The White Ribbon

The White Ribbon (2009) is set in a village in northern Germany between 1913 and 1914. A series of things happen: the doctor's horse is brought down by a wire, a child is taken and beaten, a barn burns. Nobody is caught. The village schoolteacher recounts it years later. The subject is not crime but discipline. Children in the village are punished harshly; the pastor ties a white ribbon on his as a sign of purity. Michael Haneke shows, without ever saying it, that this generation will be adults in the thirties. It is in black and white, but was shot digitally and desaturated afterwards; Haneke chose that route to get closer to the texture of period photographs. Christian Berger was the cinematographer. There is no score. The only music heard is music the characters play or sing. The children were cast from thousands of applicants, and Haneke worked with them without sharing the content of the scenes. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2009. It was nominated for Academy Awards in Foreign Language Film and Cinematography and won the Golden Globe for Foreign Language Film. It runs 144 minutes. Good for: formal discipline, films about historical origins, and Haneke. Less good for: it answers nothing and never identifies who did any of it, deliberately and unsatisfyingly. There is violence towards children and animals. At 144 minutes the pace is deliberately cold.