Sunday, July 20, 2025

Michael Haneke | Das weisse Band—Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon) / 2009

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.


     A short while later, an older working woman is killed on the Baron's property when a rotten floor gives way. The bereaved family, particularly the elder son, are convinced that the accident has been a result of carelessness on the part of the rich landowner, and the son "revenges" his mother's death on the day of the harvest celebration by destroying most of the cabbages in one of the Baron's plots. His crime, in turn, forces the family into near-starvation when the Baron refuses to further employ them.

     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 understand." Later, the School Teacher's attempt to ask for her father for her hand in marriage ends abysmally with the Father demanding that he wait another year before asking again.

     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).

Rafael Thomaseto | Próprio (Self) / 2020

where is love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rachel Ancelevicz and Rafael Thomaseto (screenplay), Rafael Thomaseto (director) Próprio (Self) / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

This film by Brazilian director Rafael Thomaseto features a young 16-year-old, who like so many teenagers everywhere is made to feel isolated and different, particularly if you are a closeted homosexual, in a world in which his peers lie and brag about their numerous female conquests and mock those like the central character of this film, Fernando (Jota Barletta), who is unable to find someone of his age who might fulfill his sexual desires and yet undesiring of the girls with whom their friends expect him to sexually engage.

    Unfortunately for many teens and even younger boys who have personally recognized their sexual difference, they are forced, particularly in our digital age, to seek out older boys and men on line, often with unfortunate results.

    That is precisely what happens to Fernando, who makes a date in the local park with a man named Edson (Theodora Cochrane).


    Edson is handsome enough to engage the young Fernando, and at first seems genial, perhaps the perfect person to introduce someone like the young experienced teen into gay sexuality. But the minute the boy has led him to a forested path and begins to demonstrate his eagerness, the testosterone level obviously rises in the older partner and without any of the romantic gestures of Fernando in mind, Edson forces him up against a tree, pulls down his pants, and brutally fucks the young man who has not yet even experienced anal sex.

     Any of us who have been fucked (I personally found it comfortable to serve as both bottom and top) have had to experience those first pains of the anus being opened wide enough to accept a penis. But generally, that first, maybe second, and third time, we engaged with someone who was gentle enough to explain the process and go slowly, also engaging in foreplay which helps ready am anal virgin for what comes next.


      Edson, obviously without empathy or a fig of thoughtfulness, gets right to business, literally torturing the first-timer. And, in some respects, one might describe his sexual encounter with the boy as a kind of rape.

      The director, in his synopsis, suggests that it is “a traumatic episode that will undoubtedly haunt Fernando the rest of his life,” a statement that seems somewhat overwrought since when one actually decides to enter into sex as a gay individual, one expects and even fears some unpleasant surprises, some possible pain, with the faith that further experiences will surely be more enjoyable. The presumption seems to be that Fernando was completely unaware that anal sex is painful at first. Yet the young man, self-described, as a “sporty twink,” would have been totally unprepared and unaware of what was possible. And while there is no question that the young adult he meets is cruel and insensitive, interested only in fulfilling his own needs, I can’t imagine that in todays world of available porn and online messaging, that a neophyte might not have suspected that there was also some danger in his suddenly hooking up with an unknown man.


     Most certainly, Fernando was unnecessarily hurt, severely disappointed with what he dreamed would be a sexual thrill, but that it might affect him the rest of his life as trauma seems to read the character as a far weaker being that Barletta plays him.

     I might add, moreover, that young women, unfortunately, have long had to imagine that their first sexual experience, given the despicable behavior of the male gender, might be other than they expected.

     Even more importantly, if Fernando is actually that traumatized, what is goal of this film? Is it simply a warning for young teens not to try out sex with someone they don’t know, someone older than them? Is there no other dimension to this movie other than a statement of the dangers of a pre-arranged meeting on-line with an unknown party?

     If so, we might as well put this movie in the same bin as the 1950s and 60s US films Boys, Beware! In actuality, the film ends with Fernando turning to a gentle encounter with another kind of animal, a horse he obviously has cared for or ridden previously on a nearby ranch, suggesting to me that the character recognizes how to heal, is quite resilient and understands that not all gay men with whom he might anonymously meet up are violent and insensitive. I guess the question is: does his masturbatory acts just previous to his encounter with the horse hint at a memory of that violent moment in the woods or a future in which a sexual partner will involve him more fully in the romance of love-making.

