The White Ribbon

I have not seen Der Weisse Band, and I probably won’t do so, having already turned down one opportunity. I don’t really personally see the need for another film by Michael Haneke about how unpleasant people are, no matter how technically refined it is. I suspect – maybe unjustly, but I will never know – that it reeks of the complacency of a certain type of – mostly european – intellectual. But then what do I know? I laughed out loud in the cinema through the end of the last Lars Von Trier film that I inflicted on myself, and afterwards staggered out into the night desperately in search of anything I could find by James Cameron.

…how these children could grow up to constitute the Third Reich.

Too simple. Plenty of families managed to rise above their repression, plenty of communities managed to discard feudal deference without succumbing to Naziism.

I saw the film and was impressed by its powerful evocation of a time and place. But I also found it disturbing, and not always for good reasons.

As Toby Young says:

According to Haneke’s view of mankind, there was nothing exceptionally evil about the Third Reich; it was just an extreme expression of a universal human trait. No need to feel guilty, then — or, at least, no more guilty than any member of the human race. The message of this disturbing, nihilistic film is that we’re all Nazis at heart.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/film_reviews/article6914196.ece

No, we’re not. Not all of us. That’s just slick nonsense, no less pernicious than “it was all Hitler’s fault”. Collective guilt too easily becomes the guilt of no one.

Primo Levi had some pertinent words in his last book, “The Drowned and the Saved”:

I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.

http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/book_reviews/article/?t=other&f=drowned

The film was shot in analogue color (more explanation at the link below) and a digital intermediate was created for post-production (as is the case for most films nowadays).

Link

The idea proposed by the Baroness, that outside Germany there was this wonderful land, Italy, where everything was happy, seems at first to make it look like a dissection of the uniquely evil character of the Germans that Haneke is always being accused of by anti-intellectuals. But in fact…Italy was somewhat fascist too in the 1940s, was it not?

Toby Young’s piece struck me as being quite exceptionally lazy

How could it happen? (As usual, somewhere the corpse of Michael Young is spinning in its grave…whose kid are you, indeed.)

All the more disturbing, given Haneke’s explicit statements that his film is not “about the nazis”. [Mrs Tilton @9]

Oh?

After the premiere, Haneke told The Times: “I see my films as a ski jump. It’s up to the spectator to decide whether to take off.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/cannes/article6355154.ece

Despite Mr. Haneke’s avowed determination to leave viewers free to interpret, associations between the crimes committed in the movie on the cusp of World War I and the far greater crimes of 1933 to 1945 seem inescapable from the first moments of “The White Ribbon,” when the film’s voice-over narrator proposes that his story might “clarify some things that happened later in our country.” […]

Although Mr. Haneke expresses reluctance to provide an “instruction manual” to his film, he was willing, on the day after the Lincoln Center event, to own up to having directed the audience’s thoughts toward Nazism. Sitting in a small conference room at a midtown Manhattan hotel — tired, still draped in black and feeling in need of espresso — Mr. Haneke nevertheless broke into laughter when asked whether viewers of “The White Ribbon” would find thoughts of fascism unavoidable. “I hope so!” he replied.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/movies/01klaw.html

Chris,

I saw the film in Cannes (my partner is in cinema; no I won’t rope him into this discussion) and the vast consensus, particularly among the Germans we met, was that while Haneke was paying lip service to his film being about broader things, he and everyone else acknowledged the elephant in the room. I won’t say that Haneke’s film is as clearly (and laughably limited) a political parable as, say “V for Vendetta”, but without our shuddering hindsight about where this domineering influence of religion and proto-capitalistic feudalism would lead, the film would have little resonance.

The “aboutness” is more Haneke’s than mine, Chris. As I began by saying, above, “plenty of communities managed to discard feudal deference without succumbing to Naziism.” Or, if you insist, (in reaction?) the Rote Armee Fraktion. This “aboutness” is double-edged. I resent (what I see as) the film’s moral of collective guilt, but without it I think the work would be less resonant.

