The Complicit Gaze: Michael Haneke's Cinema of Guilt

Michael Haneke's film Das weiße Band (2009) centers on a community whose children secretly commit heinous crimes that terrorize the early‐twentieth‐century German village in which they live. While Haneke's film has been typically read as a sociopsychological analysis of the conditions that allowed for the rise of fascism in twentieth‐century Germany, this article problematizes the spectatorial position of the viewer and explores our culpable involvement in the ethical issues at stake. In the context of the totalitarian subtext on which the film draws, the essay asks: what kind of guilt is implied in the act of spectatorship in which Haneke's characters so frequently partake, but also, and perhaps primarily, that we as Haneke's cinematic spectators perform as well? I argue that a sensation of guilt accompanies us as Haneke's spectators throughout the film, and it does so, if we adhere to Das weiße Band‘s visual architectonics, not merely in a strictly theological but indeed in an anthropological sense.