Cruel Attachments, Tender Counterpoints: Configuring the Collective in Michael Haneke's <em>The White Ribbon</em>

Abstract

IntroductionIn line with prominent topoi of Michael Haneke scholarship, most reviewers of The White Ribbon (2009), original title Das weise Band, agreed that die film presents its twenty-first-century audiences with a starkly filmed, more or less Brechtian-and thereby belatedly or even anachronistic-study on emergence of fascism in an audioritarian German village cosmos on die eve of World War I.1 With its temporally removed voice-over narrator and its black-and-white aesdietics, film evidendy undertakes a critical analysis of collective violence that keeps its audiences at a distance.2 My own initial response was quite in line with tiiat traditional reading. At best, The White Ribbons critical tale seemed to offer me a tangential alignment with die awkward teacher, whose attempts to solve mystery of portrayed violent incidents and whose second identity as die much older narrator keep him at a distance from die cruel village world. When I first taught die film in an interdisciplinary graduate seminar, however, several students shocked me by declaring their emotional alignment widi die village pastor, whose methods of constituting his religiously based family collective through discipline, both witii cane and die stigmata, gave film its tide-The White Ribbon-as a marker of temporary exclusion for presumed impurity. Clearly, tiiis class discussion was a reminder of die crucial importance of audience positionality in mediating responses to any film. In tracing diese different reactions in die classroom, however, I also revised my assessment of die film's composition, namely of how it encourages or discourages specific forms of (affective as well as cognitive) audience engagement.3 Witiiout entirely accepting my students' take, I began to develop a more complex reading of The White Ribbon. Through tiiis reading, I challenge dominant takes on Haneke's oeuvre and, by extension, a number of entrenched categorical oppositions in cinema studies, including those of affect versus distanciation and (as I will explain) realism versus montage.To be sure, tiiis reassessment can draw in part on more recent work on Haneke. Scholars have begun to explore how his films rupture audience distance witii offers of spectatorial identification (prominently witii Juliette Binoche's characters in die French features), witii framings that create distance only by depriving die spectator of it (or making her unsafe at any distance), and generally through die ways in which [a] fleet perforates formalist surface of Haneke's films.4 In exploring diese complications, however, recent Haneke scholarship still largely remains focused on die intersection of violence and unpleasure, which does not address my students' more positive affective responses to The White Ribbon.5 Against background of established oppositions between affect and distanciation as well as association of Haneke's auteurist signature witii (distanciating) modernism, tiiis recent scholarship has furthermore been haunted by tropes of contradiction and paradox, ambivalence and ambiguity.6 In tiiis piece, I therefore make a suggestion for a more full-fledged reassessment. The alternative framework I propose is not necessarily suited for rereading Haneke's entire oeuvre, which has perhaps been analyzed too exclusively through an auteurist lens anyway. Beyond its explicit focus on The White Ribbon, however, I hope tiiat my reading can inspire a retiiinking of a broader range of (more or less) independent films made in die last decade or so, perhaps as a no longer modernist cultural moment including but not limited to Haneke's own Amour (2012).This proposal draws on die work of Bruno Latour, who became known not least for his provocation that we have never been modern.7 Specifically, my reading of The White Ribbon aims to reframe die terms of spectatorship analysis by way of a dialogue between die film's invitations to relate to its historical village collective and Latour's suggestions for reassembling die social or, as he words more emphatically, the collective. …