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10 - Choric Configurations and the Collective: Ruth Beckermann’s Films
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- By Fatima Naqvi
- Edited by Claudia Breger, Columbia University, New York, Olivia Landry, Virginia Commonwealth University
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- Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 May 2024
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- 12 March 2024, pp 183-201
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Summary
In this re-politicized age, the collective and its representation has moved to the forefront of our interest. How can the collective be figured in documentary films with aesthetic ambitions? Is there a way for the body politic to emerge without using obvious historical footage of protest movements, parades, processions, or a panoply of talking heads? How might these kinds of films, which tend to wear their politics on their sleeve, represent the group without falling prey to propaganda? Are there new ways of representing the agon of collectives in the public sphere, and, if so, what stylistic means are used?1 How do the films negotiate the consent of their subjects, that is, what a director chooses to show about the implied community? And, finally, what are the possibilities for new polities— perhaps a kind of rejuvenated chorus of antiquity—to emerge from particular modalities of such documentary filmmaking?
In attempting to answer some of these questions, I take as my case study the films of acclaimed Austrian director Ruth Beckermann. She establishes a documentary mode of choric configurations, one that presses spatial qualities into the service of explicit and implicit collectives. In Die Geträumten (The Dreamed Ones, 2016, 89 min.), Waldheims Walzer (The Waldheim Waltz, 2018, 93 min.), and Mutzenbacher (2022, 100 min.), Beckermann reflects on contemporary socio-sexual, economic, and political mores through the lens of the past. Whether it be the fraught love story between two of the German-speaking world’s postwar literary greats, the election of a former SA member as President of the Second Austrian Republic, or the re-publication of the 1906 pornographic novel, Josephine Mutzenbacher (2021), all three films represent marginalized or oppositional voices. In this regard, Beckermann uses overdetermined sites to profoundly reflect on the possibility and ephemerality of political collectives that arise out of a sense of historical injustice. She sets Die Geträumten in the soon-to-be-defunct inter-war radio broadcast studio Funkhaus Wien, she circles the central St. Stephen’s Square during Waldheim’s election campaign in Waldheims Walzer, and she situates an open casting call for Mutzenbacher in the now partially razed coffin factory- cum-cultural center Kulturzentrum F23 Wien-Liesing. These locales, where readings from the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, protests against presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim, and conversations about the pedophilic novel Mutzenbacher occur, become spatially and temporally porous.
Contents
- Fatima Naqvi
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- The White Ribbon
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 September 2020
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Notes
- Fatima Naqvi
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- The White Ribbon
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Black Pedagogy
- Fatima Naqvi
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- The White Ribbon
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 29-35
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Summary
If the Kurrent penmanship intimates the personalized gesture within an abstracted system of writing and thinking, it also indicates the larger educational structures that attempted to produce similar (even uniform) individuals beholden to certain moral codes and models of development. In the film, Haneke examines educational institutions and methods of child-rearing belonging to a long Western tradition that was thoroughly criticized in post-1968 Germany. In doing so, he makes direct use of the aforementioned work of the critic Katharina Rutschky (1941–2010). In 1977 Rutschky, part of the generation invested in unmasking authoritarian practices in everyday life, published her book Schwarze Pädagogik: Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung (Black Pedagogy: Sources for the Natural History of Bourgeois Education), a compendium of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century texts on “Erziehung,” the difficult-to-translate noun meaning schooling, child-rearing, upbringing, disciplining, formation. Employing the caustic designation “black pedagogy” in her title, Rutschky reveals the pernicious side of Enlightenment pedagogy with her polemically chosen excerpts from various treatises espousing reform. These include works by famed pedagogues Campe, Basedow, and Pestalozzi, psychological studies, serial novels, handbooks, and manuals. Taking her cue from Norbert Elias's magisterial On the Process of Civilization (1939, republished 1969) and Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1960), Rutschky demonstrates how emotional and ideological continuities in Erziehung continue well beyond the “pedagogical century,” the name given the eighteenth century with its Rousseauian inclinations and efforts to make pedagogy a public rather than a private matter. Historical drawings in her six-hundred-page compendium show strange devices to improve posture, architecture for teacher-centered instruction (Frontalunterricht), and climbing equipment to strengthen and discipline young bodies. In Rutschky's view, the discovery of the child within the family unit goes hand in hand with efforts to internalize authority and subjugate children under duplicitous pretenses. She impugns viewing childhood as an incubation period, for it facilitates the concept that teachers need “total access” (Zugriff) to the child. The youngster becomes a “blank space, a tabula rasa, which every pedagogue desires in order to more easily inscribe himself on it.” Such a system propagates itself, churning out more pedagogues who reproduce the institutions that have created them. Child-rearing and disciplining practices (Erziehung) first supplement and then displace education (Bildung), which is interested more in the transmission of knowledge and the full unfolding of an individual's capacities.
The Unresolved Mystery
- Fatima Naqvi
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- The White Ribbon
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Summary
Although the film gives no clear-cut solution to the crimes, the culprits can be discerned by way of strict symmetries and careful perspectival lines. At the beginning, the doctor rides into the frame from the exact midpoint, a small speck growing larger. After his sudden fall, a cut again turns our attention to the central vanishing point—from which his daughter emerges. The wrongdoers are often caught in this manner, in a mise-en-abyme staging. They are in the foreground of the image plane, centered and in plain sight. The mirroring quality—with one perpetrator reflected in the other— underlines the infinite regress of culpability in a world where such social structures and psychic economies predominate. Numerous guilty parties exist across generations.
The director's studied open-endedness, his strong desire not to offer narrative closure, is counteracted on a formal level in this way. Other Haneke films such as Code Unknown, Caché, or Happy End (2017) stress their lack of resolution, the viewers’ inability to judge, and the situations’ indecipherability. Yet the filmmaker has always encouraged us to move our eyes along sight lines, into and out of the central vanishing point or horizontally across the picture plane in a side-to-side motion. He has done this to question our desire for depth, with all its attendant metaphorical accretions of interiority, soulfulness, and truthfulness. For a film like The White Ribbon, which emphasizes reading and writing, the horizontal movement is especially important. The answer lies where the axes intersect at the front of the image plane.
It is helpful to think back to an early adaptation of Haneke's as a statement of visual intent: Wer war Edgar Allan? (Who Was Edgar Allan?, 1984) is another open-ended mystery. The TV film is, like Three Paths to the Lake, far more traditional in its stylistic means than Haneke's theatrical releases, but it contains many elements we could consider trademark. Visual clues lead the student protagonist (Paulus Manker) on a fruitless pursuit down dark Venetian alleys and through cavernous interior spaces with a strong central vanishing point. The fugitive is a secretive older man, aptly named Edgar Allan (Rolf Hoppe).
Inscriptions
- Fatima Naqvi
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- The White Ribbon
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Summary
The White Ribbon consistently thematizes the pressures of individuation in a society that operates according to patterns of abstraction and the goal of normativity. In this regard, let us return to the subtitle and the opening credits. The etching of the letters on the screen foreshadows later moments of physical and mental inscription on the bodies and psyches of the young. Haneke originally scribbled three potential subtitles on the script from the 10th of April, 2008. As alternatives, he noted: “The Story of the Teacher” (Die Erzählung des Lehrers), “The School of Virtuousness” (Die Schule der Rechtschaffenheit), “A Children's Story from Germany” (Eine Kindergeschichte aus Deutschland), and “A German Children's Story” (Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte). By choosing the last variant, the film already introduces doubt, vagueness, and uncertainty—it undermines a subtitle's purpose. With the genetivus subiectivus and genetivus obiectivus of the composite noun “Kindergeschichte,” we wonder whether this is a story of German children or a German story for children. Are they the subjects or the objects of this narrative? The indefinite pronoun “a” rather than “the” further complicates the generalizing impetus propelling any interpretation. How does this singular story stand in relation to other German children's stories? Is it one possible history (Geschichte) of German children? The question also arises: who is using this invisible stylus to write in cursive, in Kurrent script, across the black screen?
Handwriting marks the intersection of social and biopolitical concerns, as education produces middle class, bourgeois individuals as well as a people—the German Volk—in the course of the nineteenth century. Script, taught in schools, is one means of integrating children into literate society. Kurrent, also known as German cursive, and its simplified variant Sutterlin (introduced in 1911 and propagated widely starting in 1935) only disappeared from schoolbooks in the first half of the 1940s. The Kurrent font thus acts as an authenticating effect. In 1913, this would have been the handwriting style children learned. However, the old-fashioned script in the credit sequence is illegible to anyone who is not of advanced age. Even the people involved in the film's production had to familiarize themselves with the now antiquated German cursive: some advertising posters contained an incorrect double “h” in “deutsch” as well as in “Kindergeschichte” (fig. 9). The slowly unfurling script, in a style most viewers are unable to read, focalizes attention on the subtitle's limited comprehensibility.
An Ecology of Images
- Fatima Naqvi
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- The White Ribbon
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 62-66
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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.
Women’s Meta-Commentary
- Fatima Naqvi
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- The White Ribbon
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Returning to the complexities of perverted moral codes and latent fascist tendencies also gives Haneke the opportunity to continue the gender legacy of New German Cinema (NGC). It, too, offered sociopolitical criticism in the form of literary adaptations, with complex female characters like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 Effi Briest or Volker Schlöndorff 's heroine in Coup de grâce (1976). Figures like Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, dir. R. W. Fassbinder, 1979) or Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff, 1977) point out the semantic difference between loving and liking some- one, between making love and fornicating. Haneke, too, has often portrayed free-thinking women who can parse the differences between love and lust. However, he explicitly made his television film Fraulein: A German Melodrama (Fraulein—Ein deutsches Melodram, 1986) to refute what he perceived as the hypocrisy of Fassbinder’s Maria Braun. In his view, women are less capable of re-invention than men—they have more completely internalized society's restrictions, even if they are more critical toward them. Like Maria Braun, Katharina Blum, or Johanna (Angelica Domröse) in Fraulein, the women in The White Ribbon distinguish between copulation for sex's sake and out of love—and this irrespective of their social class, so whether baroness or midwife. But in keeping with Haneke's views of limited gender mobility, the baroness does not desert her husband and the midwife stays with the abusive doctor. Haneke also has drawn attention to the fact that the women of the Red Army Faction, a recurrent subject in NGC films such as Germany in Autumn (dir. Alexander Kluge et al., 1978) or Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit, dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1981), were an inspiration for figures like Klara. Ulrike Meinhof and her film Bambule (1970), about pedagogical practices aimed at wayward girls, are also an important source. Finally, Meinhof 's Christian background as well as her RAF comrade Gudrun Ensslin's Protestant upbringing play into the presentation of the young women and their revolt against the fathers in The White Ribbon.
Working Through Working Through
- Fatima Naqvi
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- The White Ribbon
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Haneke links the subcutaneous violence in all social strata present in 1913 to the rise of fascism a decade onward, the upsurge of the Red Army Faction fifty years later, and the spread of terrorism forty years after that. Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009) helps us understand this melding of epochs. Rothberg explains how various groups’ histories of victimization come into conflict in the public sphere. In some of the acrimonious debates he describes, one group's history is seen to displace other histories. In this scenario, the “public sphere in which collective memories are articulated is a scarce resource” in which “the interaction of different collective memories […] takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence.” Against this view of memory as a finite entity where one past elides another, Rothberg argues that memory is an encompassing thing in a state of continual negotiation and re-negotiation. He examines the period between 1945 and 1962, which witnessed the “rise of consciousness of the Holocaust as an unprecedented form of modern genocide and the coming to national consciousness and political independence of many of the subjects of European colonialism.” Rothberg's reflections provide context for multidirectional memory in Haneke's oeuvre, where an awareness of the Shoah's centrality co-exists with the cognizance of other oppression. The competitive struggles over recognition that continue to “haunt contemporary, pluralistic societies” animate Haneke's films, where “displacement and substitution in acts of remembrance” characterize figures’ response to historical and social injustices.
In many ways, Haneke also follows Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), to which Adorno alludes in his essays on Erziehung. For Adorno and Horkheimer, writing against the backdrop of National Socialism and the collapse of the liberal state, the Enlightenment project reverts to the superstition and myth out of which reason supposedly emerged. The so-called historical progress of reason turns out to be a return to barbarism. The domination of the external world can only be had at the expense of subjugating one’s inner nature and through a pathological relationship to the body.
Coda
- Fatima Naqvi
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- The White Ribbon
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When the film closes, the first-person frame is flouted: a transcendent perspective replaces the human one. The point of view does not coincide with the teacher’s, who has been our guide and instructor. The White Ribbon ends with a long shot of the church interior, as the children's chorus begins to sing (fig. 27). The teacher positions himself to the left of the choir at the top of the tableau. He directs Martin Luther's hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” The lyrics stress the spatial dimensions of unwavering faith, envisioning belief as a secure military fortress. “A mighty fortress [Ein’ feste Burg] is our God, / A bulwark never failing: / Our helper He, amid the flood / Of mortal ills prevailing,” sing the children, with a professional choir acoustically overlaying their voices.
In closing, the narrator re-articulates the lack of knowledge he had thematized at the beginning. But before he does so, his language plays on the “hardiness” and “festiveness” inherent in the word “fest” mentioned in the children's chorale (ein’ feste Burg). The sense of enclosure, whereby home is imagined as a fortification (Festung), conflicts with the joyous festival (Fest) and centripetal force of impending change. The fortress has long been breached metaphorically, and for viewers the scene becomes a proleptic funerary mass. Before the final fade-out, the narrator describes the general excitement:
The whole town came to the festive service on the following Sunday. An atmosphere of expectation and departure lay in the air. Everything would now change. In light of the anticipated war, Eva's father had retrieved his daughter from the city and, due to her incessant pleas, come to Eichwald in order to see the home and workplace of his future son-in- law. With a view to perhaps soon being able to call the beloved being my wife, this day was a feast day for me as well.
Acknowledgments
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The White Ribbon
- Fatima Naqvi
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Explores Haneke's historically complex film as a reflection on purity, ideology, violence, and child-rearing.
Literariness
- Fatima Naqvi
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In the German-speaking world, adapting films from literature has many implications. It shores up the canon of the educated bourgeoisie, the Bildungsbürgertum. It implies the wish to write oneself into this literary tradition, which confers distinction and cultural capital. It means participating in the circulation of words for geopolitical reasons (after 1945, adaptations marked West Germany's superiority over the German Democratic Republic, for instance, as inheritors of a “true” German tradition and vice versa). For Haneke, the strategy of evoking literature serves another function: it elicits déjà-vu on the part of an intellectual audience familiar with famous books relating to the lead-up to war and its outbreak. Haneke thereby augments viewers’ sense of inexorability and emphasizes the portentous nature of seemingly minor occurrences—they foreshadow the great cataclysm of World War I and World War II.
Since many of Haneke's films are based on well-known literature, a mature work like The White Ribbon self-confidently plays with convention in serving up a faux screen adaptation. The director is interested in the pre-war period, when an “epoch lies on its deathbed,” in the Austrian writer Karl Kraus's 1922 formulation. Haneke previously explored this era in his sepia-tinted 1993 television film based on Joseph Roth's 1924 novel Rebellion, which begins with documentary footage of Emperor Franz Joseph's funeral, coastline invasions, battlefields, and trenches from various theaters of war. The end of Austria-Hungary is also present in the 1997 TV adaptation of Franz Kafka's unfinished novel The Castle (1926), where confusion reigns in a waning, highly bureaucratic empire. The White Ribbon concentrates on the “last days of mankind,” the subject of Kraus's acerbic play about the end of Austria-Hungary and the German Empire under Wilhelm II. With representatives of all social strata in 1913, Haneke, like Kraus, offers us a world in miniature to indict blinkeredness, chauvinism, and aggression. A who's who of prestigious German-language actors is pressed into service to display the hierarchical makeup of society: a pastor (Burghart Klaußner), estate agent (Sepp Bierbichler), baron (Ulrich Tukur), and doctor (Rainer Bock) join the lower-ranking teacher (Christian Friedel), tutor (Michael Kranz), and farmer (Branko Samarovski).
