CITY Screen, York is to show The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke’s cinematic vision of Germany before The Great War, on Sunday at 6.30pm.
Marketing manager Dave Taylor says: “City Screen will be examining different perspectives of the First World War through the medium of film later this year as the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of war looms closer, and this screening is a forerunner of that focus.”
Haneke, Austrian director of The Piano Teacher and Amour, sets his 2009 black-and-white film in a remote village in north Germany in 1913. The village is outwardly placid, but beneath the surface lies a dysfunctional and repressive society, plagued by anonymous retaliatory acts of malice and spite.
These disturbing acts led the Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw described it as “a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson”. The film will be introduced by Thomas Jochum-Critchley, Teaching Fellow in German at the University of York’s Department of Language and Linguistic Science. “He’ll also help us unwind the meaning by leading a post-screening discussion,” says Dave.
Analysing the impact of this German-language film, Jochum-Critchley says: “Michael Haneke’s masterpiece dissects the atmosphere of violence and repression in which the very generation who will eventually carry out the horrors of the Nazi-regime has grown up. The film, as much as it tells us about German pre-war period in which it is set, provides an deeper insight into the origins of Nazism and totalitarianism in general.”
Tickets: 08719 025726, picturehouses.co.uk
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