Das weiße Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte
Tags: dark, suspenseful, cruelty, mystery, thought-provoking, violence, atmospheric, revenge, sadist

Plot synopsis:
The action takes place in a German village in the fifteen months that precede World War I.Among the people who live there are a baron, who is a large landowner and a local moral authority, his estate manager, a pastor with his many children, a widowed doctor and a schoolteacher who is thinking of getting married. It is he who, many years later, tells this story.Though everything seems to be quiet and orderly, as it always has been, with the seasons following each other, and good harvests following bad ones, suddenly some strange events start to occur. If some appear to be quite ordinary, even accidental -- a farmer's wife dies falling through rotten floorboards -- others are inexplicable and may well be malevolent.Thus, a wire placed at knee-height has brought down the horse being ridden by the doctor, who is severely wounded.There's more of the same: an unknown hand opens a window to expose a newborn baby to the intense cold of the winter. A whole field of cabbages, on the baron's land, are beheaded with a scythe. One of the Baron's sons disappears: he is found his feet and hands bound, his buttocks lashed by a whip. A barn belonging to the manor is set on fire. A farmer hangs himself. A midwife's handicapped child is found tied to a tree, in a forest, seriously beaten, with a threatening message on his chest speaking of divine punishment.The village is worried, and at a loss as to what to do. The baron whose wife will soon leave the village to go to live in Italy makes a speech in the church, but it has no effect. The pastor, a particularly strict character, had since the beginning of the events, tied a white ribbon to the arm of his two eldest children, a boy and a girl: it is to remind them permanently of their duties to purity. In spite of these ribbons, his own family is not spared. His eldest son admits that he masturbates. The pastor's pet bird is stabbed with a scissor by the pastor's daughter.The schoolteacher, whose pupils are growing more and more unruly, and who is considering getting married (it is the only love-story in the film), starts little by little to unravel the mystery. What he discovers seems incredible to him: those guilty of most of these misdeeds are the village children. They have formed a secret society and their leader seems to be Klara, the pastor's daughter.Why did the children behave this way? The schoolteacher can't say. They are haunted by dark feelings, fears, a desire to revolt, to dominate, to conceal, to be violent. All this is heralding something that will explode fifteen or twenty years later, when this generation has grown up.The schoolteacher tries to reveal what he thinks he has found out to the pastor. He is rebuffed. There's no question of bringing that out into the open. The pastor insults him, and even threatens to report him. Our children guilty? It's inconceivable.We learn that the Archduke of Austria has been murdered by a Serbian in Sarajevo. An international crisis is brewing.The worries and the dramas of the village are soon lost in the strange excitement of the coming war. Later, the schoolteacher ponders over it again: didn't those events contain the germs of the tragedies that followed? Weren't the barbaric acts of the children, deep down, the natural consequences of what they had been taught? [www.cinemas-online.co.uk]

Review: 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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Michael Haneke "White Ribbon", Golden Palm winner of Cannes Festival in 2009, takes place in a small German village one year before World War I.
Because this is what the white ribbon symbolizes, not the so-called purity but the pretension to achieve it.The film circles around the lives of many villagers, from various ranks and backgrounds at a time where people were mostly defined by their jobs, a baron, a priest, a farmer, the doctor, the teacher, and every one of them tries to maintain a façade of dignity.
But Haneke is as explicit when it comes to show how laborious these rituals are as to demonstrate their uselessness.This is a village where moral and social conveniences end up poisoning relationships, aa farmer's wife dies because of a work accident but the husband can't complain because he knows it's a lost cause, the baron is the employer and you can't cut the hand that feeds you.
What Haneke does is depicting violence to deprive it from any kind of taboo value, and by refusing to provide hints or answers, he makes both everyone guilty and everyone innocent, and you've got to figure out which option is the worst.We all have our 'white ribbons' our limits, and in the absolute no one would over cause harm to anyone, but these things happen, and just because they are irrational doesn't make them immune to a form of rationality, this is the country of Kant that established that for each cause there's an effect and inversely, and one effect becoming a cause, and maybe that's the perpetual movement of history captured in this microcosm of humanity.
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.
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.
Widely regarded as the best European film of 2009, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon centers on the birth of evil in pre-war Germany.
