrator is remembering took place between the summer of 1913 and the autumn of the following year. Michael Haneke’s screenplay seems to me in a class of its own among this year’s pictures and that opening voiceover is key to the whole film. Our knowing that the narrator is not omniscient gives Haneke a free hand. The passages in which the teacher doesn’t appear are presumably what he knows ‘by hearsay’: we can’t know, any more than him, whether everything we see really happened or not. This uncertainty gives us a kinship with the narrator – a kinship strengthened, each time we see him, by the personality of the teacher, who is well-meaning, awkward, troubled. Haneke makes the crucially right decision to have as the film’s pivot a character who is decent and likeable.
It was obvious too early in Hidden that the mystery of the recording of the protagonist’s life would not be solved but there were hints that it linked to the individual’s past and that that past might represent something of what France did in Algeria in the 1950s and early 1960s. In The White Ribbon, after Karli, the handicapped boy, has been tortured, manuscript appears on the screen showing the words from the Book of Common Prayer:
‘For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, and visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations.’
How this note comes to appear in the story at this point is, in realistic terms, unclear. In terms of what the story means, the words suggest a definite historical connection. A quarter of a century after the events described, the Second World War began. The adolescents of Eichwald in 1913 would then have been in their late thirties; their own children would have been teenagers. Who is behind all the incidents may not be explicitly revealed – but it stays ‘hidden’ only in the sense that those responsible are not unmasked in the way that the culprit in a conventional crime story would be. Although various adult characters are supplied with plausible motives for committing certain of the crimes in The White Ribbon (and eventually depart the village under a cloud), we’re left in little doubt that the malefactors are minors. The children are always on hand to help in the immediate aftermath of a mishap – when the doctor’s horse has fallen, following Sigi’s first disappearance, after Karli’s torture. Haneke seems almost determined not to stand accused of disdaining to unravel the mystery of who carried out the acts. There’s an extended (and gripping) interview between the schoolteacher and the pastor – in which the former accuses the children and the latter angrily threatens to report the teacher to the authorities. If it is the children, what motivates them? Is it an innate capacity for cruelty, reinforced by the various ways in which a number of them have been abused by their parents? How much is their psychopathology the result of the harsh Protestantism and feudal social structure of the village? Haneke doesn’t give cut and dried answers but it seems reasonable to interpret The White Ribbon as an illustration of how a malign sensibility was formed and how, given the particular time and place in which the story is set, it was possible for that sensibility to be realised as Nazism through the economic and political events of the decade following the First World War. In other words, there are persisting elements of uncertainty and mystery in the picture but a grim clarity at its centre.
The title refers a ribbon which the pastor and his wife forced their children, when they were infants, to wear – to keep in mind their duty to be pure of heart. Early on in the story, as the result of staying out late (the offence is disobedience – there’s little investigation of what they’ve been up to), the two eldest children are forced to wear the ribbon again to remind them that ‘white is the colour of innocence’. A group of the children, including the pastor’s daughter Klara, are soon to be confirmed in church. This accumulates importance as an event to which everything is tending; by the time it arrives, it has a metaphorical power not unlike – even though the film-making is utterly different – the climax to The Godfather, when Michael Corleone attends his nephew’s christening and renounces Satan as the Corleone family’s enemies are serially murdered. In The White Ribbon you feel that, as they become full members of the church, the children are being formally confirmed as morally completed and corrupted. Although the storytelling is, for the most part, very clear, it took me a little time to distinguish the pastor’s children from those of the baron’s steward. But the children gradually and irresistibly impose themselves as individuals. Each of them is named, whereas we rarely learn the names of the adults – the midwife is called Frau Wagner, otherwise they’re identified by their profession: the cast list describes the grown-ups as the teacher, the baron, the pastor etc.
Why are the children never suspected by the locals? (The teacher, who comes to suspect them, is from a town some distance away.) It’s because their parents regard their young’s capacity for wrongdoing as circumscribed by their own belief system: the pastor ties his adolescent son up in bed so that he can’t masturbate, which is the worst thing he’s seen as capable of doing. The wages-of-sin-is-death strand of Christianity is strongly in evidence, however. When the teacher is out fishing one day, he sees Martin, the thwarted wanker, walking on a dangerously high, narrow crossing above the river. Once he’s got him safely down, he asks the boy what he was doing up there. Martin replies that he wanted to see if God meant to punish him and that he now knows, because he survived, that God doesn’t want him to die. (He can therefore presumably go on to do worse things, secure in this knowledge.)
