I was reminded by Daphne's post of this film I saw a few years ago in a German course. If you've ever seen any of Michael Haneke's films, you won't be surprised to know that this one is especially bizarre and creepy... and quite a commentary on the pre-war German life.
Die Weisse Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon, A German Children's Story) follows the lives of the citizens of a suppressed Protestant north German village, Eichwald, in a period just before World War I (July 1913-August 1914). Strange murders, gorey deaths, and suicides accompany intense sexual and physical abuse of the children in the town.
In Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, Julia Evers called the film "an oppressive and impressive moral painting, in which neither the audience nor the people in the village find an escape and a valve from the web of authority, hierarchy and violence. [...] Everything in The White Ribbon is true. And that is why it is so difficult to bear."
I often try to avoid the Kracauer-ian analysis, but it is easy to suppose that Haneke created with this film a prequel to the story of Nazi Germany. It is fairly easy to predict that the dark, abused, oppressed 14 year-old boy growing up under violent authoritarianism (his father was an abusive pastor) in 1913 could have made an excellent violent, authoritarian Nazi in his 30's. Haneke comments on the allusion of the film to Nazism.
A must-see, I think.
I am so glad you poesterd this! This movie is one of my favorite. It is so dark, the atmosphere is so heavy it took me a few days to recover from it. Regardless, a agree with you, this movie is a must see!
ReplyDeleteI think I've watched this twice so far, and both times I've still been unable to fully grasp the meaning of the film. I think it goes very, very deep, and I'm only halfway there. I can see exactly where your Kracauer-ian analysis comes from, though, and I would say that it is a fair connection to make. The time period and the entire top-down structure are so reminiscent of what might be a pre-Hitler era.
ReplyDeleteI saw this film in my Intro to Screen Studies class under the context of a week on the Lacanian Gaze. I can't believe Lacan hasn't been brought up yet, actually, since his work (while obviously not Frankfurt School--in fact, he is technically a scholar of the psychoanalytic theory of human psychology) often applies to what we are looking at--particularly his concepts of objet (petit) a and the Gaze. There are other, more eloquent people than me who can better explain these concepts, so here is a link to some more information about both these terms:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_petit_a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze