The Complicit Gaze: Michael Haneke's Cinema of Guilt

Uneasy Beginningsthe title of Michael Haneke's 2009 film Das weise Band in many ways draws attention to what the work is about. the metaphorically charged "white ribbon," which Haneke borrows from an early nineteenth-century text by Johann Heinrich Gottlieb Heusinger, is, in the words of the austere pastor who ties it in his children's hair or around their arms, intended to remind them in its white color of "Unschuld und reinheit" (see Heusinger 251). the implicit logic at play here is that the white ribbon will admonish the children-who are late for dinner and try to cover up their fault with lies-for having forfeited a putatively original purity through their delinquency. it is significant to grasp the peculiar logic of this white ribbon in its ambiguous connotation,1 as it signifies, on its surface, innocence and purity and, in the words of the pastor, is meant to help avoid "sunde, selbstsucht, Neid, Unkeuschheit, luge, faulheit." this didactic impetus, however, simultaneously and inevitably relies on the assertion or assumption of the bearer's degradedness in that it legitimizes itself as a result of his or her alleged im-purity, dis-ingenuousness, his or her regress-the very state that occasions the wearing of the white ribbon in the first place.to be sure, Haneke's film does not merely take up the didactic impetus of the white ribbon thematically but indeed translates it into the aesthetic registers of the cinematic medium. the questions of black and white and guilt and innocence enter the film-typographically-from the very beginning, or even from before the beginning. as part of the opening credits the film's title appears, in white block capitals, against a black backdrop. soon after, the subtitle emerges, again against the black backdrop, yet gradually rather than abruptly this time, and in small-font kurrent script-whose curved, swirling lines exhibit a ribbon-like quality-rather than in white block capitals: "Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte."2 if the pastor's world and the one epitomized by the white ribbon unmistakably seek to discern innocence and truthfulness (symbolized by the color white) from guilt and mendacity (symbolized by the color black), then this insistence on dichotomous structures finds itself both prefigured and tacitly unsettled already in the film's opening title. it is unambiguously called into question by the time seventyfive-year-old ernst Jacobi, who enacts the voice-over of the aged schoolteacher, begins this pensive tale, and does so in a manner reminiscent of Hegel's phrase of the "moderne Verlegenheit um den anfang" (51).ich weis nicht, ob die Geschichte, die ich ihnen erzahlen will, in allen Details der Wahrheit entspricht. Vieles darin weis ich nur vom Horensagen, und manches weis ich auch heute, nach so vielen Jahren, nicht zu entratseln, und auf unzahlige fragen gibt es keine antwort. aber dennoch glaube ich, dass ich die seltsamen ereignisse, die sich in unserem Dorf zugetragen haben, erzahlen muss, weil sie moglicher weise auf manche Vorgange in diesem land ein erhellendes licht werfen konnen.the "Vorgange" to which the narrator so ominously alludes here are, of course, the conflagrations of the second World War and the atrocious crimes of National socialism-crimes that, he intimates, are strangely foreshadowed by the events from 1913/1914 that he is about to relate. Precisely because of this purported parallel or even trajectory it appears all the more astounding that this narrator, who talks for almost two and a half hours (see also Williams 48), has so little to say about his own role in those "Vorgange in diesem land." What kind of witness are we dealing with here? Why this vagueness of his account, which relies on "hearsay" and disparages itself as "obscure" and "strange" as if it strained credulity? D oes this schoolteacher have something to cover up, to hide, or to deny? a wrongdoing, an ignominy, a disgrace, guilt? and what if Haneke's film does not simply present itself as an enclosed forum for the negotiation of guilt and innocence-to be studied from a secure distance-but if instead the viewer is meant to be put on the stand as well and confronted (metaleptically) with those same negotiated questions of guilt and innocence? …