13 FOR HALLOWEEN #9: The White Ribbon

Whisper it quietly, but Michael Haneke makes genre films.

Wait! Don’t hit that back button. Hear me out on this.

‘Benny’s Video’ is a social horror movie: ‘Peeping Tom’ for the post-video nasties generation. ‘Funny Games’ is your classic home invasion movie, kind of like ‘Straw Dogs’ but without the satisfaction of Dustin Hoffman muttering “Jesus Christ, I got ’em all”. ‘The Time of the Wolf’ is a post-apocalypse movie cross-bred with the home invasion scenario (Haneke doesn’t like his audiences to have any safe places), kind of like ‘The Road’ re-imagined by some strange and disturbing hybrid of Lucio Fulci and Andrei Tarkovsky. ‘Cache’ (a.k.a. ‘Hidden’) is a thriller without any kind of shoot outs or car chases and made up of inordinately static shots. ‘The Piano Teacher’ is a glacially deconstructed Douglas Sirk melodrama with slightly less colourful cinematography and a heroine who sniffs semen-encrusted tissues in a porno cinema and puts broken glass in the pockets of people who piss her off. The sex scenes don’t bear thinking about.

‘The White Ribbon’ – easily the most mellow work in Haneke’s filmography, for all that it touches on child abuse, vandalism, arson, class oppression, misogyny, suicide, and the particularly brutal demise of an innocent and defenceless caged bird – is basically ‘Village of the Damned’ as if directed by Bela Tarr.

It’s a horror movie without obvious horror genre imagery. It’s a story about demonic behaviour where the demons are – … ah, but this is where it gets ambiguous. Let’s backtrack a little and cast our eye over the plot.

It’s 1913; a small town in Germany called Eichwald. Read into that name whatever you like. The town is basically the fiefdom of the Baron (Ulrich Tukur), the Pastor (Burghart Klaußner) and the Doctor (Rainer Bock). I’m pretty sure none of these characters are actually referred to by name; only by status. In fact, I don’t recall that many of the characters have names beyond the children. Our narrator – for ‘The White Ribbon’ is recounted in the measured tones of the Schoolteacher (Ernst Jacobi – although Christian Friedel plays him as younger man), a device reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s ‘Dogville’ and which suggests a novelistic rather than filmic mindset on the part of the director – commences the story with an accident which befalls the Doctor. Nah, scratch accident. We’re talking a wire strung between a couple of trees which fetches him from his horse.*

Next up, a woman plunges to her death through the rotten floorboards of a mill, an incident which her adult son blames on the Baron’s cheapjack attitude to maintenance at said property. A minor act of vandalism against the Baron’s property is quickly followed by the kidnapping and mistreatment of the Baron’s son. Tensions exacerbate between the haves and the have-nots. Tensions develop, too, between the Baron and his wife (Ursina Lardi), who insists on decamping abroad with their son. People disappear. There’s a suicide.

The Doctor returns from convalescence and (SPOILERS) resumes his practice, as well as his private activities – sexually humiliating his mistress and doing something quite unspeakable to his teenage daughter. (END SPOILERS) He’s not the only wrong ’un in Eichwald. A labourer goes round asking the village girls how old they are, demonstrating an unnatural interest if they’re 14 and seeming almost disappointed if they’re 17. Meanwhile, the Pastor discovers his son has been practising onanism and responds by thrashing the lad and tying his hands to the bed posts at night. The Pastor reminds me of my old man in the way he talks up the old “spare the rod, spoil the child” / “this is going to hurt me more than it does you” routine. Except where mine would just belt me with the back of his hand and get it over and done with, this SOB tells his kids he’s going to thrash them the following evening and leaves them to anticipate it in a state of silent dread.

‘The White Ribbon’ is subtitled Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (trans. “a German children’s story”) and although the film ends irresolutely, with the culprit(s) never found, no real accusations levelled (the Pastor threatens the schoolteacher’s future in the town when he suggests who it might have been, but never follows through), and the village thrown into even greater turmoil with the news of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination and the inevitability of war, Haneke implies quite strongly that the children are … well, not the villains exactly. Nor does the phrase “to blame” quite cover it. To say either would be far too black-and-white. And the only thing about ‘The White Ribbon’ that’s black-and-white is Christian Berger’s magnificently austere cinematography.

The children, ultimately, are in an emotional hinterland. They’re in transition between being victims and villains. Haneke hints quite heavily where it will end for them. They’re already beginning to organize themselves. They’re starting to get smarter than the bullying but intellectually complacent adults who have no concept of the monsters they are creating. Haneke doesn’t need to revisit ‘Funny Games’ turf to make his point. Scenes where the school teacher discovers a group of them sneaking around behind someone’s house …

… or where a barn mysteriously burns to the group and some kids watch intently from a window …

… are as creepy as anything in a more obviously generic horror film. There might not be any blood and gore in ‘The White Ribbon’; it might be devoid of suspenseful set-pieces or baroque imagery, but the horror’s there all right: it’s in what’s not said, what’s kept secret, what happens when a door closes and Haneke’s camera lingers in the corridor outside.

