Here it does not say papa but herr Vater

Order reign. How could it be otherwise In the village of Lutheran farmers of Germany in the North, summer 1913, fathers Act suffers no challenge. Any uprising was severely repressed. When two of the many children of Pastor adumbrate a rejection early, they are forced to wear an infamous White Ribbon. They will keep it until their father believes that the confidence pact which binds its children can be restored. Similarly, if a young person is suspected of engaging in guilty solitary nocturnal activities, he is strapped on his bed with strips. Here, it does not say "papa" but "herr Vater". Talking about lowering the eyes. A violate the rules of this "black pedagogy", based on the moral torture and humiliation, born in the 19th century, it is liable to whipping.

So with social, immutable order. Organized around the agricultural area of baron, the home of his Manager, the temple of the pastor and the doctor's Office, the village community is does that an annual collective outpouring at the feast of the harvest where the beer flows open. After this brief moment of authorized bacchanale, all returned in the order. Except in this fucking year 1913 where the strangest events are going to succeed.

Estate of disorders

Returning from a tour, is doctor a fall that could have been deadly when his horse is going to take the legs in a malignement wire between two trees. Later, a peasant woman dies in passing through a floor without any known whether it was an accident or murder. Drunken rage, his son grabbed a false and décapite a whole field of cabbage belonging to the baron. Shame, her father is will depend on. Then, the small ICMS, the son of the baron, is abducted, tied up, gagged and molested. Then, Karli, the disabled son of midwife, who is discovered, the slashed eyes. One day, finally, the pastor has stupor to find put on his desk the small bird of the aviary, the throat by a pair of scissors.

In the spirit of the young teacher of the village - it is her story in voiceover that strange - belief moved that it is children that cause these disorders. It opens to the pastor who reacted with extreme violence. Refusing the idea in his monstrous eyes, that children can do evil, he sum the young man to shut up, otherwise it will break his career. At this time, to add to the confusion, the doctor, the midwife (which is his mistress) and the small Karli suddenly fled. A few weeks later, the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand is assassinated in Sarajevo. For a moment, the great slaughter of 14-18 will obliterate this history of terrible children.

A German story of children

For a moment only, because twenty years later, Hitler's accession to power, these children will be adults. For Haneke, responsibility for Nazism is equivalent to the previous generation which, by its rigour blind and authoritarianism without limit, has led to the actors in the tragedy Hitler. So far, the Austrian Director does not limit its analysis to only Nazism but extends it to all terrorist regimes. The subtitle of the film, written by "Sütterlingschrift", a spelling of the 1920s, now abandoned, and that only Germans of a certain age can still decipher, said that "The White Ribbon" is "a German children's story". And non-"a history of German children", said Michael Haneke who had the idea of such film in alongside, in the 1970s, Ulrike Meinhoff, herself daughter of Pastor "which was evidence of rigorously born of Protestant education." Also oppressive that disturbing, this magnificent work is shot in a black and white reminiscent of the atmosphere of photographs of August Sanders. The long sequences plans haunt the memory long after the last deleted this rigorous film denouncing the dangers of rigour.