Facing the blank page I see the black and white images of the sublime and terrible Das weisse Band . Needless to use the word masterpiece for film by Michael Haneke: each work is a summit, an extreme. I do not have adequate tools for the interpretation, but I have a fondness for certain irresistible to the cinema of the highest Austrian director, and if I want to write something sensible I must first ask what to feed my passion. What makes all of Haneke's films so fascinating to me?
Answer simple but not trivial: fear. The cinema of Haneke's scary, frightening, strike without mercy on the weak points of the soul, and it hurts. The filmmaker is a kind of Viennese philosopher torturer, who can speak with equal effect to the irrational and rational components the human spirit.
There are two other traits of Haneke's films that are being emphasized. The first is the cold, which is accompanied by total control of the form: Haneke has a supreme mastery of the film medium, a technique so lofty that it can be used against itself - as in Funny Games, Code Inconnu or Caché - or rendered almost invisible - like in Das weisse Band . In all cases, Haneke moves with surgical precision and without pathos, methodically.
The second essential element in the film is Haneke moral judgments. In apparent contrast with the glacial form, is not indifference but a clear ethical vision, a quiet but clear-cut critical and severe, such criticism does not want to teach anything and does not seek converts. Haneke shows the behavior of his characters without condemning them, almost fatalistic, yet it is far from being a mere observer. He shows no wish to prove: paradoxically, Haneke is one of Europe's most directors seem to have followed and put into practice the famous motto Fellini.
In fact there is nothing to show in the cinema of Haneke, if anything, the opposite is true: at the beginning everything seems more straightforward, almost no development, but basically whenever there is a trap, because the circle does not close, does not add up and the feeling never came. This is perhaps the style of Haneke, the most disturbing and alluring at the same time, resulting in a film always surprising, counterintuitive and hopeless, but thanks to these features come with another paradox, to imitate "reality".
Michael Haneke is a master in short, an outsider, one of the greatest directors of contemporary cinema. However, this is nothing new, so that the Palme d'Or won this year by Das weisse Band might at first be a recognition given consideration ex-post the entire work of the director, but not so simple. Haneke never makes a film like any other, despite the recurrence of the items was said previously, and although I have seen virtually none of the other films in competition at Cannes in 2009 are inclined to bet that is higher than that of Haneke all the others, my bet is worthless, of course, but there is no doubt that Das weisse Band would remain a milestone without Palma.
Opera enigmatic and gloomy, in which black and white photo of the milky unsaturated and has a substantial value, Das weisse Band is an ensemble film and headless: the voiceover of one of the protagonists of the story is really just a ruse, a diversionary ploy by which the directing deliberately impede the understanding of the viewer. What is expected from the voice over a character who took part in the events recounted and recalls them from the future? Definitely a help to the understanding of such events, or at least a privileged point of view on this story. In contrast, at the end of the film will be clear that the young elementary school teacher, one to whom belongs the narrator, may not be of any help in explanation of events and their causes, knowing nothing more than what was seen and known by the audience itself. The first image of the film, a real estate flat landscape of northern Germany, is slowly emerging from a fade, as the mirror image, the last shot fades to black, and at the end of a series of mysterious and disturbing events - when it seems that a labile trace has been left to the viewer to let him find even a simple causal link between the incidents to which he attended - all sinks back into thin air without explanation. Just before the narrator had reported the attack in Sarajevo, and the tragic fate of Germany and of Europe itself.
What is most striking in my opinion the way in which Haneke manages to maintain an obscure and almost imperceptible tension throughout the film. There is always the sense of an imminent threat, an explosion of fiction next, but also the most significant events in the story follow each other without obvious links consequential and the most atrocious episodes, with almost no link with what follows them and what before them, they lose significance. Something similar happens with the relationships between the characters: there are those initially presented to an atom with only a name and a location context, which explains why they initially appear "Pure" and clean, without smudges, but also without psychology, as if they were images of classical antiquity. With the passage of the film the relationship between the actants become more evident in their duplicity obscene: Each report has a dual face, depending on whether you look at from the point of view of the public or the private sector. Meanwhile, the psychological characteristics emerge revealing the inner monsters, madness, betrayal and every other kind of wickedness ...
I have already written more than decency permits. I refer those who want to form an opinion about the movie seriously at this link .
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