Radio Micropsia: Episodio 23

Por Radio Nacional (FM 93.7), domingos de 20 a 22hs.
O por internet, entrando por aquí.

No, la foto no es de acá, pero podría serlo (tampoco cambian mucho visualmente los shows de Jonathan Richman). Lo cierto es que estuvimos allí, en el Salón Real, y lo vimos. Escucharlo, más o menos, pero era él y, si hacías silencio, parecía como que cantaba. Así que repasaremos el concierto, otros shows de la semana, y algunos lanzamientos nacionales e internacionales (de Cerati a Jakob Dylan, pasando por MGMT), además de nuestros comentarios sobre el cine de la semana. Si quieren escuchar algún programa en donde no se diga que "La cinta blanca" es una obra maestra, tienen una cita con nosotros a las 20.

Oscars 2010 - Predicciones (the Gurus of Gold)

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Oscar Preview: Foreign Language Film (In Contention)

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Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 11:06 am · February 18th, 2010

The foreign Language film category has been marred in controversy for the last few years. When films like “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days” and “Persepolis” were unceremoniously nixed from the field a few years ago, a special new “executive committee” was established to have final say on the fallen, hopefully saving the committee (which has to see all the titles to vote) some embarrassment.

Still, there is an inherent bias throughout the votership here. Violence rarely plays well, and they are loathe to be accepting of non-traditional filmmaking. One need only look back one year to 2008’s “Departures” upset for evidence. For thee reasons, the category always seems ready to surprise.

The nominees are:

“Ajami” (Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani)
“The Milk of Sorrow (La Teta Asustada)” (Claudia Llosa)
“A Prophet (Un Prophète)” (Jacques Audiard)
“The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos)” (Juan José Campanella)
“The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band)” (Michael Haneke)

When it came to the annual narrowing of the submitted titles to seven semi-final contenders, there was at least one film that needed the executive committee’s help in staying afloat. And against all odds, that film managed a nomination at the end of the day. It’s not worth embarrassing the title in this space, but suffice it to say, it probably has no chance at appealing with the entire committee.

One film that was well-positioned with relevant themes and an intriguing director tandem from the start was “Ajami.” A dramatic examination of religious conflict in a region of Israel populated by Christians, Muslims and Jews, the film has frequently been categorized as a sort of “Crash” of the Middle Eastern conflict. At the helm are Scandar Copti, a Palestinian, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. But while conflicting ideologies might make for a nice headline for the film, it doesn’t always yield a solid piece of work. The pro- and anti-zionist tandem of Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner on “Munich” comes to mind. “Ajami” is a sometimes confusing tale, due largely to an arbitrary broken narrative structure that keeps the emotional beats from connecting. And it’s also a violent film, which could ultimately hurt it.

Perhaps the least conventional narrative of the bunch is Claudia Llosa’s “The Milk of Sorrow,” which was a surprising entry in the field. The film is interesting in that it is concerned with the psychology of an entire country. Llosa dramatizes a folk tale in Peru that says the violence and rape endured by the country’s women for 12 years during the Maoist uprising was passed on to their children through breast milk. It’s an intriguing study of how the wounds of militaristic conflict never fully heal, which certainly makes it compelling from a zeitgeist standpoint. But the narrative is incredibly inaccessible, with a measured pace that never lifts it off the ground or pushes it forward in any dynamic way. The nomination will most certainly have to be the reward here, because it is not up the committee’s alley.

Speaking of which, Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” is far and away the most accomplished of the foreign language nominees this year. This means, of course, it is destined to lose the Oscar. The French prison drama charts the rise to power of a young Arab, which gives Tahar Rahim the opportunity to offer up one of the best performances of the last 10 years. But the film is undoubtedly the most violent of the lot, and that will most certainly give voters pause. “Gomorrah,” a frequently cited parallel despite a vastly different narrative, was snubbed last year largely due to violence. That Audiard’s film made it this far is already a bit of an accomplishment, but it will have its day once more at the end of the year, when you can count on its showing up on any number of top 10 lists.

If I were to place a bet on any of the nominees, I would frankly double down on Juan José Campanella’s “The Secret in Their Eyes.” It is a powerful tale that at first glance appears to be a conventional police drama, but as the narrative unfolds, its themes begin to register and it takes on a whole other shape. The story, in the briefest terms, concerns an Argentinian federal agent’s quest to solve a murder that was swept up cleanly and sloppily by a crooked justice system. Told in flashback, the film is framed by the agent, 25 years later, haunted by the case’s memories, and indeed, the memories of a love that got away. The film is about so many things, really, which is its greatest strength. And it packs a powerful narrative punch in the third act that is sure to get it across the finish line.

The most critically acclaimed film of the bunch is “The White Ribbon” from Golden Globe winner Michael Haneke. After years of working, and establishing quite the following, Haneke only received his first nomination this year. So an award for his efforts would be quite novel, but I’m given slight pause by the unconventional nature of the narrative. While the themes may be potent, and the craftsmanship certainly respected, this just isn’t the manner in which this committee likes its stories told. They like crisp, simple, plot-driven films that aren’t overly demanding, and Haneke’s film misses in all those categories. Still, it’s been a long and healthy run for the film, one that began with a Palme d’Or way back in Cannes. There is an outside possibility the film takes the prize for prestige alone, but I’m doubtful.

Will win: “The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos)”
Could win: “The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band)”
Should win: “A Prophet (Un Prophète)”

Should have been here: “London River”

Oscars Try to Navigate Through Babel (The New York Times)

January 31, 2010

By DENNIS LIM

THERE was a time when the Academy Award for best foreign-language film reflected the state of world cinema: Fellini films won back-to-back Oscars in the mid 1950s, as did Bergman films in the early ’60s. But the category has come to suggest a peculiar gulf between Academy opinion and the tastes of critics and audiences alike.

Some Oscar-nominated foreign titles from the past decade will leave even committed art-house audiences drawing a blank: “Zelary” from the Czech Republic, “As It Is in Heaven” from Sweden, “Zus & Zo” from the Netherlands. Meanwhile critical favorites and festival hits have often gone unacknowledged; a list of conspicuous omissions might start — but certainly would not end — with “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Caché,” “Silent Light,” “Gomorrah,” “The Edge of Heaven,” “Secret Sunshine” and “Volver.”

This incongruity has much to do with the category’s submission and nominating process, which is more byzantine than for any other, involving nominating bodies in various countries and several Academy committees. This year’s nine-film shortlist, announced this month, was whittled down by two committees from 65 submissions; the final five, to be determined by a third committee, will be revealed along with the other Oscar nominations on Tuesday. Mark Johnson, a veteran producer (“The Notebook,” “Ballast,” the “Narnia” films) and chairman of the Academy’s foreign-language committee since 1999, said that he has been striving in recent years to improve a process that, he acknowledged, often left the impression of an out-of-touch voting body. “We’ve attacked some of what I think have been real legitimate problems and criticisms,” he said.

While Mr. Johnson’s efforts have been largely focused on arriving at a more credible group of nominees, they have not streamlined the complex, multistage procedure. At each phase “there are always surprises and disappointments,” said Michael Barker, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is distributing three of this year’s nine shortlisted films: Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon” (Germany), Jacques Audiard’s “Prophet” (France) and Juan José Campanella’s “Secret in Their Eyes” (Argentina).

The rule changes have not eliminated controversy. This year some critics pointed to omissions like “Police, Adjective” (from Romania), “Mother” (South Korea) and “I Killed My Mother” (Canada), all of which were the submissions of their respective countries, and films like “The Maid” (Chile) and “Vincere” (Italy), which were not selected in the first place.

Jonathan Sehring, the president of IFC Entertainment, an active distributor of foreign films, called the nominating process “terribly flawed” and singled out for criticism the one-film-per-country rule.

Some countries arrive at their choice by polling an Academy-like professional organization with hundreds or thousands of members; countries with less robust film industries might have more ad-hoc groups, sometimes with as few as a dozen voters. While the system is designed to allow even the smallest of film-producing nations a shot, it also ends up punishing relative powerhouses like France and Italy, which have many more acclaimed releases in a given year than, say, Iceland or the Ivory Coast, but must pick only one.

The emphasis on national origin means that international co-productions (like “The Motorcycle Diaries”) tend to fall by the wayside. Until recently the Academy also insisted that the foreign language match the foreign country; for instance, Mr. Haneke’s “Caché,” a French-language film by an Austrian director, was deemed ineligible. And two years ago “The Band’s Visit” was disqualified from being Israel’s official candidate because too much of the movie was in English.

At the national level the decisions are often tangled in internal politics. “Some countries approach the process in terms of ‘Whose turn is it?’ ” Mr. Sehring said, adding that personal agendas can come into play. Some questioned Italy’s decision this year to submit Giuseppe Tornatore’s big-budget period epic “Baaria” over Marco Bellochio’s “Vincere,” a film about Mussolini’s secret lover that has been received with greater enthusiasm at festivals (and is being released in the United States by IFC this year); it has not gone unnoticed that one financial backer of “Baaria” is Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

Voting bodies are apt to consider, sometimes above all other factors, how well a film might travel. Mr. Barker of Sony recalled being at an Academy-related panel at a film festival in Norway and hearing the question come up in the bluntest terms: “Do we pick what we think is the best film, or do we pick what we think the Americans will vote for?” France has fielded suspiciously treacly fare like “Merry Christmas” and “The Chorus,” ignoring work by better-known auteurs like Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas.

The record in the foreign-language category suggests a weakness for stodgy, conservative films, and the Academy members who vote in the category are usually older.

Gary Palmucci, general manager of Kino International, attended a few Academy screenings two years ago, when one of his films, “Beaufort” (Israel), was up for an Oscar. With a few exceptions, he said, “it looked like everybody was over 65.” (Kino has another Israeli film on this year’s shortlist: “Ajami,” which opens in New York this week.)

