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.
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