User reviews

Fans of Michael Haneke's more morally shocking films such as 'Funny Games', 'Benny's Video' or the draining 'Time of the Wolf' might find themselves surprised by the quieter and slower analysis of evil in his latest work 'Das Weisse Band'.

The action takes place in a North German village shortly before the outbreak of the First World War and in structure presents a number of subtly drawn individual characters as they are caught up in a mysterious series of violent events.

In the hands of a mere moralist this could be an unbearable few hours. But it's credit to Haneke's skill as a film-maker that we are utterly caught up and absorbed by a large cast of children and adults.

One of the on-going arguments in Haneke's films appears to be the origins of human evil, or perhaps more precisely put, individual acts of evil behaviour. Are such acts an individual's responsibility or do they spring from a climate in which particular energies are at work? This is the question Haneke appears to be exploring here (just as was a central question relating to French society in 'Cache').

One of the most disturbing things at the heart of the film is the fact that we do not know why particular acts of evil take place (including the maiming of a disabled child and the beating of a nobleman's son), or even who commits them. However, this is no 'whodunnit', although with its retrospective voice-over from the School Teacher's p.o.v. we are let to believe for a long time that were in a crime/thriller genre.

Throughout his body of work so far, Haneke has suggested that looking for the sort of easy answers films and TV all too readily supply is partly responsible for our misunderstanding how violence in society occurs. (Funny Games).

'The White Ribbon' bypasses the usual dramatical devices of motivation and blame and instead softly focuses on an environment (in this case Germany in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century) in which certain unhealthy energies are at work.

These energies include an emotionally repressed and joyless Protestantism, the mistreatment and oppression of women, the familial abuse of children, the fetishism of strong masculine and patriarchal values, and the un-breachable divide between the rich and the poor. Set over all this, like an umbrella, is the fact that the small provincial society depicted in the film is all but completely isolated from wider society.

Another poster here has pointed out that Haneke is using his village as a microcosm to reflect Germany as a whole, and I would agree with that. Haneke's Dorf, whilst having an individual character, is a relative of Von Trier's Dogville in the sense that it stands for a larger set of national values. In this respect Haneke seems to be diagnosing German society in the run up to the 'Great' War as one of authoritarianism, religious doubt, intolerance, and fear.

What is remarkable in such a film is how little human joy or love is to be found in such a seemingly idyllic rural landscape. The love strand (between the narrator Teacher and the dismissed 17 yr old children's nurse) has a rather strained aspect. It is as though the film maker is suggesting that affection might also be down to available opportunity.

One of the most moving scenes in The White Ribbon is when a young child brings his father, a Priest, a caged bird he has nursed back to health. The father's beloved pet canary was killed (by his daughter as a protest against the bleak, loveless household she's been reared in - a home in which a father shows more affection to a small bird than his own children.

Thus the scene symbolically depicts a child demonstrating the love that the parent himself is unable of showing. Tears fill the priest's eyes. It is a tiny moment of love and hope in an otherwise emotionally barren wasteland. It is also a symbol of how a new generations of Germans have dealt with, and healed, previous decades of pain.

Filmed beautifully in black and white with subtitles, The White Ribbon is a movie that will leave viewers with a lasting residue long after it ends. The film portrays the residents of a northern German village, dominated by a baron, sometime before World War I.

Inhabitants of this village, young and old, are sliding down the slippery slope of moral decline. The men in leadership positions - a doctor and clergyman, for example - are detestable, especially in their treatment of women and children. The most brutal scene in the movie, perhaps, was not one that portrayed physical violence, but verbal abuse towards a woman that served faithfully as caretaker, and more, for the town's widowed physician. As for the some of the children, although it is only suggested, it appears that they are budding sociopaths that perpetrate despicable acts against others.

Weeks after seeing this film, I started thinking more deeply about the children in this town. I realized that they would become young adults during the time Hitler would rise in power. They live an incubator in which the cruelty that they experience they, in turn, perpetrate against unsuspecting victims. Their circumstances are such that they are being unwittingly primed for carrying out the atrocities that will come to characterize their future in Nazi Germany. The White Ribbon is a prequel for the rise of the Third Reich.

