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The White Ribbon (2009)

Director: Michael Haneke

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23 reviews

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From Time Out London

Michael Haneke’s extraordinary new film is a black-and-white ensemble piece set in a north German village on the eve of World War I. It’s a sombre, roving drama that recreates the rituals of a rural Protestant community and imagines the private lives of its householders – the doctor, the baron, the pastor – to show how hierarchical, patriarchal and even feudal such a community may have remained even as the guns were being primed on the Western Front.

It’s a film that’s broader in its focus and less direct in its efforts to shock and tease than 2005’s ‘Hidden’, the Austrian director’s last original film (if you skip his American remake of ‘Funny Games’ in 2007). Yet it also feels like a continuation of a sort of storytelling that he developed further with ‘Hidden’. In that film, the racial guilt of an entire nation was projected through Daniel Auteuil’s hunted Parisian intellectual, and here again Haneke sets a drama in one period to explore issues relating to another. ‘The White Ribbon’, too, is an open-ended mystery about a crime or crimes. However, while in ‘Hidden’ Haneke used the present to ponder its relationship with the past, here he does the opposite, using the past to reflect on that era’s future.

Crucially, ‘The White Ribbon’ is narrated by a man whose elderly voice suggests he’s relating events to us from the perspective of the 1960s or ’70s. In the film, he’s a sympathetic 31-year-old teacher who educates many of the children who creepily roam the village in packs and whom we see subjected to extreme discipline and punishment (and in one case, sexual abuse) at home. The teacher is not from the village, which probably gives him a more objective eye, but he’s present as a series of events occurs: a doctor’s horse is tripped up by a wire; a woman dies in a sawmill; a barn is set ablaze.

Our narrator suggests at the start that what we witness ‘may explain what came later’. Which, of course, this being a German story in 1913, turns the mind to fascism. One looks at the faces of the film’s large cast, especially its children, and wonders what would their relationship be to National Socialism? But to linger too long on such literal questions is an error. This is art, not science, and I don’t think that even Haneke, that most rational of filmmakers, believes one could trace a direct line from his village to the behaviour of a nation two decades later.

What he offers are merely suggestions as to why a people might turn to antisocial behaviour, whether it’s as local as sabotaging cabbages and assaulting a disabled child or as national as following a leader whom you assist in carrying out crimes in your name. I’d hesitate, too, to assume that Haneke is saying something specific about the German national character at this time. Let’s not forget the key role of shame in this film: even the ‘white ribbon’ of the title is a band tied around the arms of naughty children. Let’s not forget, too, that it was partly the shame forced on Germany by the rest of Europe that led to the terrible events of the 1930s and ’40s.

Faithful and striking historical reconstruction is evident throughout. The superb performances also lend a period authenticity to the film. Yet, there’s also something essentially modern about Haneke’s perspective: he peers into closed-off parlours and invades intimate moments (a father lectures a boy on masturbation, a child questions his sister about death) to suggest links between the psychology of domestic regimes and wider societal behaviour – links that few of these characters could have even conceived of in 1913. It’s Haneke’s investigative and quietly accusing contemporary eye that links repression in the home with corruption in the community beyond.

As a thriller, this is much more muted and subtle than ‘Hidden’. The result is that there’s more space for Haneke – and us – to consider the behaviour of his characters and the relationships between them. It’s his least aggressive and most mature film – a masterpiece from a director who is increasingly making a habit of them.

Author: Dave Calhoun 2009-11-10 12:24:24

Time Out London Issue 2047: November 12-18, 2009

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User reviews of this film

jools said...

Posted on Jan 04 2010 00:00 Beautiful and haunting and stark. Don't go if you need cheering up. The sense of mystery lingers after the film, as do some of the more shocking scenes; the doctor's scene with the midwife and then his poor daughter, the parson and his 'self-loving' son, the strange children wandering menancingly and blank-faced round the village. The still landscape scenes were lovely too and there was the occasional bit of humour here and there, but not enough to give the gloomy characters more roundness and believability. Surely life wasn't that dark, even in pre-war Protestant Germany?

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Freddy said...

Posted on Jan 02 2010 16:24 The master.

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Les Reid said...

Posted on Dec 21 2009 22:38 The White Ribbon is like Heimat, but not as good. It pretends that it has something important to say about pre-war Germany, but it hasn't. The pre-war setting is simply an excuse for Haneke to indulge his predeliction for nasty sadistic scenes. I thought he had grown out of that when he made Hidden, but it seems not.
My fellow sceptics should take heart from the review in Sight & Sound where HK Miller cuts through the pretentiousness to expose the cold egotism underneath.

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usman latif khawaja said...

