Long Distance Call

“Europe’s old regimes were civil and political societies with distinct powers, traditions, customs, and conventions. Precisely because they were such integral and coherent social, economic, and cultural systems, they were exceptionally resilient…The old order’s civil society was first and foremost a peasant economy and rural society dominated by hereditary and privileged nobilities. Except for a few bankers, merchants, and shipowners, the large fortunes and incomes were based in land. { } In fact, political society was the linchpin of this agrarian society of orders. Everywhere it took the form of absolutist authority systems of different degrees of enlightenment and headed by hereditary monarchs. The crowns reigned and governed with the support of extended royal families and court parties as well as compliant ministers, generals, and bureaucrats.”
Arno Meyer

“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a “symptom of decay,” let alone a “modern” symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”
Walter Benjamin

Certain artworks take more time to process. Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon was released in 2009. It was much acclaimed and won that year’s Palme D’Or. I felt oddly dissatisfied with this film when I first saw it, which was already a couple years after its release. Now, I find it both more problematic, and less. It is a highly unsettling film, but not always for the reasons one might expect, or that Haneke’s intends.

The architecture reflects the industrial municipal feel of 19th century factories, and of Auschwitz. The creepy kids all look like they walked of the Children of the Corn remake or Village of the Damned, but that is, then, part of examining the volkish mythology of National Socialism. Groups of blond Aryan children tend to evoke memories of Hitler Youth posters. Those films were all referencing Nazi myth as symbols for latent violence and corruption of innocence. Perhaps. Haneke does himself no favors in his interviews, though. For a director who makes sure we know he studied philosophy, his comments are stunningly banal and trite.

“I set the story in its particular era so that it might acquire an added political significance. It could just as easily have been set in an Islamic village. Of course, it would have had a different look, but the essentials would have been much the same.”

Well, no, they would not. Pakistan in 1915 would present an entirely other set of historical conditions, and forces. Kenya in 1895 is vastly different. It’s actually a bit hard to believe Haneke is sincere when he says this stuff. But these issues aside, there is another more urgent issue with Haneke the artist. For all his visual and filmic virtuosity, the intentionally unanswered questions, the criminal mystery is always a tease — and it becomes a style of murkiness, a particular murkiness, and one worries that Haneke indulges in it as a way to give his narratives an ersatz profundity. The repressed anxieties that saturate the atmosphere are moving and acutely realized. This is his gift as a filmmaker. A kind of preternatural restraint in his compositions, and a mise en scene that exudes a genuine sense of unease. I was thinking, watching it now, how much better Haneke is than artists like Greg Crewsdon or directors like Lynch. Haneke has an artistic intelligence that raises the stakes in terms of interpretation.

There is a kind of echo, throughout, active echo of Wilhelm Reich in this film. A sex negative, deeply repressive, patriarchal and socially stratified society is one that produces violence, at every level. But Haneke produces a sort of Universal template for this; and the implication is meant to suggest, it seems, two things: one is that such repression and hierarchy is the germinating pool for National socialism, and two, that everyone, regardless of being victim or victimizer, is responsible. Now maybe responsible is the wrong word because Haneke is precisely avoiding the specific in order not to assign blame per se.

And yet, he hedges his bets in a sense by setting it in a specific time and place. Except its not exactly so specific. The audience is meant to see this as a parable about the rise of Nazism. Germany, just prior to WW1, is being dissected in terms of the historical culture of religious intolerance, puritanical sexual hysteria, misogyny, and authoritarian structure as found in a small rural, probably Northern, village (it is not made clear if this is Hanover or Westphalia or where, or just an invented region). But by creating a narrative of intentional vagueness, and making this rural German village a kind of allegorical setting, he actually undercuts the very particulars needed to produce allegory. He starts with the universal in order to create the specific. Allegory must start with the specific to produce the allegorical. And the specific here is implied, in a sense.

