The White Ribbon interrogates the conditions for its own possibility as a feature film about violence—to do so, it looks at the status of the individual image. Although some reviewers stress the gulf separating The White Ribbon's stylistic opulence from the aesthetic austerity of Haneke's other theatrical features set in the contemporary world, the director actually stages his dramatic departure as a concerted return. Haneke's engagement with the medium of photography in The White Ribbon can be traced back to his television film Three Paths to the Lake (1976), based on Ingeborg Bachmann’s eponymous story from 1972. The protagonist's successful career as a photojournalist is subjected to scrutiny—the voice-over narrator (Axel Corti), the lover Franz Josef Trotta (Walter Schmidinger), and the protagonist Elisabeth Matrei (Ursula Schult) herself question photojournalism's purpose. “Why do you take pictures?,” Trotta asks Elisabeth accusingly, “Do you think you have to photograph [abfotografieren] destroyed villages or corpses for me to be able to imagine war?” A jarring montage sequence of photographers vying for the perfect shot reveal the rapacious, commercial logic driving them (fig. 24). Trotta's deprecatory locution—“abfotografieren” instead of the more common “fotografieren”—emphasizes the sterile aspect of photography, which simply re-produces and facilely re-presents. Its creativity lies, perhaps, in its introduction of error or falsehood, akin to the circulating rumors in The White Ribbon. Individual photos are never guarantors of some greater truth. Photos undermine what happens on the soundtrack in Three Paths: while a photomontage shows Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, the voice-over narration mentions Churchill and Hemingway. Other photos the photojournalist has supposedly taken include her in the frame. Haneke's TV film compels us to imagine a different image practice beyond the one we observe here. Three Paths demands that we, like Elisabeth, think about the reason for images, especially those depicting suffering and violence. The film asks us to think about why they proliferate and whether their avowed ethical impulse is disingenuous. As I mentioned earlier, Haneke writes himself into a tradition of filmic modernists skeptical of the building blocks of cinema, calling into question the tools of his craft.