The White Ribbon [Blu-ray]

To what extent are the actions of an adult influenced by the events of their childhood? When an entire country goes bad, who is really to blame? Is it the evil does themselves, or does it go back further? Do you enjoy a movie that keeps you thinking long after leaving the theatre? If the answer to that last question is yes, then put The White Ribbon by director Michael Haneke on your Must watch list! Our story takes place as an admittedly unreliable flashback; our narrator states that he pieced together the story through rumor and assumptions. A small village in Germany in the early 1900's is the setting. Right away we are witness to a horrible riding accident: the village doctor is tripped up on his horse by a wire strung between two trees on his usual riding route. Several other violent incidents follow including the beating of a young boy, but there are no suspects for these brutal crimes. Even worse, the villagers don't seem terribly motivated to find the culprits. We then are introduced, on more intimate level, to the villagers themselves and then the horrible really starts to flow! The town Steward beats his son while in the grips of an explosive rage. The Preacher beats his children in the name of piousness. Don't get me started on the Doctor! The only island of human goodness in the film is in the form of the schoolteacher and his sweet courtship of the Baron's nanny. But the teacher is our narrator, so maybe he's just whitewashing his own role in this scenario. Darn unreliable narrators! On the upside, the movie is absolutely beautiful to look at, even when you can't quite look. The black and white cinematography not only fixes our story firmly in the past but also makes some of the horrors we witness a little easier to look at. The director does not rely on crazy camera angles or tricks to tell the story; Realism is the word of the day here. The scenes usually play out in only one or two different shots depending on the number of characters in the scene. There is no traditional background music; all sounds and music that we hear feel natural. The actors in the film look like "real people", they speak like "real people", they move like "real people"; amazing acting throughout this film. These elements come together to form a truly believable feeling when viewing, you lose yourself in the unfolding of events. The characterizations, especially of the leading citizens of the village were very interesting. The men in positions of power were never referred to by name, only by title; bestowing on them the mantle of archetype which allows them to be completely awful within the scope of their role. That being said, there are not many "bad guys" or "good guys" in this story. Most of our characters feel very human: conflicted, unsure, imperfect. Which brings me to the children: there is a great cinematic tradition of mobs of evil children in films. Don't think for a second that our director will make it that easy for you! It is interesting to ponder the narrator's assertion at the start of the film that the events of the film may "clarify things that happened in our country". One thinks of the rise of National Socialism in the form of Nazis, the wholesale slaughter of millions of innocent people, etc... I have watched this film several times and I think I come away with a different take on it every time; I will leave it up to you, prospective viewer, to come to your own conclusion. I know that there are many people who do not like movies with open- ended conclusions, and to them I say: This is NOT the film for you! This movie seems to raise many more questions than it answers but, if you don't mind some mental heavy lifting, the rewards are great.

This film magnificently captures the micro that led to the macro in Germany, the foundation laid in Prussia/Germany back in the early 1800s that led to the explosion we came to know as Nazi Germany. Child abuse, child killing and violations of children back in the 1800s was so bad that the French and English were appalled when they visited Bavaria. And remember it was not a great time to be a child in France and England in that time period so for the French and English to be appalled...well...it had to be really really bad.What happens in childhood doesn't stay in childhood, the festering secrets and festering wounds will manifest in some way. It is what spawned Adi (Adolf's nickname as a boy). We think it's all a great unsolvable mystery as to how a young Bavarian/Austrian boy could get everyone to simply obey him by being a raving lunatic but the answer lies in the secrets of this one German village, then multiply that by thousands of villages with similar parental authorities enthroned in simple households raging and torturing children and there you have it.Read Lloyd deMause's meticulous research or Alice Miller's work. What we can't talk about directly we can speak the truth in film making and this film does truth telling in stark black and white to tell a stark dreadful tale. How cold and calculating the abuse was to those children. The shaming, the humiliation, the degradation, the parental need for absolute control of children and use of children to fulfill the needs of the adults who also had the same childhood experiences.There is no resolution to the film because some elements of Germany still hold on to these same dynamics that fostered the violent explosion, still hold onto the denial, still hold onto the sickness, still hold onto the family secrets, the dirty laundry of Germany.A young German girl, Anna Rosmus from Passau, Bavaria innocently wrote a paper about Passau's history of helping the Jewish people only to find out in her research the people of Passau lied and covered up. They rabidly verbally attacked her, threatened her and she ended up moving away from Germany for her own and her family's safety. And this was in the 1980s not the 1930s. That film is called "Das schreckliche Mädchen", in English it is (very poor translation by the way) "The Nasty Girl". A better translation is "The Horrible Girl". Passau was where little Adi lived when he was very young.Das Wiesse Band is an excellent, excellent film. It's fascinating and important history for the world to know and understand.

