Recently, "The Hidden Corner" was a hit, exploring a "hidden corner" in the field of domestic film and television and sociology: the evil of childhood. Although in the eyes of adults, children are innocent, in fact, children and evil may be closer than people think, because they are closer to human instincts, there is no concept of good and evil in the adult world, they even know how to use the identity of children to obtain acquiescence and connivance, and then fight back against the adult world.
In the process of chasing the drama, I kept thinking of the Austrian film master Michael. Haneke's masterpiece The White Ribbon. In addition to the suspense elements of "The Hidden Corner" and the theme of "Bad Boy", the film also explores some deeper issues:
Does the evil of human nature come from instinct, inducement, or connivance? Will violence be passed on from generation to generation?
Around these problems, Haneke has been preparing for 12 years, and "White Ribbon", which carries his countless painstaking efforts, swept through major film festivals after its release, winning heavyweight awards such as the Palme d'Or at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Among the 100 greatest films since the new century, The Guardian ranked 21st.
The story of "White Ribbon" takes place from 1913 to 1914 on the eve of the First World War, in a remote mountain village in northern Germany, the quiet life of the years is suddenly broken, the doctor is tripped and injured by a rope while riding home, the wife of a sharecropper is killed in an accident, a mentally handicapped child is beaten to the point of near blindness in the name of God, the initiators of all these vicious incidents have not been investigated, and the arson cases and beatings against children in the village continue to occur. With the in-depth investigation of the village teachers, when the truth is about to surface, the investigation is forced to stop because the gunfire of the war is approaching, and the adults also attribute the reason to the doctor who was forced to leave the village.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 Creates a distancing effect between the internal and external perspectives, and explores the internal causes of childhood evil in depth</h1>
Haneke disdained to use the usual elements of murder and suspense in commercial films to satisfy the audience's appetite, so the film did not target "finding the murderer" as a genre narrative. In fact, when the priest re-tied the white ribbon to his two children, the audience behind the scenes had already guessed that the remaining question was only why, and why was it the village doctor who was injured? What triggers the violence that innocent children should not have, and what defiles the white ribbon that symbolizes purity?
In White Ribbon, Haneke strives to create a sense of disbelief in the authenticity of the story, so he arranges two narrative perspectives, inside and outside, to create a distancing effect.
●Internal focus (child's perspective)
The film focuses on 6 families: doctors, priests, barons, baron assistants, baron nannies, and farmers. Domestic violence is so frequent that children who are the bearers have become accustomed to it and naturally learn and imitate it. For example, after the passage in which Clara's siblings are flogged, the episode of a mentally handicapped child being beaten by an unknown character immediately follows.
At the same time, the sensitive children discover the misery of the adults under the solemn appearance: the well-mannered doctor, who conspired with the midwife to kill his wife, the two committed adultery in front of the wife's portrait, and the doctor finally cruelly abandoned the midwife, and then extended his evil hands to his 14-year-old daughter, who deceived her brother in the face of her father's indecency and said that she was piercing her ears. The Baron's wife boldly revealed the fact that she had cheated, and the wife of the Baron's assistant could only endure in silence in the face of her husband's beating of her son. This seemingly calm and closed village is full of revenge, adultery, incest, violence, etc., and is quite depressing.
The film discovers sin through the child's perspective and conveys to the audience the stimulation and impact of violence on the child. These children, in the violent environment of growing up, learned how to be violent and intensified. They gathered in groups of three or five, not to play, and they came to watch the scene of the vicious incident not to see the hilarity, but to learn and imitate violence, which made people shudder.
●External focus (teacher's perspective)
The teacher's perspective is a kind of "detective" perspective, taking the audience step by step to find the real culprit of the incident, the audience can see: two boys out of jealousy, in the winter, opened the window to make the newborn brother seriously ill, the boys unscrupulously pushed the little girl into the pond, the little girl poked scissors into the body of the bird and put it on the father's desk in protest; the mentally handicapped child was beaten and poked blind, and the murderer also left a note "paying for the sins of the parents", all the clues pointed to the group of children in the village. They wandered around the village and seemed to know all the secret and sinful things.
Children are no longer the embodiment of innocence, beauty and hope, and their hearts are filled with resentment, indifference and evil thoughts of revenge. Countering violence with violence has become a strange and disciplined collective act of children, who naturally have a human animalistic side in them, and when they are violated by adults, they turn to judging others in the name of justice.
In the end, the adults obviously perceive the children's crimes, but choose to despise and indulge, and they tie white ribbons to remind the children of purity and goodness, but it is this hypocritical education that not only does not correct the children's wrong behavior, but also makes this malice continue from generation to generation, and eventually lead to a greater tragedy.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 The role of black and white in the language, symbolism and atmosphere of the lens</h1>
In an era when filmmakers were hollowing out their minds to create visual spectacles, Haneke ignored the producers' worries about the box office and insisted on making "White Ribbon" into a black-and-white film, in which black and white are both opposites and echoes, obviously with Haneke's deep thinking.
Visual contrast between black and white elements. In addition to the obvious image of the white ribbon, the exterior of the village or the interior of the room, as well as the dress of the characters, follow a unique black and white collocation law. Children in the house are often placed in the dark, and the windows covered with white veil form a visual contrast with the darkness in the house. The white ribbons on the children's arms echo the white veil of the window, and contrast with the priest in black and black robes, reflecting the inner entanglements and struggles of the characters. The film uses a lot of empty shots, such as when the warehouse is on fire, the narrative is still as calm as ever, there is no noise, half of the shot is white flames, half is black night scene, this strong contrast composition, to the audience with enough blank space, to guide the audience to think.