     Perhaps the real problem is that today young boys are made to feel that it is necessary to engage in sex at 16 or 17 in order to define themselves as socially fit. Although at the very same age, I wish there was someone there to encourage me to take advantage of my hormonal urges. I was far more innocent than is Fernando when I did finally have my first gay sexual encounters.

     In short, the signatory statement by Rafael Thomaseto appears to undercut the depth of his own insights as represented in his short film.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).


Chantal Akerman | Je tu il elle (I you he she) / 1975

hunger and thirst

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chantal Akerman (screenwriter and director) Je tu il elle (I you he she) / 1975

 


Chantal Akerman’s death by suicide in October 2015, led me to revisit many of her films and to watch new ones, among them Je tu il elle of 1975. This film begins with a kind of reverse creation myth, as the filmed figure and narrator (Akerman herself) describes her activities for six days, as she pulls her furniture out of the small, narrow apartment she has apparently just moved into, writes a long letter—presumably to the “tu” (perhaps the film viewers themselves) of the film’s title—after which she crosses much of it out, lays her manuscript in an inexplicable manner across the floor, and almost manically spoons from a bag of sugar. At times, the narrative voice runs ahead of the visual actions; at other moments it lags behind, creating tension. As she lies on the mattress nude for days at a time, that first week gradually expanding to nearly a month, what becomes apparent is that this woman is completely self-destructive. She waits, so the narrative voice proclaims, for something to happen which, except for a passerby staring into her window, never comes.

    Finally, completely disenchanted with the life she has chosen—one presumably of freedom and independence—the character, Julie, abandons her cramped space and takes to the road, catching a ride with a lonely trucker with red hair, but is otherwise nearly a Marlon Brando look-alike (Niels Arestrup).

     He says very little but suggests she may want to take a nap in his bunk. Later they visit a local bar where a TV set blares out American series’ such as Cannon, whose characters, strangely, spout aphorisms such as “a child of fear is the father of evil.”


    The two continue of their voyage in silence, stopping by another truck stop for dinner. Back in the truck he instructs her with quite specific details on how to jack him off, which she does successfully. He opens up to her and tells a sad tale of how, with children and the long hours of his job, his sex life with his wife has waned, leaving him with nothing but quick pick-ups along his route and endless yearnings.

      In short, the truck driver relates his own anti-creation tale, one that shall surely lead, like Julie’s own apartment isolation, to disappointment. Certainly, this man’s idea of sexual gratification—entirely self-centered—offers nothing to the world. Akerman frames the encounter so that we do not even see Julie while she is pleasuring him, her existence having been wiped out in the act.


     In the third act of this film, Julie returns to her lesbian lover (Claire Wauthion), who tells her that she cannot spend the night, yet she feeds Julie who is now ravenously hungry and thirsty, clearly suggesting her sexual desires as well. Critic Michael Koresky, writing for the Criterion DVD, argues that their following ten-minute engagement in sex is nearly sexless, representing a “complete dissociation, from narrative, from body, from life.” The New York Times critic Janet Maslin—in what has to be one of the most disinterested reviews ever written—describes it as an athletic tussle.


     I found the long act to be one of the most graphically loving sex scenes I have ever witnessed; the women seemed to me to be passionate in each other’s embrace, this last scene representing a true fulfillment of the hunger and thirst that Julie had imposed upon herself. Presumably, she will remain with the woman she had mistakenly left. It is clear that, at last, Julie has returned home to someone with whom she can create a life.

      The closing score reconfirms this with a lovely French song, suggesting one should “kiss whom you please.”

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2016

Reprinted from Hyperallegic Weekend (August 13, 2016).