*This scene strikes a chord with me. A little family history: three or four generations ago, a couple of my ancestors did some work for one Squire F., a nobleman and landowner, who promptly fucked them over as regards payment. In retribution, they laid in wait for him one evening, fetched him off his horse and kicked seven different kinds of shit out of him. Realising they’d just worked over a member of the landed gentry, they hotfooted it for Portsmouth, stowed away on the first ship they came across and made a new life for themselves in Canada. True story. To the Canadian branch of my family: greetings, good wishes, and good on yer for striking a blow in the class war.

North Face

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Eurovisions (Germany) / In category: 9 of 10 / Overall: 84 of 100

As part of my month-long Clint Eastwood fest in May I reviewed ‘The Eiger Sanction’, concluding that “for all of its earlier deficiencies, the last half hour is jaw-droppingly impressive, every frame of it shot for real. No matte backgrounds, no studio mock-ups, no compositing or special effects or trick photography. Bruce Surtees, Eastwood’s regular lensman, captures the vertiginous dangers of the Eiger, his camera appraising the treacherous slopes with an all-too-believable wariness … ‘The Eiger Sanction’ is solely about visual spectacle. And when Eastwood breaks out the pitons and the guide rope and starts climbing, the film delivers.”

I hadn’t seen ‘North Face’ when I wrote that.

The climbing sequences in ‘The Eiger Sanction’ are still pretty impressive but sweet Jesus, ‘North Face’ takes it to another level. It’s like watching ‘Cop’, a perfectly good James Ellroy adaptation with James Woods on form and a memorably blunt ending, then sliding ‘L.A. Confidential’ into the DVD player.

My interest in ‘North Face’ was piqued when I discovered that director Philipp Stölzl had made the video for Rammstein’s 1998 cover of Depeche Mode’s ‘Stripped’ – a video, compromising footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Olympus’, that was banned following accusations that it was little more than Nazi propaganda. I’d always interpreted Stölzl’s aesthetic choices as an ironic commentary on the nature of propaganda and the manipulation of the image, particularly in the way the lyric “let me hear you make decisions / without your televisions” is married to incredibly heavy-handed fascistic imagery.

Fast-forward a decade and here’s Stölzl making a film about an attempt to conquer the north face of the Eiger under the edict of the Führer. Interesting, I thought; a man once accused of Nazi propaganda making a film with a backdrop of, well, Nazi propaganda. I missed ‘North Face’ on the big screen (it played for a couple of nights at a local arthouse cinema), but picked up the DVD for £4 last week. Best £4 I’ve spent in ages!

The only character in the film who has any vaguely National Socialist leanings is newspaperman Henry Arau (Ulrich Tukur) and that’s mainly because he’s just received instructions from the press office that he needs to run a big feature on the triumph of Aryan fortitude yada yada yada in conquering the north face of the Eiger because this will be seen as an exemplar of the indefatigable German athlete yada yada yada yeah whatever at the forthcoming Olympic games.

Arau, conscious that the news of Karl Mehringer and Max Sedlmayer’s fatal attempt at finding a route to the summit, is still a part of the public consciousness (their bodies, at this point, have not been recovered) latches onto his secretary Luise Fellner (Johanna Wokalek)’s recollections of growing up in Berchtesgaden with talented climbers Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas). Arau, encouraging Luise’s ambitions towards photojournalism, despatches her to seek out Kurz and Hinterstoisser (currently serving in the army) and sound them out on whether they’re ready to tackle the Eiger for the greater glory of the Fatherland.

Ah, this’ll be where the Stölzl propaganda controversy comes marching in, then? Not so. Stölzl cuts to a chocolate box scene of Alpine perfection, all brightly painted buildings and cozy chalets. Nazi troops are marching in precise formation in front of a barracks. But before you can hum two bars of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’, Stölzl cuts to our heroes, on latrine duty, scrubbing out the piss-stained channel of a urinal. Their punishment, apparently, for ignoring curfew to go off for a bit of extra-curricular mountain climbing. Not that it deters them. Next pass they get, they’re off again. Cycling out of the barracks, the sentries snap the Nazi salute and chorus “Heil Hitler”; Kurz and Hinterstoisser chorus “Auf wiedersehen” by way of response.

Propaganda? None here, freunde.

Although Kurz and Hinterstoisser agreed, after some prevarication on Kurz’s part, to undertake the attempt on the Eiger, they do it for themselves not for the Party. They even quit the army in order to do so. From this point on, the Nazi propaganda background is purely that: background. As soon as our heroes start to scale the north face, all considerations of politics, history and national identity are firmly backgrounded while a tense and vertiginous drama of man vs. the elements – which segues into a drama of desperate survival when the elements very quickly prove the victor in said contest – unfolds, Stölzl documenting every harrowing moment with chilling realism.

Moreover, he reduces Arau’s sloganeering to so many pathetically empty words, cutting from Kurz and Hinterstoisser’s ordeal on the Eiger, to a bow-tied and verbose Arau holding court in the restaurant of the plush hotel he and Luise are booked into. Wine flows and fine meals are consumed, the contrast with the climbers’ meager rations as harsh and immediate as a slap in the face.

Stölzl is absolutely in control of his material. He structures the film effectively, the cuts back to the hotel always demonstrating a purpose – whether a juxtaposition or a subtle reminder, during Arau’s conversations with a pensive Austrian businessman, that events are playing out as Nazi Germany maneuvers Austria into annexation – and the battle for survival on the mountain depicted without recourse to histrionics or false heroics; depicted, authentically, as an ordeal.