The Unresolved Mystery

Summary

Although the film gives no clear-cut solution to the crimes, the culprits can be discerned by way of strict symmetries and careful perspectival lines. At the beginning, the doctor rides into the frame from the exact midpoint, a small speck growing larger. After his sudden fall, a cut again turns our attention to the central vanishing point—from which his daughter emerges. The wrongdoers are often caught in this manner, in a mise-en-abyme staging. They are in the foreground of the image plane, centered and in plain sight. The mirroring quality—with one perpetrator reflected in the other— underlines the infinite regress of culpability in a world where such social structures and psychic economies predominate. Numerous guilty parties exist across generations.

The director's studied open-endedness, his strong desire not to offer narrative closure, is counteracted on a formal level in this way. Other Haneke films such as Code Unknown, Caché, or Happy End (2017) stress their lack of resolution, the viewers’ inability to judge, and the situations’ indecipherability. Yet the filmmaker has always encouraged us to move our eyes along sight lines, into and out of the central vanishing point or horizontally across the picture plane in a side-to-side motion. He has done this to question our desire for depth, with all its attendant metaphorical accretions of interiority, soulfulness, and truthfulness. For a film like The White Ribbon, which emphasizes reading and writing, the horizontal movement is especially important. The answer lies where the axes intersect at the front of the image plane.

It is helpful to think back to an early adaptation of Haneke's as a statement of visual intent: Wer war Edgar Allan? (Who Was Edgar Allan?, 1984) is another open-ended mystery. The TV film is, like Three Paths to the Lake, far more traditional in its stylistic means than Haneke's theatrical releases, but it contains many elements we could consider trademark. Visual clues lead the student protagonist (Paulus Manker) on a fruitless pursuit down dark Venetian alleys and through cavernous interior spaces with a strong central vanishing point. The fugitive is a secretive older man, aptly named Edgar Allan (Rolf Hoppe).