The Ash Twins Blog

Director Michael Haneke recently released “White Ribbon,” a historical piece about Germany before World War I. Salon just published an interview with Haneke in which he shares the insights of a filmmaker who is both artist and social critic:

I think that education is one of the decisive points in human experience. When I was making the American version of “Funny Games,” there was a word I discovered that I find is so indicative. There’s a scene in which one of the two boys pees himself, and the other one says, “Please forgive him. He’s not housebroken.” I think that word is so illuminating: It suggests that we have to be broken for the house. We have to be broken to be acceptable socially, and that’s the dilemma of every educational system.

You have to partially destroy or restrict the freedom of the individual in order for him or her to function in society. That’s the dilemma of every generation, and I’m not convinced that current approaches to educational theory are necessarily the ideal solution either. . .

The question that I’m asking is: What conditions have to be in place for people to seek to grasp such ideological responses [like Nazism]? In a position of hopelessness, humiliation and despair, people clutch at any straw, and those straws usually take an ideological form, whether religious or political. Out of hopelessness, they turn to ideology — the model is always the same, although the external forms may be different. . .

There are so many different things that take place in “The White Ribbon” that there are any number of possible explanations. It may not be that the acts have been committed by someone intentionally. For example, when the barn burns down, it’s possible that was simply caused by an accidental spark. Perhaps the hay had been stored when it was too wet, and spontaneous combustion happened. Perhaps the farmer’s wife who died simply fell. It was an accident, and she was not murdered. The explanations, in fact, are so unimportant. In real life, there are any number of events that take place that we don’t understand. It’s only in mainstream cinema that films explain everything, and claim to have answers for anything that happens. In reality, we know so little about what happens. It’s far more productive for me to confront the audience with a complex reality that mirrors the contradictory nature of human experience. . .

I remember with my first film that was shown in Cannes, “The Seventh Continent” [in 1989], there was a screening and afterward we had a discussion. The first question came from a woman who stood up and asked, “Is life in Austria as awful as that?” She didn’t want to accept the difficult questions being raised in the film, so she tried to limit them to a specific place and say, “That’s not my problem.” You could make the same mistake with this film, if you see it as only being about a specific period.