Stéphane Marti | Le Veau D'or / 2002

the devil's bargain 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphane Marti (director) Le Veau D'or / 2002 [15 minutes]

  

Generally, when viewing a film by Stéphane Marti it is not something that you can talk about as much as you simply experience. You recognize at the same moment, however, that it is not merely your perception of the work that is central to his art but the experiences / images of camera, the photographer, and the models / actors who themselves appear not quite to know what secrets they are revealing in their fetish-like actions. They are both enactors of the ritual gestures of the film and subjects of it who finally in their interchange in a work such as Le Veau D'or reject the photographer while still embracing the film camera. It short, it is a complex interchange involved with all, a past evidenced by the carefully curated objects revealed throughout the short film, a present that is completely indeterminate, and a future of what you finally of make the images you witness and what you might carry of them through your own life.

     As Michel Amarger has written: 

 

“Marti plays with the proximity of his subjects to one another, composing plastic variations in choreography. The tradition of his predecessors is incessantly evoked; first and foremost, that of Michel Journiac, who frequently works with the changing identities of his subjects, from object to actor. Like Journiac, Stéphane Marti celebrates rituals surrounding desire and death. Eros and Thanatos suffuse a mythology interwoven with themes of antiquity, unbridled sexuality, and traditions of cinema.”


 

    Just as the white model (Losio) paints the black man’s finger’s red, so does the black model paint black and red rectangles on the feet and hands of the white boy, and two luxuriate in a kind of exotic world filled with votive-like object such as sacred skulls, crucifixes, dried flowers, Monique Delvincourt fragmented mirrors, and Louboutin high heels, black and red also.


      Their encounters with each other are both sexless and highly homoerotic as they dress up, paint one another, and basically play at being various other selves which seem finally too personal for the presence of the Marcel Mazé’s constantly clicking camera. It is as if the mysterious performances that they have invoked gradually become sexual and private, of which the film’s viewer can only glimpse through the interstices of the continually shifting frames of the video, film, and photographic images of objects, bodies, and music which sensuously come to a sort of orgasm as the two paint one another with white, red, and black bars almost as if skin color and blood equally have rubbed off upon the other in their unseen sexual encounter.


     Desire here is intertwined with interactions of race, gender, and cultural experience that ultimately cannot fully be comprehended but merely observed.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Amy Gebhardt | Look Sharp / 2006

evidence of what doesn’t exist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amy Gebhardt (screenwriter and director) Look Sharp / 2006 [9 minutes]

 

Australian director Amy Gebhardt creates a tough series of sequences as photographer Jo (Rhondda Findleton) spends the night in bed with her subjects in the Melbourne of the 1970s, drinking a great deal and fucking as a three-some mostly just to keep them close and to put the boys as ease for the actual photos she wants.


     Like all such manipulative but also brave and challenging female photographers such as Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, and Carol Jerrems, Jo has gotten two grungy but good looking Sharpie gang members into her bed, hoping to push their somewhat bisexual sharing of heterosexual sex just a little further, to challenge their macho defenses just enough so that she might capture the two men in a tender moment together which might hint at their homosexual “allowances,” if not tendencies beneath their layers of self-protection.

     It is a dangerous task. At any moment the men, Jason and Darren (Charlie Garber and David Lyons) are ready to explode with the recognition of what she is asking them to perform and the fact that she is manipulating them into the situation with which they feel intrigued but obviously also uncomfortable. Violence is most certainly a possibility, as it is always with on the edges of society concerning sex.


      As the Gay Celluloid reviewer nicely summarized this work:

 

“Filmed over two days in an urban squalor set reminiscent of Derek Jarman's The Last of England, here writer and director Amy Gebhardt has added many a neat touch, with the bedsit now akin to a boxing ring, one that finds David Lyons as Darren / Des hitting out when forced into a corner. In short and behind all of the 4-Xs of the piece, lies the issue of repressed feelings, with Jo…. determined to edge ever closer to the truth beneath the macho exterior of hard-as-nails gang member Des and here cue Lyons in an emotionally to the core performance.”


     If Look Sharp does not reach the artistic merit of its mentors, it certainly pushes the limits of the normally nicely contained short LGBTQ cinema works, introducing a far grittier energy into short gay cinema, even while Gebhardt’s characters are not necessarily gay and are most certainly permanently closeted to admitting and expressing it. Yet here is the evidence to which Jason and Darren will most certainly never admit.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2023 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

https://myqueercinema.blogspot.com/2023/12/former-index-to-world-cinema-review.html Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [For...