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The White Ribbon

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The White Ribbon
Theatrical release poster
Directed byMichael Haneke
Written byMichael Haneke
Produced byStefan Arndt
Veit Heiduschka
Michael Katz
Margaret Ménégoz
Andrea Occhipinti
StarringChristian Friedel
Ulrich Tukur
Josef Bierbichler
Narrated byErnst Jacobi
CinematographyChristian Berger
Edited byMonika Willi
Production
companies
Wega Film
X Filme
Distributed byFilmladen (Austria)
X Verleih AG (Germany)
Release date
  • 21 May 2009 (2009-05-21) (Cannes)
Running time
144 minutes [1]
LanguageGerman[2]
BudgetUS$18 million[3]
Box officeUS$19.3 million[3]

The White Ribbon is a 2009 black-and-white German-language drama film written and directed by Michael Haneke.[4] Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (literally, "The White Ribbon, a German Children's Story")[5][6] darkly depicts society and family in a northern German village just before World War I and, according to Haneke, "is about the roots of evil. Whether it’s religious or political terrorism, it’s the same thing."[7][8]

The film premiered at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival in May 2009 where it won the Palme d'Or, followed by positive reviews and several other major awards, including the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film also received two nominations at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2009: Best Foreign Language Film (representing Germany) and Best Cinematography (Christian Berger).

Plot

The memories of an unnamed elderly tailor form a parable from the distant year he worked as a village schoolteacher and met his fiancée Eva, a nanny. The setting is the fictitious Protestant village of Eichwald, Germany, from July 1913 to 9 August 1914, where the local pastor, the doctor and the baron rule the roost over the area's women, children and peasant farmers.

The puritanical pastor leads confirmation classes and gives his pubescent children a guilty conscience over apparently small transgressions. He has them wear white ribbons as a reminder of the innocence and purity from which they have strayed. When his son confesses to impure touching, the pastor has the boy’s hands tied to his bed frame each night. The doctor, a widower, treats the village children kindly but humiliates his housekeeper (the local midwife) and is found with his teenage daughter at night. The baron, who is the lord of the manor, underwrites harvest festivities for the villagers, many of them his farm workers. He summarily dismisses Eva for no apparent reason yet defends the integrity of a farmer whose son has destroyed the baron's field of cabbages.

The schoolteacher's friendship with Eva leads to an invitation to her family home during a Christmas break, and they receive permission from her parents to marry after a one-year engagement.

Unexplained events occur. A wire is stretched between two trees causing the doctor a terrible fall from his horse. The farmer's wife dies at the sawmill when rotten floorboards give way; her grieving husband later hangs himself. The baron’s young son goes missing on the day of the harvest festival and is found the following morning in the sawmill, bound and badly caned. A barn at the manor burns down. The baroness tells her husband that she is in love with another man. The steward's daughter has a violent dream about the midwife's handicapped son, then the boy is attacked and almost blinded. Shortly after the pastor's daughter opens his parakeet's cage with scissors in hand, the pastor finds the bird cruelly impaled. The steward at the baron's estate thrashes his son for a petty theft.

The midwife commandeers a bicycle from the schoolteacher to go into town, claiming that she has evidence for the police given to her by her son. She and her son are not seen again, and the doctor's family has also vacated the premises, leaving his practice closed. The schoolteacher's growing suspicions lead to a confrontation in the pastor's rectory, where he insinuates that the pastor's children had prior knowledge of the local troubles. Offended, the pastor threatens the schoolteacher, warning that he will face legal action if he repeats his accusations.

The film ends at the time of the declaration of war on Serbia by Austria–Hungary, with the conclusion in church on the day of a visit from the narrator's prospective father-in-law. Disquiet remains in the village. The narrator left Eichwald, never to return.

Cast

  • Christian Friedel as the school teacher
  • Ernst Jacobi as narrator (the school teacher many years later)
  • Leonie Benesch as Eva, nanny to the baron and baroness's twin babies
  • Ulrich Tukur as the baron
  • Ursina Lardi as the baroness, Marie-Louise
  • Fion Mutert as Sigmund, their oldest son
  • Michael Kranz as Sigmund's tutor
  • Burghart Klaußner as the pastor
  • Steffi Kühnert as Anna, the pastor's wife
  • Maria-Victoria Dragus as Klara, their oldest daughter
  • Leonard Proxauf as Martin, their oldest son
  • Levin Henning as Adolf
  • Johanna Busse as Margarete
  • Thibault Sérié as Gustav
  • Josef Bierbichler as the baron's steward
  • Gabriela Maria Schmeide as Emma, his wife
  • Janina Fautz as Erna, their daughter
  • Enno Trebs as Georg
  • Theo Trebs as Ferdinand
  • Rainer Bock as the doctor
  • Roxane Duran as Anna, the doctor's daughter
  • Susanne Lothar as the midwife
  • Eddy Grahl as Karli, her son
  • Branko Samarovski as a peasant
  • Birgit Minichmayr as Frieda
  • Aaron Denkel as Kurti
  • Detlev Buck as Eva's father
  • Carmen-Maja Antoni as the bathing midwife