That ancien regime that served as a kind of transitional phase in Europe between feudalism, and modern industrialism, is the backdrop here, a way of life rapidly being seen as obsolete. The ancien regime carried with it significant amounts of feudal tradition and values, which included great personal dependence by workers and peasants on the landowner and the fief, and the paying (in many places, including north Germany) of seignorial tariffs or duties. As the military power of small fiefs declined, the values and social traditions of noblemen, continued, even intensified, as they were incorporated into the nation state. All this took place under the umbrella of power that is the Church. Obviously the role and particular of the Church in Spain or Italy is far different than that in Germany or Holland, say. So, Haneke is setting forth his elliptical narrative against a backdrop of a dying system of patrimony and hereditary privilege. The agricultural may have been rapidly transitioning to capitalism, the culture, and the social roles and relationships remained feudal and often desperately and overreachingly feudal.

The scarred and psychologically damaged children of this mythical town of Eichwald (sigh) are seen fatalistically as the inevitable outcome of such cultures. The blank facades of the buildings, mirror the blankness of the people, and the blankness or elided narrative/historical particular. In a sense, and this is partly the real defense of this film, the missing solutions, the identification of the criminal or criminals, is exactly the missing emotions of the people of Eichwald. Also, remember that the rise of German industrialization between the 1880’s and WW1 was sharp, certainly far greater than anywhere else in Europe during those years. And this village bears no trace of this fact.

Russia, Germany, Austria/Hungary — this was the kernal of late feudal or ancien regime cultural currency. And it is worth noting how much Madison Avenue puts this culture to use today. Austro Hungarian nostalgia is probably second only to Victorian England in the nostalgia sweepstakes. Germany is too north, too second world war-ish after all, and Russia is, well, Russia. Hollywood therefore creates historical nostalgia around Victorian England and the Austro Hungarian Empire.

I mention this because even during the decade leading up to WW1, the production of cultural and artistic values was shaped by neo-Feudal tastes that were solidly lodged in the ancien regime. The bourgeoisie, and maybe this means only France, but perhaps England in another sense, were as intoxicated with feudal aesthetics as Hollywood is today with Colonialism and most things ancien regime. And second, because a part of what Michael Haneke is doing is to reinforce these tropes of nostalgia, even if he intends to be doing the opposite.

The White Ribbon, therefore, is ideologically too close the Village of the Damned where audiences shudder at the ultra creepy expressionless children, not at the society that creates these ultra creepy expressionless children (the solution to Village of the Damned is just a lot of ritalin, if we moved that narrative to 2016). The ancien regime though, remained tied to the land. The industrial development in Germany was significant, but culturally the vision of each class remained tied to feudalism, finally. For feudalism was the template for class dynamics. The rise of factory worker and merchant/trader in central Europe before WW1 was not unimportant, but the seeds of National Socialism, that Church infested volkish myth that Hitler rallied behind came from feudalism. The sophisticated classes, both Jewish and south European, in Germany were concentrated entirely in the cities. And that could well be part of Haneke’s point, if I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. The feudalistic dominance in matters of taste and ancestor worship, was encouraged in Germany in particular, even as the new capitalist class, and factory worker were growing. This feudal nostalgia though was in a sense artificial. Hence, that quality of rigidity that occurs in dead bodies, social or otherwise is expressed as emotional rigor mortis here.

Why the dead bird? Why the sadism against the little boy, or the fire of that particular building? For the film is absent the societal tensions of the present day of 1914 Germany. The setting and landscape of the film is the ancien regime, but part of that sclerosis was the gradual disruption of ancestral belief by a new manufacturing industry. This was the death throws of an old order, and one under duress in a sense, and hence one that intensified its own contradictions. Still, it is not easy to represent, allegorically, something missing if all one does is leave it out. I think we are meant to experience the effects of that which is missing. The audience cannot know how and certainly not why (and maybe why isn’t important) such things have gone missing unless there is a structural expression of it. The film is unsettling though, and part of that is exactly the experience, for the audience, of sensing the social pathology is not going to be ‘shown’. It is an experience of a caesura, but that is a contradiction in terms, really. If Haneke wants to be Kafka here, he fails.