Extraordinaria película sobre los rigores del protestantismo alemán y el autoritarismo y los abusos de la nobleza rural alemana de principios de Siglo XX. Una película violenta, dura, rayando lo desagradable, pero muy inteligente y profunda.

Drammatica e inquietante storia È in bianco e nero e questo la rende ancora più coinvolgente.

Le regard à la fois éreinté, sournoi, résigné, sans aménité, rancunier, sinistré, blessé et rougi de larmes intarissables du très bel enfant sur la devanture du boîtier de la vidéo est à la porté de toute l'ambivalence que va régner dans cette histoire édifiante et révoltante. La révolte, justement parlons en, celle de ces enfants à la figure d'ange, mais transformés en tyrans par des parents leur inculquant des valeurs idéologiques terrifiante et oppressante. Finissant dans la prolongation implacable et purulente de leur puritanisme maniaque et rigide, par souiller leur précieuse innocence et confiqué leur magnifque pureté. Et pourtant ici dans l'émaillage progressif des incidents successifs (dont une grange brûlée et un champ sacagé) rien n'est exhibé, tout est suggéré, puis finalement pudiquement axé sur la vie traditionnelle d'un village au allure épouvantable de somatotrope prénazie. Avec entre autre dilemme, ces sempiternelles prières avant de toucher son assiette, ou les inclinaisons de tête pour des baises-mains assortie de révérences chorégraphiées. Mais là ou le film atteint son paroxysme dans cette aspect gravissime insupportable et suffoquant en lyrisme absolu et bouleversant, c'est par ce mélange antagonique de cette grâce enfantine imprégné dans une substance morale acidifiée. Ce qui n'empêche nullement le propos d'être par ailleurs dépareillé de sensibilité en profondeur. Car le réalisateur ne s'improvise pas juge ou procureur. Il sait pertinemment que ces enfants ne sont que de frêles et manipulables êtres révoltés par trop de rigidité emmagasiné. Victimes soumises de leurs bourreaux d'ascendants, eux même enfermés dans leur valeur spolié de puanteur. C'est donc en substance et admirablement une condamnation sans compromis de cette idéologie d'un temps maudit et la demonstration éloquente que celle ci peut tenailler l'esprit au point d'en souffrir, de ne plus pouvoir s'en sortir et de s'en servir à des fins d'une barbarie mesquine et destructrice terrible. L'esthétisme inouie de l'apport de l'image en noir et blanc revigore encore le long métrage pour lui ennoblir la spécification élevée et enviée de classique du cinéma, en la mémorable compgnie d'autres chefs-d'ouvres ou les enfants sont également au premier rang. "L'enfance d'Ivan", "Bouge pas, meurs et ressucite, "Le voleur de bicyclette", "Suscia" et "Los Olvadidos", parmi d'autres me semblant être les exemples les plus marquants. Edifiant, terrifiant, militant, passionnant, émouvant et une palme d'or qui sonne comme une évidence. Un indispensable indémodable !