This demographic quirk can be partly chalked up to the rigors of the nomination process. Every year the submitted movies are divided into four groups; an Academy member who wishes to participate in the nominations must see at least 80 percent of the films in one group (which usually works out to more than a dozen films). All films must be seen in theaters; since most of the titles are not in commercial release, that usually means attending special Academy screenings.

“The people who have that kind of time are often the older members who are retired,” Mr. Johnson said. And they tend to favor what Mr. Palmucci described as “a more meat-and-potatoes kind of film.” Mr. Sehring noted that movies with relatively challenging subject matter (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” about abortion in Ceausescu-era Romania) or form (the hand-drawn animation of “Persepolis”) have often been overlooked.

Such criticisms are hardly new, but they intensified two years ago when the Academy snubbed “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes. Mr. Johnson responded by introducing an intermediate step in the nominating process to try to create a safeguard measure against glaring oversights.

“I don’t mean to be critical of the general committee because it’s older,” Mr. Johnson said, “but I wanted to make the selection process reflect more the Academy at large.”

Instead of entrusting the general membership with arriving at the nine-film shortlist, the Academy now takes the top six choices of the voting members (an average of 300 every year, Mr. Johnson said); the remaining three are wild-card selections by an executive committee appointed by Mr. Johnson, including the director Curtis Hanson, the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, whose film “The Lives of Others” was a foreign-language winner. (The shortlist is narrowed to the final five by yet another committee’s members, who watch all nine films in a three-day period.)

Last year — the first time the shortlist was determined by two separate committees — the eventual nominees included well-reviewed art-house hits like “The Class” and “Waltz With Bashir” as well as an under-the-radar critical favorite, “Revanche.” This year’s list includes the Berlin festival’s top prizewinner, “The Milk of Sorrow” (Peru), and two Cannes hits, “The White Ribbon” (Germany) and “A Prophet” (France), films that might be too dark or difficult to have made it this far under the old system.

But there is nothing Mr. Johnson can do once the nominees are set and the vote is opened to the entire membership. Last year his rule changes produced the category’s most respectable lineup in some time. But it was the Japanese film “Departures,” which many considered the most conventional and sentimental of the five, that won.

That decision may not stand the test of time, but in a sense it is in keeping with tradition. In 1981, when Mr. Barker and his partner Tom Bernard were at United Artists, they had a foreign-language Oscar frontrunner in François Truffaut’s “Last Metro.” The other prime contender was thought to be Akira Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha.” But the eventual winner was a Russian film, long since forgotten, called “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.”

“It was a surprise to us that this could happen,” Mr. Barker said. “But then we realized this kind of thing has been happening for generations.”

A History of Violence: Michael Haneke Interview (Newsweek)

Filmmaker Michael Haneke talks about the brutality of his films, respecting the viewer, and his new movie, The White Ribbon.

By Marc Bain |
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Dec 28, 2009

Michael Haneke is one of Europe's most decorated—and controversial—filmmakers. He has a talent for exploring social issues with a camera, and he's equally adept at getting under his audience's skin. In his 2001 movie The Piano Teacher, for instance, he examined what happens when civilized society suppresses animal passions, including some genital self-mutilation in the process. On Dec. 30 his latest film, The White Ribbon, gets a limited release in the U.S. The movie, which earned Haneke his first Palme d'Or at Cannes, is arguably his best to date. With his usual unsentimental eye, it examines life in a small Protestant village in Germany on the eve of World War I, while teasing out implications about the origins of fascism. It could also be his most inviting movie; it has moments of genuine sweetness and is shot in beautiful black and white. Haneke spoke to NEWSWEEK's Marc Bain about making viewers uncomfortable, film as propaganda, and why he takes his audience seriously. Excerpts:

Violence is something you deal with frequently in your movies. Why do you keep returning to the subject?
It's simply that violence is a part of our society. It's the part that frightens us most when we're confronted with it. But I don't understand why I'm always categorized as a specialist for violence. I don't think that's the only thing that's present in my films. I deal with lots of social issues, like the question of media in our society. Personally, I can't stand violence. In any standard American mainstream movie, there's 20 times more violence than in any one of my films, so I don't know why those directors aren't asked why they're such specialists for violence.

You make very different movies than mainstream American directors do. Your approach seems to be less about using violence to entertain.
Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society. You should ask Tarantino why he's so obsessed with violence.

Your movies, as you say, deal with many uncomfortable topics. But they never give the viewer a sense of justice being served. Is there an emotional reaction you want from your viewers?
I try to take the spectator seriously ... Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is. My approach is rather to deal with the question, to raise the question in a way that confronts the audience with it and forces the audience to find their own responses. As a dramatist, your requirement is to do that with as much urgency as possible so the viewer feels compelled to think about the issues. You can't provide reassuring answers, because there are none. The only people claiming to have answers are politicians or people who want to extract money from your wallets.

Do you feel that film is morally obligated to avoid reassuring answers?
Yes. Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote about kitsch as a kind of false emotion that the Soviets used for propaganda, to manipulate people for political ends. You mention film's history as a propaganda tool. Is that something that's on your mind as you make a film, keeping the film from acting as propaganda?
Yes, of course. But automatically when you make a film you're manipulating the spectator. If you place your camera here instead of there, you're going to give a very different impression, so filmmaking always involves manipulation. The question is rather, to what end do you manipulate the spectator? I've often said that manipulation is a form of rape. The only acceptable form of rape is when you rape the spectator into autonomy, make the spectator aware of their role as a receptor, as a victim, so that they become autonomous or independent.

The White Ribbon looks at children who are raised in a very strict manner—some might even call it extremism—in this small Protestant village in Germany. The implications are obviously broader than the setting. What issues were you trying to address?
I think that the elements that you mention are present in the film and present in that context, but that's certainly not my goal. The question I'm trying to raise is: what are the conditions necessary to make people susceptible to an ideology? Around the world, in every country, in every age, it's always been the same thing: when people are suffering, when people are being humiliated, when people have a sense of hopelessness, then they'll listen to the first person that comes along and says, "I know the solution to your problems." They're willing—eager, in fact—to follow that person. That was the idea behind the film, and for that reason I chose the most prominent example of ideology that we know, which is German fascism. But I think it would be wrong to limit the film to the subject of German fascism for the reasons I mentioned.

There's a cycle of violence evident in the movie. As the parents hurt their children, the children take that pain out on others. Do you think there will ever be an end?
I'm afraid I don't see an end to this cycle of violence. I see children as a fresh field in which people are walking with their hard rubber boots. The longer people walk on the tender soil, the harder the soil gets. Eventually the children themselves start to walk in their hard boots over the soft soil. It's an inevitable cycle. We forget rather quickly physical pain, but our unconscious doesn't forget the humiliation we've suffered and the psychological pain we've suffered.

In the past, with Funny Games, for instance, you directed the movie at a specific audience [American consumers of violence in media]. Is there an audience you had in mind for The White Ribbon ?
Funny Games is the only film of mine which was ever made for a specific audience. All my other films were made for as broad an audience as possible, and this one is no exception.

American critics have accused you of being sanctimonious in your films, like a stern schoolteacher lecturing children. As you see it, you respect the viewer. What do you think accounts for the disconnect between the way you see your movies and the way others sometimes see them?
I think it stems from the fact that most television and mainstream cinema takes the audience as idiots. When they're finally confronted with a film that takes them seriously, they see it as an affront.

Another criticism has been that you make the audience uncomfortable by torturing your characters, albeit for an intellectual point. Do you think of your characters as people or ideas?
I strive very much to create individuals. I'm not interested in them as ideas. I think that's why it disturbs people, because they are real characters. I think it's the mainstream cinema where you find people are reduced to ideas, to clichés of good or evil. In real life there aren't people who are entirely good or entirely evil. We are capable of both, all composed of both in contradictory ways. If you look at the great novels, the characters in them are also very contradictory. It's only in bad literature that people are good or bad.

Last, could you tell me a little about the next film you'll be working on?
I'm so busy giving interviews ... that I haven't had time to sit down to write my next script. But I'm hoping to be able to shoot next summer in France another French production, starring again Isabelle Huppert. I hope I'll have time soon to start writing that script.

"The White Ribbon", de Michael Haneke (críticas)

By A.O. Scott/The New York Times

The last shot of Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon” is haunting not because it sums up the unnerving, at times horrifying series of events that have filled up the previous 2 hours 25 minutes, but rather because it seems to unfold as if none of them have taken place. Taken alone, the film’s final image might conjure a mood of gentle, pastoral nostalgia. Here, in glowing, understated black and white, we glimpse part of a world that used to be. The camera sits inside an austerely beautiful village church that is illuminated by winter morning sunlight, its pews filling with congregants whose dark clothes and weathered faces bespeak hardy old virtues of work, faith and family.

By now we know otherwise. The only comfort offered by “The White Ribbon,” a chronicle of small-town German life on the eve of World War I, is that the social order it depicts has vanished from the earth. Good riddance to the good old days! But at the same time, Mr. Haneke may intend that sense of distance, of pastness, to be illusory, so that the strangeness of these people and their doings is shadowed by an uncomfortable sense of recognition. We fool ourselves if we think bygones are bygones. We’re on a guilt trip down memory lane. And though the road twists and turns and reveals some pretty scenery, in the end we arrive in a familiar place, to be lectured and scolded by a filmmaker whose rich craft disguises the poverty of his ideas.

Our guide is the village schoolteacher, played on screen in his relative youth (by Christian Friedel) as an earnest, chubby-faced bumbler and in voice-over narration (by Ernst Jacobi) as a ruminative old man. This teacher, who like most of the adult characters in the film is not referred to by name, is by far the most benign — if also the most ineffectual — authority figure in a place that turns out to be a veritable theme park of patriarchal abuses.

