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I don't know if Michael Haneke's film, The White Ribbon, is out in the States yet, so if it isn't, ignore this. It won Cannes and has generally been getting a lot of attention, I think -- there was an article about Haneke in The New Yorker (here's a snippet) and the BFI has organized a festival to celebrate Haneke's life and work. He's definitely made his mark: this recent film has been called his best, and it clearly develops the only other film of his I've seen -- Cache -- presenting an even more pared-down and relentless meditation on violence so systematic that it appears sourceless. In Cache, a French family keeps on receiving footage of themselves that has been filmed without their knowledge, and menacing things happen to their son. The basic conceit -- surveillance without a clearly-identified source, cruelty of and to children, and a preponderance of violence -- carries over to The White Ribbon. In other words, Haneke seems to have a basic form he's working with, and he keeps telling the same sort of story in different historical settings.
The White Ribbon is set in the Germany of 1913-14, as no viewer can fail to notice. The assassination of Ferdinand is important towards the end of the film, and while the first World War doesn't make a direct appearance per se, it's clear that Haneke is connecting the terrible things happening in a small village, dominated by a baron and populated by workers who staff the baron's estate and work the surrounding fields, to the way that WWI and WWII wreaked such havoc across Europe. It's clear, in other words, that the trauma of the twentieth century is something that Haneke feels we still need to process. The link that many have wanted to draw, having seen this film, is between the group of children at the center of the film's events, and the fact that they will be adults on the eve of WWII. The connection, in other words, is one between the (apparently unreasonable) cruelty of children and the (obviously unreasonable) cruelty of Fascism. But more than that, Haneke is trying, I think, to take an almost allegorical approach to the history of the twentieth century by presenting the viewer with a series of events that happen in one village to a handful of people. He suggests that these events -- which are unsolved crimes -- are paradigmatic of the rise of Fascism, but more importantly, he shows the problem with thinking about it this way, and suggests that it is necessary to harness responsibility for atrocities to human actors, rather than blaming larger systems or ideologies.
One thing I've found to be true of both Cache and The White Ribbon is that violence in each film appears paratactic. This is Haneke's way, I think, of representing the difficulty of understanding the points of contact between individual human intention or agency and events that are much larger than the work of one particular person. The gang of children who uncoincidentally show up at the door of the houses where injured victims of unsolved crimes are convalescing want to see "if they can do anything." They aren't there just out of curiosity, nor just out of atonement. It's hard to tell why they're there, and Haneke deliberately leaves it unresolved. But this atomizes the sense of responsibility such that characters seem to be harmed by things (a wire stretched across a field that trips a horse; a rotten floor in a sawmill) and seem to take their revenge on things (a field of cabbage). You as a viewer feel terribly unsatisfied with leaving the cinema not knowing who did what, and one way of making sense of this is to say that Haneke's films are polemics against not believing that humans have to be held responsible for harm to other humans that they have caused; that the idea of accident or contingency is unsatisfactory, especially in the context of a mass atrocity which was facilitated by active as well as passive participation.
I lay awake for a long time the night I saw The White Ribbon. In part, I was frustrated because I didn't think there was a reason for all the violence Haneke used, nor did I think that he deployed it sensitively, despite what the program notes suggested. But I suppose it made me think about the claim Adorno makes about the impossibility of lyric (i.e. a kind of poetry of beauty) after the Holocaust. I tend to be very resistant to Adorno, because I frequently find him a pompous ass and think he's subject to the worse sort of hypocrisy, living this hugely decadent lifestyle while decrying the fall of civilization and the bankruptcy of modern morality. But watching Haneke's film, which is beautiful but also horrible -- you can't take one without the other -- made me think that maybe, strangely, that claim about committed art and the impossibility of beauty as such after 1939: maybe that's right. There's another observation Adorno makes -- this time in the company of Horkheimer -- about cartoons being a kind of cathected humor which just makes you laugh at the brutality you're subject to. Haneke isn't cartoonish or antic, but he lures you in by giving you something beautiful and then showing it to be terribly destructive. This is, perhaps, the same kind of move, and regardless of how The White Ribbon fares, I think it's part of the longer conversation about how aesthetic possibilities are directly shaped by certain large and irreversible events in history.
Make this. It shall not disappoint. It's from The Kitchen Diaries, Nigel Slater's fantastic chronicle of a year of cooking.