This artfully filmed story of life in a German village before the first world war presents a realistic picture of how well meaning parents raised their children. Discipline and obedience were all important. Shaming and harsh punishments were meted out for any failure to obey. The children in the story (filmed in black and white) walk about in a gang of seemingly well-behaved little robots.Terrible things are happening in this village of obedient children and strict parents. The doctor is returning from his daily horseback ride when his horse trips and falls over a wire strung between trees. Someone has done this deliberately. But who? A mentally challenged child is found tied upside down on a tree, badly beaten. Another child is beaten in the same way.The young man who is the school teacher begins to suspect the children. Their revenge smacks of punishment. He confronts two of the children in their home and is getting close to forming a suspicion in his mind. However, the respectable father intervenes and throws him out of his house. That ends any investigation.The voice-over is the aged voice of the school teacher, now an old man looking back on these sinister events. What happened, he says, must have something to do with what followed in German history.I found the film remarkable in many ways: beautifully filmed, well acted (how did they find an actor to play the mentally challenged child?) and thought provoking. What did German child rearing have to do with the events which followed, I had to wonder. Confessions of a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of Healing and TransformationConfessions of a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of Healing and Transformation

The White Ribbon,based as it is on old black and white photographs by Sander of farmers and peasants in rural old German communities,has crisp white and black cinematography and a voice-over narrative by the school-teacher(Christiane Friedel),looking back from his old age,this enhances the archaic aspects of the film.The dominance of the bourgeois hierarchy in charge is emphasised by their titles-Baron, Pastor,Doctor, Teacher,Steward,Farmer-and hence the rigidity of the status quo and the patriarchal Protestantism,with its repressive mechanisms of social control.The children who suffer under this are known by their individual names,but they are at times depicted as a swarming brood of evil menace with the collective malice of psychopathy.The film steps back in time to a pristine world of pre-industrial farmlands,snowscapes,wheat fields,beyond sight or sound of our modern media-bombarded environment in the year before WWI in Eichwald in northern Germany.Though fascism is never directly addressed, we are made aware that the utopian agrarian idyll which formed the basis of so much Nazi fantasy was always a lie.This is an even-paced film depicting slowly the passing of the seasons. Meanwhile the film's more sinister events -a malicious attack on the town doctor, the death of a farmhand, the kidnap and torture of two small boys - are interwoven with the delicate progression of a relationship between the narrator's younger self (the school-teacher is the closest thing the film offers to a protagonist) and a buxom young nanny, Eva (Leonie Benesch),depicted in a warm,humourous and tender way.The question of who is responsible for the suffering echoes throughout as well as the passage of social maladies over the generations.The film is done in parable form.The narrator says that some of the things he's going to say he heard from hearsay and he doesn't know exactly how true this all of this is... We never really know who committed the crimes,although the teacher thinks that the groups of children are probably the culprits.The narrator is also reflecting on what has come to pass in the modern world from his old age.Hanneke uses deconstruction to show the possibility of many interpretations.We may be seeing the seeds of National Socialism,the Red Army Faction or religious fundamentalism being sown.The evil is symbolic, potential,enclosed in ritual.There is an atmosphere of punishment and abuse from the male elders of the community towards the children and women.The Baroness wants to leave her husband and take her children away from `the malice,envy,apathy, and brutality' of these surroundings.The films offers us goodness,self-sacrifice and love in the form of a grieving husband,the two young lovers's courtship,the filial bond between a son and his mother,the young boy offering an injured sparrow to his indifferent father to replace the killing of the parakeet by malicious siblings.The schoolteacher is our guide through the tale,but events are viewed from the children's perspective. The scene in which Anna's tiny brother, wandering the house wakefully in the middle of the night, stumbles upon his father and sister together, is a masterpiece of ambiguous horror.The village's young are as much victims as perpetrators.The acts are not those of a `sick person', rather that the guilt is collective, and that the children's rebellion against us is the inevitable consequence of our own actions.There is the idea of innocence being victimised and lost,thedisplacement of simmering resentment and revenge upon those targets that will not fight back.Hanneke consulted mannuals of child- rearing in the country-side,and the white ribbon was used as a reminder of innocence and a mark of shame.In a Nazi context this symbol could become the yellow star that Jews have to wear at all times or the black armband of the Nazis.The schoolteacher's attempts to expose the seamy underbelly lead to his expulsion.The attacks on the status quo by the children is followed by the announcement of WWI.We get the idea that the suppresion of small things leads to the outbreaks of wars.' All the big wars can be traced back to all these small ones between all of us. I always try to build models to show the big picture with the small model.' thus Hanneke in an interview.Truth is never simple and everyone is suspect.Hanneke offers his films up like wounded sparrows for our gaze.