Damned moderation, just go to,

http://www.taz.de/1/leben/film/artikel/1/liebe-ist-zu-wenig/

instead of taking anybody’s (e.g. 17’s word for it).

(you’ll have to cut & paste, I jusr can’t master the niceties)

Except that either he’s elaborately stupid or he wanted the elephant (which he did, for all the various unclear opportunities for citation he is leaving left and right).

Mrs. Tilton @ 23:

Here’s the quote you mention from Anthony Lane’s October 5 New Yorker piece:

The director himself is at pains not to label his movie with too specific a tag. He told me, “It’s important for me that, even in America, I will not be happy if the film is seen as a film about a German problem, about the Nazi time. That is an example, but it means more than this. It’s a film about the roots of evil. It’s about a group of kids who are preached certain ideals,” he said, “and become the judges of others—of those who have pushed this ideology onto them. If you build an idea into an absolute, it becomes an ideology. And it helps those who have absolutely no possibility of defending themselves to follow this ideology in order to escape their misery. And that’s not a question of the fascism of the right. It also counts for left-wing fascism and for religious fascism. You could make the same film—in a completely different form, of course—about the Islamists of today. There is always someone in a wretched situation who seizes the opportunity to emerge from his misery and to rectify his life. In the name of a beautiful idea you can become a murderer.”

As a rule of thumb, a German movie meditating on the roots of evil can’t not call Nazis to mind. Whether it can mean more than this as Haneke wishes is, well, I haven’t seen it so I won’t weigh in.

Mark Kermode reviews it. Starts at 11:35.

Thanks for the correction. My podcast in iTunes is twelve minutes shorter than the 60 minutes at the link.

Cheers, Peter @26.

a German movie meditating on the roots of evil can’t not call Nazis to mind

Then again, I see that the Austrians are trying to claim the film is really Austrian rather than German. Which, if true, would prove conclusively that it cannot possibly be anything at all to do with nazis.

Novakant @27, JoB @31,

Kinder des Zorns is one of those rare German versions of an English title that is arguably better than the original.

(For those in other cultural theatres of operations: Germans have a habit of not merely translating film titles where appropriate, but of radically rewriting them in ways that they apparently imagine are helpful. So, for example, instead of giving the dubbed version of Airplane! the German title Flugzeug!, they turn it into something like Die total crazy und verrückte Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug, das auch noch crazy ist”. Which is good, because without those subtle hints I ‘d have assumed it a documentary about ants.)

JoB @31

Lol, I’m glad that the taz film critic and myself are on the same wavelength.

Mrs Tilton @32

There is that, but to be fair, I’m not sure a film titled “Flugzeug!” would have sold very well – it just sounds a bit, oh, I don’t know. I think the German language generally might be better, or actually really good for longer, poetic titles, e.g.:

Die Angst des Torwarts beim Elfmeter
Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach
Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel – Ratlos

The early Werner Herzog was a true master of this art:

Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen
Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner
Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle

Novakant,

I should have been clearer; I was referring not to original German titles but to the annoying tendency of German distributors to call (making up an example here, but it’ll serve as illustration of the phenomenon) 48 Hours not plain old 48 Stunden but rather the equivalent of 48 Hours of an Amusing Black Criminal and a Tough-Guy White Cop Teaming Up to Catch the Bad Guy and Bonding as Improbable Buddies By the End of the Film. It’s as though they fear Germans will not see a film if the title doesn’t amount to a précis of the plot.

It’s pervasive, and not just in the film world. They can’t even let “House” be “House”; it must be clarified as “Dr. House”, presumably so that Germans will not fear it is an arte povera version of Warhols’s Empire and switch to the Erste for Tierärztin Dr. Mertens instead.

Original titles are a different matter. As one of my old blogmates once put it, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter surely takes first place in the All-Time Worst Books with the Best Titles competition. (And now I think of it, Handke only just barely missed being Haneke.) OK, it’s not universal. There are also titles like Unser Lehrer Dr. Specht. Workmanlike if nothing else; the title summed everything up so well, there was really no reason to watch the series at all. But for conciseness and elegance, nothing beats Tatort. In English you’d need four words for that. (Yes, you could do it in two, but it would sound crap.)