This era, the sixty or eighty years leading up to WW1 was, in terms of architecture, one which expressed almost exclusively ruling class tastes. The visage of the era (in northern Europe anyway) was the scowl. Buildings scowled, frowning sternly, at the populace. By the turn of the 20th century the paralysis in architecture resulted in buildings of psychic immobility. There is a quality of death that haunts public buildings from this period. The developing bourgeoisie took to endless recycling of historical motifs the better to valorize traditional taste and more, a traditional frame for class interaction. Imre Steindl’s Hungarian Parliament building, finished in 1904, was the quintessential authoritarian ruling class statement. It stands nearly 270 meters in length, featuring 12 miles of corridors, and a 96-meter high central dome, along with nearly 700 rooms. But this is only the largest of such examples as one can find literally hundreds of railroad stations and government houses that melded northern Gothic features with eclectic Byzantine or Roman style decorations and classical motifs. It is likely that the Eiffel Tower was the first significant construction that spoke to the future and not the past, but even then it served as a gratuitous landmark that pointed to the power and wealth of the governing classes. Of course other buildings were being built, partly due to the new technologies that allowed glass and steel to be incorporated, but few were of great influence ( The Crystal Palace in London, maybe).

There was by the end of the first decade of the 20th century, though, very serious avant garde movements in architecture and painting. And even in dance (mostly in Russia). All of these movements were doing several things at once. And it is beyond the scope of this posting to dig too deeply into all mediums, but I do want to suggest some of the tensions in play. The figure of Wagner looms here, especially relevant for Germany and Austria, as both a builder of musical monuments and a destroyer of, however intentional or not, the classical system of taste. A trip to Bayreuth at the time became akin to today’s pilgrimage to Sundance or the Venice Film Festival. But it was more than that, it was the last bastion of Dionysian energy in the arts. And a gesture of governing classes to validate their aristocracy. However this was a profoundly mediated Dionysus and Wagner was (for Adorno) the first composer for whom the audience enjoyed their consumption more than the actual music.

” Everything in Wagner has its temporal core. Like a spider, his mind sits amidst the powerful web of nineteenth century exchange relationships.”
Adorno

In 1901, the Kaiser, giving a speech at the unveiling of statues that ran along Berlin’s Siegessaule, praised the artists who resisted “modern trends and currents, most of which were foreign and perverted the word “freedom” with their laxity, boundlessness, and arrogance.”

It is notable that of all the European countries at the start of the 20th century, Germany remained the most backward looking in terms of the ruling gentry, and and in those ruling aristocracy the virtues of nationalism and patriotism were most applauded, but also most infused with racial and mythic genealogical sentiment. And the most popular and validated style for all the arts was realism, whether ornamental faux Baroque or ernest sentimental naive. Work that *represented* naturalism — a very narrow and controlled idea of nature and humanity. So, then, the resulting reaction of artists (starting with the Blue rider group in 1911…though this might be disputed somewhat) was to descend on Berlin, by 1914 a city of several million. And in that center developed the German Expressionist movement which signaled an implicit critique of urban industrialization, and of the regressive mythic kitsch of the Kaiser. In Vienna a parallel artistic reaction was taking place — most notably with Oskar Kokochaka, and his friend Adolf Loos. Vienna was also the seat of psychoanalytical radicalism.