The wholesome facade of this hamlet, with its tidy brick houses and wind-swept wheat fields, where residents tip their hats and address one another with unfailing formality, masks a carnival of cruelty. Children are beaten and molested. Women are silenced and humiliated. Workplace accidents claim the lives of innocent farmwives. Horses and house pets are maimed, cabbages are wantonly decapitated and the only force more fearsome than the brutality of fathers is the innocence of children.

Mr. Haneke, born in 1942 and perhaps the most lauded living European filmmaker with a surname other than Dardenne, traffics in shock and terror, but in a cerebral, systematic way. His films rarely foreshadow their jolts or speed up their plots to generate suspense, but rather proceed, with almost meditative calm, to weave a cocoon of dread around intimations of mystery and implications of violence.

“The White Ribbon,” which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and the top European Film Award this year, is a rare foray out of the clamor and anomie of modern urban Europe that is Mr. Haneke’s favored setting. The film also marks his return to his native German after a decade of mainly French-language films. In it, he uses the sharp elegance of Christian Berger’s monochrome cinematography (achieved by shooting in color, then draining it away), the grammatical precision of old-fashioned speech and the pageantry of period drama to lull and also to inflame the audience’s expectations. The effect is something like a ghost story, the horror of which is at once elusive and pervasive. What is happening here? Why is it happening?

The answer to the first question: a lot of weird stuff. The town doctor (Rainer Bock) is injured when his horse trips over a wire strung across his gate, apparently for just that sinister purpose. That apparently inexplicable crime is followed by others, including the abduction and beating of one small child and the near blinding of another. There are whispers and denunciations, and visits from the police, but no solutions are forthcoming.

Instead, as suspicions multiply, we are led on a tour of several households, which taken together offer a sociological composite portrait of guilt and repression. The schoolteacher, whose courtship of a milky-fresh young woman named Eva (Leonie Benesch) provides hints of tender comedy, traffics mainly in rumors and surmises while the camera assumes a position of omniscience. (Unless, that is, it is the vehicle for the narrator’s retroactive speculation or self-protecting deceit, which is not unthinkable.)

In due course we enter the homes of the Baron (Ulrich Tukur), the town’s principal employer and landowner; the doctor, a widower with two children and an interesting relationship with the midwife (Susanne Lothar); the steward (Josef Bierbichler); a tenant farmer (Branko Samarovski); and, perhaps most important, the pastor (Burghart Klaussner).

Each of these men, with the partial exception of the poor farmer, represents a different face of power. And each one, accordingly, manifests his own special brand of awfulness, mistreating those close to him with methods appropriate to his station. The Baron is cold and sarcastic with his wife (Ursina Lardi). The steward beats his children in a state of volcanic rage, while the pastor does the same in a mood of pious sorrow.

Monstrous as these daddies are, their children may be worse. A gaggle of towheaded darlings walks through the film, their mild smiles so sinister that they might have wandered in from the 1960 British science-fiction horror chestnut “Village of the Damned.” Anyone who has seen Mr. Haneke’s “Cache” or his twin versions of “Funny Games” will be aware that he does not believe in the blamelessness of youth. Quite the contrary: children, in his world, carry the sins of their parents in concentrated, highly toxic form, and are also capable of a pure, motiveless, experimental evil.

What will become of these particular blond children, who are either demons or victims, driven to mischief by severe paternal discipline or so intrinsically bad that no punishment could suffice? Do the math: it’s 1914. In 20 or 30 years, what do you suppose these children will be up to? Our narrator, well into old age, tells us that he is revisiting the strange events in the village to “clarify things that happened in our country” afterward.

But “The White Ribbon” does the opposite, mystifying the historical phenomenon it purports to investigate. Forget about Weimar inflation and the Treaty of Versailles and whatever else you may have learned in school: Nazism was caused by child abuse. Or maybe by the intrinsic sinfulness of human beings. “The White Ribbon” is a whodunit that offers a philosophically and aesthetically unsatisfying answer: everyone. Which is also to say: no one.

The teacher may be Mr. Haneke’s obvious surrogate: an intellectual whose pursuit of the truth is enabled by his inability to change anything. But really the filmmaker is closer to the pastor, his chosen emblem of blindness and hypocrisy. After caning his children for a minor infraction, the pastor makes his oldest son (Leonard Proxauf) and daughter (Maria-Victoria Dragus) wear white ribbons, which serve both as emblems of shame and reminders of the purity of soul they are in danger of sacrificing. “The White Ribbon” is offered to its grateful, masochistic audience in a similarly punitive and yet oddly forgiving spirit, as a reminder of just how awful we are and how much worse we used to be.

“The White Ribbon” is rated R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex, violence, repression.

The White Ribbon

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Michael Haneke; director of photography, Christian Berger; edited by Monika Willi; produced by Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Margaret Menegoz and Andrea Occhipinti; released by Sony Pictures Classics. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. In German, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.

WITH: Ulrich Tukur (the Baron), Susanne Lothar (the Midwife), Christian Friedel (the Schoolteacher), Burghart Klaussner (the Pastor), Leonie Benesch (Eva), Josef Bierbichler (the Steward), Rainer Bock (the Doctor), Ernst Jacobi (the Narrator), Ursina Lardi (Marie-Louise, the Baroness), Fion Mutert (Sigmund), Branko Samarovski (the Farmer), Leonard Proxauf (Martin),Maria- Victoria Dragus (Klara) and Michael Kranz (the Tutor).

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By Betsy Sharkey/Los Angeles Times

We don't go to Michael Haneke films for comfort, but to gaze through a glass darkly. That vision -- tense, provocative and unnerving -- is on full display in "The White Ribbon," which could be considered a culmination of this difficult director's brilliant career.

Set in an ordinary German village on the eve of World War I, the film looks at the children who would survive that war and grow into the generation that would bend to Hitler's sway. Shot in black and white, which serves as both a statement and a style, Germany's foreign language Oscar entry has rightfully been collecting critical acclaim since it took the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

Here the dramatic interplay of innocence, evil and human behavior so often on Haneke's radar has been joined by themes of guilt and responsibility. He's woven all this into a mysterious, often eerie parable that attempts to explain the seeds of Nazism. That the setting is a seemingly idyllic farming community is not accidental.

But accidents are very much at the heart of "The White Ribbon." As the narrator of this tale explains as the film begins, there were a series of strange events years ago in his village that "could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country."

Ernst Jacobi, our narrator here, affects a grandfatherly, almost apologetic tone that could lead you to believe that he will fill in all the missing pieces for us. Don't be fooled. This is a film that requires concentration -- a don't blink, don't breathe approach will serve the viewer well.

The world we're dropped into by cinematographer Christian Berger, whose work with Haneke includes two of the director's better known films, "Caché" and "The Piano Teacher," is both beautiful and harsh. The farmland with its rolling fields of wheat stands in lush contrast to the families in the region, hard folk tied to a rigid Protestant vision of morality where pleasures are few, forgiveness is slow in coming and retribution rules the day.

"The White Ribbon" is told from the point of view of the village schoolteacher, with Christian Friedel playing him as a young man on-screen and Jacobi's voice his latter-day, much wiser and reflective self. The story is framed by the family life of all those who make up the region, a perfect socio-economic mix of the Baron, the Pastor, the Steward, the Doctor, the Farmer and the Schoolteacher.

It all begins when the village doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown after his horse runs into a trip wire set on the road to his home. After school that day, the village children gather at the doctor's house. When someone spots them outside, innocent faces smile and explain that they're just there to see after their classmate Anna (Roxane Duran), the doctor's teenage daughter.

But their politeness is eerie; the way they move through the village in groups suddenly seems sinister. Haneke is just starting to sow the seeds of mistrust, and like any good provocateur, he soon has us suspecting everyone in town of secret schemes and dark deeds.

Next, the farmer's wife is killed, the Baron's son is beaten, an infant catches a worrisome fever, and on it goes. There are no suspects and there are few clues, though the governing principle seems to be punishment.

While the accidents drive the action, they are also there to give context to the most significant question posed by "The White Ribbon": What is it about someone's childhood that creates the adults they become? Haneke, who wrote the screenplay with veteran writer Jean-Claude Carrière ("Cyrano de Bergerac," "Valmont") consulting, puts the responsibility on both parents and society as a whole, rather than any genetic predisposition, which leads you back to the question of who is minding the children.

In "White Ribbon," Haneke is, and it is to the children he always returns -- building scenes in such a way that you wonder are they responsible? Is it all or just a few? Planned or happenstance? And hovering over it all -- if it is the children, then why?

Before we can condemn them, the director begins opening the doors to their homes and the texture of their lives: the indifference in one household, the denial in another; for others, it's neglect, or brutality. Harshness and humiliation seem the guiding principals of parenting here.

The schoolteacher, an excellent Friedel, represents kindness in this unkind land, thinking the best of everyone until he no longer can. His courtship of another gentle soul, Eva (Leonie Benesch), a nanny in the Baron's employ, also provides needed relief from the film's somewhat unrelenting grimness. Meanwhile, the overbearing Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) represents the church's role in creating an environment of fear and retribution.

The pastor's ritualistic and sadistic punishment of his teenagers -- Klara and Martin, very powerfully played by Maria-Victoria Dragus and Leonard Proxauf -- gives the film its name: the white ribbon they must wear to remind them that purity is their goal and that thus far they've failed. Of course, there are beatings, and self-righteous tirades too. Their crime? They were late for dinner.

That the story plays out in black and white makes things easier in a way -- the images have the beauty of old photos. That look, coupled with the faces (the director reportedly saw more than 7,000 children to try to capture the era), gives the film the feel of an artifact, a historical document.

