Computer Animation Arts

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is a 2009 German language film shot in surgically precise black and white. The time is 1913, the place is a small, isolated German village named Eichwald, and the narrative evolves around a series of unexplained acts of cruelty and malice perpetrated against the remote, rural community. The mark left by a trip-wire used in a booby-trap. A mysterious fire. The Baron's son is thrown in the river. In common with Haneke's Hidden (2005), The White Ribbon is purposefully ambiguous. Motives are never laid bare and pointed fingers fail to skewer definitive targets.  In this way, the film refuses easy categorisation, but for this viewer, at least, Haneke's menacing exploration of shame, reprisal and complicity continues a fine cinematic tradition of paedophobia : stories that evince or seek to evoke a visceral distrust or dislike of children.   While The White Ribbon determines for its audience neither moti...