Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski)

Between the devil and the deep blue sea (of dreams?), indeed.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

The shape of revenge in darkness.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

The sound of waves crashing against a lovers’ tryst.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet). MMM: “Manech aime Mathilde.”

The romance of piggy-back rides and church bells.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet). A time of lightness and darkness, and the shadows in between.

I love Jeunet’s magnificent landscape-shots. The worlds he constructs are located precisely in that liminal space between lightness and darkness, but also between La Belle Époque and post-apocalyptic pastiche-ruins.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

A time of waiting. A time of war. A time of winding staircases of memories. A time of hope and solitude.

Das weisse Band (2009, Michael Haneke)

Haneke’s genre-bending films continue with Das weisse Band and its explicit reference to the tropes of the fear in and of small towns and children as bad seeds.

It Takes A Village: Das weisse Band (2009, Michael Haneke)

Haneke ups the ante in terms of his “clinical realism” in Das weisse band by taking away colour altogether. Sure, black-and-white makes things “of the past,” which makes sense since the film takes place in the 1910s. But the film’s texture and tone of black-and-white is paler, cooler, and allows no room for nostalgia that black-and-white images can provoke.

When I say clinical, I don’t necessarily mean that the film is devoid of emotion. On the contrary, the film grips you by the throat so that by film’s end, you’re stunned and speechless. The increasing violence that one witnesses is an insidious kind of horror, which slowly dawns upon the spectator. The horror is all the more insidious because for the town, the very surface order of things is the priority, nothing seems to be changing, or so a majority of the inhabitants want to think. The force of the facade, of the house, as a shield against contamination or rumour is powerful.

A tough visual, narrative tightrope to walk and cross: clinical yet affective and powerful; a claustrophobic atmosphere, tense and taut with each touch, yet marked by the everyday-ness of it all.

It Takes A Village: Das weisse Band (2009, Michael Haneke)

The film recounts the strange happenings–of a rather increasingly violent nature–in a small Protestant village in Germany, on the eve of World War I. “Accidents” like the town’s doctor falling off his horse because of a wire tied between two trees, the blinding of a mentally retarded boy, are just some of the events that occur in this seemingly sleepy-eyed town. Finding the identity of the authors of these acts comes to preoccupy and divide the townsfolk and their lives. Concurrent with these “accidents” are the goings-on of several families in the town.

The ritualised, religious framework in which their lives are contained is the focus here, especially in the way it expresses itself through the children. Father figures who beat their children even though it pains them, in order to instill discipline and character, to eliminate “bad” characteristics; houses in which silence, order, and hierarchy reign, the atmosphere is claustrophobic to say the least. 

The film’s title is simple as to be duplicitous, as it makes more explicit the element of claustrophobia as well as the black-and-white images. The white ribbon is a mark of “innocence and purity” that the pastor forces his children to wear. Wearing the white ribbon for the children, as a form of discipline and punishment, must remind them of the wrong they have done. The “white ribbon” comes, then, to have ironic meaning: as a symbol of innocence and purity, the ribbon is beautiful; but the duty that one gives it entwines it with punishment, shame, and negative actions. For Martin, the pastor’s son, “negative” and “bad” actions encompass things that relate to the body. He is punished for masturbating by being tied down in his bed when he goes to sleep. It’s rather like a hop, skip, and a jump to get into a discussion about intolerance for a dirty body and, inversely, a reverence for cleanliness, order, and asceticism that becomes an ideology supported by a religious framework. 

The film is narrated by a male schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), who arrives at the village to teach; he is therefore an outsider. As an outsider, he can narrate what he perceives. The idea of having a voiceover narrator was a rather unexpected one; a first for Haneke. The schoolteacher’s voiceover narration doubles his outsider status; in turn, it makes the spectator watch “outside” of a full identification with anyone, despite the narrator’s use of first-person.

In truth, none of the characters allow for easy or any identification. The film is a rather clinical examination of ideology and behaviour becoming deeply imbricated. Violence as a mode of discipline and punishment, and instilling a way of living partly built on intolerance and the negative rather than dialogue and openness, Das weisse band is all the more horrific because this ideology of violence and intolerance is such a part of the everyday living of these families.