"About Color and Art"
Haneke shot on color film, converted it to digital video, converted the digital video to black and white, and edited it with black and white digital images. After choosing the color for a long time, I re-drawn the face of each character to outline a clearer and tougher character line. The pursuit of clean and neat colors and lines also affects the character art, the doctor's lover and daughter's meticulous and motionless hair, the young male protagonist Martin's stern expression and deep facial features, and the priest's daughter's square jaw.
These are all traces of Haneke's choice of "texture".
This visual style references to a certain extent the still portraits shot by the German photographer, August Sander. During his creative time, Sander focused on documenting and observing his fellow Germans through video, and was the most important portrait photographer in German history. Formal shots carry a very restrained sense of distance.
Haneke emphasizes this sense of distance, and the black and white film constantly reminds us that we are not in a fictional reality, but in a re-created world.
However, “color can create visual aberrations, and black and white can accentuate all the fakes, which we have to be careful about.” To achieve a sense of distance in black and white, Haneke had to face more and more complex aesthetic challenges.
Black and white is actually a kind of defocusing, and at the same time, it will bring new challenges to the lighting design during the shooting process. It may be more difficult to build an unreal world that is "real" in black and white.
"Thinking About Education"
In the interview, Haneke said: "My parents' generation abandoned all the principles of authoritative education and failed to bring happiness to their children. On the contrary, these children grew up and often lost themselves and couldn't fit in. society."
This stemmed from the reporter's question, saying that "White Ribbon" may make us question the way of education. If such education is too strict, then the connivance that began in the 1970s has led to a slack in basic values.
Think about this.
The discipline and resistance, patriarchal oppression and a certain degree of compromise in "The White Ribbon" are a microcosm of the two generations of German people, with a strong political metaphor, but Haneke is reluctant to overdo it in the director's interpretation. To emphasize, and tend to say that I just want to tell a confusing small town quirk.
One of the actions that might reflect his thinking is that Haneke dropped the subtitle "A Story About German Children" during the film's release, because he feared that audiences would mistake the film for a special German question. In fact, he insists, such fables are equally likely to occur in all countries.
In this way, although we are focusing on the childhood of the Nazi generation, if we ignore politics, we only look at the children under high pressure - right as a way of education - in such an educational environment, whether children can continue to grow What about taking the "right path" guided by the fathers while being "punished"?
As the exporter of such compulsory education, the priest's hints and rhetorical questions about his son's masturbation behavior made his son walk on the wooden stick under the strong fear, and the straightforward criticism of his daughter made the daughter faint, and indirectly caused The murder of a pet bird by her daughter is even an unanswered case.
The shackles of strict Protestantism make this town surrounded by fog both conservative and extreme, with bodies that are cracked under repression and lies that try to maintain order. But such harsh education and obvious symbolic punishment can be effective when we only focus on the stability of order.
In the film, we do not see that the fathers who stand in the perspective of power execution get the pleasure of exercising power. On the contrary, they look numb, never look back, vain, "not worthy of being loved", and are often hurt and insulted by themselves And can't find the exit. Among them, apart from priests who physically punished their children and covered up crimes for their daughters, and farmers who committed suicide in shame because of their sons, they can only be relieved to a certain extent by asking others to silence their voices, end their lives and insult the weak in reverse.
The achievement of this state of the fathers stems from their belief that this is the right thing to do. They are fortunate enough to do it and have been taught to do so since childhood. This is the social inertia and nationality achieved by the process of education.
But why do we still feel that in the disintegration of the 1960s and 1970s, people still cannot be happy? Why don't we get true freedom and the courage to love from our loose education?
I haven't found the answer yet. It may be that human beings and their children will always face problems. The change of such problems does not mean that the problems will no longer exist. When we have order to resist, what we have is blind anger and firmness. The fist and the definite enemy; when the order collapses, what we have is a lost sword, a soft action under the sole of the foot, and the foggy predicament and weakness of the postmodern.
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