Award-winning ‘White Ribbon’ does not dress up the beginnings of modern warfare

The cinema has always had its own mighty way of making change. Films have always seemed to support or denounce particular elements of modern life. They’ve raised awareness of real-world issues and revolutionized the ways art can work to affect humanity.

Now that the fast-paced lives of people worldwide, and especially college students, demand constant multitasking, going to the movies gives audiences a fix of high-intensity feeling. In the theaters, they can see, hear, and perhaps even taste and smell—all at once. Movies grab the viewers’ attention and point them in new directions, in ways paper flyers or radio announcements no longer can.

“Change” may have been America’s buzzword for quite some time now, but in today’s film world, it’s one particular German movie that seems to be embracing change the most. The recently announced Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon”, strives to be different in several ways.

All two hours and 24 minutes of drama and depression go by with no noticeable soundtrack, no real comic relief, and no color—but it is the overall theme of the film that makes it so radical. It is, as Haneke told Austrian newspaper Kurier, a movie about “the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature.” There’s a global discourse revolving around the meanings and implications of the term “terrorism,” and this movie is now an active member of the discussion.

In some ways like a mystery novel, “The White Ribbon” deals with a series of brutal, unconscionable crimes that take place in the small German village of Eichwald just before World War I. The village’s mistreated “underlings”—women, children, and workers—seem to exact revenge upon their oppressors, Eichwald’s three de facto chieftains—the baron, the doctor, and the puritanical Protestant pastor. The result is a two-directional “terrorism” of sorts, one in which we know not whom to blame.

The announcement of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination comes at the movie’s closing, as if the pernicious happenings of one little village were premonitions—precursors to more heinous, larger-scale events to come. The end of “The White Ribbon” is the start of World War I.

What does all this mean? The film’s striking unconventionality is an important part of its message. Because it has no color, because it has no music, because it leaves so many things unanswered, moviegoers must pay closer attention. “The White Ribbon,” while it seems to be about pre-war Germany, has great relevance today.

How do the politics, religions, and ideologies of modernity relate to the violence seen everywhere in the world? Who really has the power? At this point, there may not be a definitive answer to these questions, but “The White Ribbon” certainly seems to bring the cinematic viewer much closer.