Das weiße Band: Michael Haneke’s Theater of Cruelty

After earning the Palme d’Or from the 2009 Cannes Film Festival jury, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon has somewhat implausibly garnered the attention of the mainstream film community, so far winning the 2010 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Picture as well as being nominated for the same category in the upcoming Academy Awards. Implausibly, because Haneke is a director of stringent artistry and hardly in line with the fluff material that typically adorn the film industry’s requisite ceremonies of glamour. The White Ribbon has already been hailed as Haneke’s masterwork, but it is only because, in a curious way, it is an immediately accessible film, gripping and (seemingly) plain-spoken. The master-strokes are unquestionable, the pacing brisk yet measured; but more significantly, it is a film so concentrated in the black-and-white sheen of its cinematographic period, that one forgets it is a contemporary film, a recent one made in 2009 to wit, and not a ‘classic’ from the days when Ingmar Bergman and Sven Nykvist composed the great black-and-white Trilogy comprised of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence.

Haneke clearly wishes to hearken to these ageless standards. One of the lead characters in The White Ribbon, the village pastor, is played by Burghart Klaußner, a man whose grimace and frigidity uncannily match the visage and mood of Bergman regular Gunnar Björnstrand (who coincidentally or not, also played a pastor in Winter Light). The cinematography of Christian Berger, now a common feature in Haneke’s portfolio, manages to sculpt interior wood panels, frozen candlelight, and darkened corridors in an icy marble reminiscent of Nykvist’s lens. Working from an original story of his own (as Bergman had for most of his career), Haneke constructs a fable of cruelty that commences, and ends, on the stage of perverse eros. (The film begins as if it were a play or a story by Chekhov. The curtains unfold, and the narrator, a village schoolteacher, introduces us to a story he only knows partially.)

In the small farming village of Eichwald, Germany, a series of unfortunate events — some of them intentioned by an unknown assailant — begin to menace the townsfolk. The setting takes place a few years before the start of the First World War, and we are offered a glimpse of a time immemorial, before the War mowed down the Austro-Hungarian Empire and began the long arduous changes that would transform Europe. If the lensing of the film recollects the classical tone of Nykvist/Bergman’s great works in black-and-white, then the selection of the characters’ faces bespeaks an internal fascination with historical authenticity. Almost none of the actors seem capable of existing in our own 21st century, so thoroughly vintage do their mannerisms, costumes, and countenance appear to us, as if they were pulled directly from yellow-bordered, sepia-toned, crumbling photographs from bygone days (in which one’s great-grandfather alarmingly shows up, a strapping young man glumly looking ahead).

The faces of the children are most striking in this way. Since the story revolves around the village children and the perverse effect the sins of the fathers have on them, the actors who play the children perform on an exceptional level when they are not so much speaking as when they are staring into a void or thinking or walking stiffly in silence: their faces and their actions speak for them. (The film’s subtitle translates as “A Story of German childhood”.)  Haneke confesses that the most painstaking part of the film’s pre-production was engrossed in the selection of the children who would play in the film: more than 7,000 children, in photographs, videos, and interviews, were auditioned by Haneke and his crew over a span of 6 months, just to get the faces right.

The psychological cruelty that characterizes the action in The White Ribbon is one that may very well represent the overall pathology in Haneke’s films. I mention ‘cruelty,’ with which Haneke’s films are rife (as in Benny’s Video, Funny Games, and The Piano Teacher), but I use the broader definition, in the sense that Antonin Artaud first expressed, in a letter, defending the title of his famous concept of the “Theatre of Cruelty”:

This Cruelty is a matter of neither sadism nor bloodshed, at least not in any systematic way. I do not systematically cultivate horror. The word ‘cruelty’ must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that it is customarily given… One can very well imagine a pure cruelty without bodily laceration. And philosophically speaking what indeed is cruelty? From the point of view of the mind, cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
– Antonin Artaud, letter to J.P. (Paris, September 13, 1932)

Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty is one that sought to destroy the anachronisms of theater arts (which by his time in the 1930s were already being eclipsed by cinema for the attention of the public) through a severe and indeed bodily reengagement with the spectator. Artaud envisioned soundtrack cacophonies that would not lull the spectator but challenge her, torment her even, and scenic elements that would swarm the audience and envelop them in the stage-play, erasing the conventional boundary that separates the stage from the seat of “life.” Artaud’s concept of cruelty thus is a regenerative mechanism that excites in the spectator an authentic and visceral communion with the performance; a cruelty, moreover, that emerges from the scenery and from within the characters of the work (a work that no longer bases itself on the literary text alone but leaps up in the performance and lunges out at the audience), and shrilly and effectively awakens the spectator from the dogmatic slumber of social mores and banalities. Such was Artaud’s hope; that theater (we begin to suspect that he meant more than just theater arts) would enliven the blood and cause hazardous revelations in people equally ordinary and extraordinary.

Haneke’s Theater of Cruelty is one with far more humble, circumspect aims. Like in all his films, Haneke assembles displays of cruelty (sometimes pushing the effect of cruelty to its maximum by hiding the torture that is only hinted at, alluded to) for the purpose of arousing morbid intellectual speculation. The participation of the spectator, bodily speaking, is null – he works, after all, in film and not in theater – but the mental participation is extreme. Haneke does not “systematically cultivate horror” (something a straight-out horror film will do), but he effortlessly conjures “a pure cruelty without bodily laceration,” i.e. a psychological cruelty that harasses the spectator with as much vehemence as it does the characters. Almost all of the “accidents” that occur in the film, even as they escalate, are not shown on screen; we only catch sight of the effect, and never the cause or the act. The narrative is a play on shrewd psychological etiology: those fathers we believe we trust, and those mothers whom we feel will endure, turn out to be monsters and victims.

The schoolteacher who acts as our narrator is a kind man, but as we also find, an ultimately timorous sapless man. No hero emerges, only victims. By the end of the film, we know (we believe we know) who has committed the crimes, but Haneke frustrates us (a common behavior on his part) by upsetting our desire to see a criminal hanged or a culprit flogged. We learn to our horror that this desire to see a hanging, to watch ‘justice’ meted out, is in part a desire to commit the crime ourselves. A choking atmosphere of evil pervades the scenery, even in broad daylight, because its aura is uncontrolled, diffuse, spontaneous combustion. Those who are responsible for the evil are precisely those who won’t have to lift a hand to enact it.

I do not believe that The White Ribbon can be singularly pointed out as Haneke’s best film (The Piano Teacher and Funny Games are every bit as meditatively savage), but I do believe that its motion indicates an auteur at the height of his powers: Haneke does not get better than this. The effect its distilled cruelty has on the mind, in Artaud’s words, “signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.” These are all hallmarks of Haneke’s art and especially of Das weiße Band, which in the film signifies the problematic state of purity and innocence. Haneke recognizes that moral purity, at its extreme end, can also sterilize and stagnate, and result in cruelty. “This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.”