Over the years, art-house films have provided some of our best cinema. Generally more focused on character and story than most blockbusters can afford to be, they have the opportunity to move us with something more subtle than spectacle, and they take advantage of it, providing the intimate dramas and intensely personal stories that inspire a devoted (if sometimes smallish) following.
But sometimes, the advantages of working small can have unexpected consequences. The most obvious—if only because it is literally larger than life—is that art films have a habit of sliding into self-parody. Usually this involves some jumble of familiar plot elements (a French or Italian countryside, middle-aged divorcees, lots of food metaphors) and a director’s incomprehensible conviction that his story has never before been told. The more insidious trouble comes when great directors are hired away to work on projects that almost always seem less personal—see Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who followed up his brilliant The City of Lost Children with a job directing an installment of the sci-fi Alien franchise. (He returned to the fold soon after, giving us wonderfully playful films like Amelie and Micmacs.)
Austrian director Michael Haneke is one of the few who has managed to continue making films that feel like they given up very little. Known for their often devastating impact on audiences, his films—among them the psychosexual masochism of The Piano Teacher, and the similarly raw Funny Games, a decidedly unfunny film he remade himself in an English translation a decade after the original was released—have rarely been less than riveting, even when they horrify.
This week his 2009 film The White Ribbon comes to the area courtesy of the Amherst College Department of German. Set in the early decades of the 20th century in a fictitious German village, this dark look at aggression and obsession is framed as the recollections of an elderly man who left Eichwald many years before. At that time, the village was ruled harshly by those in power: the rigid pastor who pins white ribbons on children as reminders of their purity; the doctor who molests his daughter; the landowner who banishes people on a whim.
In the run up to Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia, this place comes to violence—mysterious accidents, deaths and suicides, arson and attacks. A woman’s son is brutally beaten, and soon after she tries to go to the police, they both disappear. Pets are murdered, and… well, you get the idea. This is a bleak and chilling story, the cinematic equivalent of cold, wet cobblestone against your skin, and it is what Haneke does best. Screenings are on Thursday, Dec. 2 at 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. at Stirn Auditorium.
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Also this week: Isabelle Huppert, who starred in The Piano Teacher, is also onscreen this week in White Material, opening Friday, Dec. 3 at Amherst Cinema. The latest film from director Claire Denis (Beau Travail) features Huppert as Maria Vial, the owner-operator of an African coffee plantation. With the unnamed country suffering the whiplash of regime change, the local French forces have begun to ship out, warning the remaining white residents that they’ll be without protection in the face of increasing unrest. Unbowed, Maria stays on, determined to preserve her life in Africa.
Also at Amherst, a special presentation of the classroom documentary Race To Nowhere will take place on Sunday. Questioning how we define success in our American classrooms, director Vicki Abeles turns her lens on a system that she believes is obsessed with the illusion of achievement at the expense of achievement itself. The result? A generation of kids pushed out of school unprepared for the rest of their lives.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
