Michael Haneke is celebrated as one of the most confrontational currently active film makers in Europe. His films Hidden, The Piano Teacher and Funny Games all actively try and engage their audiences with Haneke’s polemic ideologies, his films rather violently placing the director’s world view on the screen. Funny Games even had the gall to break the fourth wall to hammer home its points, literally pointing a finger at the audience. The White Ribbon, however, is a different kettle of fish. Rather than directly telling the audience what to think, Haneke allows for several ambiguities to arise and, as such, the film is a more rewarding experience. This does not mean that Haneke has abandoned all his trademark styles though. The White Ribbon, his Palme D’Or and European Film Award winning picture, is as sinister, as misanthropic and as ideologically driven as anything he has committed to celluloid thus far. There are two conclusions that can be drawn here and both are harrowing to say the least. One is the reductionist view that The White Ribbon is a disturbing allegory about the genesis of Nazism. The other is something much, much more sinister.

   Filmed in clinical, sterile black and white, Haneke permeates his work with the same sense of cold, calculated, dread, fear and terror that can be found lingering in the rest of his oeuvre. Set in a remote German village in 1913, The White Ribbon appears to be centred in a serene locale yet it soon transpires that this is not the case. Seemingly random acts of malice occur one after the other. The local Baron’s soon in kidnapped and badly beaten, the same fate occurs to a boy with Down’s syndrome. Trip wire is placed between two trees hurling the local doctor from his steed. A farmer’s crop is mercilessly destroyed by a spiteful family. A woman dies at work, perhaps accidentally. The village, it seems, is in the grips of some unknowable evil; everyone from the local children, appearing as they do like members of The Village Of The Damned, to the strict pastor to the aforementioned doctor all imbue a real sense of darkness. As the acts of spite continue to occur, two policemen are brought in to try and solve the cases but it soon becomes obvious the film is not your average “whodunit?” Although the perpetrators are hinted at, Haneke’s intention is not to point fingers at individuals. He is attempting to address a larger social ill.

   The White Ribbon takes its title from the item the local pastor makes his children wear as a constant reminder of their sin filled souls and the permanent need to be cleansed and purified. Rather than be a simple brace, the item represents something much more dreadful; it is the sinful pastor’s way of passing on his shame to the next generation and symbolises the foreboding violence to come. The film is about the victims becoming victimizers and how this system rots in a continual cycle. The process continues down generations and from here bile and spite are every day parts of life. Like Haneke’s previous works Hidden and Funny Games, the film is bleak and heart breaking to watch for long stretches. The pastor imbues the children with guilt over even the most trivial of offences and the film contains lashings of grotesque violence, incest and general uncomfortable themes.

   The first reading of this film could be drawn from a historical approach. The foreboding nature of the village seems to echo the crisis arising in Europe where in little less than one year innocence would be lost not just in small villages but across the entire continent as war ravaged the whole continents. However the narrator, a teacher in the village, suggests early on that what we witness “may explain what came late”. Does he refer to the First World War exclusively or is he casting out further? That the village’s children are of the age that come the Second World War they would play major figures in German history, being of the age to vote and to serve the Nazis, is of no coincidence. Their innocence has been taken by a decaying, putrid way of life and as the victims become the victimizers their sense of spite and malice has only grown larger to the degree that the atrocities of the Second World War have become a depressing inevitability. The shame forced on Germany by Europe in the aftermath of the First World War was, after all, one of the key reasons that led the country down the path that led to the atrocities of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Similar, in essence, to the shame the white ribbons forced onto the villages young represent.

   A more encompassing reading of the film would suggest that the village acts as an allegory for mankind as a whole. Haneke’s film is brilliantly misanthropic suggesting that the rot is not just inside the society that spawned the Nazi’s but rather in all of us. Whilst Nazi’s are the obvious starting point for this film, it is a sociological study on the affects of shaming people through religious beliefs or political convictions and explains how anti-social behaviours can arise. Thus the film’s ambiguity is needed; although hints are dropped as to who exactly the perpetrators of the crime spree may be they are never caught. If the wrong doings were put down to a few bad eggs that could be locked up to conclude the film, the suggestion would be that resolution can come in the inprisonment of a few deviants. If, as this film hints via ambiguity, the perpetrators of evil could be any one of us, then social ills can’t be cured by simply locking away just a small number of people. We are, suggests Haneke, all capable of pure, total evil. It is almost like the film is a meditation of the famous Noam Chomsky quote that any of us under different circumstances could be either a saint or a gas chamber attendant. Whilst Haneke may have given up lecturing his audience he certainly hasn’t given up challenging them.