So, when I try to identify the problem I have with Haneke, I find important connections to the place Wagner holds in the cultural scaffolding of Germany and the Austro Hungarian Empire, and with this missing element, this blank emotional space in the film. Carlo Ginzburg relates in his comments on Diderot, that most men would prefer to kill a man at great distance rather than strangle a cow with their own hands. Enzo Traverso made the same observation (and he quotes Ginzburg, actually in his new book) about WW1 — the first air war, the first anonymous war and one that even in the closeness of the trenches remained impersonal. In Wagner there was a recuperation of ancestral or pre-historic mythology. Something that became more pronounced in Stravinsky. The primevalism of Wagner was a summation of something that Benjamin said of Baudelaire …“allegorist of commodity fetishism: revealing the return of the primeval in the petrified objects of the nineteenth century.” What is of relevance here is that the long 19th century survived in cultural activities and objects right up to WW2 actually. Adorno famously connected the birth of cinema to Parsifal . What he was pointing at was the spectacle inherent in the mythologizing that artificially looked to access pre-history. For pre-history is not there. And this in turn reminds me of Kracauer’s observation that cinema ‘symbolizes totality’. But it is itself unable to provide a whole. It can only inform the viewer that the whole is there. In any event, the questions Haneke seems to raise in The White Ribbon are those which connect to the later eruption of Nazi violence and accompanying Nazi spectacle. Mass violence, administered and rational and planned. And that such violence was lurking, embedded, in the dying off of the old regime, the distant sounds of feudalism and societies bound to the land, to agricultural cultivation, and to strict dependencies. And that is maybe the most crucial aspect of all; the serfs acute dependency on the manor. The crimes in the village are then voided space, they are a form of erasure, and the detective narrative that is so familiar becomes inverted. The discovery of clues does not lead to the solution, the guilty party, but rather the guilty party (in this case the forces of social history, I guess) lead us back to the clues. At the end there are only clues, details, for which the feudal eye had no use. Now, this was the age of optical discovery and of psychoanalysis and more on that below. The unseen doesn’t mean its not there. The whole is traced backward to details, but these are illegible. And in a sense, this is a film of the illegible.

That said, I suspect I am writing a description of a better film than the one Haneke made. And maybe that’s unfair, because in a way this is a work that accepts the impossibility of its premise. On the other hand, there is an additional question here and that is this is a film of its own time, too. The 21st century. And there is a dangerous mythologizing of its very purpose or intention. The fetishistic quality of a period film in black and white is high. Also the mythologizing of the making, the artistic builder of facsimiles of the pre modern — the implied fetishistic quality of authenticity.

Making a film about the months before WW1 cannot then avoid the idea of realism. In that sense the unintentional sampling of Village of the Damned is to be noted. Also, there is a highly trained response in today’s audience to seek parallels as a substitute for mimetic experience. The solution is, I think, the tearing down of realism in any effort at historical narrative. Pasolini knew this, and Syberberg, and even Fassbinder. Simply remove the issue. Rossellini too, is a perfect example of simply rejecting the entire question of historical ‘re-creation’.

“Distance and moral indifference that makes it possible to bomb towns and murder en masse are mixed with the physical closeness and emotional involvement of the combat seeking to kill Bolsheviks, torture partisans, and eliminate Untermenschen in a struggle experienced as redemptive.”
Saul Friedlander
Nazi Germany & The Jews         

There is something in the application of Fordist principles of production when applied to mass killing that intensifies the compartmentalizing of the already compartmentalized psyche. Chris Kyle as sniper hero was the perfect man for his age. He allowed permission for death by drone, by long distance. And this idea is realized emotionally as well. The emotional distance of the contemporary spectator of mass violence, or its proxy entertainments, is part of this puzzle of voided space. The whole leads back to the detail and in those details are a reassurance of normalcy.

This brings up the problematic nature of art in a society of control and one ruled by exchange value. The contemporary state is really post commodity almost, and so deeply have the principles of the commodity form become ingrained in daily life and in consciousness, the attempt to critique is itself hampered by not just a language degraded by commerce but by an erosion of the mimetic experience. Benjamin noted that the figure of the storyteller, in pre technological society, was narrating what he called ‘transmissible experience’. This is traditional information, carried along in traditional forms. Traverso notes that the violent industrial death, on a new mass scale, was not transmissible experience. In fact it dislodged death from the community, tore it from the religious and social fabric of shared values. In medieval painting (per Benjamin) the death bed becomes almost a throne room, and visitors are depicted entering through open doors from outside.

Death on the battlefields of WW1 meant individual bodies often were lost amid the mud and torn flesh and gore, or obliterated though new technologies of death — there were suddenly no corpses, or fewer. Men walked into voided space and did not return. So, Haneke in a sense is prefiguring that coming erasure — an erasing of the inevitable action of ultimate erasing; death.

