by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor

Michael Haneke relishes his reputation as one of the controversial directors working in the film arts. He is a provocateur with a mission to shock audiences out of their complacency and contemplate the good, bad and ugly of modern society. “My films are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false answers……for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus”, he stated in a recent interview. Haneke clearly delights in his status as the dark poet of cinema, whose films lay bare the coldness of European society and challenge Hollywood’s blithe treatment of screen violence.  The film that made his reputation, 1992’s BENNY’S VIDEO, shocked audiences and critics with a morally ambivalent portrait of a teenager who kills a young girl “to see how it feels”. In FUNNY GAMES (1997), two intruders play a deadly cat-and-mouse game with a bland suburban family. The violence turned psychological and perversely sexual in THE PIANO TEACHER (2001), an international arthouse hit that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and acting honors for its leads Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel. Haneke revisits these themes, the contrast between the intimacy of small town life and its hidden nastiness and terror, in THE WHITE RIBBON, his latest triumph. The film, which won both the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is another dark and profoundly disturbing immersion in a world in chaos, where innocence proves no match for stark violence and psychological terror.   THE WHITE RIBBON is structured around a string of misfortunes that befall the citizens of Eichwald, an agricultural community in pre-World War I Germany. The film, shot in moody black and white, begins with several startling set pieces where a number of villagers meet horrible deaths. Interspersed between bucolic shots of ordinary village life are scenes of shocking violence. Any hint of childhood innocence is immediately squashed by the grown-ups, making it clear that the chain of violence will continue for the future generation. 

Is Haneke making a statement about the origins of Nazism? It is clear that the dehumanizing of the children by their parents and elders has de-sensitized them to a degree that they become capable of horrific violence themselves. Although not a Holocaust film per se, THE WHITE RIBBON definitely asks the most troubling question of them all: how did an advanced and highly moral society fall so far into the dehumanization and brutality of the Shoah? As usual, Haneke asks more questions than he can answer…..realizing that the ultimate reckoning comes with the audience who bare witness to the characters’ (and their own) human contradictions.

THE WHITE RIBBON opens the ERA New Horizons International Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland on Thursday evening. Website: www.enh.pl