little atrocities
by Douglas Messerli
Michael Haneke (screenwriter and
director) Das weisse Band—Eine deutsche
Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon)
/ 2009
In the small German village of
Eichwald just before the outbreak of World War I the people appear to be
God-fearing and hard-working citizens, obeying both the economic rule of the
local Baron (Ulrich Tukur) and the religious values presented to them by their
pastor (Burghart Klaußner). Through their families and school teacher
(Christian Friedel), the children have been taught humility, purity, and, above
all, obedience. Although Eichwald is a poor village, it is, on the surface, a
model German community.
As the School Teacher narrates, however, a series of events that begin
to happen that brings everything into question. It starts with a small wire
being struck between the gate to the Doctor's house, which throws him, killing
his horse as he returns home from his medical rounds. The Doctor, himself, we
soon discover has recently lost his wife, and is forced to rely heavily on the
neighborhood midwife (Susanne Lothar) for the care of his older daughter, Anna
and his young son, Karli. The Midwife's son, Kurti, represents another burden
since he suffers from Down Syndrome.
This purposeful attempt on the life of the Doctor—who survives with a
broken collarbone and arm, but is forced to spend weeks in a hospital in a
neighboring town—causes pain and fear within the family and general
consternation throughout the community. Yet no one is able to explain who might
have done the act, nor can the wire be found soon after the event.
Through his stunningly beautiful black and white landscapes, which help
to distance us from the period and view his film from a more objective
perspective, Haneke ultimately takes us into the homes of some of these
"good folk," where we see them almost as August Sanders-like
photographs come to life. The Pastor, for example, is shown to be a strict
autocrat at home, severely beating his children for arriving late for dinner
and, as further punishment, forcing his two eldest children to wear white ribbons
as signs to remind them of purity and faith. When he discerns that his eldest
boy, Martin, has been masturbating, he ties the child's hands to the bed each
night. Arriving at the school for Confirmation lessons, he discovers the
children loudly playing with others and forces his daughter, Klara, to stand at
the back of the room, her face turned away from him as he berates them for
their actions, a sermon which ends with her collapse.
When the seemingly "kindly" Doctor returns home we quickly
discern that he and the Midwife have been engaged in a long-time affair in
which he verbally abuses her, while he is also sexually abusing his teenage
daughter.
Surely the adult abuse of these children is somehow related to the
events occurring throughout the community.
And still more "little atrocities" occur: the Baron's barn
burns, his son, Sigi, goes missing and is found tied up naked to a tree where
he has been badly beaten. As the pampered son of the Baron—and a target for that
very reason—Sigi is surely also seen by the perpetrators as being what today we
would describe as a homosexual or gay child, foretold in another instance when the
Steward's son steals Sigi’s flute, eventually throwing it into the river, and,
in return, is beaten by the Steward.
In another home a baby, left beside an open window in the cold winter
night, has grown ill. The peasant whose wife has died on the Manor commits
suicide.
At the Pastor's home, Klara, recovering from her breakdown, kills her father's pet bird by running a scissors through its mouth and guts.
These acts of hate, punishment, and revenge affect even the innocent
love of the School Teacher and the young nanny, Eva, working at the Manor.
After Sigi's abduction, Eva is fired, even though she has been hired only to
care for the baby, and the young woman is forced to return home where
"they will never
Meanwhile, the "little atrocities" grow into near murder as
the Midwife's retarded son is found beaten, his eyes gouged, an act that nearly
blinds him. To the community, particularly to the already abused children, he
represents an emblem of their own so-called sins and degeneration, for which
the Pastor has made children wear the white ribbons of the film’s title.
As critic Ian Johnston observes in his review of the film in Bright
Lights Film Journal, the white ribbons the Pastor’s children are forced to
wear are echoed in various other ways throughout the film:
“The white ribbon of the title also
gathers other associations in the film. There are the ties used to bind
Martin’s hands at night in a bid to stop him from masturbating, a symbol of the
oppressive constraints placed on natural behaviour. There is also the white
bandage wrapped around the injured Karli’s eyes that simultaneously marks a
society’s scapegoating of one of its weaker members (reminding us of the Nazis’
later treatment of the mentally impaired) and symbolizes that society’s
blindness to its own true nature. The shaming white ribbons worn on Martin and
Klara’s arms project associations into the Nazi future, both the Nazis’
armbands and the badges of shame (yellow for Jews, pink for homosexuals, purple
for Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) used in the camps.”
The Baroness reveals to her husband that she has fallen in love, on her
temporary escape from Eichwald to Italy, with another man. She wants to take
the children out of what she perceives as a world of distorted values.
On June 28, 1914, in the very midst of all these inexplicable
happenings, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is killed by a Serbian
nationalist, and by September of that year Germany outlines its intents and plans for War.
In an attempt to visit his beloved Eva, the School Teacher borrows the
Baron's bicycle, but before he can even leave the yard he is met by the
Midwife, who demands that she be given the bicycle; she knows, she insists, who
is the guilty party behind all these atrocities, and is on her way to the
nearby town to report it to the authorities. Dumbstruck, the Teacher permits
her to take it away, but as an afterthought he checks her house, which she has
boarded up and locked. Has she left her young son there alone? Upon exploring a
back window, he discovers the children from several families gathered, trying
to call in to Kurti, who has apparently been the source of his mother's misinformation.
Suddenly, the School Teacher remembers that these same children had
gathered at the Doctor's directly after his accident. One of his students had
previously revealed a horrible "dream" about Kurti. Are the children
themselves guilty of these horrendous acts? The children in the film suddenly
remind us of the monstrous children of the 1960 film Village of the Damned,
directed by Anglo-German Rolf Willa.
The Doctor, the teacher soon discovers, has also just left the village,
taking along his two children. When he attempts to query Martin and Klara, they
offer him no information. A talk with their father ends in the Pastor's
explosive dismissal of the Teacher, assuring him imprisonment if he dares to
tell his fears to anyone else.
Local gossip, meanwhile, tells a terrible tale of the Doctor's and
Midwife's ugly relationship, an affair, the locals claim, that began far before
his wife's death, and which bore the son they both tried to abort, the retarded
Kurti.
Here, the story comes to a conclusion. The War has been declared, and
the Teacher is inducted. The voice of an old School Teacher who has been
telling this story, now a tailor, has never seen Eva again. He has no real
evidence, moreover, of who may have committed all these acts so long in the
past.
In a sense, it doesn't matter. Everyone in this small village has in
some way been involved in each of these "little atrocities" almost as
preparations for the German and Austrian actions of the greater atrocities of
both World Wars, but particularly in Hitler’s regime. Eichwald was simply a
microcosm of the culture's transformation of good and kind people into fearful
and hateful ones.
Los Angeles, January 3, 2010
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (January 2010), World Cinema Review (2010) and Reading
Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).
No comments:
Post a Comment