Another winner from proficient writer-director Haneke.While the linking of parental oppression and abuse with national (in this case German) characteristics, that seemingly led to the horrors of WWI and later to Nazism, seems a trifle too easy a solution, this otherwise superb study of human cruelty comes up trumps.No other contemporary director is able to create such a compelling atmosphere of subtle discomfort and hidden menace while imbuing every scene with a sense of dread and foreboding.
Just finished watching this at Melbourne International Film Festival 2009 with the girlfriend..She rated it a 2 out of 5, I gave it a out of 5..Both of us also saw a fantastic documentary called The Cove on the weekend which we both rated 5 out of 5..Just goes to show that anything that we emotionally and visually connect with is going to inherently going to rate better..The White Ribbon deals with our hypocritical society and really exposes how little we have progressed..Sins are committed by elders in the name of religion or parenting and the children bear the scars..Are we any better today in our behaviour?
A lot of quizzical looks around, muted applause and a lot of ppl like my girlfriend will forget about it by tomorrow..But as a lesson on what animals and monsters we hide and ignore behind the safe curtain of society's rules of hypocrisy, this is a monumental expose by Michael Haneke..Brilliant, thought-provoking, sublime cinematography and a movie-maker self-assured to let the movie slowly unfold and at the top of his game, yet another important addition to his existing body of work..
A number of acts of violence thrown in now and then are arguably intended to provide a hint of a plot and -for the same price- conjure up the lurking-presence-of-evil-inherent-to-human-nature, but both their cinematic and philosophical potential remain undeveloped in the scorching light of the director's self-loving drive to show us how Germany really looked like.Haneke has no doubt read his Fontane and his Thomas Mann too.
It may well be that, but what Haneke accomplishes is nothing less than exploring the nature of evil itself that emerges from cruelty, forced servitude (in many forms), empty dogma and the corruption of innocence (that white ribbon that symbolizes innocence in the title of the film and is physically manifest as a real ribbon worn on the arms of children who would—in 20 years--replace those ribbons with swastika's).Universal in its scope it may well attain "masterpiece" status even as we watch.
The set scenes between actors achieve a finely tuned naturalness and rhythmically counterbalance the forward action of the script and the interplay between the actors so another degree of interest is revealed and what it might lead to.It is not predictable, not with the range of characters, the events that occur and a very strong evocation of place in a film in quite some time, make this worth watching again and again..
In a society where speaking the truth and revealing the evil at small scale are less important than keeping appearances of social order the freedom is in danger and evil can develop at bigger scale.All this is spoken in few words by the off-screen commentary of the village teacher who tells the story, but is not explicit in the cinema language of the film.
A long and slow portrayal of a very conservative and judgemental Austrian village, just before the outbreak of World War One, in which some moderately interesting events happen to some dull and spiteful characters.The film succeeds in building an atmosphere of bleakness - if you want to know exactly what it feels like to live in a joyless, judgemental, protestant, Germanic society where traditional protocols are enforced by miserable dominant patriarchs then this is your film.
And here we have a (fictional) story that is recalled by one of the participants, and in a way that is obvious it's only the commonly agreed version of what happened, if that.By now, it is all but common knowledge: we see the generation that would grow up to be the Germany that in its moment of despair flocked to Hitler and the Nazi party, as well as witness some of the childhood trauma that perhaps explains it, explains how a society could acquiesce to Nuremberg and Krystallnacht, some less reluctantly than others, would come to crave the grandiose vision, and went on to scatter the bodies of its youth across three continents and two oceans.On a broader level, there is a small , elusive aperture in the machinery of the universe that evil flows from, and depending on your predisposition, you will come out of the film with a few things about the nature of that evil.You may note ancient sin that mysteriously stole into the world and poisons its way through the generations, sustaining and replicating itself like a virus.You may note what in the Eastern world is known as karma, which is not a metaphysical proposition but a simple truth: every force in nature promulgates its reaction, and it is no different with mental pain you inflict (and had inflicted on you by your father's father).You may note that karmic cycle of sin as nothing other than ego and desire, that aspect of self that thinks the world including its own offspring should conform to its image, and spends a lifetime tinkering with that self-image - ambition, pride, vanity, hate, all means to control life that is ever-changing and flows.All of it true, but I like to settle for something else, which I believe explains deeper.
