“It’s very double-edged, very ambivalent” - Michael Haneke on “The White Ribbon”
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- The film takes place in a German village where strange accidents soon appear to be deliberate.
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The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band) was awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. It has also been nominated for an Oscar in the category of “Best Foreign Film.” Thilo Wydra interviewed Michael Haneke about his film.
The viewer cannot help but speculate about the open ending of your film The White Ribbon...
I’m the only one who doesn’t (laughs).
One leaves the film urgently demanding an answer.
If you don’t get an answer, then you have to go looking for one.
There’s something Kafkaesque about that.
The viewer is always right. From his point of view, he’s right. Otherwise he wouldn’t see it in that way.
Kafka’s Trial was written in 1914, and your film also takes place in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War. In Kafka, it’s always about an innocent guilty individual.
In twentieth-century literature, I believe that Kafka is somewhere in the fore. He is, at least in German, the author who had the most influence on subsequent generations. Once you’ve read him, you can’t forget the experience. You can read Kafka only with intellectual or artistic pleasure. But that’s like when a piece of ice falls on your finger when the temperature is 20 degrees. It hurts.
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- Set in Protestant northern Germany on the eve of World War I, the film tells the story of the village's children, their teacher and their families.
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Can you recall what was the initial inspiration for The White Ribbon?
Not really, no. Quite simply, I’ve forgotten. I’m not being coy. I don’t know when – I know what was, as it were, the first idea: to show a children’s choir that has absolutized the ideals preached to it and sets itself up as judge of the preachers who don’t live up to those ideals. That was the basic idea. To show how radicalism and terrorism arise -- of whatever kind.
Their germ…
Yes, exactly. It’s always the case that people who are under pressure, who are bad off, who are suffering for whatever reason - and you can of course show this particularly well with children - grasp at any straw that could pull them out of their predicament. That’s an idea that can naturally be converted into ideology, a favorite means. Whether that leads to right-wing fascism or left-wing fascism or religious fascism - it will certainly always look different each time in context and you’d have to describe it differently, but this basic principle is probably the same everywhere. If you take Islamists, you could make a film where what I’ve just said would apply exactly - though it would of course look different from my film and describe entirely different social conditions. And that was the idea. But I no longer remember how and when I hit on it.
Extremism as a global theme...
I can recall that I had read a little bit about Italian fascism, and it had struck me that fascism in Italy was actually different from that in Germany. This mentality of bureaucratic honor - Eichmann, who had no consciousness of his guilt at all, but thought he’d only been doing his duty. Or the “Red Army Faction,” which didn’t do what it did from negative motives. It came partly out of a Protestant background, at least Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, whom I knew, and who was a very, very honourable person. At the end of 1960s she wrote a piece for us, when I was still an editor at the Southwest Radio. And the woman - she was brilliant! Brilliant and engaged and full of compassion for people she was interested in.
Suppression and aggression on the one hand, veneration and reverence on the other. It all goes together ...
It’s not so simple - every ideology that is absolutized, including religiosity, religious history. I’ve talked to people who find that The White Ribbon is a film against religion. That’s absolute nonsense. I have absolutely nothing against religion - quite the contrary. Protestantism – I grew up myself as a Protestant - has always moved me very much. But the danger lurking in this rigorism that is peculiar to Protestantism is a certain elitism. As a Protestant, I have to come to grips directly with my conscience and God. I don’t have the institution of the priest, who can forgive me. It’s all very double-edged, very ambivalent.
It’s also about man’s guilt, and again about the innocent guilty individual.
The question of guilt is a central one in all my films, which come of course from this quarter - probably. All those who have grown up in the Judeo-Christian tradition can hardly manage without coming to terms with this idea. When you consider yourself as a social being, you are incessantly guilty.
In addition to all that there is the subtle manipulation: for instance, that of the viewer by the director. Funny Games is pure manipulative cinema. On another level, The White Ribbon, too. Alfred Hitchcock was a master of this.
In Funny Games you are marked as an accomplice; that’s what made people so angry. Because I made them into accomplices and then reproached them with letting themselves be made into accomplices. That’s the nasty method of it (laughs). I manipulate the viewer into independence, so that he can take up a position to the manipulation. There are incredibly many people who still get worked up about this. That’s quite all right with me, because they are really getting worked up only over themselves.
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- Munich-born Austrian director Michael Haneke has received numerous awards for his films.
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Michael Haneke is the creator of, among other films, the media critical trilogy The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny’s Video (1992) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of an Accident and the film adaptations The Castle (1977), after Kafka, and The Piano Player (2001), after Jelinek. Before The White Ribbon, he made an American remake of his controversial and brilliant film Funny Games (1997), which restaged it scene for scene and was also premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Thilo Wydra, free-lance publicist, author and the German correspondent for the Cannes Film Festival, conducted the interview.
Translation: Jonathan Uhlaner
Copyright: Goethe-Institut
