Horner's Corner

Michael Haneke’s new film is set in a north German village in 1913-4 : the last months of peace. The interiors  of the houses are still immersed in the dark heaviness of the 19th century, outside there is as yet no sound of automobiles. Yet everything is about to change. Haneke conveys the look and ‘feel’ of this world and the themes of the story through impressive cinematography (digital b&w that exaggerates the light /shadow contrasts), and mise en film (creaking doors, floors -everything is wood, hard, unyielding, in deep shadow or blinding light). If its  beautiful and horrifying tones and sounds remind me of anyone else it is the films of Bergman and Nykvist. And the acting is uniformly superb, utterly plausible.

This village is not a happy one. There is a  circuit of oppression and violence (actual and symbolic) that runs through the fibres of the place. Its most obvious source is the string of patriarchs : the pastor, the doctor, the baron, the tenant farmer and so on -but it runs all the way to the apparently weakest members,  the women and children, and then back round to the patriarchs again, and to the whole community. A series of apparently unmotivated acts of violence occur – the doctor is nearly killed out riding by a wire stretched between two trees, a barn is set alight, a “subnormal” child is tortured and so on. Among the leading male characters only the schoolteacher  is sympathetic: only he seems capable of love and a refusal to force his will on others. His voice is the framing narration, looking back at ‘those events’, and making a possibly too explicit link between them and certain events in the 20th century. I think we could have worked that out for ourselves.

We needn’t pursue the plot further here. Its clear that Haneke is making a point about the cruelty, emotional manipulation and hypocrisy of the father figures, and the way in which the enjoyment of this power  generates the current of cruelty and revenge that runs through everything. Behind, beneath, around the words of authority and command uttered by these men is an excessive, cruel enjoyment, violently sexualised behind the facades of unbending respectability and the formalities and rituals of hierarchy (Haneke captures this very well). They are  repressive, oppressive, sadistic, fucking with the minds and even the bodies of their own children. Its all about power: economic, sexual, psychological (via that old favourite of religion and ‘morality’: guilt). And one sees that it is known, at some level, to be all part of the same thing: the daylight, the ‘whiteness’ of purity has its night, the underside of oppression and torture. The purity has its high sounding platitudes and ‘moral’ window dressing; the pleasures of cruelty remain silent and in shadow.

But the question we need to ask is: why this film, now? Why this theatre of cruelty set nearly a century ago? If there is something to be said about disavowal and hypocrisy among the contemporary bourgeoisie, then Haneke has surely said it already in the great Hidden. If he thinks that our problem now is the Name-of-the-Father and  sexual repression, then surely he hasn’t noticed the compulsive, incontinent ‘enjoyment society’ of contemporary capitalism. The Protestant Victorian father figure, all deferred gratification and finger wagging  hypocrisy is a nightmare from history: gone for good.

Yet I think Haneke is aware of this. Hidden itself, let’s remember, historicized its themes. It was about history: the personal and the political were connected through the disavowed past of the all too comfortable protagonist. Haneke is certainly aware that the world has moved on from  Lutheran repression to the repressive desublimation of the 21st century. So how to understand The White Ribbon? Well, for one thing, we cannot grasp the present without a sense of where we’re from – the catastrophe of the mid 20th century still radiates its influence into our time, and its roots are entangled in the world we’re looking at in the film. The terms of oppression have changed; but what remains the same is the way in which truth and lie, guilt and innocence, our deepest fantasies and dreads, connect the public to the private worlds. The White Ribbon is about those connections, and is a way of understanding how, as Auden put it, ‘those to whom evil is done/do evil in return’. It’s about emotional fascism:  not something we’re done with, although it wears other masks these days.

(1) The Rhine

(2) Shanghai

(3) May Day V