You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is telling and appropriate that Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon opens in total darkness, for the director's moral universe, as well as the characters depicted in the film, is indeed one of dark foreboding. We see nothing but hear only the elderly voice of a narrator:
I don't know if the story that I want to tell you is entirely true. Some of it I only know by hearsay and after so many years it remains obscure today, and I must leave it in darkness. Many questions remain unanswered. But I think I must tell of the strange events that occurred in our village, because they may clarify some of the things that happened in this country.… (italics mine)
And so the schoolteacher narrator, now an old man, begins his rendering in a series of flashbacks, depicting the mystifying happenings that transpired in his youth in a small, agrarian German village shortly before the start of World War I.
As the darkness gradually fades away, we view a shadowy figure on horseback in the murky distance as he stridently canters toward the camera, and then abruptly crumples to the ground. We later learn his horse trips on a “thin, strong, invisible wire” strung between two trees at the entrance to his property. This is but the first in a string of enigmatic events previously referred to by the storyteller. The accidental death of the tenant farmer's wife — the outcome of a rotting floorboard in the Baron's barn; the abduction and recovery of the Baron's child, bloody and beaten; the blinding (and possible death) of the village midwife's Down Syndrome son; the nighttime fiery destruction of the Baron's barn in revenge; the threatened suicide walk of the pastor's son testing God to see if He wants him to live; the stabbing to death of a pet bird with a scissors — to name some. There is, indeed,