Production

Michael Haneke has said the project was in development for more than ten years.[9] The initial version of the script was written as a television mini-series for the Austrian broadcaster ORF, but when no co-producer who was willing to invest in the project had been found after five years had passed, Haneke decided to put the project on hold.[10] Eventually revived as a feature film, the production was led by the Austrian company Wega Film. It was also co-produced by X Filme (Germany), Les Films Du Losange (France) and Lucky Red (Italy).[11] The film received financial support from the Austrian Film Institute, various local funds in Germany, the French CNC and the Council of Europe's film fund Eurimages.[12] It had a total budget of around 12 million Euro.[10]

More than 7,000 children were interviewed during the six-month-long casting period. For most of the adult roles, Haneke selected actors with whom he had worked before and therefore knew they were suitable for the roles.[9] The role of the pastor was originally written for Ulrich Mühe, an actor who had starred in several of Haneke's past productions, but who died in 2007. Various actors were considered for replacement and eventually the part went to Burghart Klaußner, whom the director did not personally know before. Actors with significant stage experience were preferred because of the measured language of the screenplay.[13]

Filming took place between 9 June and 4 September 2008. Locations were used in Leipzig, Lübeck, Michaelisbruch (Dreetz) and Netzow (Plattenburg)[14] and Dassow (Schloss Johannstorf).[15] The choice to make the film in black and white was based partly on the resemblance to photographs of the era, but also to create a distancing effect.[9] All scenes were originally shot in color and then altered to black and white. Christian Berger, Haneke's usual director of photography, shot the film in Super 35 using a Moviecam Compact. Before filming started, Berger studied the black-and-white films Ingmar Bergman made with Sven Nykvist as cinematographer. Haneke wanted the environments to be very dark, so many indoor scenes used only practical light sources such as oil lamps and candles. In some of the darkest scenes, where the crew had been forced to add artificial lighting, extra shadows could be removed in the digital post-production which allowed for extensive retouching.[16] The team in Vienna also sharpened objects and facial expressions, and modern details were removed from the images. In the dance scene, where the camera moves in 360 degrees, tiles were added frame by frame to replace the original Eternit roofs.[13]

Release

Cast and crew at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of the film

The film received its premiere on 21 May 2009 as an official selection at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival and had its theatrical release in Austria on 25 September 2009.[10][17] In Germany, a release in selected cinemas on 17 September was followed by wide release on 15 October.[18] American distribution by Sony Pictures Classics began 30 December 2009.[19]

With a fully German cast and setting, as well as co-production by a German company, it has been discussed whether the film should be regarded as an Austrian or German production. Haneke himself has expressed indifference on the question: "In the Olympic Games the medal doesn't go to the country, but to the athlete." The general feeling is that it is primarily a Michael Haneke film.[20]

Reception

Critical response

In Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, Julia Evers called the film "an oppressive and impressive moral painting, in which neither the audience nor the people in the village find an escape valve from the web of authority, hierarchy and violence. [...] Everything in The White Ribbon is true. And that is why it is so difficult to bear."[21] Markus Keuschnigg of Die Presse praised the "sober cinematography" along with the pacing of the narrative. Keuschnigg opposed any claims about the director being cold and cynical, instead hailing him as uncompromising and sincerely humanistic.[22] Die Welt's Peter Zander compared The White Ribbon to Haneke's previous films Benny's Video and Funny Games, both centering around the theme of violence. Zander concluded that while the violence in the previous films had seemed distant and constructed, The White Ribbon demonstrates how it is a part of our reality. Zander also applauded the "perfectly cast children", whom he held as "the real stars of this film".[23] "Mighty, monolithic and fearsome it stands in the cinema landscape. A horror drama, free from horror images", Christian Buß wrote in Der Spiegel, and expressed delight in how the film deviates from the conventions of contemporary German cinema: "Director Michael Haneke forces us to learn how to see again". Buß suggested references in the name of the fictitious village, "Eichwald", to the Nazi Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann and the Buchenwald concentration camp.[24] Eichwald is however a common German place name, meaning the "Oak Forest".

Critics such as Claudia Puig of USA Today praised the film's cinematography and performances while criticizing its "glacial pace" and "lack [of] the satisfaction of a resolution or catharsis."[25] Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post wrote that trying to locate the seeds of fascism in religious hypocrisy and authoritarianism is "a simplistic notion, disturbing not in its surprise or profundity, but in the sadistic trouble the filmmaker has taken to advance it."[26] Philip Maher at allmovie.com found the director "ham-handed" and "in the end his attempt at lucidity inevitably draws us further from the essential nature of fascism".[27]

Review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes reports that 85% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 137 reviews, with an average score of 7.6/10.[28]

Accolades and awards

At the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, the film received the jury's highest prize, the Palme d'Or, and the international film critics' prize, plus a special mention from the Ecumenical Jury.[17][29] This was followed in August by the FIPRESCI Grand Prix for best film of the year.[30] It won three major prizes at the 2009 European Film Awards, held in Bochum, Germany, for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenwriter.[31] At the 67th annual Golden Globes, the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2010 the film won the BBC Four World Cinema Award.[32]

