When Fathers Take Themselves for Fathers

Pierre-Gilles Guéguen

[...]Haeneke, near to Thomas Bernhard through his native language, offers us in the “The White Ribbon,” how the ferocity of a normative and educative conception of the paternal function ravages a generation of children. His film “The White Ribbon” which won the palme d’or in Cannes in 2009 is a fiction on the violence of fathers in a small Prussian village just before the declaration of war in 1914. This war will prove terribly devastating for the young European men of this generation; the very people who make up[...]