“What then is this crux of Wagnerism that, in these renewed critiques of his music, of his theatricality, of his operas, has not been reached? In the eyes of Lacoue-Labarthe, it is the Wagnerian system as bearer of the aestheticization of politics; it is Wagner as transformation of music into an ideological operator for which it is always a matter of constituting a people in art, that is to say a figuring or a con-figuring of a politics. Here a vision of Wagner as proto-fascist is affirmed (I take the expression here in its descriptive sense), in that he invented a figure of closure in the opera (we will return to this point) by assigning to it the configuration of a destiny or of a national ethos of such a type that it would constitute the definitive political function of the aesthetic itself.”
Alain Badiou

The end of the ancien regime included changes in the treatment of death even before the cataclysmic interruptions of WW1. If the feudal landscape provided the frame for understanding death as natural, and narrated by medieval clergy, and associated with God’s rewards– it was a transaction in a sense, but a community wide one. Everyone shared the experience. There were rituals that helped direct the experience. The weakening of these rituals foreshadowed the complete disintegration of them after WW1. This weakening of ritual and of feudal structure and values in general, was the result of an increasing redundancy of roles, of jobs, and a loss of the comforting (psychologically, anyway, and only partially) of feudal certainty. The real and most profound effect of WW1 was the change to the image of death. Benjamin, Traverso, Adorno, and others — even Freud, really — recognized that the first world war was a tear in the cosmic fabric of representation. A rupture in the transmitting of experience aesthetically. That rupture opened psychic scars into suppurating open wounds in the decades following the end of the war. And those wounds carried forward into the hyper industrialized death of the atomic age and WW2.

The rise of fascism, Traverso noted, in Italy, incorporated as part of its foundation mythology, the vitalist soldier who was not destroyed by the horror of war, but made stronger. In fact, across Europe the returning soldiers of the first world war exhibited symptoms not seen before and this helped initiate the early psychoanalytical and medical specialties associated with the treatment of shell shock. Fascism was partly responding to this sense of fear, neurosis, and nightmares by idealizing a new man, a powerful strong martial figure not weakened by the horrors of war. One who had passed the test. The collective anxiety needed a place to direct itself..and that was provided by the selling of an idea of Bolshevik infestation, and part of a Jewish plot, and a threat to the values of this new man. Fear became a currency that Fascism spent in large amounts. But the point here is that cultural expression, and mass culture can be said to be born, in early form, after WW1 produced material, what Kracauer called visible hieroglyphics, which at least partly are inscribed with the unconscicous collective. In any event, this signaled a decisive break with the last vestiges of feudalism and the ancien regime. The world was now urban, traumatized, neurotic, and increasingly alienated.

There is another contributing factor involved in the end of the ancien regime, mentioned above, and that is the rise of optical instruments, and what Martin Jay called ‘the social multiplication of images’. The world of Haneke’s film is a pre modern world. We view it from the perspective of an entirely other scoptic realm; Cartesian perspectivialism. Jonathan Crary pointed to a shift, which began in the early 1800s, from the science of light and optics to the operation of human physiology. The nature and temporality of human sight. One of the causes (or one of the effects, depending on who is arguing this) was an increased concern with color. This coincided with the invention of photography, and by extension then with the nature of sight and how it is processed by humans. In painting these factors impacted the idea of realism, for one thing. The Renaissance framing gave way to impressionistic experience. The Impressionists, however, were transitional figures and in a sense had a regressive side to their idealized pastoral landscapes and a fascination with the passing parade of the everyday city. Gauguin called them superficial, lacking in thought. Then, with the advent of photography, and this biological treatment of sight, a natural elevation of color can be seen in the painting throughout Europe, but perhaps most noticeably in Germany. Der bruke and the Blue Rider painters seem quite satisfying today, partly because of their saturated colors (which reminds me of a small period in the 50s for technicolor films where, because of TV, the studios over saturated the colors…unsure how they would read on the small screen).