The symbolism of black and white. The whiteness of the "white ribbon" is a symbol of innocence and purity, as the priest says in the movie: "White is the color of innocence, and the original intention of using the white ribbon was sasuke Mary to avoid sin, selfishness, rudeness, lying and laziness". Black, on the other hand, represents the filth and sin hidden in the shadows. Although the white ribbon symbolizes religious restraint and moral prohibition, it does not restrain the growth of discontent, resentment and evil thoughts in the hearts of the people, because the village has become a testing ground for human nature, and the filth under the hypocritical appearance of the adults and the evil under the appearance of the children's angels are all described in black and white with a sense of quiet fear. At the end of the film, there is a long shot of thirty seconds of snow, the vast white snow tries to erase people's footprints, but the crowds of people who come and go step on more black traces, implying that white cannot hide the black behavior of human beings, and the idealism represented by the white ribbon has become an irony.
Create a sense of objectivity and distance through black and white. Because the background of the story is far away from the audience, the choice of black and white can give people more realism through images, because the audience's subconscious black and white film is a reproduction of history, so that the audience can easily substitute into the atmosphere of that period of history. The film uses many long shots, empty shots, especially some medium and long-range shots, the camera position is fixed, the characters walk around in the picture, and at the same time join the narration of the teacher, he tells the history in a storytelling tone, and the audience examines everything that happens as a bystander, thus creating a sense of objectivity and distance.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 Nazi childhood? Not entirely, but the film is about looking at the common crux of human society</h1>
Many film critics have summarized "White Ribbon" as describing the "childhood of the Nazis", and the children in the village are the future fascists, the main force in World War I and World War II. But Haneke disagrees with this understanding, saying: "Just because the story is set in Germany, it cannot simply be seen as a film about fascism, but more accurately about the ideals of human nature and corrosion, which is the crux of the global prevalence." ”
Whether human nature is inherently good or human nature is inherently evil is a topic that has been discussed for thousands of years, and in China, Mencius's "theory of sexual goodness" and Xunzi's "theory of sexual evil" have a large number of supporters. This inherent image of the child's "innocence" is an extension of the idea of "sexual goodness". And abroad, the "original sin" committed by adam and Eve, the first ancestors of mankind, stole the fruit of the tree of wisdom, and the descendants of Adam had to bear the judgment and punishment caused by this original sin. There is also the greek myth of father-killing complex, Freud's "child sexuality" and "Oedipus complex", people are reluctant but have to examine the inherent evil in human nature.
Haneke apparently agreed with Freud's theory that each person's personality stems from childhood life, and that childhood encounters and the trauma of the original family will bring an indelible shadow to a person's life. This theme has been explored in previous works such as "The Piano Teacher" and "Fun Games".
Where does the evil of the children in "The White Ribbon" come from? Although the film is not very clearly pointed out, we can still see through some characters and plot settings that the biggest reason is the induction, education and connivance of adults. There are two symbolic characters in the film: the baron and the priest, who represent the nobility and religion, who are the owners of reason, order, and authority, who are like gods in the village, and who impose corporal punishment because their authority is challenged by their children. For example, the pastor's family, as the father of the pastor is the representative of traditional patriarchy and theocracy, he pays more attention to order than morality, the children will be punished by corporal punishment when they return late, and the whole family will starve, and he uses authority to restrain the children's behavior.
But this idea is clearly contradictory: on the one hand, they advocate for the worship of extreme reason by children at the upper echelons of society, and try to suppress inconsistent voices. On the other hand, they instilled elitism and deliberately turned a blind eye to violence and bullying by the weak. This logic of repression and obedience, which is deeply embedded in the minds of children and passed on from generation to generation, is the reason why children have no guilt when they commit violence, and the tragic source of Germany's two world wars. As Haneke put it, "Any idealism that goes to extremes leads to terrorism." ”
It can be seen that the ambition of the film is not only to expose the root causes of the existence of individual violence, but how individual violence produces collective and social nature, which in turn causes disasters in human society. Starting from primitive society, the most important nature of human beings is "self-interest", robbing resources to survive and doing things that are beneficial to themselves, of course, they will unconsciously harm others. Psychologist Lorenz believes that the source of violence is the self-preservation instinct of living things. Children naturally also have this nature and instinct, the day nature is suppressed, creating conditions for the instinct to resist, this kind of violent tendency from psychological repression, once the psychological pleasure is developed and it is very difficult to quit, at the same time, this violent tendency also has a trend of group transmission, which in turn causes the destruction of the whole society.
Haneke was a thorough pessimist, and he described an extreme situation. If we jump out of the movie to see real life, for most children, their innocence and cuteness lie in the fact that there is no need to use "evil", only a few poor children, because adults in the living environment intentionally or unintentionally transmit the "evil" side to children, how to prevent this situation is the eternal problem of human society.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > written at the end</h1>
Watching "White Ribbon" is not an easy task, on the contrary, it feels quite heavy and helpless. Like "The Hidden Corner", the director's original intention is not to let the audience see "how bad children can be", but to appeal to people: objectively understand the origin of "evil", we can better guide and carry forward "good".
Plus, in this age of entertainment to the death, Michael. Through "White Ribbon", Haneke shows that the art of film can still be as sharp as a weapon, rejecting entertainment and pastime, stinging people's increasingly numb nerves, and then triggering social reflection, which is the most awe-inspiring place for an artist.
Thanks for reading.