Eichwald means ‘oak wood’ but I couldn’t help thinking of it as a conflation of two notorious names of the Nazi period – Eichmann and Buchenwald. Everything in the village seems morbidly out of joint. The doctor’s wife died giving birth. The midwife’s handicapped child may be the illegitimate son of the doctor. The midwife has bad breath, caused by an ulcer. Yet Haneke creates images – and sounds – which are beautiful in themselves and piercingly beautiful in context: rippling corn, the snowed-in landscape (‘Covering/Earth in forgetful snow’), the singing of the church choir. These may sound conventional choices but it’s because they are such primal indicators of loveliness that they can be used powerfully to evoke pleasant thoughts or memories and, at the same time, subvert them – because in The White Ribbon they’re parts of a pathological environment. A sequence like the one in which the tenant farmer’s coffin is loaded onto a cart is brilliantly executed. At one level, it’s a beautifully detailed moment of social history. At another, it reinforces the unanswerable ubiquity of death in any community. At a third level, it brings home the particular tragedy suffered by this particular family – and the fact that you could know nothing of this from the externals of the ritual taking place. This is the first film Haneke has made in black-and-white and it’s the right choice not so much because of the moral starkness of the material but as a way of connoting an historical past. The look of the film often suggests monochrome photographs brought to life and the lighting by Christian Berger is very expressive. There is plenty of sunlight but it always appears to be somehow separated from the Eichwald settings and people. (The malignancy is very localised: when the teacher visits the home of his future in-laws, in a different village, the atmosphere is pleasant and the family seems happy.)
The scene in which the doctor comes to treat Karli, after his torture, is hard to bear. We’ve already heard the doctor’s merciless rejection of Karli’s mother and seen the evidence that he has an incestuous relationship with his teenage daughter. This is the man Karli has to rely on to tend the injuries to his eyes; when the doctor who may be his father places bandages over the upper part of the boy’s face, his cries are terrible to listen to. Abuse of children by adults, as well as by each other, gets worked into the texture of The White Ribbon: the pastor hands out corporal punishment to his older children, the doctor has sex with his daughter; the steward punches and kicks one of his sons. The sexual and moral sadism of the fathers reaches such a point that even a well-intended act – the teacher’s suggesting that the police interview the child who claimed to have had a dream that Karli would be tortured, and which came true – leads to her being grilled by two policemen so relentlessly that it feels like part of the cruelty. Yet Haneke goes beyond the mistreatment of children by direct injury or even through inculcation in a warping system of belief to get at other ways in which innocence is destroyed in childhood experience. This occurs explicitly in the memorable scene between the doctor’s children, in which the little boy Rudi asks his older sister Anna questions about death:
‘Does everybody die?
Yes.
Really – everyone?
Yes. …
Will I die?
Yes – but not for a long time yet.’
It dawns on him, thanks to her compassionate evasiveness, that the story he’s always been told that their mother, who died giving birth to him, went ‘on a trip’ is a lie:
‘Did mother die?
Yes – but that was a long time ago.’
The exchange is terminated when Rudi petulantly sweeps his bowl of soup off the table so that it smashes on the floor. (It made me think of the eight-year-old Sylvia Plath’s reaction to the news of her father’s death: ‘I’ll never speak to God again’.) Haneke also gets beneath this kind of eating of the tree of knowledge to suggest the sad, dark places in a childhood home: Rudi weeping on the staircase because his father’s unexpectedly been taken away (through the riding accident) and he doesn’t know when, or if, he’s coming back – or waking frightened in the night and wandering in the dark looking for Anna (who, at that moment, is being sexually assaulted by the same father whose return the little boy was longing for).
A couple of the exchanges between two adults seem a bit much yet Haneke does something very clever with both. The first is when the doctor tells the midwife, with whom he’s been having sex for years, how much he despises and is physically disgusted by her; this brings to mind the cruel invective in Winter Light, when Gunnar Björnstrand’s priest tells Ingrid Thulin’s schoolteacher, who loves him, what he thinks of her. The words here are more crudely vicious and, although the scene is in its way as startling as the Bergman one, it’s less complex and knotty. (Here you can only feel completely outraged on the part of the midwife who has to sit and listen to a man who’s used and abused her. The brilliance of the sequence in Winter Light is that, while you feel sorry for the woman and that the priest is behaving appallingly, Björnstrand gets across the strong element of self-loathing in his rejection of Thulin, and she makes you realise that her uncomplaining devotion would have a powerfully claustrophobic effect, and be likely to drive the object of desire to harsh words.) But even while you’re thinking that the doctor’s callousness feels excessive you remember that perhaps this didn’t happen – the schoolteacher-narrator didn’t witness the scene so it must be hearsay. (It also may cross your mind that you’ve built up a sufficiently strong hostility to the doctor by this stage that you’re virtually complicit in an attempt to imagine what vileness he’s capable of.)