Posted on Dec 14 2009 04:39 December 14th, 2009 4:36 amRating: a coherently incomplete account of human innocence
Haneke fashions his fastidious and fascinating studies of human flaws irrelative of time and place ,as in white ribbon where though he relates the sinister and secretive community of saboteurs in a rather feckless german village with it's dystopian fluster ,he also is using it as a metaphor for entire humanity and all of the social vices and egregious milieu rife in europe on the eve of a major catastrophe .
That WW1 is not a consequence of his devious GERMAN characters, but rather the degenerate and deranged characters that Europe in general bred in that era itself from lubeck to lombardy to london is quite manifest itself .
As he begins his austere narrative with a village doctor who is almost murdered in a horse riding accident which seems a planned pre-meditated conspiracy ,he follows the vile act with a festering study of the social fabric and class strata that imbued the continent where an underground peasantry and it's fervent allies are engaged in a sinister cat and mouse game with the aristocracy and the intellectual professional class as a working class woman peasant is killed by accident while at workplace .
He cleverly uses a schoolteacher as a narrator as he instructs and observes this clash of egos where malice and avarice is consumed by loathing and tyranny where even schoolchildren are part of the ugly equation .
The baron and baroness and their power over the village is being challenged in a clandestine manner and it seems that the pastor and the peasants might be incriminated but it is an open equation where no one is innocent .
The White Ribbon here stands for the purity of human intent and spiritual innocence and it becomes a mockery in a social structure where justice or morality is nihilistic and persecution and vengeance is the rule in a subersive society .
The conversation between a young boy and his elder sister about the nature and inevititabe tragedy of life and death is genius ,where the boy learns the truth about existence and shows his frustration about existence itself in an extreme reaction .
Every relationship here is riddled and shrouded in degenerate immorality from the aristocracy to the arrogant self-loathing professional village doctor and the tragic midwife who has a mentally handicapped son , and hints of incestuous relations between the so-called respectable citizens ,while teenage children are radically restrained and sexually oppressed to attain physical pleasure by physical restraint by religious zealots in name of god .
The main protagonists are the teacher ,the pastor ,the doctor and the baron with their female counterparts playing their rather invisible roles in a male dominated masochist milieu .
The peasants or workers here are shown as silent victims or as clandestine revolutionaries who torture young children on the other side of the fence and indulge in arson and destruction of property as a weak protest,which itself becomes a greater vice than their victimisation .
Yet haneke portrays this in mystical images with pristine corn fields and puritan snow flakes with the spring and winter in prime and seasonal blooms and the script blossoms in a manner where art becomes a social comment in itself with monochrome images of ethereal beauty ,like the grey facade of the village church juxtaposed against the lush white snowy fields in a metaphor of the natural purity as opposed to human bigotry and bias in the bestial reality .
This is more in conjunction with his movies like CODE UNKNOWN and Day of the Wolf ,rather than the character driven CACHE or Piano Player .
It still is a very calm account of the turbulent events where world will change ,or at least Europe will forever and it heralds that equivocally in an intelligent and totally cerebral execution by a master of modern cinema .
It is an individual work from his previous artistic endeavours ,and no less or more as all are meritorious in their own cadre .
The fact human conscience of the perpetrator is aware and hurt by the psychological sequel of it's vices more than the victim, is the main message and the teacher conveys it rather like a clairvoyant as the village and it's inhabitants fade in the mists of time like the rest of humanity as the characters discuss in a key scene itself in a self-revelatory moment of exploring human conscience .
The fact that the very human conscience is at stake here as it is now, makes this just as contemporary and timeless as the events and their impact on a tiny German village in 1916.
– usman latif khawaja , havering,london,england

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ALFREDO said...

Posted on Dec 07 2009 17:55 IT IS AN EXCELLENT FILM, TRUE, BUT A VERY DEPRESSING ONE TOO. AND I FOUND AT THE END THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING MISSING BUT I CANNOT TELL YOU WHAT. THE FACT THAT IT IS IN BLACK AND WHITE DOESN''T HELP. CAN I RECOMMEND IT?. I DON'T KNOW.

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Dec 07 2009 13:42 I didn't see the merit of this film and found it’s objective quite tiresome after the first hour or so. There is a cumulative effect of the diverse acts of violence so that the point it had to make was very clear - violence begets violence. But it didn't seem to do much more than make that point and the violence even became monotonous. As soon as we see the Baron's son near the pond, we know he's going to be pushed in. The only surprise in the scene is that he isn't drowned. However, the actual depiction is remarkable only for being so contrived.
Sometimes the film seemed to me to duck depicting difficult scenes or events - the response of the pastor to his family when he discovers someone has gutted his pet bird with his scissors. We're shown so many other scenes in which he reproaches his family but the repercussions of this crucial moment are not shown to us and needed to be. As depicted, his discovery of the murdered bird is lifeless itself.
The truth of the human behaviour depicted was questionable. Imagine yourself fishing from a woodland stream, the wood around you is quiet except for birdsong. You look up and see a boy walking along the handrail of a bridge. The bridge is high enough above the ground that he may be seriously hurt or even killed if he falls. Would your response be - in this quiet place and when the boy is unaware of your presence -to bellow his name at the top of your voice, to bellow it again as you run towards him and to hammer your way along the bridge towards the vulnerable boy you fear may be risking a deadly fall? Do you think your fear would make you raucous and startling to the boy or would it make you soft and cautious?
Was this a clumsy film with quite a substantial element that was arbitrary and ineffectual?