Seeing this film led me to wonder about what present times are a prequel for.

In an interview with the French newspaper "Le Monde" on 10/20/09, published on 10/21/09, Michael Haneke has explicitly and unequivocally declared his intentions in making the movie "The White Ribbon":

He intended to make a movie about the roots of evil. He said that he believed that the environment of extreme, punitive and sexually repressive protestantism in Germany, has laid the groundwork for Fascism and Nazism. He also said that he saw the same patterns developing in fundamentalist Muslim societies today, and that it is those societies that today were spawning terrorists and suicide bombers. Finally, he expressed the sentiment that "The White Ribbon" is a movie against ALL extremisms.

Michael Haneke has directed his vision in a very masterful and artful way: the cinematography, the acting, and the script are all superb.

The only problem I have is with the vision itself: The environment certainly plays a role, but to explain evil exclusively as the product of one's environment is simplistic and goes against common sense observation: The majority of people on this earth have grown up under repressive regimes and yet have NOT turned out to become murderers, mass murderers, terrorists or suicide bombers. Something is missing in the equation.

Few film auteurs can match the consistency of Michael Haneke, and once again the Austrian filmmaker has come up trumps with an exquisite and brooding mediation on repression, tradition and the sins of the father.

Shot in stunning black and white, the film chronicles a series of mysterious events in a town leading up to the outbreak of WWI. The pace is slow and thoughtful, and the film is reference to August Sander while being a respectful throwback to the German expressionists whose work would come out of the horrors the film's narrative seems to foreshadow.

The hallmarks of Haneke's body of work are all there – elegiac tone, clinical editing, wincingly frank dialogue – but in many ways The White Ribbon stands alone in the canon. It is a challenging work that will polarise audiences but represents a breathtaking new wave not just in the director's career but in European cinema.

Some might say the film's inherent flaw is that there is no-one to root for, but this is perhaps its key strength. It's certainly plausible that this is Haneke's intention: he wants to position us as mute outsiders to a slowly creeping menace, unable to have a say in the invisible horrors that await us. The result is a deadening and thoroughly rewarding experience - a combination few filmmakers could hope to achieve.

During the course of the year before WWI, a series of tragic and suspicious looking incidents take place in a small farming village somewhere in black and white Germany. The culprit or the culprits behind the crime wave will not be too easy to find.

The doctor, the priest, the baron and the teacher who also narrates the film form the elite of the village. We get to know each one of them and a few other villagers along with children of this village, calm on the surface but deeply tormented by an undercurrent of brutality, envy, malice and apathy.

The children's natural path to maturity is blocked by strict religious morality, cruelly enforced by the priest, thereby inhibiting their personal observation of the world around them. The priest feeds children with guilt and sexual repression instead of love and punishes even their most innocent mistakes. Certainly this environment will make it easy for them to not only accept but seek ruthless authority later in life.

As might be expected, love in this town is restrained and uneasy, while incest and affairs are overlooked by villagers. The Baron employs half of the village in his farm, yet almost no one seems to be against feudalism, nor rise up against the accidents that happen in the workplace. Social justice is a stranger to town, yet villagers are entrenched in apathy.

If adults do not face up the truth, however this truth might be against their convictions, rise up and take charge, then who will? And according to whose morality? Isn't fascism with racism, in short Nazism, misdirected popular anger and an easy response to deep injustices within a society ? Haneke observes mostly psychological, educational and religious roots of Nazism while leaving economic aspects mostly in the background.

Visuals of the film are very solid. The symmetry in the shots and the tidiness of the houses, even of those belonging to the poor farmers hint at the discipline and rigor Germans are well known for. Acting is top notch by the whole cast, especially children's faces beam just like in Bergman films. Directing was superb.

Haneke uses a village and a narrator similar in essence to Lars Von Trier's Dogville, still these two movies are clearly different.