History hovers over "White Ribbon" with the force of impending doom. These children will inherit this world of sin and sorrow, and the consequences will be catastrophic. Whatever responsibility we might feel for future generations after seeing a cautionary tale like this one, well that's just one of the questions Haneke leaves us to figure out.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com

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By J. Hoberman/Village Voice

The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke's first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and, addressing what used to be called "the German problem" while dodging the filmmaker's own likeability issues, it's his best ever.

A period piece set on the eve of World War I in an echt Protestant, still-feudal village somewhere in the uptight depths of Northern Germany, The White Ribbon—which won a deserved Palme d'Or at last May's Cannes-fest of Cruelty—is as cold and creepy and secretly cheesy as any of Haneke's earlier films, if not quite as lofty. Instead of sermonizing, Haneke sets himself to honest craftsmanship. Detailed yet oblique, leisurely but compelling, perfectly cast and irreproachably acted, the movie has a seductively novelistic texture complete with a less-than-omniscient narrator hinting at a weighty historical thesis: It's Village of the Damned as re-imagined by Thomas Mann after studying August Sander's photographs of German types while perusing Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism.

The White Ribbon's original title identifies the movie as "A German Children's Story" and, recounted by the village schoolteacher 40 or 50 years later, this dark fable has a mock legendary aspect. The tale may not reflect "the truth in every detail," the elderly teacher-narrator announces. Much is known only by hearsay and "a lot of it remains obscure to me even today." Many questions are unanswerable, he admits, and yet "the strange events that occurred in our village . . . may cast a new light on some of the goings-on in this country." No need to speculate on what those goings-on might be.

The first strange event occurs seconds into the action, when the irascible village doctor is thrown by his horse, having tripped on a mysterious wire strung across his habitual path. Thereafter, this quiet town, comfortably nestled into its peaceful landscape yet seething with hidden resentments, is subjected to an escalating series of inexplicable accidents and unsolved incidents of terror, most of which are discussed after the fact, but never shown. Some are precipitated by the angry son of a tenant farmer after his mother is fatally injured in a barn collapse while working for the local baron; other events, foretold by dreams and portents, appear connected to a pack of angelic-looking little towheads, led by the pastor's eldest daughter and seemingly possessed of a group mind. In the meantime, the narrator—or, rather, his youthful avatar—shyly woos the equally bashful nanny who watches over the baron's children.

This circumspect courtship may be the one purely innocent activity in a movie unfolding beneath a rubric of innocent purity. Nothing is ever truly revealed, least of all who commissioned the most heinous crimes. With one exception, the only wrongs shown onscreen are committed against the village children—who are regularly subjected to corporal punishment, among other abuses. (There is to be no laffing at these funny games!) In a scene that could have been lifted straight from Reich's Mass Psychology, the implacable pastor, a poster boy for vindictive divinity, ties his eldest son's hands to prevent even the possibility of nocturnal masturbation; the widowed doctor meanwhile engages in unmentionable practices with his 14-year-old daughter. (Notable for its obdurate, unsmiling, and down-right mean-spirited fathers, the town is populated by case studies from The Authoritarian Personality; it might be re-christened Patriarchalischenplatz or just plain Schweinhundtstadt.)

In a sense, Haneke is strictly bound by his own white ribbon. Although based on an original screenplay, the movie strongly resembles his adaptations of Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth. The odd quality of seeming to faithfully follow an acknowledged literary classic is heightened by Haneke's deliberate, almost parodic, classical filmmaking. The camera is quiet; the compositions are studied and seldom in close-up. The black-and-white images are etched on the screen with precise hyperreal clarity. (Christian Berger's impeccable cinematography was cited as the year's best by the New York Film Critics Circle.) Only rarely is the ominous stillness disturbed, as with the sudden eruption of deftly choreographed collective activity that is the town's harvest festival and, not coincidentally, leads to the single instance of revolt against Herr Baron.

History has the same brusque impact. Just as the baroness prepares to leave her unpleasant husband, citing not only his own insensitivity but the intolerable "malice, envy, apathy, [and] brutality" of his town, the steward rushes in with news that Archduke Ferdinand of Austria has been assassinated in Sarajevo. End of story, almost. All police investigations are halted; everything is subsumed by the expectation of war, if not the 30-year nightmare about to convulse Europe. The final shot finds the townspeople gathered in church, perhaps for the last time. In any case, the narrator maintains that he never saw any of them again.

No one's idea of a cinematic cuddle-bunny, Haneke is as much strategist as filmmaker and more pedagogue than visionary. The White Ribbon is certainly the most beautiful movie he has made—a sort of triumphantly willed Meisterwerk. His use of narrative uncertainty, resembling those in the unsolved mystery at the heart of Caché, may be standard-issue, but there's no denying The White Ribbon's seriousness and unity. The severe, withholding culture that Haneke critiques is precisely mirrored by his methods. The White Ribbon keeps the viewer in a state of perpetual uncertainty, but it's more than clear how things will end.

J. Hoberman will be on leave for the next two months

Nominaciones a los Globo de Oro: mejor película extranjera

-La nana, de Sebastián Silva

-Baaria, de Giuseppe Tornatore

-Un profeta, de Jacques Audiard

-The White Ribbon, de Michael Haneke

-Los abrazos rotos, de Pedro Almodóvar

Awards Countdown: foreign-language films (Screen)

Sixty-five films have been submitted for the foreign-language film Academy Award category this year but the Globes and Baftas might well recognise some of the films that failed to make the Academy cut, writes Mike Goodridge.

This year’s foreign-language film category for the Academy Awards is missing a few more notable films than usual, and it is not the fault of the Academy but of the countries.

The submissions list, which is already limited in that it allows only one film per country, omits some of the year’s best films — City Of Life And Death from China, which won at San Sebastian; Lebanon from Israel, which won at Venice; The Maid from Chile, which won Sundance’s world dramatic competition; Dogtooth from Greece which won Un Certain Regard at Cannes; Broken Embraces from Spain and Vincere from Italy, which were in Competition at Cannes; and Euro box-offi ce smash The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo from Sweden.

The same category in the Golden Globes and Bafta can pick up these films as nominees, so it will be a point of interest to see how different the three awards are in the fi nal analysis.

That said, the 65 films submitted for the Oscars will yield a shortlist, first of nine, then whittled down to the final five, which should encompass the two great masterpieces from Cannes this year — Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet — alongside some of that festival’s most notable successes : Police, Adjective (Romania), Ajami (Israel), I Killed My Mother (Canada) (pictured), Mother (Korea), Samson And Delilah (Australia) and The Misfortunates (Belgium).

Then there is the Berlin Golden Bear winner The Milk Of Sorrow from Peru and one of the Berlinale’s best films this year, Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly from Iran. And it might not have received the warmest reviews in Venice but you cannot rule out Giuseppe Tornatore’s Baaria.

The director’s sentimental style has always appealed to Academy voters and even his last film, the uneven thriller The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta), made it to the fi nal nine in 2007. Other films of note from the second half of the year include Juan Jose Campanella’s box-offi ce hit The Secret In Their Eyes from Argentina, which played Toronto and San Sebastian; and Fernando Trueba’s The Dancer And The Thief from Spain, which had its world premiere in San Sebastian. Both films star Ricardo Darin and both directors have a strong Oscar history.

As part of our awards countdown coverage, Screen caught up with some of the film-makers who stand a strong chance of scoring recognition across all awards bodies.

Could Michael Haneke win an Oscar or could the man he beat to the Palme d’Or, Jacques Audiard, take gold instead? Will the Academy’s conservative membership opt for more traditional, less edgy films such as The Secret In Their Eyes or Baaria? And will some foreign-language films of note, such as Sin Nombre or Coco Before Chanel, simply fall through the cracks?

Screen International brings you six of the directors of this year’s Oscar-nominated foreign-language films.

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Michael Haneke

WRITER-DIRECTOR, THE WHITE RIBBON (GERMANY)

Michael Haneke came to The White Ribbon after he had made his English language remake of Funny Games in the US, which, he says, was not his favourite working experience. “For a control freak like me, the US was a very difficult country to work in,” he says. “I didn’t feel in control with the language and… we were under-financed and needed more money.”

So he was not prepared to compromise on his German epic, a script he had written as a threepart TV series 20 years ago and which “ended up in a drawer”. The $17.9m (€12m) production was to be shot in black and white with no major stars. “Yes, it was expensive, but the success of [2004 hit] Hidden (Caché) helped get it financed,” he says.

For the first time, Haneke asked for assistance with his screenplay, enlisting Jean-Claude Carriere to help him cut 20 minutes from the script. “After two afternoons’ work, we had it down to two and a half [hours]. It’s the first time I have ever cut anything. I normally always write to the right length.”

Haneke spins myriad mysteries in The White Ribbon but eschews conventional answers. “You can’t offer answers and solutions,” he says. “You should assume people are more intelligent than that. People always ask me about the videotapes in Hidden but that is the least important element in the film.”

But he does concede that the film shows a time in Germany in which the seeds of fascism were being sown. “I’m not offering an explanation for fascism but showing the conditions from which it can arise,” he says.

The Palme d’Or win at Cannes was, he says, useful because it makes the financing conditions easier for his next film, but he also expresses pleasure in the award which had been denied to him when Hidden, The Piano Teacher and Code Unknown played in Competition. “It is always nerve-wracking,” he says, “because you have to wait until the last day to find out.”

The Austrian director is now representing Germany in the foreign-language Oscar category, a race for which he was excluded with Hidden since it was deemed neither French enough nor Austrian enough by the Academy. So to which country does he feel he belongs? He smiles before answering. “I belong to the country of Haneke,” he says.

By Mike Goodridge

Jacques Audiard

DIRECTOR/CO-WRITER, A PROPHET (FRANCE)

Wearing a pork-pie hat on a rainy London morning, Jacques Audiard explains that for him, “a film only exists if it has a rapport with what I see in the street”. Looking for a project to follow his critically acclaimed The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Audiard says hewas at an impasse. Later, on the phone from Paris, he explains: “When that happens, I think about casting.”

