This month Terry reviews:
THE WHITE RIBBON {2009}
Terry gives it: +++++
"So much Wrong is so often borne with those so certain they alone are so Right!"
- Terry.
In my 40 years of film-going I have seen a number of great films so, trust me, I do not make the following statement carelessly but, rather, with great thought and a feeling of urgency to get others to view it. The White Ribbon is a cinematic masterpiece.
I speak not only of its aristic merit. Indeed this is a skillfully woven story in which troubling and unsettling revelations about one character after another fall into the viewer's unsuspecting lap and most viewers will leave the theater unable to shake them off. This effect is due in large measure to the intentionally haunting style of the film. With each revelation,with each jarring incongruity we recognize, there comes with each of these moments of a-ha!'s a particularly striking image on the screen, thereby reinforcing the imprint on the viewer's mind of what was understood in that moment.
But something much more subtle is accomplished here as well, something worthy of recognition and praise - for it is not a thing oft done well, rather too often when it is done a filmmaker is faulted for being preachy. The White Ribbon succeeds in delivering the difficult thing in film-making of which I speak - analyzing human behavior in the retelling of historical events in order to provide an important message relevant in contemporary times - and its success in doing so without having to preach its message to us in the present lies in the remarkably conceived images I spoke of earlier. The haunting images, tied as they are to those unsettling revelations and moments of understanding for the viewer, are certainly a more effective means of guaranteeing a film's message is carried out of the theater.
What Spielberg did in 1993 through Schindler's List was a triumph, yes, presenting the Jewish story in a manner that would make a lasting emotional impact. He did so with scenes painstakingly crafted to present stark realism -
he put us in the lines heading for the boxcars, he put us among the feet being shuffled into the gas chambers meant to look like showers -
it was all so real, so 'in your face'.
But what Austrian director Michael Haneke does, it must be said, is achieve something more difficult,
something that, I dare say, no one has been able to adequately provide since the Holocaust -
that is, an analysis of the German people that would somehow explain the psychology of a particular generation of Germans who "allowed all that to happen.”
This tale can not be told using the 'in your face' model. If it could, we would not still be left searching today for answers at Auschwitz - wondering how one group of humans could behave so inhumanely to another. The answers we seek are provided instead in a metaphorical work of classic stature - one originally written for the stage and now masterfully presented by Haneke, a work that asks us to not merely look again at the actions of the Germans responsible for that horrific genocide, but rather, to critically examine a collective's shared worldview.
Yes, it is that same generation of Germans that would "allow that to happen" who are examined in this film -
but 30 years earlier.
Because, to understand the behavior and mindset of adults -
we must understand their upbringing, do we not?
If you love history and have studied the choreographed events that led a democratic Germany to hand power over to a single-party dictatorship - your mind is going to go wild in the film, as did mine:
the children, collectively, are the Germans?
the tearful, depressed boy seen in an early scene engaged in a dangerous balancing act and in a later scene being restrained by his own people on the night of a barn's (Reichstag's?) burning represents those in the collective filled with anger at what was happening around them and who wanted so badly to do something, anything - but, alas, were powerless?
the father (does this authoritarian figure represent the Fuhrer? or, on a larger level, the German protestant church at the time?)
And for those who really know this history, a challenge:
for whom or what is the Baron's wife a metaphor? she who decides to take her not-accidently-angelic-and-quite-Aryan-in-appearance son away (to Italy!) to flee this place of "malice, envy, apathy, and brutality"?
And who or what does the Baron, whose barn is burned, represent? Quite a contrasting moment is revealed when he, in response to her deep and intentionally descriptive meditations on his community asks her something so lacking in self-introspection as "did you sleep with the Italian?"
There is a scene in the film Judgment at Nuremberg where Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy), in Germany to preside over the trial of four Nazi judges, attempts to discuss the NAZI period with his housekeepers, Mr. and Mrs. Halbestadt, who had lived near the Dachau concentration camp. His attempts to try to understand "these Germans" like the Halbestadt's - who, like so many Germans, chose ignorance and silence in response to the smell of burning flesh and bone fragments that wafted from the smokestacks a few hundred feet from their home each night - proves fruitless for they cannot help but focus on the loss of their single child in the Allied bombings toward war's end and the fact that they themselves nearly starved in poverty.
Like the scene in Judgment at Nuremberg, The White Ribbon provides viewers with such intentional scenes but on a more complex level because this time the viewer is held responsible for examining multiple scenes subtly layered so as to present example after example of insane contradictions, nay, hypocrisies that have always been found to be present in ultra-religious societies as the one depicted here. Example: Note the scene of an adolescent boy's hands being tied to the side of the bed at night (an act done with great ceremonial pride in which all members of a family, clearly confident in the right-ness of their actions, are shown to obediently participate), immediately juxtaposed with that of a father just down the street who is engaging in horrific things with his own teenage daughter, and yet a third scene, that of a nearby farm boy who, having dared question his community's traditions, now "walks behind the casket of his 'father'". If you don't "get" the message in those three threads, you may never understand the far Right direction a nation grounded in evangelical Protestantism so quickly took, leading it into such great evil. Students of history take note, religious extremism has come in many forms, faiths, and denominations but the core principal remains: so much wrong is so often borne with those so certain they alone are so right!
Did all Germans know? This question that is so often asked - and often leads to discussions about levels of sin, those of actual commission contrasted with those of omission – is shown to be the moot point it is when we are confronted by the film's principle examination - which is, the odd cultural norm that was pre-WWII Germany. Perhaps "odd" is the wrong word, an "unhealthy" cultural norm? Okay, a dangerous cultural mindset, and it goes something like this:
To speak publicly about the wrongful acts committed by members of "our" community, thereby “disturbing the community peace,” is a sin far greater than any of those crimes one should not have spoken of in the first place; and, furthermore, it is the tattler that deserves to be ostracized from the community!
Wow...trust someone who's been there...this is a painful moment of enlightenment!
Haneke (and those of us who've been there)
hope that you'll -
not forget -
no, we should never forget what the Germans did
no more than we should forget other in-humane chapters in our past,
including The Killing Fields, the Trail of Tears, Rwanda, or what self-righteous Serbs did to their neighbors.
But, perhaps, as is so often the case for humanity that moves forward from tragic events
we can come a little closer to finding forgiveness in our hearts by
arriving a little closer to understanding a cultural mindset of a people at the time
and how it was that ...
they spoke not of the evil in their midst.
______________
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