The making of art today requires a careful traversing of the the mythologies of neo liberalism, of global capital. And cinema is perhaps the most difficult of mediums in which to solve these issues because, firstly, the economy of movies is so exaggerated, and second because of the sheer magnitude of the influence of screen images on daily life. But I think also, alongside these questions of screen image, human gaze, and the circulation of image can be added the fall out from the still lingering changes to the idea of death that began with WW1 and ended with Hiroshima. The atomized western subject is one who has created no new rituals for death, no new forms of incorporating the collective anxiety of the lost community. In that sense what Haneke touches on with a film of the last days of the ancien regime is quite pertinent. The problem for Haneke, and any filmmaker today, is that there is an unavoidable mythology that comes baked into any backward glance. The remaking of the past, in film, is a highly fraught terrain.

I have added two photos to this posting, one from Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, whose work I admire (I have written before about the various wonders of African photographers) and the Chinese photographer Zhang Xaio, whose book Coastline has won a number of photography awards. In both photographers there is something ineffable and uncanny, but it is not a western uncanny. These are the dreams of those outside the walls of western marketing. However much exposure both may have had to western culture, their vision is undeniably originating from another subjectivity, and it is speaks to haunting quality of a gaze not infused with industrial immolation. The colonial memory has its own neurosis, and it is notable to read Fanon’s corrective to Lacan and Freud here, but also the post revolutionary Chinese, maturing in an era that does not remember the rituals of its own feudal history. And one photo from Peter Mitchell’s new monograph on ‘Motorway City’. Mitchell was a truck driver who decided to photographically catalogue the changes he was seeing in the 1970s in West Riding and around Leeds. It is also the story of the dying off of a culture. A minor sub-system in a greater dying off in that era. The photos, though, are evocative less for the poignancy of the decline of an anachronistic corner of the working class, than for the greater sense of indifference that hangs over each photo. The ruling class have never cared about these people, but Mitchell clearly does.

The Impressionists painted appearances. They were, from one perspective, the anti psychoanalytical artist. The movements in Germany that came both before and after WW1 were quite the opposite. They were either looking to paint the inner gaze, the truth of what isn’t seen, or they were painting the effects of traumatized inner lives. There is a tendency to view contemporary culture as if it is just getting over the bad influence of Freud. That post modern artworks, lacking visuality (as Krauss and others have pointed out in differing ways) are no longer constructed on topography instilled by Freud or Jung or even the later revisionists like Klein. In fact I think the loss has been more of the linkage to antiquity. The loss is the final disconnect from that old regime, from feudalism and medievalist’s directed eye. The zenith of Modernism in mid 20th century feels like the last time that optical questions were important, that looking was a way to define relative or comparative importances, and that following that the ‘missing’ changed from caesura, or unconscious or off stage to just non space, surveilled space, and a blankness of amnesia or some cognitive synaptic misfire. The psychotropic era where voided space was medicated space, not the image of *nothing*, the nothing of classical Chinese painting or Japanese painting and caligraphy, or the space of Pinter’s pauses. That pause was the denuded battlefields lost bodies, but by the late 1960s that battlefield was an unseen or unread jungle, the unprocessed gaze of stoned GIs. The trail backward, on a wrong way street, toward the details, the invisible to the naked eye *clues*. Chandler’s PIs were on quests, to find the grail. Robert Stone’s, too. The contemporary detective is Pynchon’s or worse, David Foster Wallace, and there is no quest. Quests are corny, and so not ironic. Patricia Highsmith is the modernist crime writer. She is replaced today, I think, more by infantile sci fi writers. JJ Abrahms reinvents Star Wars for the hedge fund generation. And unsurprisingly, there is no terror in Abrahms. Kubrick and Tarkovsky are linked to the Douament Ossuary, there’s is the empty terror of HAL slowing down. What is left when HAL falls silent? The silence of outer space. the silence of crypts. Contemporary films set in space cannot stop talking (Martian, Gravity, Intersteller), for there is no link. That voided inner landscape has no correlative. Anti psychotic drugs create chatter, not silence. The endless stream of opinions voiced.

“The vulgar Marxist conception of nature { } recognizes only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features that later emerge in fascism.”
Benjamin

In looking back, there are fugitive aspects that are certainly not part of a film director’s considerations (save for maybe Straub or someone). Adolf Loos pointed out, in the 1920’s, in a critique of a contemporary’s interior design, that he didn’t like the chairs because they were not comfortable. But he added, people sit differently than they used to, the ideas of relaxation have changed, and what he called ‘the technique of resting’. For this is a last barrier for cinema. The universalizing attitude that wants commonality and not difference.

