(Text / Xiaoqi)
"Its whiteness, a constant reminder of your purity."
According to a village teacher's recollection, on the eve of the First World War, a series of bizarre cases occurred in a village in northern Germany: first, the doctor in the manor was tripped and injured on the way home on horseback, and then a peasant woman accidentally He died tragically in the sawmill, the baron's son was hanged and beaten, the house suddenly caught fire in the snowy night, and then the midwife's son also suffered misfortune and almost lost his sight... In the eyes of the village teacher, all this seems to be related to the children in the village. The story came to an abrupt end after the assassination of Archduke Fernandi and the outbreak of the First World War.
For many, the Cannes Palme d'Or may seem incomprehensible. Its narrative is calm and detached, and the whole story makes a point but doesn't say anything. In fact, if we want to interpret Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon," we must first start with the context of the times the story is about.
After the second industrial revolution, Germany became an emerging capitalist power. At that time, the world had been completely divided up by the old capitalist countries. In order to expand overseas colonial markets, wars between the old and new powers were inevitable. After the Sarajevo incident, the First World War broke out, and then Germany was defeated and was sanctioned by the foreign powers. At the time of internal and external troubles, the German fascist forces rose and expanded rapidly, and then World War II broke out... Fundamentally, the two worlds All wars stem from the conflict of economic interests within the imperialist countries.
Director Michael Haneke took a different approach in "White Ribbon": he did not pay attention to the intrigue between imperialist countries, but instead focused on German society, focusing on a small village, with the bizarre phenomenon in the village In order to present the scene of decay and decay in Germany at that time. In Haneke's eyes, it is not accidental that the two world wars, especially the Second World War, started in Germany. It stemmed from the profound social contradictions in Germany and the psychological symptoms of depression in the whole society. Haneko's lens is like a scalpel, mercilessly cutting out a section of German society, so as to remind everyone in modern society to reflect on history in multiple dimensions.
The first is the lack of family education. We hardly see any viable homeschooling in this film. When Feld's wife died unexpectedly, the son blamed the manor's owner, the baron, even at the expense of destroying the baron's vegetable plot. The cowardly Feld would not be reasonable, but just slapped his son in the face. superior. When the butler's son stole the tree flute from the hand of the baron's son Sigi, and even nearly drowned Sigi, the butler was whipped in addition to beating. As for the girl whom the village teacher admired, she worked as a nanny in the baron's house, but because Sigi was hanged and beaten and suffered a disaster, she was dismissed by the baron. Is doing bad and was abandoned by the master. Parents don’t seem to have effective communication with their children. Even the polite-looking pastor seems to be reasoning with his daughter Clara and son Martin. In the name of doing arbitrary admonitions. The people of the father's generation exercise absolute authority, and the negligence of family education makes the children in these manor lose the correct guidance.
Although these people of the father generation have absolute right to speak, but they are dirty and filthy, and they also have huge problems. In the marriage relationship, the baron and the baroness have been at odds for a long time, and the baroness derailed others mentally and tried to take away the child to end the marriage. In the cohabitation relationship, the widowed doctor had an affair with the neighbor midwife, and there were even rumors that the two murdered the doctor's wife together. The midwife's mentally retarded son was actually the doctor's, and it was only because he was afraid that the adultery would be revealed and attempted an abortion, which led to the child's birth defect. The doctor even disliked the midwife for being old and ugly and having bad breath. The reason why he had sex with him was because it was too troublesome to find prostitutes in the city. In order to satisfy his lust for young and beautiful women, the doctor even attacked his own daughter... The film reflects the suppression of "sex" and the indulgence of "sex". The father generation is the same, the son generation is the same. Just like Martin, the priest’s son, who was masturbating under the covers. He knew it was blasphemous, but he was so addicted to it that he was bound to the bed every night by the priest to restrain himself.
The Austrian psychoanalyst Freud put forward the theory of "id", "ego" and "superego". The "id" represents desire, which follows the principle of hedonic and hides in our subconscious; Following moral principles is our conscience and inner moral judgment. "White Ribbon" is about a game between the id and the superego outside the ego. The superego includes theology and social morality, and the id includes sex and violence. So we saw that the pastor was talking about forgiveness and tolerance, but he still ruthlessly reprimanded his children, and we saw that the doctor looked sane to the outside world, but when he returned home, he acted like a beast. There has always been a strong constraint of the "superego" in the film, but because this constraint is too strong, the id becomes more and more repressed - especially for the children who are under the absolute authority of the father's generation.
There is a child in the film that is impressive: she is dignified and graceful, humble and demeanor, if it weren't for her accidental emotional outbursts, it is hard to imagine that she would be a perpetrator, she is - the priest's daughter Clara .
It is worth noting that the priest's family is highly symbolic: as believers of the religion, the priest is the "closest to God" existence in the entire region, and is also the most respected and strictest family. In this family, the pastor's wife often "listens to your father." The pastor has absolute authority. He arbitrarily issues God/Father prohibitions to his children again and again. That white ribbon is the embodied existence of the superego, which reminds Clara all the time: do not make mistakes and be a pure and kind person. It was under the repression of such strong arguments that Clara became perverse and fierce, and fainted in one of her father's punishments. When she woke up, she was in a trance and exposed her cruel side: she picked up scissors and cut the birds raised at home. When stabbed to death, the scissors formed the shape of a cross, and the bird formed the "Crucifixion Jesus" - she placed the dead bird in front of the priest's chopping board, and violently resisted the superego's strong suppression in the process of blasphemy.
When we focused our attention on Clara again, we couldn't help but feel horrified: when the doctor's horse was tripped and injured, she and many younger siblings came to the doctor's house to ask for help; when the midwife's mentally retarded son was almost blinded, she even more It was with a group of children peeping outside the shutters... Recalling the scene where the mentally handicapped son was beaten, we will pay attention to the note found at the scene, which reads: "Because I, the LORD, your God, is a jealous God and hates me. , I will pay his debts, from father to son, to the second and third generations."
The perpetrators of these violence are so cruel. Thinking of the doctor being tripped and the son of the doctor and the midwife being beaten, this note seems to reflect the sins of the doctor's family, and then the doctor left the town with all the children, which seems to confirm the truth of the rumor. . Thinking back to this passage again, it seems that only the children of the pastor's family know best in the whole town, and then think of Clara, who was watching a play with a group of children... The perpetrator is obvious, but when the governess tried to inform the pastor, the result was exchanged The pastor sternly rebuked and warned. Then the war broke out, and the matter was over.
Throughout the film, we see a society that is extremely repressed and extremely disordered. In this society, there are social problems such as the lack of family education, and there is also a strong suppression of desires for sex and violence. In this strong suppression, sex and violence are still vented in some alienated way. Like the son who took revenge on the baron's vegetable garden for his mother's death, he just wanted to let his violence have an outlet. Accumulation of small and small pieces will lead to a greater rebound, and such hidden dangers are bound to break out at a certain node. So we can see that twenty years later, the former group of children have grown into the backbone of society. They have grown from the generation of children to the generation of fathers. They raised their arms and shouted, vented their hatred, and unscrupulously released their id in violence. At the time, their arms were no longer pure white ribbons, but Nazi swastikas.
At that time, they have a unified name - fascism.
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