Credits
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- The White Ribbon
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Germanness
- Fatima Naqvi
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At stake in Haneke's undertaking is nothing less than an elucidation of what it might mean to be German in the modern period. This brings us back to the model character of Haneke's film. While Haneke commented in an early sketch that he did not want to create a treatise (Abhandlung) about the predisposition of the populace toward fascism, it is hard to avoid this impression. Not only do exemplary figures represent their professions and social classes, but foreshortened scenes limit understanding of different personalities and abrogate emotional investment. With the exceptions of the pastor's small son Gustl (Thibault Serie) and the doctor's youngster Rudi (Miljan Chatelain), even the children remain rather schematic. The film comes across as an abstract reflection on the internalization of power, the performance of authority, and the suppression of others in the name of perverted ideals.
In his early synopsis, Haneke describes an “Ordnungssystem”— meaning both a “system of order” and an “ordering system”—underpinning the children's behavior. “I would like to show,” he writes, “a group of young people who, situated in a seemingly secure [festgefügt] system of order, make the principles of this order absolute in their childish idealism; in this way they become the guardians of these ideals and therefore judges over those who fail in front of them, and thus they demonstrate in an exemplary fashion the complete perversion of those very ideals.” A syllogistic logic reigns in this firmly joined world: “He has the power who is instituted as the stronger thanks to (performed) authority [(Spiel-)Autorität]. He who has power must be obeyed. He who does not obey is bad. He who is bad must be punished.” The children in the film operate according to these unquestioned premises and unleash chain reactions (if a, then b). The children witness the performance of authority but also play (spielen) at being authoritative and authoritarian. They inadvertently uphold the system that subordinates them because they do not question the grounds on which it is based. Not only are they unable to distinguish between game and reality, the totalizing nature of the system does not reveal a gap (it is “festgefügt”) where they can assert their autonomy. They perpetuate the corrupted Christian ideals that employ brutality as a deterrent, retrospectively justifying their own punishment in the name of that closed system.
Frontmatter
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Introduction
- Fatima Naqvi
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Michael Haneke's films undermine certainties, activate critical thinking skills, reveal the fragmentary and contingent nature of the world and how we think about it: these have become truisms in discussions of his oeuvre. Perhaps a less common way of interpreting his works would be to emphasize that they are self-reflexive about being self-reflexive. They are inordinately “meta.” Haneke's films reflect critically on the way in which we work through the past and reveal how hard it is to grapple with historical legacies, especially in a media-saturated age. They make apparent the blockages in memory, and they demonstrate the value of media artifacts like photographs in overcoming these obstructions. His works showcase our unconscious resistance to accountability. They also thematize our conscious problems with this resistance, especially when we have been trained to see it as morally repugnant. We have come to accept that it is imperative to work through the past, especially National Socialism. However, Haneke's films also suggest that being enjoined to “never forget” might be less emotionally effective than allowing ourselves to always be haunted—haunted by images of many pasts that ghost through our minds.
Haneke's acclaimed 2009 film The White Ribbon (Das weiβse Band) brings together these various aspects. It engages with our response to Germany's traumatic twentieth-century history, especially after the end of the analog era. This black-and-white digital film has been seen as many things: a family drama, a whodunit, a film-festival darling, and an example of successful art-house cinema. It is also a morality tale, mind game, study on the function of media, and “heritage film with a vengeance.” The White Ribbon can be placed in a German tradition of Enlightenment critique, where horror emerges from rationality. Furthermore, The White Ribbon focuses on practices of transmission, inscription, and recording on a personal and social level. It delves into child-rearing practices that impress themselves on the body and mind, from one generation to the next. The film looks at what we gain when something is lost in translation; it presses superimposition into the service of truthfulness, mixing historical trajectories (pre–World War I Germany, Nazism, left terrorism of the 1960s, Islamic radicalism post-2001).