read full article: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/the-white-ribbon/
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Michael Haneke’s latest movie “The White Ribbon”, which opens this
December at theaters everywhere, received my vote for best foreign film
in 2009. Shot in black-and-white, it is the study of social relations in
a German farming village on the eve of WWI. Nominally, a “whodunit”
about a spate of incomprehensibly gratuitous violent crimes, it is much
more of an attempt on Haneke’s part to understand the rise of fascism in
Germany. Despite his claim that the movie is more generally about
authoritarianism, it serves—at least for this viewer—as the artistic
counterpart of Arno Mayer’s groundbreaking “The Persistence of the Old
Regime”. For both Mayer and Haneke, the persistence of feudal
relationships not only explains WWI, but the rise of fascism and WWII as
well. Although Nazism is most associated with the motto Kinder, Küche,
Kirche, “The White Ribbon” illustrates that these values had deep roots
in German society. And Haneke’s main goal is to show their underlying
perverse realities.