Audiard had in fact already linked up with scriptwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri, who was working on a story that would become A Prophet, when he found his inspiration.

Visiting Dafri on the set of another film, Audiard sat in the backseat of a car and found himself next to Tahar Rahim, who would go on to star in the film. “When I saw him, it was love at first sight. The only problem with that is that you don’t want to believe the first person you see is the person you’ve been looking for. I don’t know how I would have done this film if he didn’t exist. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about it.”

But A Prophet, which had a lengthy gestation period — Audiard and Nicolas Peufaillit wrote the screenplay from an original work by Dafri along with Thomas Bidegain — did come together and has gone on to even greater acclaim than his last film. A Prophet took the Grand Jury prize at Cannes this year and is France’s Oscar entry this year. Audiard does not love the label though. “It’s a bit heavy to say I’m representing France,” he laughs.

Still, awards do mean something to him. “They move me, but when I get a prize like in Cannes I think about the people I’ve seen get these prizes before me. I thought about Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese in Cannes this year and I thought, ‘They were up here too,’ and, ‘No, you must have made a mistake.’”

Regarding the international roll out of A Prophet, Audiard allows that it is important to know his films travel. “I fell off my chair the other day when someone told me foreign films only make up 2% or 3% of films released in the UK, so it’s quite a big deal to be part of those 2% or 3%. There’s nothing more moving for me than to do something about a specific issue that gives something back to someone in Asia or America… We make films to communicate, after all.”

By Nancy Tartaglione

Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani

WRITER-DIRECTORS, AJAMI (ISRAEL)

“Scandar Copti and I worked seven years on this project and up to our first screening, in Cannes’ 2009 Directors’Fortnight, we had some of the best and most experienced professionals telling us why this film couldn’t possibly work,” says Yaron Shani, one of the two debutant writerdirectors of Ajami.

However, the clash between Jews, Christians and Muslims in a Jaffa slum, which could serve as a microcosm for Israel as a whole, received a special mention from Cannes’ Camera d’Or jury, going on to pick up awards in Jerusalem, Valencia, London, Montpellier, Ghentand AFI Fest in Los Angeles and, most recently, Thessaloniki.

“After Cannes, there were no doubts any more,” concedes Shani. “Israeli reports from Cannes were still relatively subdued, but once the film was shown and awarded in Jerusalem, even the most severe film critics went into unexpected superlatives.”

It was not just the critics who were impressed: Ajami won all the major prizes from the Israeli Film Academy, beating Venice winner Lebanon. Having taken the film to a number of international festivals, Shani was surprised to discover the political subtext of the picture, which “may have opened doors for us”, was secondary to its success.

“Everywhere I went, audiences and the press were far more seeing a good movie.” Naturally, most interviewers asked about an Arab (Copti is an Arab-Israeli, born in the Ajami neighbourhood of Jaffa) and an Israeli (Shani is an Israeli Jew) working together, but wondered even more at the remarkable results they obtained from a cast of non-actors.

When Israel’s two leading distributors originally passed on the film, Shani, with Ajami’s producer Mosh Danon and talent agent Ilan Zeller, set up a distribution company called Yuval to release it in Israel. In its first six weeks, the film has reached 120,000 admissions — a major hit in Israeli terms. “Originally there was no great enthusiasm among local distributors and by the time the picture swept over audiences in Jerusalem and better offers came up, we had our own operation going,” he explains.

The US release is planned for January through Kino International.

Shani has not yet discussed the future with Copti, but while he believes each should develop an identity of his own, he admits the chance to work together again would “be wonderful, given the special relationship we have”.

By Edna Fainaru

Bong Joon-ho

WRITER-DIRECTOR, MOTHER (SOUTH KOREA)

South Korea’s Oscar entry is Bong Joon-ho’s thriller about a desperate mother out to prove her son’s innocence when he is accused of murder.

A director with a sharp and humorous point of view, known for playing with genre conventions while satirising social ones, Bong’s previous works include Memories Of Murder, based on a series of unsolved killings that terrorised 1980s Korea; and The Host, a thriller which sees a dysfunctional family battle a river monster. Both were record breaking hits on their Korean release and won critical acclaim at home and abroad, playing international festivals such as San Sebastian and Cannes.

With Mother, Bong says he was again trying to break open stereotypes. “I’d always wanted to work with Kim Hye-ja, and I made this film specifically for her. The actress is herself a ‘mother’ icon in Korea, so I decided to confront that head on.

Whether it’s by breaking down themes or stories, I like doing things other people don’t. The ‘mother’ theme or the subject matter is usually portrayed as warm, but I went the opposite direction to show what extremes motherhood could go to. I wanted to portray a mother speeding recklessly with her brakes undone.”

Mother made its world premiere in Un Certain Regard at Cannes before screening at further international festivals including Toronto and New York. “Cannes was the first time I showed the film publicly so I was nervous about the reviews, but all the major publications received the film well. It was also gratifying to go to places where they didn’t know Kim Hye-ja or Korean Wave star Won Bin [in the role of the son], and have people laud their performances.”

Locally, although the film’s 3 million admissions were not close to his previous record-breakers, Mother drew the best reviews of his four films.“

But the online reactions were mixed, remembers Bong. “Young male viewers anticipating something else from my previous films said it was too heavy — one called it ‘a film I wouldn’t want to see with my mother’. Others said it was a masterpiece surpassing Memories and The Host. I think for a film of its size, Mother had a good round.”

Much ado has been made of Mother’s Oscar submission, but the director remains level-headed: “It’s just one out of 60-something submissions. People have told me not to be without hope since the extreme mother theme is one that works in so many cultures — with the Jewish mother, the Italian mother and so on.

It seems to be doing alright in Japan, and I’m looking forward to its release in the UK, US, France and Germany.”

By Jean Noh

Espen Sandberg and Joachim Roenning

DIRECTORS, MAX MANUS (NORWAY)

With the $10m Second World War epic Max Manus now the highest-grossing Norwegian film for 30 years and its subsequent entry as the country’s foreign-language Oscar candidate, its directors Espen Sandberg and Joachim Roenning have come a long way from making short films and music videos on Roenning’s father’s video camera.

After attending the Stockholm Film School and completing their yearlong national service — where they made “propaganda” films — they continued to work together (under the name Roenberg) on commercials, music videos and short films before making their debut feature — Bandidas starring Penelope Cruz — in 2006. The script for Max Manus came to them through leading Norwegian producer John M Jacobsen. Actress Liv Ullmann brought it to Jacobsen’s attention after the writer Thomas Nordseth-Tiller (who tragically died of cancer earlier this year aged just 28) took part in a pitching contest at the Kosmorama Trondheim International Film Festival in 2006.

The real Max Manus is a legend in Norway for his work as a saboteur during the Second World War, including missions to blow up German ships at Oslo docks. He evaded capture and received training in England before returning to Norway to work undercover. He died in 2006.

Funding for the film came from a variety of state film funds, including $3.1m from Norwegian Film as well as contributions from Germany and Denmark, and distributor Trust Nordisk, which handled the film’s local release.

Aksel Henning, perhaps Norway’s biggest movie star, was cast in the lead and he is understood to have turned down several parts in order to play the role. As Manushimself placed great emphasis on friendship and loyalty, it was important to ensure the wider cast of friends and co-saboteurs was exactly right, which proved a bigger challenge for the directors. The 49-day shoot took place predominantly in Oslo with a week in Scotland and just four days on a sound stage. However, it was the postproduction work, where CGI scenes of ships being blown up were added that concerned the directors. “At that point, we hadn’t seen really good photo-real effects in Norwegian films,” explains Sandberg.

“We worked with just about all of the post-production houses in Oslo and they did a top-class job.” Max Manus was released in Norway on December 19 last year to major local success — a quarter of the population saw it at the cinema — and it has since screened at a number of festivals, including Toronto. “A pivotal moment for us,” says Roenning, “was showing it to Tikken [Max’s widow] and Gunnar [Sonsteby, the only key character in the film still alive]. It was the most nervewracking part of the whole process. They said it took them right back.”

By Caroline Parry

Giuseppe Tornatore

WRITER-DIRECTOR, BAARIA (ITALY)

Tornatore is no stranger to the foreign language Oscar category. He won in 1989 for Cinema Paradiso and was nominated again in 1996 for The Star Maker, but a nomination for his latest film, Baaria, would perhaps mean the most to him since it is his most personal film to date.

The Sicilian saga is a tribute to Tornatore’s hom town, Bagheria, in Palermo province where he lived until he was 28. But Baaria is not a true story, Tornatore explains. “Some of the characters are inspired by real people and others have been created from multiple real people. And then some are completely invented. The lead character of Peppino is in some aspects inspired by my father but is mostly fictional. If there is any autobiographical element to the film, it is in Peppino’s son who wants to become a photographer.” The saga follows Peppino from his childhood as a street kid in the 1930s to old age and also tells the story of the town that grows around him.

“The one thing I didn’t want to do was make a historical film,” he says. “I didn’t think it was necessary. My vision was to tell the story of a small town and take it through an enormous amount of time to show that time is fleeting. I wanted to play with time to tell the story of a century in a short span and signify that time doesn’t exist, that it’s possible for a father and a son to cross each other in the same time.”

So Tornatore avoided using any historical facts about Sicily. “It was just the echo of time that interested me,” he says. The film does, however, address the dream of communism that grew up in Italy after the Second World War. “It served as a point of passion after World War Two,” says Tornatore.