Das Weisse Band has also some similarities to Cache, but just one notch less satisfying than his masterpiece which had a slightly more intriguing and fulfilling story. This movie is made more accessible by Haneke with his choice of more obvious tips, where sometimes characters talk directly about the situation. But in a time and age when people are battling too many problems and drug themselves with TV and easy payoffs who could blame Haneke?

Given the current global economic conditions and the fanaticism running high across all three major religions, this is a must-see movie for anyone caring about the future of our global village to avoid a Le Temps du Loup type of ending!

Stunningly beautiful, shot in the exquisite black and white, with the faces of the characters looking like the old pictures from the beginning of the 20th century, The White Ribbon has the longer title in German, Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte -The White Ribbon - A German Children's Tale. The longer title gives quite a good idea behind the mystery of the troubling, disturbing, and shocking events in the film that did not have an explanation by the end of the film and left some viewers confused and unsatisfied. I think that the film is very clear and if approached with the open mind and readiness to accept the subtle details in the storytelling and implication, the open end will not disappoint. Anybody who is familiar with the work of Michael Haneke knows very well that he does not make pure mystery/thrillers even though his movies have a lot of mysteries and often very dark secrets By his own admissions, he uses the mystery in the White Ribbon to show the origins of the extremism of all epochs, and what could have been the beginning of the darkest times in the history of the country. Looking at the life of one small picturesque village in the northern Germany just on the brink of the World War 1, Haneke explores the malice, envy, apathy, hatred, and brutality that envelop the village like a web, and lead to the outbursts of evil that goes unpunished and will bring the larger evil in the future. While watching the film, I kept thinking how much it brings to mind the films of another master of grim and sad yet compelling and thought provoking pictures, Ingmar Bergman. Two of his films remind The White Ribbon especially. One, The Winter Light, a tragic and thought-provoking film about a village priest (Gunnar Bjornstrand) who can't give much comfort and hope to those who need them as he feels none for himself. Another - Fanny and Alexander, the story told from the point of view of two children, a brother and a sister whose lives changed tragically after their widowed mother married a local bishop, seemingly a charming and caring man. What would have happened to Fanny and Alexander, what kind of persons would they have become or would they have survived had they not had a big dysfunctional but loving family who saved them from the abusive, cruel hypocritical stepfather, Bishop Edvard Vergerus?

Like Bergman, Michael Haneke does not make the horror films but the computer generated monsters are simply a joke comparing to the real monsters of hatred and evil that found a place to hide and grow in the souls and minds of the characters in his latest film. It is a serious, disturbing, and thought-provoking film. With all its darkness and pessimism, the film has sweet, touching and even humorous moments. They have to do with the only love story in the film and come to think of it, the only love story in all Haneke's films I've seen, between the film's narrator, the local school teacher and the 17 years old Eva, the nanny for the children of the baron, the most powerful man in village.

One of the critics said that The White Ribbon is the film that will haunt the viewers for days and will be seen, discussed and thought of for the decades to come. I completely agree with that, and I feel I can watch it again and again. Yes, it is that good.

Movies don't come much more austere or art-house friendly than "The White Ribbon," a German film written and directed by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. With its stark black-and-white cinematography and deliberate pacing, the film has the look and feel of an old Ingmar Bergman picture - Ingmar Bergman crossed with M Night Shyamalan, that is, since its story centers around a village in pre-World War I Germany where strange and inexplicable things begin to happen. The town doctor is injured in a mysterious horseback riding mishap; the baron's son is found hanging upside down in a barn; a worker dies in a freak factory accident. All of this is narrated by the town's schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) who falls for a sweet, shy girl who works as a nanny at the manor house.

The children - most of whom look like they just stepped out of "Village of the Damned" - struggle with thoughts of death and the guilt caused by a repressive society, while the adults - an emotionally rigid and unyielding pastor, a cruel, incestuous doctor - contend with their own inner demons, as they groan under the burdens of a class-conscious feudal system and the weight of their own conflicted desires. The theme seems to be that when people bury their natural urges under a crushing mountain of rules and regulations - whether societal or religious in nature - those sublimated urges will manifest themselves in other, demonstrably harmful ways (killing birds, destroying property, kidnapping and torturing children, etc.). The conclusion we're supposed to come to, I guess, is that it was from just such seeds that the war that was to come would eventually spring. I guess.