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Marianne McAleer said...

Posted on Nov 30 2009 01:24 A heartbreaking and understated film that had me longing for revenge. I was on the edge of my seat throughout, appalled at the cruelty meted out to the children yet desperate to discover what happened to them. There was an incredible amount to discuss by the end. Patriarchy? No thankyou.

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fb said...

Posted on Nov 28 2009 15:49 Not gonna add much to what has already been well said by other reviewers. Agree with all of what you wrote, Mark, other than your view that TWR was more about repressive patriarchy than a foretaste/forewarning of the political madness to come. By setting TWR in a village, it was too easy to see the abuse/violence as typical yokel behaviour - much more intriguing if the characters had been urban sophisticates, not pastoral inbreds (though, to be fair, most of the abuse seemed to be meted out by the more educated members of the community). David Glowacki, I understand the points you are making, though I never felt that scenes ended before they became interesting, as Haneke was adding brush strokes upon brush strokes to reveal his final vision. Totally agree with you on the characters looking very alike, though - the doctor's daughter (Anna), the schoolteacher's fiancee (Eva) and the pastor's daughter (Klara) might as well have been identical Aryan triplets! And Juliet, if you could've watched for another 2 1/2 hours, you'd've been in heaven at the Brixton Ritzy on Thur nite, as we got to watch the last 10 mins again cos the subtitles went a little on the blink! I was a bit disappointed when I heard that Haneke was going historical with the follow-up to "Hidden" (he has so very much that's interesting to say about the present), but TWR, despite its flaws, has only increased my admiration for the man many of us regard as the most vital film-maker of our age.

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Chris said...

Posted on Nov 24 2009 17:57 This is a serious film - and an excellent film too. The director manages to infuse the audience with exactly the type of unease that is experienced by many of the protaganists within the film which is quite a trick. The overriding sense at the end of the film is hmm - takes quite a time to digest, but ultimately as the Baron's wife says near the end the main theme is the cruelty, malice, envy and apathy that lies right at the heart of a community that is outwardly respectable at the start and the devastating impact that this has upon individuals within that community whose indignation is thoroughly repressed. Is this as good as Hidden - another great Haneke film. In a different way yes - you will leave the theatre reflecting for some time upon what you have just seen. Beautifully shot too - some of the scenes were like Ansel Adams at his best.

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nathan said...

Posted on Nov 22 2009 22:38 Disappointing, for me it was a copycat of Hidden but in B&W.

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Niko said...

Posted on Nov 22 2009 13:39 I think, this is a brilliant and very important film. How many times have I been disappointed by stereotypes and senseless explanations about the causes of commitment to ideologies and the two wars that were started by my country... This film absolutely surprised me and helped me to gain a better understanding of my countries history. For example, I never understood why young men could be so keen to enter into the first world war; Martin Haneke shows why the war could be seen as a relieve for people who lived under conditions that were just desolate.

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michael haneke said...

Posted on Nov 21 2009 15:19 Ok so I’m going to make a movie in black and white, and I’m going to pace it deliberately slow, and I’m going to insert tangentially a few big historical events to arrogate a sense of gravitas, and I’m not going to confront any of the issues or tie anything off properly because that’s difficult, but I will use a single character narrator because that gives me a get-out clause for narrative holes and underexplained events, and everytime the audience thinks “I’m bored “ or “I’m frustrated” I’ll simply reply, “Ah but that’s the point, look look: it’s b/w - it’s aesthetic; it’s slow - it’s profound; it’s incomplete as a story - it’s intriguing; it touches on two world wars - it’s ... a masterpiece!” And guess what? All the critics will be led by the nose and sedulously repeat, “Ah yes, just like you told us, it’s a masterpiece.” Clever no?

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Juliet said...

Posted on Nov 21 2009 14:37 An incredible film which resonates still a week later. I could have sat tin the cinema for another 2 and a half hours.!

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Marco said...

Posted on Nov 20 2009 12:29 The pace of the movie suits the time and place where it takes place. I thought it was very good

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dave calhoun said...

Posted on Nov 19 2009 17:43 E A Dobson - Just to respon to your question about Geoff Andrew. He's very well. He's not on staff anymore, but he still writes for us regularly. He's currently working full time as the esteemed programmer of the BFI Southbank in London.
Thanks
Dave Calhoun

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