I found it extremely unsatisfying when the end-credits rolled over, there are tons of questions remain unsolved after 160 minutes while over 30 characters were introduced in the film, for sure Haneke doesn't want to give us any definite explanations of the crimes happened, the whole film demonstrates a ubiquitous mental abuse among the German village at the time before WWI (especially towards children), which caused abnormality in their thoughts, the power of poisoned minds was so overwhelmingly dominant so that it would ignite the naissance of Nazi among the next generation while a detectable overthrow of religious paternity was under the way.
But here comes Michael Haneke, an Austrian(!) director with the superb, original "Das Weiße Band" to belatedly capture Calvinist cinema's crown.Shot in stark black and white, "Das Weiße Band" transports us to a German village in the 1910s, where people work hard, pray hard and go nowhere, literally.
Austrian film director Michael Haneke's latest, The White Ribbon: A German Children's Story, has already won the Palme d'Or. The chances are it'll pick up Best Foreign Film at next month's Oscars, too.
Bad things happen, that's all we on Earth can know.The White Ribbon: A German Children's Story is no exception to Haneke's rule of thumb – build something dispiriting and the plaudits will come.
and i saw that this film has such a high rating, i was excited to watch it.i thought that it was a some sort of ghost story because the movie poster on here is in black and white, eerie looking.
"My God, why won't you just die?" The doctor to his mistress in White Ribbon.Director Michael Haneke seems quite comfortable with ambiguity, as I am, if you remember the uncertain identity of the clandestine videographer in Cache and now witness the strange events in a small northern German town at the cusp of the 20th century just before WWI.
Film Review: "The White Ribbon" (2009)Director Michael Haneke anylizes with a clever eye of beat and actions taken in a rural central European (German) village, what causes lead to passive psychological violence before spreading like a firestorm through Austrian-Hungarian as Ottoman Empire, which eventually leads to "World War One" due to the assassination of crown prince of the Austria "Franz Ferdinand" on June 28th 1914 in Sarajevo as the director just calmly as visually captures human confrontation due to power, sexual conduct and hierarchy of stand in stellar black-and-white digitally as wisely put in post-production due to already magnificient cinematography by Christian Berger, when the Berlin-based X-pool production company entrusts the exceptional director with complete creative freedom alongside his hauntly-upplaying cast, making "The White Ribbon" 135-Minutes of high suspense and cinematic conflict scene-by-scene.Copyright 2018 Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC.
The setting and story - repressive feudal early 20th century society is remotely similar.The "alternative Heimatfilm" genre (a Heimatfilm is a usually sentimental film with a regional background, although this film is certainly not sentimental) - is similar to Edgar Reitz' Heimat TV Series from the 1980s (Pre-World-War 2 stories in rural village near french border)The menacing atmosphere combined with visual beauty, created by the camera-work, reminded me of Ingmar Bergman/Sven Nykvist movies from the 1950s.The ending is open, and the message of the story is incomprehensible after all.
Austrian director Michael Haneke's icily beautiful The White Ribbon is a film very close to the perfection of a certain cinematic type.
In Michael Haneke's 'The White Ribbon', a serious of dark, mysterious events overtake a German village in the year immediately before world war one.
I really cant add much more, there are relationship issues involving the doctor and a bit of a burgeoning love story between the teacher (and narrator), and the nanny employed by the Baroness, Eva, but I guess that's all I can say about the plot without giving too much away.Whilst watching the film I have the impression that the children maybe know something about the trouble in the village, but none of them are letting on.
Michael Haneke's super creepy and unsettling film about a small German village in the days leading up to World War I is the best horror movie I've seen in a long time.Things are deeply wrong in this particular village, though they're wrong in ways that are hard to define and which no one will admit.
There's the mystery of the 'accidents' combined with the tragically dysfunctional lives of each villager, with the unfair treatment of the children, with the expressly marked roles of men and women, with the growing ambiance of war around them, with the loss of innocence in the town's children, with the inhibition of sexual discovery in each of them, with the refreshing love story between the narrator and a naïve teenagerwell, the movie imparts cold, direct facts of life, pieces of humanity in all their wonder or horror, and it's up to the audience to make any sense of it all and to come to one's terms with the implications of the film's message.I think of "The White Ribbon" and I see it being the topic of discussion in cine-circles around the globe and in film classes.
The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) tells the story of a small German village and the strange occurrences that happened in the months leading up to World War I.