The White Ribbon

2010_11_13 The White Ribbon
In a way “The White Ribbon” is a poor man’s version of Robert Musil’s novel THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES. I mean that in the sense Musil’s novel is an aristocratic dark prelude to the First World War, whereas Director Hennke narrative takes place in a remote village in Northern Germany in 1913 and 1914. However, it is also much darker in spirit and more ominous than Musil’s narrative. There are three commanding male figures in ”The White Ribbon,” a doctor, a pastor and a Baron, a feudal Lord in a location that hardly seems in the 20th century. They are a nasty triangle of men who practiced a brutal form on male dominance over the women and the children of the village. It is also a story of a silent war going on between the children and the high-and-might triumvirate of Baron/Pastor/Doctor, three professionals that have usurps all authority over the peasant farmers. This war was largely subterranean and events are not clearly spelled out; there are a lot of suggestions about what was going on but ambiguity overrules clarity. There is much that is unanswered and never resolved. Many of Hennke’s films are like that.
The movie opens with the doctor mounted on his horse riding back home. When he approaches his garden the horse takes a tumble and the doctor breaks his collarbone in the accident. Only it turns out to be not an accident as someone had stretched a thin wire tied to two trees across the path and the horse had tripped over it. The incident put the doctor in the hospital for several weeks. By the time the police get there to investigate someone has removed the wire. We never find out who the guilty party was, although by the end of the movie we have some strong suspicions. There are eventually two other destructive incidents that take place but which are never resolved. Someone set fire to the Pastor’s barn which was burned to the ground, and the retarded son of the midwife was brutally assaulted and nearly blinded. The Baron’s son was also kidnapped and found tied to tree in the woods. There were a couple of attacks against the evil trio when we do know which one of the younger folks did it. The oldest son of one farmers, angry at his mother’s death which he blames on the Baron’s carelessness, destroys a huge cabbage patch belonging to the Baron and the pastor’s oldest daughter, one of the apparent ringleaders of the secretly rebellious youths, kills her father’s pet bird without attempting to cover her tracks. She killed the bird with a scissor and put it on his desk in the shape of a cross. The Pastor regularly canes his kids for minor infractions of his protocol of Christian behavior. In another instant, he had another son tie his 14 year old son to his bed to prevent him from masturbating and lectures the lad about such sinful behavior which could end up corrupting his nerves. As the abuse accumulates and the story unfolds it is no mystery why the kids push back against the tyranny of “the fathers.”
The only sympathetic male adult in the movie is the local schoolteacher. He’s also the voice of the narrator of the story—in old age as he looks back at his time in the village. He figures out what has likely happened but makes the mistake of talking to the pastor who calls him vile for suggesting any of his children would stoop to the behavior the teacher is suggesting. The Pastor is just covering his ass because if the authorities are called in he too could be swept up in the scandal of terrible abuse of the vulnerable children. He is a Christian hypocrite of the worst sort, a zealot who disciplines his kids like he was a Gestapo Captain. He beats them; he verbally abuses them by tearing them down as inadequate; and never shows them any warmth, love, or affection. He maintains a cool image and a stance of frowning down his nose at them. The mother is pathetically neglected, treated as a maid, not much more than that. It’s a breeding ground for revolution.
If the Pastor lives to exercise power, the Doctor lives for vanity’s sake. He is the nasty rooster who likes perverse sex, like fucking his live-in punching board, the Village midwife, a woman about 40, and the mother of the retarded boy Karli. After having sex with the midwife he tells her she’s ugly, has bad breath, and he wishes she’d “just die.” He also likes to finger his eldest daughter while he masturbates. She’s probably 16. He’s grotesquely arrogant, egotistical, and absent of empathy—an unsavory role model At the end of the movie he, his kids, the midwife and her son, all disappear, but not together and mysteriously—without a word to anybody. The last we see of the midwife she is borrowing a bike from the schoolteacher to go into town to tell authorities she knew who strung that trip-wire. But that was little more than a ruse to leave the village.
The Baron is the Lord of the Manor and the ceremonial spokesman for the village, the sponsor of the harvest festivities and the employer of many of the farmers. He looks and acts like an aristocrat. His wife dares to confront him with the fact she is leaving him and this hateful village “so full of brutality, envy, revenge and resentment.” The actress who played the role showed how nervous and fearful she was in opposing the “Lord of the Manor.” But as the film concludes she is still with her husband. The Baron’s steward had come in while they Baron and his wife were arguing to tell him some big news: the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated in the streets of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. At this point the film rather hurriedly come to an ambiguous end, while the narrator tells us he was drafted, went in the army, survived the war, but never went back to the village, so he never found out if any of those strange events were solved and understood. The final image in the movie is all the villagers gathered in the church to discuss the war. As people sit waiting the picture slowly turns dimmer and dimmer till, finally, the screen goes dark.
The film was shot in black and white, which was good I think. For one thing it was in tune with the drab character of the village and its environs. The black clothes the girls and women wear seem fitting, in-sync with the puritanical gloss of the culture and the stern Patriarchy that was still so pervasive and dominant.
When all is said and done “The White Ribbon” is a terrible indictment of the Germanic version of fatherhood and it helps us understand why “The Great War” happened and why someone like Hitler was able to come to power, as he was or represented the ultimate expression of the omnipotent paterfamilias.