I watched a DVD of Michael Haneke's film White Ribbon over the weekend. The only other film I'd seen of his was Caché (2005).

White Ribbon is set in 1913 and is a film that deals with a specific time and place. It deals with strange incidents in a small town in Northern Germany, depicting an authoritarian, patriarchal, Protestant world, where children are subjected to rigid rules and suffer harsh punishments, and where strange deaths occur. The narrative constructed by Haneke is centred around violence and is a “study of child abuse, class resentment, punitive, sexually repressive Protestantism and a gesture towards an incipient fascism.

The language is anachronistic; it evokes the rhythms and, partly, the milieu of 19th-century bourgeois realism, is concerned with malevolent children in pre-WWI Germany. Its an almost feudal system in which the local aristocracy and the church rule over the tenant farmers, men dominate women and children are treated as if they were their parents’ god-given property.

It echoes Ingmar Bergman through his stylistic use of black-and-white, with Haneke skilled at alienating (in the Brechtian sense) spectators by keeping them at bay, behind an opaque veil that is never lifted, while simultaneously involving them in the texture of the world he creates. The work of interpretation is left to the viewer.