The White Ribbon
Saturday, February 20th, 2010
The White Ribbon
I intentionally avoid reviewing photography (or really anything else) on this blog for a slew of reasons, and now we can add this one: trying to write something about a movie that doesn’t sound like it belongs in an ad in the New York Post is a lot harder than you’d think. I saw “The White Ribbon” tonight though, and I absolutely have to write about it. It’s an experience that is at once subtle, beautiful, ghostly, and revelatory. It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen.
It’s possible to watch this film and see nothing at all but a meticulous, well-crafted confusion, begging for a manual to decipher it. It also seems that one might receive the film’s central theme loud and clear, but then miss the forrest through the trees: if a film about a certain period in German history is inevitably a reflection on the coming of Nazism, how does this one stack up to the scholarship on that subject? I’ve now read several reviews from major cultural arbitrators that are wildly, shockingly, off base, and I’ll note that Fandango does a far better job in one sentence describing this film than do several lengthy attempts by the New York Times. That sentence, by the way, is this: “An undercurrent of malice runs through a German village, as a series of misfortunes plagues its citizens in the year before the outbreak of World War I.”
Alternatively: “Forget about Weimar inflation and the Treaty of Versailles and whatever else you may have learned in school: Nazism was caused by child abuse,” A.O. Scott writes snidely in his review, demonstrating what would appear to be a fundamental misreading of both the film and the nature of history. The history of a people is not confined to specific isolated events, it extends infinitely across the past. And while “White Ribbon” depicts quite a bit of abuse of all stripes, it must be understood to be part of the “undercurrent of malice” engrained into the very way of life of townspeople that populate the film. This is what the narrator means when he says that he does not know how much of his story is true, but it may explain what has happened in his country.
That’s not exactly a shot in the dark, either: A different Times article quotes Filmmaker Michael Haneke this way: “I depict the conditions that have to be in place for people to be receptive to ideology, to be willing to clutch at any straw whatever that will allow them to get out of the extremely difficult situation they’re in.”
Haneke executes this so perfectly, it’s like getting hit by a bus. Art is not scholarship. Art is art. There should be no question that this film is art of the highest caliber.
