The White Ribbon
This chapter explores the psychoanalytic resonance of the sound track for The White Ribbon. The film is among Haneke’s most ambitious feature productions, with over a hundred elliptical scenes. Its coherent thematic logic becomes clear through psychoanalysis, especially with regard to Lacanian concepts of the Symbolic and the Real. The Symbolic realm of the film is within a small village in Germany in the lead-up to World War One, where the voices of tyrannical patriarchs and the sounds of their violence dominate. The Real realm of The White Ribbon is even more fearsome, for it is shockingly, sonically attached to the bodies of children that ultimately resist their oppressive elders. The chapter establishes how every aural detail of The White Ribbon is loaded with repressed and subtextual meanings that constitute an ultimate warning: the oppressive Symbolic engenders the nightmarish Real.