I wish I could say that I liked "The White Ribbon" better than I do. It's certainly wonderful to look at, and there is something haunting and hypnotic about Haneke's vision of life in a small German village at that particular moment in time. But the plotting is so obscure, the pacing so funereal, and the overall demeanor so heavy-handed and pretentious that, I'm afraid, it takes quite a bit of forbearance and patience just to get through it all.

Still, the mood and the visuals make it worth the effort.

A couple of years before the outbreak of the First World War, in a feudal German village, mysterious events happen. First, the local doctor has an accident when his horse stumbles on a hidden wire. Then a woman falls in a hole below the rotten floor of a barn and dies. The young son of the local baron is found hung upside-down and tortured. The retarded son of the midwife is found tied to a tree and brutally battered. In an environment of cruelty and abuses, the local teacher suspects that the repressed daughter and the son of the pastor are the responsible for the crimes.

I was anxious to see "Das Weiße Band - Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte" and today I have finally watched this awarded film. Unfortunately I found it prolix, overrated and very disappointing and gives the sensation that the ending is missing.

The black and white cinematography is top-notch and one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. The performances are awesome and I was particularly impressed with the beauty and acting of the unknown Leonie Benesch. The screenplay is intriguing and engrosses the attention of the viewer from the very beginning. Unfortunately the story that has the obvious intention of showing the birth of the serpent egg of the Nazism and Fascism does not have a conclusion.

Claude Chabrol, just to give an example, was specialist in films with intelligent open ends that forced the interpretation and the discussion of the viewers. Michael Haneke, on the contrary, leaves many questions without answers, even very simple points, like for example whether the teacher has married Eva or not; or the fate of the doctor and his family and the midwife. There are so many abusive and wicked characters that almost everyone would be capable of the evilness against the children. But I believe that the two adolescents with the white ribbon may be the responsible for the cruelties. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "A Fita Branca" ("The White Ribbon")

The White Ribbon (2009) is a desperately dark story unfolding in a Protestant village of northern Germany just before the First World War. This microcosm is composed of a baron, a pastor, a doctor, ... and the plebs. Strange accidents will succeed one after the other, some worthy of a despicable barbarism, and will gradually pertain to a punitive ritual. The film is based on a few abject characters and Michael Haneke masterfully films the darkness that ineluctably infiltrates the hearts of the fellow citizens from this German provincial environment, thanks to an aesthetic apotheosis and a cinematic sobriety. As a synthesis: The White Ribbon (2009) is a masterpiece. 8/9 of 10.

The White Ribbon is a film that only Haneke could make. It's bleak, upsetting, perverse, and so true to the human condition that it's hard to watch, yet you won't want to look away. It forces you to think about how a society treats its children, and what those children will do when they've grown up and run the society. The cinematography alone is enough reason to watch this film.

White Ribbon focuses on a pre World War I German town and surveys the evolution of violent, wild incidents resembling punishments indicted on certain individuals. We are provided access to the story from the point of view of the town teacher, whose recollective voice-over interposes throughout the film. The narration competently obscures the culprits, thereby attributing the responsibility for the rage, and its (hypocritical) social incorporation to the whole society rather than certain "abnormal" characters.

In movie circles,White Ribbon is widely regarded as depicting the evolution of a microcosm of a proto-fascist society (which is to a certain extent viable by the way). However, the movie is a less Germany-specific and more universal parable on the socialization of rage and violence, on the evolution of the social circulation of rage and violence. The film follows a route from local (Germany) to universal, coming up with far reaching arguments, just as Foucault focuses on 18-19th century France and presents arguments on the evolution of prison and punishment systems.

