Inconceivable Effects

Abstract

The Complicit Gaze: Michael Haneke's Cinema of GuiltUneasy Beginnings the title of Michael Haneke's 2009 film Das weiße Band in many ways draws attention to what the work is about. the metaphorically charged "white ribbon," which Haneke borrows from an early nineteenth-century text by Johann Heinrich Gottlieb Heusinger, is, in the words of the austere pastor who ties it in his children's hair or around their arms, intended to remind them in its white color of "Unschuld und reinheit" (see Heusinger 251). the implicit logic at play here is that the white ribbon will admonish the children-who are late for dinner and try to cover up their fault with lies-for having forfeited a putatively original purity through their delinquency. it is significant to grasp the peculiar logic of this white ribbon in its ambiguous connotation, 1 as it signifies, on its surface, innocence and purity and, in the words of the pastor, is meant to help avoid "sünde, selbstsucht, Neid, Unkeuschheit, lüge, faulheit." this didactic impetus, however, simultaneously and inevitably relies on the assertion or assumption of the bearer's degradedness in that it legitimizes itself as a result of his or her alleged im-purity, dis-ingenuousness, his or her regress-the very state that occasions the wearing of the white ribbon in the first place.to be sure, Haneke's film does not merely take up the didactic impetus of the white ribbon thematically but indeed translates it into the aesthetic registers of the cinematic medium. the questions of black and white and guilt and innocence enter the film-typographically-from the very beginning, or even from before the beginning. as part of the opening credits the film's title appears, in white block capitals, against a black backdrop. soon after, the subtitle emerges, again against the black backdrop, yet gradually rather than abruptly this time, and in small-font kurrent script-whose curved, swirling lines exhibit a ribbon-like quality-rather than in white block capitals: "Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte." 2 if the pastor's world and the one epitomized by the white ribbon unmistakably seek to discern innocence and truthfulness (symbolized by the color white) from guilt and mendacity (symbolized by the color black), then this insistence on dichotomous structures finds itself both prefigured and tacitly unsettled already in the film's opening title. it is unambiguously called into question by the time seventyfive-year-old ernst Jacobi, who enacts the voice-over of the aged schoolteacher, begins this pensive tale, and does so in a manner reminiscent of Hegel's phrase The German Quarterly 89.2 (spring 2016) ©2016, american association of teachers of German 203 of the "moderne Verlegenheit um den anfang" (51). ich weiß nicht, ob die Geschichte, die ich ihnen erzählen will, in allen Details der Wahrheit entspricht. Vieles darin weiß ich nur vom Hörensagen, und manches weiß ich auch heute, nach so vielen Jahren, nicht zu enträtseln, und auf unzählige fragen gibt es keine antwort. aber dennoch glaube ich, dass ich die se...

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