The White Ribbon

'Als ihr Klein wart, hat eure Mutter euch bisweilen ein Band ins Haar oder um den Arm gebunden. Seine weiße Farbe sollte euch an Unschuld und Reinheit erinnern...'

There is little in the way of innocence and purity, however, in Haneke's latest film, the White Ribbon (Das weiße Band), which took the Palme d'Or at Cannes earlier this year.

Shot beautifully in black and white, the White Ribbon explores the dark, septic heart of a north German village on the eve of the Great War. Growing up here, in its stultifying atmosphere of hypocrisy and repression, are the children who - along with the others of their generation - will witness and experience the privations of the First World War and play their part in the atrocities of the Second. Not for nothing has Haneke subtitled the film 'Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte' - a German children's story.

It is not, however, through the sullen eyes of the children that the tale is told, but through those of a moon-faced school-teacher who witnesses the slow unravelling of the fabric of the village through various acts of malice: the village doctor felled from his horse by a trip-wire laid by unseen hands, an arson, a chillingly brutal attack on a mentally handicapped child... There are more petty cruelties of which the teacher is unaware, but which we the viewers are allowed to glimpse: the heavy-handed discipline meted out to the children at home, an abusive adulterous affair, incest... All of which point to a rottenness at the core not just of the lives of the children, but at every level of village life. The suffocating strictures of society - the pre-War vestiges of feudalism and an austere and empty Protestantism - chafe the grown-ups as much as the children.

The pervasive sense of dysfunctionality is relieved only by a few moments of genuine tenderness: a child's gesture of filial love, and the tentative courtship between the teacher and a young nanny.

As with Haneke's earlier films, there is no pat ending and no sense of resolution when the credits begin to roll.

'It's not the job of art to answer questions,' explains Haneke in a subsequent video interview on the BFI website, 'but to pose them in such a way that anyone who is prepared to engage with them can do so properly.' As to his choice of gritty subjects, 'the fact that the things I show aren't always a bundle of laughs isn't because I'm cold, but because my gaze is that of a realist.'