The second instance is a dialogue between the baron and his wife. After Sigi is first assaulted, the wife takes the child off with her to Italy – we assume to recuperate. After the second incident, when Sigi’s pushed into the river, she tells her husband over dinner that she’s going to return to Italy with the child but this time she also makes clear that she has a lover there. This revelation seems to come from a more conventional film yet by the time the scene ends you’ve forgotten your reservations. The steward interrupts, saying that he needs to speak to the baron urgently; you assume it must be about what his sons did to Sigi – in fact it’s to break the news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. (Haneke does well, I think, to have the story continue a little beyond the outbreak of the First World War: it might have seemed too obvious to present Eichwald and what had gone on there as instantly swept away by the outbreak of war.)
There was more than one point when I thought the film was about to end but didn’t. My initial reaction was that Haneke was drawing things out too much but I quickly changed my mind: he always adds something valuable. And his judgment in deciding how far to resolve elements of the story is hard to fault. One of the pastor’s younger children asks permission to care for an injured wild bird. The pastor agrees but makes clear that, if the bird recovers, the little boy will have to let it go and asks if he’s prepared to do that. The father explains that the bird could not be kept like his own caged bird. The son agrees uncertainly. When the pastor’s bird has been killed, the boy returns with the one that he’s nursed back to health and offers it to his father, ‘Because you are sad’. This is a powerful moment – the priest struggles to hold back tears. Its power is not at all lessened by Haneke’s moving away from the scene at this point so that we’re left unsure whether the wild bird will be kept in a cage after all.
The film has been cast with incredible attention to detail in the look of the people – they’re not just a collection of interesting faces, they fit together as a community. Just about everyone in the large company is completely convincing and although I’ve no doubt they’re doing exactly what Haneke wants, the characterisations never seem limited by directorial control. The older children have been beautifully directed to convey secretiveness in different ways. Sometimes it has a sly edge (Maria-Victoria Dragus and Leonard Proxauf as Klara and Martin), in others it’s fearful (Roxane Duran as Anna). The standouts among the younger children are Miljain Chatelain (Rudi), Eddy Graal (Karli) and Thibault Sérié (the pastor’s younger son – the one with the bird). Among the grown-ups, Christian Friedel, as the schoolteacher, has a quality which seems both individual and to qualify him as everyman; Leonie Benesch as Eva, the girl he loves, is affectingly poised between generations (perhaps why she has a name) – as if she’s grown up good rather than bad by the skin of her teeth. Among the older characters, Burghart Klaussner as the pastor and Susanne Lothar as the midwife are outstanding. Klaussner (who made a strong impression in his small role as the judge at the Kate Winslet character’s trial in The Reader) is like a burly, more physically intimidating version of Gunnar Björnstrand. Klaussner gives the priest shadings which humanise him – it’s these that seem to make his baleful influence all the more terrible. As well as his final scene, mourning his bird’s death, we sense when the white ribbon is untied that the priest does loves his children in his own benighted way, that he truly believes and is glad that he’s succeeded in forcing them back to innocence. The pastor’s benignity is as chilling as his harsh morality (they’re two sides of the same coin). Lothar (the widow of Ulrich Mühe, who played the main role in The Lives of Others) has a determined rigidity for much of the film, as if walking straight and quickly was the best way of keeping what’s inside you at bay. It makes her emotional transparency in the scene in which the doctor berates her all the more distressing. In the smaller adult roles, Detlev Buck is witty and very likeable as Eva’s straight-talking father.
Another reason for admiring this film is that it seems to be an example – of a kind I can’t remember seeing – of a German sensibility addressing ‘the things that have happened in this country’. (Haneke is Austrian but I don’t think this makes a great difference.) In interviews, he has said that The White Ribbon is not about a specific generation in a specific social setting in a specific country, rather that it’s about ‘the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature’. This kind of soundbite doesn’t do justice to the picture: what Haneke creates as an artist is more richly ambiguous than what he has to say as a politically-minded citizen. Because the setting links with the Nazi regime in the way that it does, you feel the question of how religious discipline and dogmatism feed off, or bleed into, national character and circumstance, is left unresolved – and that the film is the more potent for that. In an interview for a profile of him by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, Haneke said that he thought there was no vicious act of which he himself would not have been capable. He’s too coolly objective a director for that to come across watching The White Ribbon – yet his distance also means that he doesn’t seem judgmental. Haneke may now be regarded as one of the leading auteurs of his day – but, on the basis of this film, he calls to mind Flaubert’s dictum that the artist should be present in his creation the way God is present in His – auteur absent. I want to resist Haneke’s misanthropic pessimism and I sometimes resent his chilly authority – there are moments when you think he’s verging on sadism himself. But The White Ribbon is a deeply impressive film.
15 November 2009