For at the very end of evaluation of Haneke, there is something just a bit too dangerously close to sentimental. It is the sentimentality of subtle condescension. And it may well be that the film is ‘read’ this way because of the problematic trope of *bad children* — to return to the top of this posting. The Bad Seed or The Omen were individual children, but most examples of this genre tend toward the highly reactionary in an inevitable reinforcing of *family* and patriarchy. The appeal in the horror-child is only in relation to an ideal child and childhood. But again, how much of Village of the Damned is not simply a reaction to National Socialist mythology and imagery? And that question is relevant in terms of Rosemanry’s Baby and The Exorcist, as well. Somehow in all these films there is an ambivalence at the heart of these stories that both is drawn to the fascist ideal of strong vital families growing their strong vital tow headed little nazis, and a repulsion. And a fear. Literal reproduction becomes symbolic reproduction. There is a guilt at the center of all ‘bad child’ movies.

The audience is not certain that child or children committed the acts of violence in The White Ribbon, but it is clearly implied, and as such there is this uncomfortable teetering between ideological and Reichian subtext, and just horror movie subtext (reactionary, Catholic, and metaphysical). Its an odd quality of all Haneke’s films, actually, that for all his art house cred and appearance, his films tend to draw upon pop culture genre rather more than is at first apparent. As I say, I am not at all sure I trust what Haneke says about what he is doing. And his films feel ever so slightly untrustworthy, too. There is also a useful comparison to be made with Von Trier’s first film Europa (Zentropa in the U.S.), in that again, an aestheticizing of fascism that serves as both critique and advert. Haneke is visually adroit, and his grasp of cinematic grammar is pronounced, but I think the most telling comparison might be with Fassbinder’s Effie Briest. For in some way the Fassbinder adaptation of the Fontane novel feels far less medicinal, and the sense of societal entropy more allegorical.

Finally, the more interesting question is how artists look back, how they treat their inheritance, culturally. Haneke said he chose children that resembled August Sander photographs. Yeah, well, I don’t even know quite what that means, except its the sort of comment one might hear at a cocktail party. But Sander, and the advent of photography, is certainly a part of this story. And that recourse to color in the painters in Berlin or in Vienna, at the turn of the 20th century is certainly connected to the appearance of optical technology, a technology without color. To what degree the psychoanalytic schema unfolded in black and white is hard to say, but our memories of our unconscious, I am guessing, tend toward monochrome, even if the dream itself is in lurid technicolor Cinemascope.

Today’s tacit acceptance of remote warfare suggests the comforting notion of death being akin to a cyber experience. Death is when your wifi goes out. The space is not really a space, and yet it is far away. Norbert Elias argued that the elaborate rituals of royal courts, in the service of making clear the boundaries of social hierarchies, led to a devaluation of other senses which were too intimate, and privileged vision, but a remote vision. Martin Jay noted this reached its zenith at the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and the creation of symbolic space in the King’s two bodies. Jean Marie Apoostolides wrote of Versailles…

“The image of the king, the image of his double body, invented at the time of courtly festivals, will detach itself from the private person and will function in an autonomous way. { } At the end of the reign, the king’s place becomes an empty space, susceptible of being occupied by anyone possessing the effective reality of power.”

There is a connection between perspective sight, or perspective vision, and the idea or production of ‘realism’. And realism is almost always a reactionary tendency. This is also the result of a privileging of scientific definitions, which, as Jay says…“space was robbed of its substantive meaningfulness to become an ordered, uniform system of abstract linear coordinates.” The relevance in this case has to do with form — and in Haneke there is an insidious uniformity of linear space, and one that can, meaningfully, be juxtaposed to that of Fassbinder or Rossellini. In the latter, the space is intimate, even when it is telling the viewer it is not. The opposite occurs with Haneke. The engagement with his films is always a bit like a long distance call.