Considering Haneke's entire filmography, it is evident that the director has always been interested in philosophical takes on pschology and human interaction, without historicizing his filmic arguments strictly, i.e., without attributing time spans/societies to them. If we leave the mediocrity of the enterprise aside, Haneke's recent remake of Funny Games shot-for-shot, yet in a different society (USA rather than Germany) fittingly illustrates the point.

After a span of work disappointing for many Haneke fans, the auteur returns with an influential and aptly argumentative film.

Das Weisse Band represents the kind of cinema that is cerebral, cognitive and dialectic without deviating from the conventions of classic storytelling. In examining the origins and nature of terrorism in human societies and psychology, the film quickly resigns from a simple depiction of country rural life in 1913 and transforms into a sadistic 'whodunnit' thriller with the main protagonists being two conflicting generations: the elderly and the youth. Das Weisse Band takes the risk of setting off too many narratives in accordance to the individual stories that occur, but the utterly terrifying aspect and power-point of the film is what we do not see happening in front of our eyes. Gripping, exciting, focused cinema.

What do you do when you 'know' there is a very tangible threat but cannot point the finger? Recall, if you will, Jean. Julianne Moore's character in Crash: " . . . and it was my fault because I knew it was gonna happen. But if a white person sees two black men walking towards her and she turns and walks in the other direction, she's a racist, right?" Or the dilemma of Islam in Europe. On the one hand, we are impelled to protect the rights of the vulnerable minority. Protect their beliefs. Their innocence. Everything decent within ourselves that we wish to respect and preserve in others. But on the other, we are terrified of the prospect creeping Islamic militancy. We teeter on the brink of racism. Islamophobia. If we risk the sacred humanity in others we attack it in ourselves. And what if all the indications are wrong? What if all our beliefs are wrong? What if all the words led us astray? Too late, we know we have to talk about paedophile priests. Too late, we know we should have talked about Hitler (in the days before, yes before, he was the Bad Guy). Or even World War One before it happened. There are times when we cannot accuse. Times when it will do no good. But still, as Lionel Shiver might say, there are times when we know, 'We need to talk about Kevin.' Haneke confronts the paradox of confronting the unimaginable. Not in the Hollywood sense of 'too scary to think about.' Just confronting something that is outside the ability of the imagination to foreshadow. In Hidden, the format was an intricate art house film that appealed more to the cinema geek. The cult viewer. A brilliant film – but one you would probably need to watch at least twice before you could 'get it.' The White Ribbon is an altogether different genre. The mystery is laid out as carefully as any Hitchcock classic, albeit with the more restrained tones and iconography of Luis Buñuel. There is not the surrealism of his Exterminating Angel, but the clearly delineated social restraints that refuse to acknowledge anything that does not fit, they are all there. A small village on the eve of World War One. A fierce Lutheran Protestantism that will admit no way of thinking unless it is true to the cornerstones of its faith. Ignorance poses as innocence. And the horrors that can spring from deeply ingrained discipline.

Somehow, within a community where everyone knows and trusts each other, a series of very unpleasant incidents occur. A wire is strung to trip the doctor's horse. A disabled boy is brutally attacked. A woman commits suicide. Unexplained arson. The seeds of deadliest emotions are there in a society that allows for nothing except goodness.

Haneke carefully details various forms of patriarchal enforcement of this goodness. It might be righteous anger or compassionate punishment. I recall my philosophy teacher at university saying how some things can be learnt but not taught. Then another professor's dismissal of Aristotle's virtue theory on the basis that it cannot be 'taught.' In this Haneke world of black-and-white moral righteousness, those characters who seek no more than a least worst option seem to come, quite logically, to an untriumphant end. A boy who wants to save a wounded bird. A schoolteacher who wants to reveal with gentleness that which force cannot uncover.

With Funny Games, Haneke shocked with intruders. With Hidden, he forced us to confront a barely solvable mystery. With The White Ribbon, his greatest work yet, a simple story takes on universal proportions. No intruders. No outsiders. We can no longer take refuge in any system of 'universal truth.' Whether it be the science of our sense or the dictates of religion. We must learn as we grow. This White Ribbon is no fairy tale story. It has no fairy tale ending. All is logical. Just that you might never, ever, be able to prove it.

