"The film examines the issue of the conditions that lead to terrorism. To do this it employs Germany’s past, which, I would like to emphasize, is only an example. It’s important to me that the film isn’t interpreted as being solely about German Fascism, but that it more generally deals with the roots of all kinds of terrorism⎯whether politically right, politically left or religious."
Children have always played a role in your work, and in this case they occupy the foreground. Why?
Michael Haneke: The underlying idea was to make a film about a group of children who turn the ideals that have been preached to them into absolute principles, then punish the individuals who did the preaching, who themselves don’t live in accordance with these ideals. As soon as an ideal or a principle is turned into an ideology, it becomes dangerous. Children tend to take what they’re told seriously, and that can become dangerous. The film examines the issue of the conditions that lead to terrorism. To do this it employs Germany’s past, which, I would like to emphasize, is only an example. It’s important to me that the film isn’t interpreted as being solely about German Fascism, but that it more generally deals with the roots of all kinds of terrorism⎯whether politically right, politically left or religious.
Guilt is an essential theme in your work, and The White Ribbon⎯the title evokes a symbol of freedom from guilt⎯deals most specifically with an interplay between guilt and innocence.
Michael Haneke: I don’t believe that children are innocent. Children aren’t innocent, they’re naive and take things as they’re told. When you take something literally, it can be dangerous. The world isn’t divided into good and evil, as politicians and bad authors like to tell us. That’s what genre film lives from, assuring us that nothing bad can happen to us in the end. Things are different in reality and I do my best to examine the contradictory reality. Children are neither pure innocents nor pure monsters; they’re somewhere in between, like the rest of us.
One theme you can’t deal with in this case because of the historical setting is criticism of the media, and film in particular.
Michael Haneke: I always like to feed the viewer’s distrust of what they’re shown in film. That’s expressed in The White Ribbon solely when the narrator says, “I don’t know if all the details of the story I’m going to tell you are true, a lot of it’s hearsay, etc.” The film’s story is told in a contradictory way⎯it’s not that we see only what the narrator was actually able to see. There are also scenes where he wasn’t there. That’s my wink at the beginning, to make it clear that we’re not dealing with a factual account, but someone’s construct made in an attempt to reconstruct the truth. The film never claims that “This is how it was.”
This is your first film that’s set not in the present, but in a historical context.
Michael Haneke: This period appeared to be especially relevant to the theme I mentioned. I’m especially interested in Protestantism because I was brought up as a Protestant, which is relatively uncommon in Austria. My father was a German Protestant, my mother was an Austrian Catholic. Protestantism influenced me significantly in my childhood. The other aspect was that there’s practically a glut of films about Nazi Germany and German Fascism, but not a single one of them deals with its roots, or the backstory. What came before it. I think the question of how it happened is interesting. Of course, the film isn’t an exhaustive analysis of how Fascism is born, and it isn’t intended to be, but it looks at the roots.