“Peppino is a communist but at the end of his life he realises his political dream never really came to fruition. The only goals in his life that worked were in his private life.” Tornatore shot the epic film for 17 weeks in Tunisia (and a further eight weeks in Sicily), slowly constructing the town of Bagheria (pronounced ‘Baaria’ in local slang) as it grows throughout the century. “I was able to realise everything in Tunisia,” he says. “What we couldn’t shoot in Sicily we were able to construct from scratch. It’s like if you take Fifth Avenue from today, you couldn’t shoot a movie there that takes place in the 1920s. In this movie, I reconstructed my Fifth Avenue in the 1920s.”

By Mike Goodridge

The complete Oscars Foreign Language Film selection list.

Albania
Alive!
Dir: Artan Minarolli

Argentina
The Secret In Their Eyes
Dir: Juan José Campanella

Armenia
Autumn Of The Magician
Dirs: Ruben Kevorkov, Vahe Kevorkov

Australia
Samson & Delilah
Dir: Warwick Thornton

Austria
For A Moment, Freedom
Dir: Arash T. Riahi

Bangladesh
Beyond The Circle
Dir: Golam Rabbany Biplob

Belgium
The Misfortunates
Dir: Felix van Groeningen

Bolivia
Zona Sur
Dir: Juan Carlos Valdivia

Bosnia-Herzegovina
Nightguards
Dir: Namik Kabil

Brazil
Time Of Fear
Dir: Sergio Rezende

Bulgaria
The World Is Big And Salvation Lurks Around The Corner
Dir: Stephan Komandarev

Canada
I Killed My Mother
Dir: Xavier Dolan

Chile
Dawson, Isla 10
Dir: Miguel Littin

China
Forever Enthralled
Dir: Chen Kaige

Colombia
The Wind Journeys
Dir: Ciro Guerra

Croatia
Donkey
Dir: Antonio Nuic

Cuba
Fallen Gods
Dir: Ernesto Daranas

Czech Republic
Protektor
Dir: Marek Najbrt

Denmark
Terribly Happy
Dir: Henrik Ruben Genz

Estonia
December Heat
Dir: Asko Kase

Finland
Letters To Father Jacob
Dir: Klaus Haro

France
A Prophet
Dir: Jacques Audiard

Georgia
The Other Bank
Dir: George Ovashvilli

Germany
The White Ribbon
Dir: Michael Haneke

Greece
Slaves In Their Bonds
Dir: Tonis Lykouressis

Hong Kong
Prince Of Tears
Dir: Yonfan

Hungary
Chameleon
Dir: Krisztina Goda

Iceland
Rejkavik-Rotterdam
Dir: Oskar Jonasson

India
Harishchandrachi Factory
Dir: Paresh Mokashi

India
Harishchandrachi Factory
Dir: Paresh Mokashi

Indonesia
Jamila And The President
Dir: Ratna Sarumpaet

Iran
About Elly
Dir: Asghar Farhadi

Israel
Ajami
Dir: Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani

Italy
Baaria
Dir: Giuseppe Tornatore

Japan
Nobody To Watch Over Me
Dir: Ryoichi Kimizuka

Kazakhstan
Kelin
Dir: Ermek Tursunov

Korea
Mother
Dir: Bong Joon-ho

Lithuania
Vortex
Dir: Gytas Luksas

Luxembourg
Refractaire
Dir: Nicolas Steil

Macedonia
Wingless
Dir: Ivo Trajkov

Mexico
Backyard
Dir: Carlos Carrera

Morocco
Casanegra
Dir: Nour-Eddine Lakhmari

Netherlands
Winter In Wartime
Dir: Martin Koolhoven

Norway
Max Manus
Dirs: Espen Sandberg, Joachim Roenning

Peru
The Milk Of Sorrow
Dir: Claudia Llosa

Philippines
Grandpa Is Dead
Dir: Soxie H Topacio

Poland
Reverse
Dir: Borys Lankosz

Portugal
Doomed Love
Dir: Mario Barroso

Puerto Rico
Kabo And Platon
Dir: Edmundo H. Rodriguez

Romania
Police, Adjective
Dir: Corneliu Porumboiu

Russia
Ward No 6
Dirs: Karen Shakhnazarov, Aleksandr Gornovsky

Serbia
St George Shoots The Dragon
Dir: Srdjan Dragojevic

Slovakia
Broken Promise
Dir: Jiri Chlumsky

Slovenia
Landscape No.2
Dir: Vinko Moderndorfer

South Africa
White Wedding
Dir: Jann Turner

Spain
Dancer And The Thief
Dir: Fernando Trueba

Sri Lanka
The Road From Elephant Pass
Dir: Chandran Rutnam

Sweden
Involuntary
Dir: Ruben Östlund

Switzerland
Home

Dir: Ursula Meier

Taiwan
No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti
Dir: Leon Dai

Thailand
Best Of Times
Dir: Youngyoot Thongkongtoon

Turkey
I Saw The Sun
Dir: Mahsun Kirmizigul

UK
Afghan Star
Dir: Havana Marking

Uruguay
Bad Day To Go Fishing
Dir: Alvaro Brechner

Venezuela
Libertador Morales, El Justiciero
Dir: Efterpi Charalambidis

Vietnam
Don’t Burn It
Dir: Dang Nhat Minh

Michael Haneke Uncut, por Alexander Horwath (Film Comment)

The following interview was conducted in soft sunlight, on the porch of Michael and Susi Haneke’s weekend house, a good hour south of Vienna in Lower Austria. Because of its hilly landscape, the Viennese have always called this supremely beautiful region “the hunchbacked world,” suggesting a dark, malformed quality. In all likelihood this contradiction isn’t coincidental: the Viennese generally delight in multiple meanings or meanings that can inverted, e.g., the “sweet rottenness of beauty” (and vice versa). They tend to be skeptical of the rigorous or unequivocal in life and art alike, which is probably why Michael Haneke (like many other rigorous filmmakers, writers, and composers based in Vienna) has only belatedly become a cultural hero in his own city. For 25 years, his films mostly earned critical applause (or were met with controversy) at home, but were hardly embraced or debated by a wider audience. His public image as a relentlessly serious, “professorial” man didn’t help. It took several major awards at Cannes, for The Piano Teacher (01), Caché (05), and now The White Ribbon, for the Austrian public to accept Haneke, at age 67, as one of “their” pre-eminent artists. He’ll never turn into a king of hearts, nor—as he explains in the following interview—did he ever remotely strive for that role in the cultural card game. But in the private hunchbacked world of his garden, he appears as a much more relaxed, funny, and pleasure-embracing human being than his public persona would ever seem to admit.

ALEXANDER HORWATH: Is it a coincidence that you followed your American remake of Funny Games, a production that in some ways seems the most “foreign” in your career, with a work that moves deeper into your own culture and its history than any of your previous films?

MICHAEL HANEKE: It’s pure coincidence; nothing pre-planned about it. To be honest, it’s hard to talk about the “inner logic” of one’s own work. I rarely think about such things. It’s certainly easier to categorize after the fact. The so-called Austrian trilogy, for instance, was not planned as one. It was only after having made Benny’s Video that I thought there needed to be a third film. And later, too, it was more a question of what each production context allowed me to do, rather than any overall aesthetic notion of following this film with that film.

So the new film isn’t a counter-reaction to your experience of working in the U.S.?
The only counter-reaction was that I was much more relaxed on the set of The White Ribbon! It’s a lot easier to control the situation if you work in your own language, and my English is not very good. As a control freak, I need to be fully aware of what goes on around me on the set. So, although The White Ribbon was by far the most complex, expensive, and time-consuming of my films, the work was also very easy and natural from my point of view.

The film is set in 1913-14, in a small town in northern Germany. As a moment in history, this date carries great importance. On the other hand, the locale is extremely remote from the historical centers and important events. How did you arrive at this conjunction of time and place?
I think it’s always in the “small” places that larger events or developments are being rehearsed, in terms of the spiritual and moral climate. My basic idea was to tell the story of a group of kids who make an absolute of the ideals that are hammered into them by their parents and educators. They turn inhuman by appointing themselves as judges of those who do not live by what they preach. If the drill to which you’re exposed is really rigorous, it becomes a perfect breeding ground for all kinds of terrorism. You turn an ideal into an ideology, and all those who oppose it or are neutral toward it can be constructed as the enemy.

The choice to tell this story in a small town in Protestant Germany on the eve of World War I has a bit of a personal background, but the main reason was that it allowed the film to implicitly refer to things that went on later in the 20th century, or even today. The personal aspect is that I was the rare case of a Protestant child in Catholic Austria. And the rigor that I encountered in Protestantism as a boy was quite fascinating. It’s much more elitist and arrogant, if you like, than Catholicism, where you have a go-between between yourself and God. The Catholic priest can absolve you and take away your guilt, whereas in Protestantism you are directly accountable to God.

And historically speaking, the generation of children that you show and the kind of “training” they were subjected to makes us think of their future roles as adults, or even of their own future offspring. I assume that’s why the voice of the narrator is that of a very old man. The distance between his voice and the appearance of his character in the film, a young teacher, opens up a wide range of historical experiences that lie between.
1914 was the real cultural break. In Germany and Austria, the unity of God, Emperor, and Fatherland broke down with World War I, and in many ways World War II and postwar developments can be related to this. At the height of National Socialism, the 8- to 15-year-olds in The White Ribbon would have reached an age where one takes responsibility. But I was also thinking of the history of leftist terrorism, the Red Army Faction. Gudrun Ensslin was the fourth of seven daughters of an evangelical pastor, and Ulrike Meinhof also came from a very religious background. They both had this moral rigor that I found very interesting. I knew Meinhof a bit in the late-Sixties, when she prepared her teleplay Bambule for German Südwestfunk where I was a young broadcast editor. She didn’t appear to be a fanatic, actually. She was charming, highly educated, and pretty funny. Once, her children were late for school, and she told them that if it happened again they should justify it by saying “It’s the fault of capitalism.”