The cinematography is captivating and the people, adults and children alike look and act so convincingly that this film is truly remarkable. The dawn of an even more chilling new era of two world wars which these children are about to enter gives the events yet more deprh. I grew up in protestant northern Germany and remember the very old people in our village, who would have matched the ages of the children in their old age. The women continued to wear similar fashions, with only shorter skirts, the hair worn exactly like the girls in the film. The language, the houses and even some of the interiors I witnessed as a small child are very accurately reflected in this film. The film strongly hints at a brutalised generation which is gradually driven to extremism. This might be simplistic, but is worth considering. Overall a memorable masterpiece.

I find it incredibly difficult to rate a Haneke film, especially right after I watched it. His movies slowly grow on you and it takes a lot of time before you could fully appreciate them. When Michael Haneke makes movies he always has something to say, and he is truthful in every depiction he makes. Sometimes it's even hard to call some of his films entertainment. The White Ribbon is just another example of Michael Haneke's mastery in filmmaking. When it comes to the technical aspects there wasn't a single front that wasn't outstanding. The cinematography was so gorgeous that you could literally take any point in the film and make it the poster. This is probably the best looking Haneke film honestly. The pacing is slow but incredibly effective showing a very subtle growth of evil. The acting from everybody in this huge cast is outstanding, every kid actor in this movie is better than 99% of actors working today. Everyone was giving it their all and if you look at any person in any of Haneke's films you wouldn't spot a single actor that isn't doing a great performance.

This movie is about evil and how it grows into something awful to come. It's super super subtle and kind of hard to catch. Michael Haneke is distracting us with the obvious evil so that we don't realize the subtle evil in front of us. So even though when I finished the film I was slightly underwhelmed when it ended, thinking back it was really harrowing. This is the closest Michael Haneke will ever come to making a Holocaust movie, and instead of giving you satisfying answers like Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's list it does something much more powerful and harrowing.

I need to know! Not just who is Michael Heneke but also who does he think he is? The arrogance of his work is only comparable to its brilliance. Here he visits Bergman territory without telling us so but just the faces of the actors in glorious black and white scream of Bergman. What a delightful annoyance. As anybody who is familiar with the work of Michael Heneke will suspect, this new opus, will provoke you in so many different ways that you will want to leave theater many times but you won't be able to, I certainly couldn't. This man is a wizard of sorts. I can't think of no other director who could get away with this in the new millennium. I haven't even started to talk about the film yet and I'm not going to. I'm just going to say that it's a mystery in more ways than one and that you may hate it but won't be able to forget it.

An unflinchingly-nihilistic movie that explores the darkness of humanity and authoritarianism, The White Ribbon is set in a fictional village in Germany just prior to World War I and tells the tale of a series of strange events and crimes that upset the peace of the local society. Shot with a gorgeously bleak white-and-black color palette and heralded by excellent performances (special props to the child actors who all deliver genuine and convincing showings), this is a film that, despite having no scares in the traditional sense, is at its core a horror movie: less of the chainsaw-wielding masked-monster type, more of the depressing Shakespearian-tragedy kind.

Like Haneke's earlier movie, Caché, The White Ribbon presents itself as a mystery and whodunit-type affair, but only as a framing device. It is less-interested in the solution to the crimes and is instead more about exploring the people surrounding the heinous events: how they are impacted, their reactions to the whole thing, and the implications that the crimes have on who they really are. By having the crimes subtly mirroring the actions and customs that the villagers have traditionally practiced and accepted as social norms, the movie cleverly and effectively forces the characters to face their own selves in a disturbing new light - even if only briefly, and even if they don't realize it.

The pacing of the movie is on the slower side, and viewers that are seeking thrills or definitive resolutions are likely to be left somewhat unsatisfied. However, if you are looking for a visually breathtaking film that delivers a chilling commentary on the roots of human evil that will leave a lasting impact, The White Ribbon is a fine pick.