Page - 49 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

Punishment and Crime | 49www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 47–61 Breger,3 Garrett Stewart,4 Kumar Niven and Lucyna Swiatek,5 and James Wil- liams.6 They explore certain threads that meander through the film, in an at- tempt to find its overall meaning. I understand those articles as articulations of the spectator’s efforts to process the film. As is usual for the detective genre, the spectator tries to find logic, causality and explanation. Unusually for that genre, however, the crimes remain unsolved. As in most of Haneke’s films, the spectator is given multiple clues to an answer, but few firm conclusions. Most spectators (layman, film enthusiasts and/or scholars) of the film The White Ribbon will agree that the film makes us aware of “immoral” behaviour – a term that describes that behaviour as mildly and generally as possible. There is no mention made of the film that does not contain a reference to “morals”. All articles, reviews and witnesses highlight one or more aspect of the moral prob- lems portrayed in the film: the fact that the crimes committed are horrific, the fact that the crimes are probably committed by children, the fact that there is no motive for committing the crimes, the fact that the crimes remain unsolved and unpunished and the fact that the guilty children will later become actors in both World Wars. My problem with these five conclusions is that they are all external to the spectator. They are moral problems of either the characters in the film, the film itself or (German) history. Without rejecting the importance of these interpre- tations, my claim is that the most profound moral problem – even moral crisis – occurs within the spectator. I want to explore questions such as, how is the spectator triggered to find meaning in this film that so obviously and obnoxious- ly withholds it? And how does the process of film viewing lead to moral crisis? The articles about the film previously referenced are awash with implicit references to spectators, as representatives of the society that is shocked by 3 Breger 2016. 4 Stewart 2010. 5 Niven and Swiatek 2012. 6 Williams 2010. Fig. 1: A still representing the “objective” view on the world of The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, DE/AT/FR/IT 2009), 00:17:08.