The White Ribbon

On Thursday I went to see The White Ribbon (Die Weisse Band) at the Arts Picturehouse cinema in Cambridge. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. All the reviews I have read about this film have praised it excessively.

Directed by Michael Haneke, the story is set in a north German village on the eve of the First World War. Everything about the film is superbly done. Although it is two and a half hours long, as soon as the film finished I wanted to see it again.

Visually very beautiful, the black and white scenes of Biedermeier interiors and bucolic landscapes are worth careful study in themselves (when it comes out on DVD I will probably watch it through without the sound).

The violent incidents in the story are more effective for never being explicitly shown.

The narrative attempts to locate the origins of totalitarianism in the stifling rigidity of pre-First World War society. There are various symbolic references to later events (the wearing of armbands, the contempt for established institutions, the persecution of those who do not fit in etc). The issue of whether the children are rebelling against society, or enforcing conformity to it, is deliberately left unanswered.

If we accept that the twenty years before the outbreak of the Great War represent the apogee of rational "civilisation" with its reverence to the higher culture of the mind (as opposed to the later cultivation of emotional and physical sensations) Haneke is possibly asking questions about the value of inhibitions. The people in the village are completely inhibited - actually inhibited by layers of clothes, object-filled rooms, lack of transport; mentally inhibited by self-discipline, codes of behaviour, implied obligations to each other; socially inhibited by the complex and brutally-enforced hierarchy they find themselves in.

Is the violence necessary to maintain these inhibitions (the actual beatings, the mental cruelties, the threat of destitution) justified to sustain a stable secure community? Or is the violence necessary to rebel against these inhibitions (the persecutions, the burnings, the destruction) justified to bring this social construct down? You can see it both ways.

The film's depiction of Wilhelmine Germany reminded me of the semi-autobiogrpahical novels of Sybille Bedford.