Confused Ideas from the Northwest Corner: The White Ribbon

Sunday, January 31, 2010

The White Ribbon

In a recent post, I lamented the frenetic violence and universal despair that fill so many recent movies. And in my first year of blogging, I commemorated the death of Ingmar Bergman, who perhaps first gave many Americans cause to be conscious of cinema as an art form.

In the recently released movie The White Ribbon ("Das Weisse Band"), director Michael Haneke demonstrates that both violence (mostly off-camera) and despair can be legitimate subjects, topics that leave the audience thinking and talking, rather than merely entertained and/or depressed. His cinematography recalls that of Bergman -- black and white chiaroscuro, stationary camera, long periods of virtual silence that help to develop mood and character. The black and white photography is the most beautiful use of that medium that I've seen in any recent film, at times even reminding me of the classic photography of wilderness scenery by Ansel Adams.

The movie takes place in a small, isolated German hamlet, immediately before World War I. The social structure of the village is dominated by the baron and his family, who employ most of the villagers; the Lutheran pastor; and, to a lesser extent, the village physician. The story is told from the perspective of a young, newly-arrived schoolteacher, who, decades later, as an old man, relates his recollections.

Strange, violent events occur throughout the film. The responsible parties are never identified, although at least two possible scenarios emerge. The children of the village seem, at least at first blush, to be perfectly normal kids for their time and place. But throughout the film, they are seen largely as a unit -- a swarm of children, childlike but somehow threatening. Like a Greek chorus, they observe the life of the village and the disasters that ensue. But they are a silent chorus, one that observes but does not comment. This image as dramatic chorus is echoed in the final scene of the film as the boys of the village, gathered in the church balcony, hover over the still stoic but now devastated congregatation, singing the ironically triumphal hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God.

Evil obviously haunts the village, but no one person appears evil -- individual villagers appear merely weak, scared, vain, immature, or powerless. Village society is tied in knots by repression -- sexual repression, class distinctions, social conventions. (The schoolteacher good-naturedly keeps reminding the girl to whom he's betrothed to stop calling him "sir" -- in German, I suspect he's asking her not to use the formal form of address.) The adults are so inhibited in all these respects that they find it impossible to share with each other their real feelings: impossible, at least, until a dam occasionally breaks and they blurt out their long-repressed emotions in ways that hurt each other devastatingly.

The parents love their children, but can show their love only though draconian punishments, in the hopes of rearing them "correctly." (The pastor, after beating his "misbehaving" children, forces the two oldest to wear white ribbons on their arms, to remind themselves of the purity to which they must aspire.) The baron and his family stay wealthy by exploiting the villagers, lower classes whom they see as only a step or two above the farm animals, but at the same time they attempt to treat them fairly. The villagers both respect and hate the baron. The pastor repeatedly reminds his congregation of their sinfulness and their duty to live righteously. He treats his own children -- whom he obviously loves -- no differently from the rest of his congregation. The village doctor is both kind to his patients and filled with a contempt for his long-time mistress that he finally reveals in a horrific display of verbal cruelty.

This is the picture of a dysfunctional world, as dysfunctional as the worlds shown in today's pop science fiction movies. Out of such dysfunction, evil would seem to flow naturally. As it does, although we never learn precisely how or through whom. We are reminded -- not explicitly by the movie itself, but by some reviewers -- that the children who stand around and watch impassively as evil unfolds -- or perhaps are even themselves the agents of evil -- were to grow into the German generation that gave the world Adolph Hitler.

But we also see ourselves in the villagers. As would any other nation, perhaps; and any other generation. The film reminds us of something uncomfortable about our very humanity itself, not simply about the German people, and not simply about quasi-feudal society before World War I.