"Children are people. They are no better or worse than any adult. They are merely more helpless." M. Haneke

#25: White Ribbon

This bleak, black and white, film by Austrian director Michael Haneke is set in a German village in the year immediately prior to World War One. On the edge of the end of the Hundred Years Peace and in a bucolic rural hinterland, the film suggests the last gasps of a dying era, not yet aware that it is at its end but clearly having lived beyond its usefulness and into caricature.

Told as a flashback from the perspective of the idealistic young teacher, the story is of the secrets of the village, its hierarchy, and its civic leaders within the context of how he met his wife. Both his shy fiancee and the teacher exemplify the aspiring working class--she the daughter of laborer in a neighboring village enlisted to work as the governess for the town baron and he the impoverished professor brought in to indoctrinate the children of the village. Both are in jobs that require them to impose discipline on the children and both are, in turn, disciplined into a repressive Victorian culture. Both aspire to a level of propriety and moral rectitude, aping of their social betters, as a mechanism of social mobility. They are dimly aware that these social betters (the Baron and Baroness, the doctor, the pastor, the children themselves) are not the pillars of virtue they appear to be but at the same time the social code of the era does not leave room for the aspiring petite bourgeois to notice, not to mention judge, those above or empathize with those who occupy the lower social strata.

The dramatic heart of the film is a series of accidents, or maybe criminal acts, and the mystery that surrounds them. Are they divine punishment? Cruel and mindless acts by jealous villagers? Acts of retribution from a secretive cabal of children resisting and replicating the oppression and violence of their own treatment as the had of prim and moralistic adults? Or as suspected by the Baroness, just more of the animal violence of the German peasant and by extension, Germany itself?

The film is clearly allegorical. Pre-war culture has ossified into a rigid and overt morality occluding the violence, perversion, and human indifference of the adults. The children are both the victims of this hypocrisy and its most vigilant defenders. Both the decadence of the Wiemar Republic and the Nazi hive are seeded in this one village in this one moment.

This film is beautifully shot with little narrative. The story is told largely through the images and through half-observed moments when the Victorian facade falls away. One is made to feel an accidental voyeur; turning corners or peeking through doors only to see flashes of perversity that are immediately suppressed when they become aware that they have been observed and making all involved feel uncomfortable.