Onion Soup Without Tearsonions - 4 mediumbutter - 40 ga glass of white winevegetable stock - 1.5 litresa small French loafgrated Gruyere, Emmental or other good melting cheese - 150 gSet the oven at 200°C. Peel the onions and cut them in half from tip to root, then lay them in a roasting tin and add the butter, salt, and some pepper. Roast until they are tender and soft, and toasted dark brown here and there. You might have to turn them now and again. Cut the onions into thick segments. Put them in a saucepan with the wine and bring to the boil. Let the wine bubble until it almost disappears (you just want the flavour, not the alcohol), then pour in the stock. Bring to the boil and simmer for about twenty minutes. Just before you want to serve the soup, make the cheese croûtes. Cut the loaf into thin slices and toast lightly on one side under a hot grill. Turn them over and sprinkle with the grated cheese. Get the soup hot, ladle it into bowls and float the cheese croûtes on top. Place the bowls under a hot grill and leave until the cheese melts. Eat immediately, whilst the cheese is still stringy and molten.Enough for 4.
Don't worry, I haven't disappeared under a great big stack of books in the British Library. (Do you remember that story in the NYT several years ago about the man who had so many books in his apartment that when a few stacks fell over, he couldn't leave the place? Well, it's nothing like that here.) Tom and I have just returned from a few days in Paris: it was Tom's reading week, which meant that he didn't have to teach, and I was happy to take a few days away from work, so we hopped on the train and headed for the land of stinky cheese. It was a great visit: we went to this spice shop where there was a "bar du sniffing" -- a place where you could smell all these different kinds of spices -- and to more bakeries than I'd care to admit. As I have probably said to many of you, if I had to be a type of food, I'd definitely choose to be a carbohydrate. And if I could have a pain au chocolat for breakfast and lunch most days, I would. Then I'd start to look like the ladies in the Reubens room in the Louvre...
Speaking of the Louvre, I have to say that visiting that museum is completely exhausting. You feel a bit like all the masterpieces are just dominating each other and dominating you. The way they're arranged, in these colossal long halls, sometimes hung one above the other, makes it impossible to focus on one. Instead, the composite effect is like seeing all of these postcards of masterpieces pasted up on the wall. The thing is, though, they aren't postcards; they're the real thing, but you're so overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of them that it's hard to believe that each and every painting is the real deal, an original. You see a whole run of David and the first two or three take your breath away, but pretty soon nothing seems impressive because everything is. Paul Valery has this little essay on museums, which I read at Tom's urging -- and though in general I'm staunchly pro-museum, in this case I think Valery's exactly right. Here he is, from "The Problem of Museums" (1923):
"Only a civilization neither voluptuous nor rational could have constructed this house of incoherence. I don't know what to make of the insane result of this neighborhood of dead visions. They are jealous of, and argue over, the attention which gives them their existence. They call from all sides for my undivided attention. They throw into panic the living force which carries with it all the machinery of the body towards that which entices it.
"The ear won't support hearing ten orchestras at once. The spirit could never follow, never drive several distinct operations, and there aren't any simultaneous reasonings. But the eye, in the opening of its mobile angle and in the instant of its perception finds itself obliged to admit a portrait and a seascape, a kitchen and a 'triumph,' of people in the most varied states and dimensions; and, much more, it must greet with the same look harmonies and modes of painting incomparable with each other.
"Just as the sense of vision finds itself violated by this abuse of space which constitutes a collection, so the intelligence is no less offended by a close reunion of important works. The more beautiful they are, the more they are exceptional results of human ambition, the more they need to be distinct. They are rare objects, and their creators would certainly have wanted them to remain unique. This tableau, one sometimes says, kills all the others around it."
After three or four hours in the Louvre, you can get to thinking that all the masterpieces jostling for your attention do fail to be unique: they fail because they do not monopolize your attention, do not take your eyes away from all the other pieces. Ultimately it's hard to know what the effect of so much luxury is, whether you might as well stop looking around after you've seen three or four paintings, because you do stop seeing them. At first I found it frustrating that there were crowds of visitors photographing the works rather than looking at them, but then I got to thinking that perhaps that was a better strategy than trying to take them in all at once. The Louvre is like a gigantic catalogue of famous works, and producing your own index of photographs is one way to put all the works on even footing.
But I also understood why Thomas Struth took those pictures of visitors looking at paintings in the Louvre (the image immediately above is by Struth). It's a place where you can't help but find yourself amidst big crowds, and the experience is about seeing the art from within a crowd and seeing the art as itself a crowd. Even though the eye first wants to edit all the viewers from Struth's images, to see a Louvre empty of people, he's right to insist that there's no getting away from the crowd. The paintings themselves are a bustling, jostling crowd, each clamoring for your attention.