A different context, again with different roots but with a similar moral structure, is that of Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists. What all these groups and individuals share is that ideals are being turned into ideologies to a degree which is life-threatening—not only for other people but also for themselves, because they are willing to die for their convictions.

Except for a brief and vague remark at the beginning, the narrator does not reflect on anything beyond this one story and these local characters. And his last words are: “I never saw any of them ever again.” The paradoxical effect, of course, is that we immediately start to think of where and when we might have encountered them in other shapes—throughout history or in our own lives. This is a good example of your double strategy to leave some things open but also leave enough traces for substantial interpretation.
I always look for the places in a story where leaving things open can become really productive for the viewer. I often compare filmmaking with building a ski jump; the actual jumping should be done by the audience. For the filmmaker, this is pretty hard—it’s much easier to do the jump yourself, to do it for the viewer. Because there’s always the fear of frustrating them. What do I have to indicate? What do I leave out? How much can I not spell out when constructing a film and still not frustrate the audience? Such strategies have become widely accepted in modern literature, but much less so in cinema. That’s a bit sad.

When writing a script, do you always have too much stuff at first, too much explanation, and then you hack away at it?
It’s an issue at an earlier stage—during construction. That’s when I ask myself all these questions. When I start writing the actual script, the storyline is already set. The actual writing is a pleasurable process that also involves the unconscious. But before that I need to know in detail the economy and the means of the narrative. I don’t think that any artwork based on a vector of time can be constructed in a free-flowing manner. You can certainly write a novel or a poem without knowing at the start where it will lead you. The author of a book can navigate differently from its reader. But the distinct vector of time involved in any drama, film, or musical piece asks of you to include a notion of the viewer or listener in your artistic construction. In film this presupposes, of course, that the mise en scène will be on the same artistic level as the writing. The films that have really excited me, emotionally and intellectually, were always created from such a unity, the unity of form and content. It may sound old-fashioned, but I don’t know any sensible approach that would have superseded it.

I love the scene with the girl Erna in tears, when she asks the teacher if dreams can become real. She says that she dreamt one of the violent acts that create such tension in this little town, before it actually happened. On a larger scale, this also recognizes the idea of a certain prescience in society, that societies may “dream up” or imagine changes or catastrophes that will happen at a later stage—like in Kracauer’s metaphor of Dr. Caligari and Hitler.
I won’t oppose such an interpretation. But it was much more banal. I was looking for a way to have one of the kids say something that leaves us with a feeling of suspicion as well as suspension. When she talks about her dream, it seems to us that she knows something, but it’s also possible that she doesn’t. I decided to do it that way because I remembered an experience from a long time ago, when the woman with whom I was living at the time woke up one morning and told me of a dream she had just had. In the dream, her brother was standing at a ledge in the mountains shouting for help. Later that day, her mother called, telling her that the brother, who had gone skiing in the Alps, hadn’t returned home. Several hours later, the mountain rescue service found him and two friends on a ledge where they had lost their way, almost frozen to death. It was precisely how she had dreamt it the night before! I wouldn’t believe it if someone told me this story, but I was a witness.

In our first interview 20 years ago, when The Seventh Continent came out, the question of religion took up quite some space. You talked a lot about Jansenism, Pascal, and Bresson, for instance. And in later years, theologians have engaged with your work in books and conferences. Nowadays, you rarely talk about such issues, but The White Ribbon is a film that directly tackles religion—in its less transcendent aspects, of course.
I don’t mind this approach to my work, but I am not a religious filmmaker. Not at all. The Seventh Continent is a much more existential film than The White Ribbon, which deals more with the surface of religion, its negative political side; the question of God is not raised at all. No religion automatically spawns terror, it’s always the churches and people who use the basic religious needs of others for their own ideological ends, in conjunction with education and politics. Faith per se is something positive; it generates meaning. I for one have no religious faith anymore. Tough luck! Because if you do, you have a different, more contented view of life. For the Jansenists, the existence of God survives in his remoteness or unavailability. You can say that this is only wordplay, but it’s closer to one’s sensations than a purely rational explanation. You can rationalize and explain away the feeling of being overwhelmed by nature, for instance, but the feeling remains.

You already mentioned that you were baptized as a Protestant, but you’ve also told me that you grew up without seeing much of your father and that you were educated by three “mothers” in cozy Catholic surroundings—which you disliked. Your upbringing must have been quite the opposite from the pastor’s kids in The White Ribbon.
Since puberty, I‘ve always defined myself by taking a certain distance. I see it even in everyday conversations. That’s also why I’m not good at accepting accolades. How should I say . . . As soon as a majority takes shape, I’m against it on principle. It’s instictive. Whenever people agree on everything, I get aggressive. At school, I didn’t go to Catholic religious instruction—we had Protestant instruction once a month, and I enjoyed being different from all the others in my class. I never liked being slapped on the back, and I don’t want to do the back-slapping myself, either. I was a loner as a kid and I’ve remained that way. I’m not especially proud of it, of course, it’s just a fact.

In the reception of your films, violence and its media depiction are often discussed as your major theme. But there may be a larger term that defines your interest better and that includes violence, namely the notion of lovelessness. It’s also at the center of the new film.
Doesn’t all dramatic work deal with this? Chekhov at least, who is the greatest dramatic writer next to Shakespeare. He is so heartbreaking in Uncle Vanya, the way he presents carelessness and the desperate longing for a love that, in the end, one is unable to muster anyway. And it’s also what’s prevalent in daily life, the feeling of a lack of love that everyone is afflicted by.

But since the fetish of love in all its variations has been such a core element of middle-class ideology for two centuries, it’s not surprising that the great artworks of this same era regularly uncover the actual lack of love in bourgeois relations. It’s an important type of social critique, and I see your films as part of this tradition—even though you don’t tend to view them as explicit social critique.
Well, I’m certainly a part of bourgeois culture, and I do view the society I live in as pretty loveless. In The White Ribbon the theme probably presents itself more pointedly, almost in model form, because of the historical distance between the story and ourselves. But it’s not limited to works from the past two centuries. I think that poems or artworks from earlier times appear to us through our own framework. You read or hear something that was made in the 17th century or in antiquity and you draw it toward you. Otherwise we wouldn’t be moved by so many creations from the distant past. There is a continuity of certain themes that can’t be dismissed, even if the forms of social life and artistic expression undergo massive changes.

I’m interested in the topic of education and its representative in The White Ribbon, the teacher and narrator of the film. In many ways he departs from the rigidity, cynicism, or brutality that the other figures of authority often show—the pastor, the doctor, the steward. The teacher is the only male character who really asks questions, almost like a detective, and he’s also the only one who is allowed a genuinely sweet love story. But we never really see him in his job, teaching things to the pupils or bringing some enlightenment. It’s almost as if he becomes part of the repressive system by default, his potential as an alternative figure not fully realized.
Yes, of course. On the one hand he is a bit of an outsider from the start. He’s a counterweight in the whole construction, someone who takes a distance and has his doubts. Teachers often play this role. Look at how Wittgenstein practiced his job as a schoolteacher—he was in direct conflict with the small community where he worked. I also remember one or two teachers from my own childhood who were real idealists. On the other hand, he’s a bit of an opportunist sometimes, for instance when he echoes the pastor’s authoritarian stance toward the pupils. He’s not fully up to snuff in terms of acting as an alternative. To me there are no completely positive or negative characters in the film. The pastor is not evil either, he’s really convinced of what he does. He really loves his children. That’s the horror of it. It was normal to beat one’s kids. When he tells them, “I won’t sleep tonight, because tomorrow I will have to hurt you,” it sounds cynical to our ears, but I think it’s better to believe him. It’s not very interesting to see him as a sadist or as a grotesque mental case. If these people had just been perverts, this kind of behavior wouldn’t have had such broad effects. And I’m not sure if any other system of education is inherently better. It’s always about the individual pedagogical impulse: do you do something just to exert your authority, or to help the other person find his or her way in society—as shitty as society may be. Each educational system is only as good as the person who acts in it.

As a professor at the Vienna Film Academy, you are also a teacher. Do you feel an obligation beyond the professional side, beyond teaching filmmaking, to educate the students in a more general sense?
I guess I’m a relatively demanding teacher because I think it’s no use treating students with kid gloves. At the Academy, they are working with a net anyway, so I try to quickly raise the requirements to prepare them for the professional life. I also try and give them internships on my shoots, but it can’t be more than two per film. And usually I don’t mix with the students on a personal level. I mean, I give advice whenever they call me, but I don’t go out for a beer with them. I don’t believe the role of “best buddy” is something that a teacher or parent should aspire to. I think kids hate that, they find their buddies at school, but in a father or teacher they look for a role model.

After the Cannes premiere, several critic friends asked me which literary work The White Ribbon is based on. But it’s an original script, of course. Can you describe the tone that you were aiming at? What kind of writing were you thinking of when working on the dialogues and the narration?
In terms of the formal mode, I decided on two things early on: to do the film in black and white and to have a narrator. Both are means to create distance and avoid any false naturalism. It’s the memory of someone from that era, so I wanted to find a language adequate to this period. I wanted to write from the feeling of how I had experienced this era through literature. Theodor Fontane is probably the closest I can think of. His writing seems representative. I like this measured language—it gives a kind of dignity to the subject and to the reader, it doesn’t jump at you. It’s gentle and discreet.

It’s pretty daring, I think, to introduce such a strong narrator. Ten or 15 years ago, this might have been deemed old-fashioned, but in today’s film landscape it feels like a radical gesture.
That’s why I felt it was legitimate to do it, and why it was fun. It’s like a slap in the face of what is seen as up-to-date and necessary in storytelling today. And it’s an attempt to provoke a certain attentiveness or thoughtfulness in the viewer that the current narrative models in film no longer provoke, even if they are very refined or complicated. There are also people in music and literature who create highly advanced works and at some point return to a “classicist” mode.