Which, if true, would prove conclusively that it cannot possibly be anything at all to do with nazis.

Mrs Tilton wins the thread.

I believe that the film was shot in digital colour and then converted to black and white. The monochrome imagery is often superb, but a definite digital flavour remained in the tonality: a very small flaw in a terrific movie.

We’re all getting used to the aesthetics of digital, and this is an interesting test case. It’s shot on old-style colour film. The “digital flavour” you detect comes entirely in post-production. It’s a reminder that traditional black and white has colour variation in it, as you’d expect from an organic chemical process. By contrast, this digital black and white is produced by removing the colour information.
(It sounds as though they didn’t simply desaturate the final negative, but used the colour channel information in their digital scans to preserve the subtlety of the tonal range in their black and white images. Nonetheless, once you map it and grade it to a straightforward scale of grey values, all that old-style organic variation is lost.)
If you feel the organic imperfection of celluloid black and white is important, you could reintroduce it, digitally, in a post-production fake. One can imagine a White Ribbon in which the period is evoked by reproducing the photography of the time, along the lines of Roger Deakins’ work in The Assassination of Jesse James. The interview Novakant links to at #6 explains that they specifically decided against doing that kind of thing. While Deakins is obviously an all-time great, I think Haneke’s approach has more running room as regards how digital will be used in the future. I also like the attractive modesty the interview shows as far as making artistic claims for a given technical approach. Christian Berger (Haneke’s cinematographer) talks about creating a modern black and white, but refuses to define it, and says that in the end it just amounts to “a different taste, no?”
Contrast that with the inflated claims Michael Mann made for Public Enemies. To his mind, fidgety digital video “looked like what it was like to be alive in 1933. In the end it made total sense: video looks like reality, it’s more immediate, it has a vérité surface to it. Film has this liquid kind of surface, feels like something made up.”
Public Enemies completely failed to engage. The White Ribbon does engage, superbly. And that, surely, is what matters.
I’ll bet that over time your slight discomfort with the “different taste” of the various flavours of digital will fade, as these new aesthetic standards establish themselves.

I think blaming the problems with “Public Enemies” on the digital video would be like blaming the loss of the “Titanic” on the paint job.

The movie was 3 hours of watching unsympathetic hoods tangle with unsympathetic cops, without the director’s appearing to realize that the hoods were unsympathetic — that last being the fatal flaw.

Yeah, I’m not criticising Public Enemies, which had a bunch of different problems.
I’m criticising his claims for digital as a superior means for engaging an audience with a period setting.

And unlike your good self, Novakant, I’ve always felt Michael Mann has a silliness problem. His main (only?) subject is machismo, and his world was most fully expressed in the humourless Zoolander posing of Miami Vice.

That said, Brian Cox was way the best Hannibal Lecter.

I liked The Keep until I realized that the golem (or whatever it was) was the Bad Guy. Mann should keep his anti-golem bigotry to himself.

45- So is it true that those believing firmly in man’s evil need little effort to explain it -away – in themselves whenever that’s more convenient?

It’s funny that “belonging to a certain intellectual milieu” is supposed to be sufficient reason to damn Haneke. I haven’t seen White Ribbon and therefore I will not comment on thee Nazi/Not-Nazi controversy, but I have seen Hidden (and a number of his other films) and I think it is one of the best political films ever made. And if it condemns the lot of us as being evil at heart (although it doesn’t, remember the understated hopefulness of a conversation at the end?) well, then the intellectual milieu he is in is a pretty damn good one: Adorno, Primo Levi, even Arendt.

And frankly what has happened AFTER WWII has not shown that we have improved in any sort of discernible way from the violence of OUR 30-year war (1914-1945). So humanity has proven Haneke and his “intellectual milieu” right!

Novakant @49,

I have been overexposed to them, so that most things they did became very predictable and boring

De gustibus usw. Still, I must thank you for jogging my memory, as it’s long past time I read Holzfällen again, and I shall pack it in my bag this weekend.