I was warned off the film by well-meaning friends—one of whom worried I would take it too personally, given my Teutonic background, and another disturbed by what she described as the film’s atmosphere of “sadism.” But, after hesitating, I finally caught Austrian director Michael Haneke’s extraordinary film The White Ribbon—one of the Oscar nominees in the Foreign Language Film category—at a screening last month. Before the lights went out, I noticed two “black hat” types, peyes and all, sitting in the audience, the more visible because there was only a handful of scattered viewers. I wondered briefly why they had come to see this movie, then forgot their presence as the opening credits went up over a silent background. That silence alone established a solemnity, a withheld quality, that would be more than met by what transpired on screen in the next two-and-half hours. (The only music in the film is ambient.)
Haneke—whose earlier films include Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, and Caché—has always been interested in the mechanics of brutality, the way in which aggressive impulses are funneled through and acted upon by the culture at large. Described as “Europe’s philosopher of violence,” he has never been one to concern himself with the sheer entertainment value of his work, with cajoling an audience into forgetting that it is watching a cautionary tale disguised as a cinematic venture. In The White Ribbon, he presents an idyllic rural setting in northern Germany and its God-fearing populace on the eve of World War I and, scene by laconic scene, gradually reveals the twisted passions and hostile impulses that seethe beneath the community’s sunlit fields, neat homes, and pious pedagogy. Haneke wants us to take note: This is how cruelty is learned, passed down from generation to generation in a casually escalating pattern, until the collective itself becomes infected and the tormented become, in their turn, the tormentors.