Apart from the creation of distance, are there other reasons for the choice of black and white?
There’s a very important practical reason, too. You need to bluff when making a historical film, because you never find original settings that have remained unchanged. You always have to add to the locations and structures that you find, which is much easier if the end result is in black and white and not in color. If you drive through the former GDR, for instance, you see that the houses have very different colors than ours, made by a different industry that produced different chemicals. Each era and each region have their own color that dies with the specific companies that produced it. I rarely see historical films that seem to get it right in color.

What are the positive exceptions?
Patrice Chéreau’s Queen Margot I find terrific—he manages to create a historical climate for which we have no photographic sources, of course, but which I find fully credible. At the same time, it becomes operatic. Visconti managed to do that too, even better.

So far, the technical side of filmmaking has not been a major topic of discussion about your work. But the look of your films seems to become more important, with Time of the Wolf, for instance, and especially with the new film.
For me, it’s always important, but the more experience you have, the closer you can follow what the cinematographer does. For instance, I always fight for less light when we shoot! In this case we shot on color film, because if you work with candles and oil lamps a lot, you need extremely light-sensitive material, which is unavailable in black and white. It became a black-and-white film only in postproduction. I had a fantastic crew—Christoph Kanter, my art director who I’ve been working with for ages, Moidele Bickel, the costume designer, whom I hired because she had done the costumes for Queen Margot—the best I’ve seen in cinema. She’s a master in creating the necessary patina, clothes that look truly worn. I don’t think a director needs to be proficient in all these crafts, cinematography, set design, etc., but he needs the ability to quickly perceive all details and proportions and see if something is wrong.

Today, digital postproduction also allows you to “fix” things that weren’t physically possible or went wrong on the set.
The only thing that counts is the result, in its effect on the viewer. And if the viewer is being respected in the work, then all kinds of artistic or technical intervention are not only legitimate, but should be required.

Would it be conceivable for you to make a computer-generated film in the manner of Pixar, provided it were possible to render fully realistic, lifelike images of humans?
Absolutely. It could be total cinéma d’auteur. But the pleasure and the value of collaborating with others, primarily with the actors, would be gone. The kind of tension that you always look for, between a written part and a real person who inhabits that part with all the additional qualities that are unique to this actor—that element would be gone.

Are your films still storyboarded throughout? I wonder if certain strong images—like the crucified bird—are already present in the script rather than “found” while making the film.
In general, I draw the storyboards after I’ve decided on the locations. But images like the one with the bird are always in the script. I don’t believe in fortuitous events on the set, except in relation to the actors’ work. I never trust “symbolic” things that happen by chance while shooting. They sometimes appear like sudden “proposals,” but usually I cannot judge in that exact moment what it would mean for the whole film if I were to include them. I did that twice in my career, and in the end I cut them out. You may find it great that very second, but it’s usually wrong in some other way. I pretty much follow the script 100 percent.

The first idea for The White Ribbon dates back to the late-Nineties when you still had some connection with television production. Originally, it was a multi-part project. How did you reframe it?
There is a lot of explanatory stuff that you need on TV and that you can do without if you make a “real” movie. Also, there were several smaller characters that were easy to get rid of. For the final version of the script, I had the help of screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who had some smart ideas about what to cut—for instance, there were several scenes with the kids playing games that are now gone. They made the whole setup much too obvious.

One of the central themes in your work has always been how guilt and violence are passed on, especially between generations. Your four-hour made-for-television movie Lemmings (79) is a strong example of this. The first part is set in the Fifties and the second part in the Seventies. One could almost think of The White Ribbon as a belated prequel and that there is a larger generational epic of guilt at work here.
I never thought of that, but you’re right. There is a certain thematic similarity. As I said before, I have no conception of my “complete works,” but it’s always the same brain stirring things up.

What brought up this connection for me is the writing on the piece of paper left at the scene where the handicapped boy has been tortured. It’s from the Lutheran bible: “I am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.” The idea of an evil-with-a-history, or a violence that is generationally handed down, always raises the question of where the “curse” originates from—where did the series of violent acts begin and how can it end? If you want to avoid the religious concept of original sin, you need to find historical or sociological origins for such a genealogy.
I think that everyone is capable of everything, of all kinds of viciousness as well as the opposite. It’s just as Goethe said: “I have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed.” The balance between good and evil is always there; the question is how circumstances and individual choices make it tip. There is a deep injustice in the world, because not every social or family situation offers the same opportunities to be good, nor the same ability to reflect on one’s own behavior and choices. But for those who have these opportunities and abilities, the question of good and evil is immediately present, and also the question of how to live with something that you’ve done, how to assume responsibility. As for the biblical quote in the film: I used it because it is especially horrific. And the kids take it seriously, it’s what Father taught. For them it legitimizes the torturing of the weakest person in town. That’s what fanatics do.

Notwithstanding Freud, children are still fetishized in our culture as representatives of innocence or uncorrupted nature. In your films, that’s definitely not the case. The ironic subtitle of The White Ribbon, which makes sense only for those who know this old German font, is “A German Children’s Story.” On the other hand, some of the children in your earlier films are strongly associated with utopian moments, like the girl in The Seventh Continent, or the boy in Time of the Wolf. It seems that childhood is a rich terrain for your storytelling.
The child is a highly rewarding subject—80 percent of what we carry around with us is based on imprints from our childhood, from a time before we were able to develop protective mechanisms. So if you want to represent human drama, childhood can serve as a sort of tabula rasa that waits to be imprinted. If you want to describe a society’s conflicts or relations of power, it’s an important element, because whenever power is exercised, the child is usually at the lowest rank, and on the receiving end. And any child will transform these experiences in interesting ways.

It’s also fun to work with children on the set, even though it’s more time-consuming. Acting-wise, they can’t lie, they are not professionals, so you have to work differently with them. You are also more dependent on their talent, so casting is important. If the talent is there and the part is right, you get something very special, much more than from any professional actor.

Some of the images in The White Ribbon have reminded critics of Village of the Damned—but as someone who is relatively uninterested in genre cinema, you usually dismiss these things as coincidental. Can you describe why genre traditions hold very little appeal for you, even though, as in the case of Funny Games or Caché, the points of contact are sometimes obvious?
Points of contact is the correct expression, because I do use genre—both films you mention are thrillers in a certain way. But generally, what bores me in genre cinema is the sort of abstraction or de-realization of reality that takes place there. It bores me as a viewer, not as a filmmaker. It’s like in the theater, in cases such as Ionesco or Gombrowicz: when the world is reduced to a model, I lose interest after five minutes, because I know right away what it will boil down to. I also try to build models in my films, but ones that are “filled with the world,” where the effect is not just metaphorical but steeped in a verifiable reality. And most film genres—apart from the thriller—don’t do that for me. They offer prototypical modes of behavior that only interest me if I can reflect them as a filmmaker.

That’s why I often said I’d like to do a Western, a super-realistic one. Actually, I like to watch Italian Westerns, that’s the little boy in me . . . In music, too, I’m only interested in certain composers. The world of music is infinitely richer than my personal field of interest. And it’s the same in film, I don’t feel the need to be interested in everything. Ah, yes, Altman—he made genre films, too, but he did it in a way that entranced me, partly at least. Not all his films are great, but some are truly amazing.

If you look across the contemporary filmmaking landscape, which peers would you name as allies, which are the ones whose work you cherish the most?
I’d have to say Kiarostami. He is still unsurpassed. As Brecht put it, “simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve.” Everyone dreams of doing things simply and still impregnating them with the fullness of the world. Only the best ones achieve this. Kiarostami has, and so has Bresson. But I must say that I see too few new films; I used to see more, but now I mostly watch older things, at home. I feel more enriched when re-watching Dreyer or other classics. They tell me more about the world of today than todays’s films! But, of course, there are many exceptions. I’ll watch Lars von Trier’s films; he’s certainly special, and he probably represents the optimum in terms of doing things with actors. I like the Dardennes, I loved Tsai Ming-liang’s The River, but that was a decade ago . . . And I’m interested in what Valeria Bruni Tedeschi does as a director. She has found something, an original form that’s really hers.

In terms of future projects, are there any collaborations with specific actors that you would like to pursue?
I have often worked with so-called difficult actors and had the time of my life. And then I often want to extend such working relationships to future projects, because you don’t need to start from zero again. In general, it’s much nicer to collaborate with actors who are exacting and intelligent, and who are really “workers,” who demand a lot from themselves. I think Sean Penn is the best film actor today, he can do anything—I would certainly want to work with him if the project makes sense. It’s the same in France: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Charlotte Gainsbourg—I’m in talks with her. One has to find the right constellation. It doesn’t matter if they are well-known or not, it just has to fit the story. There is also a project that I’d like to do with Jean-Louis Trintignant, whom I’ve admired for almost 50 years now.

I came upon something from Pascal, who is one of your gurus. It’s from the Pensées: “We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine.” I had to think of Cannes, where you’ve been a regular, and of your recent Palme d’Or—the whole glamour and fame aspect of cinema. It’s not something you seem made for, but maybe even you desire to live this “imaginary life in the mind of others.”
Look, this is a truly happy moment in my life. We are all social beings, and we strive for some appreciation by others. If your work is the center of your existence, it’s great to be recognized for it. You don’t do all this for yourself, you want to communicate. First and foremost, you may actually do it for your own pleasure, because you like to do it, but this energy will stall if you find no response or success. What makes me happy about the Palme d’Or is definitely not the glamour that goes with it but that it’s the optimal form of recognition in my métier. The work should shine—it’s what I go public with. As a person, I’d rather have my peace and quiet.

Alexander Horwath is a writer and curator based in Vienna and the director of the Austrian Film Museum.

© 2009 by Alexander Horwath