The film was a nominee in the category Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. Its submission as an entry of Germany rather than Austria was the source of some controversy,[33] since the Academy would have accepted it as a submission from either country. Martin Schweighofer, head of the Austrian Film Commission, expressed misgivings about the decision: "The discomfort arises because of the vague rules of the Academy. In essential functions the film is Austrian." It has been reported that the American distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, pressured Germany to submit it rather than Austria because the Academy had nominated Austrian films two years running and three in a row was considered unlikely.[34]

In April 2010, the film received ten Lolas at the German Film Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.[35]

References

  1. ^ "The White Ribbon (15)". British Board of Film Classification. 1 October 2009. Retrieved 4 September 2012.
  2. ^ "BFI ¦ Film & TV Database ¦ Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (2009)". British Film Institute. London.
  3. ^ a b The White Ribbon at Box Office Mojo
  4. ^ Buchanan, Jason. "The White Ribbon". Allmovie. Retrieved 11 November 2012.
  5. ^ Scott, A O. "The White Ribbon". New York Times. Retrieved 23 November 2012.
  6. ^ McCarthy, Todd. "The White Ribbon". Variety. Retrieved 23 November 2012.
  7. ^ Austria Presse Agentur (2009-05-24 Michael Haneke: Das Spiel mit der Angst" (in German). Kurier. Retrieved 24 May 2009.
  8. ^ White Ribbon: Interview with Director Michael Haneke (2013-08-20) "[1]". Emaneul Levy Cinema. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
  9. ^ a b c Lemercier, Fabien (2009-05-21) "Interview with Michael Haneke". Cineuropa. Retrieved 2009-05-25.
  10. ^ a b c Austria Presse Agentur (2009-04-23) "Michael Hanekes ist im Wettbewerb" (in German). Der Standard. Retrieved 2009-05-25.
  11. ^ Vienna Film Fund - Das weiße Band
  12. ^ Weisse Band, Das (in German). Austrian Film Institute. Retrieved 2009-12-11.
  13. ^ a b Omasta, Michael; Pekler, Michael. "In jedem meiner Filme muss ich laut lachen" (in German). Falter. 38/2009. Retrieved 2009-11-23.
  14. ^ The White Ribbon. Filmportal.de. Deutsches Filminstitut Retrieved 2009-12-11.
  15. ^ Freude in Dassow nach Golden Globes
  16. ^ Oppenheimer, Jean. "Rural Terrorism". American Cinematographer (January 2010): 18–24. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
  17. ^ a b "Festival de Cannes: The White Ribbon". festival-cannes.com. Cannes Film Festival. Retrieved 9 May 2009.
  18. ^ DAS WEISSE BAND - EINE DEUTSCHE KINDERGESCHICHTE (in German). X-verleih.de. X Verleih AG. Retrieved 2009-12-11.
  19. ^ McClintock, Pamela (2009-06-17) "Sony to unfurl 'Ribbon' at Christmas". Variety. Retrieved 2009-06-22.
  20. ^ Austria Presse Agentur (2009-05-28) "Michael Hanekes 'Matura'-Feier" (in German). Der Standard. Retrieved 2009-05-30.
  21. ^ Ever, Julia (2009-09-23). "Eine deutsche Gewaltgeschichte" (in German). Oberösterreichische Nachrichten. Retrieved 2010-01-31.
  22. ^ Keuschnigg, Markus (2009-09-21). "Nüchterner Humanismus" (in German). Die Presse. Retrieved 2010-01-31.
  23. ^ Zander, Peter (2009-10-15). "Die schmerzhafte Kinderstube der Nazi-Generation" (in German). Die Welt. Retrieved 2010-01-31.
  24. ^ Buß, Christian (2009-10-14). "Monster im Dorf" (in German). Der Spiegel. Retrieved 2010-01-31.
  25. ^ Puig, Claudia (8 January 2010). "Elegant 'White Ribbon' gets all tied up in monotonous gloom". USA Today.
  26. ^ "The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)". The Washington Post.
  27. ^ Maher, Philip. "The White Ribbon review". Retrieved 15 January 2013.
  28. ^ "The White Ribbon". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 31 December 2009.
  29. ^ Stone, Jay (2009-05-23). "Antichrist gets an anti-award in Cannes". National Post. Retrieved 2009-05-23. Archived 2009-05-27 at the Wayback Machine
  30. ^ Hopewell, John (2009-08-27). "'White Ribbon' wins Fipresci prize". Variety. Retrieved 2009-08-28.
  31. ^ Meza, Ed (2009-12-12). "'White Ribbon' is a fav at European Film Awards". Variety. Retrieved 2009-12-13.
  32. ^ "White Ribbon takes BBC Four World Cinema award". BBC News. BBC News. 8 October 2010. Retrieved 8 October 2010.
  33. ^ Meza, Ed (2009-08-26). "Oscar could wear 'White'". Variety. Retrieved 2009-08-28.
  34. ^ (2009-08-28) "Haneke greift für Deutschland nach Gold" (in German). Der Standard. Retrieved 2009-08-28.
  35. ^ "Deutscher Filmpreis 2010". Spiegel Online. Spiegel Online. 24 April 2010.
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