There’s no doubt the children are involved somehow, if not outright the guilty parties for nearly all the crimes. The leader is Klara, whom is mentioned rarely in forums for analyzing the story. She is hauntingly the ringleader of the children throughout the entire movie.

Klara is smart, a liar, a leader and very capable of looking innocent in a snide way. Any adult who poses a question is giving a batty-eyed “I don’t know” while her brother or other children look to her before answering questions. She has all the potential of becoming an SS or Nazi leader as far as females could go in that time.

How astute that you recognized the teacher as being Jewish. The best tailors in the world are Jewish, the profession he returns to after his father’s death. The teacher is so innocent, helpful and caring to the point of blindly opening his mouth to the wrong person to tell of his assumptions. The pastor already knows his children have failed to meet his strict standards, and thus, he forces the white ribbons or hands tied to bed posts. He reeks of deliberately seeking evil in every child, particularly his own. That only serves to confuse his children more, as they are humiliated and punished constantly…And his recourse to cover the problem?

Threaten the teacher if he ever speaks of it again. This goes in line with the Jewish being told to be silent throughout the entire Holocaust nightmare, and thus starts the “silence of the lambs”.

I dearly loved this movie and it was tremendously thought-provoking. I have friends and family who just refuse to watch any sub-titled films. What a shame….they are missing out on European history and things outside of the US. Perhaps because I’m originally from Europe, I find foreign films more fascinating.

By this time:

– Easter has come, the Baroness and Sigi have returned.

– Karla has been humiliated by her father, the Minister, at Confirmation Class, has fainted — and has ritually killed his Peepsie, her father’s parakeet.

– The Doctor has cut off relations with the Midwife in harsh fashion, and has been seen abusing Anna.

– And Erna, the Steward’s Daughter, has told the Schoolmaster of her prophetic Dreams.

Now, Karla, Martin and the Steward’s Sons are all Confirmed by the Minister.
A party ensues. And that night Karli is tortured.

The cops question Erna, rejecting her story of prophetic dreams.

Days later, as the Midwife leaves town forever, the gang of kids (sans Anna) hover at the window of her house, concerned for Karli, they explain.

So who tortured Karli?

The balance of considerations point to this gang we saw sneering at the Schoolmaster and Karli at the open: Karla and Martin, the Stewards Sons, and a few others we don’t get to know well.

But I’m not yet satisfied. Will have to see the film again. The attack on the eyes is so symbolic and so practical — depriving the legal system of a witness? (Karli cannot speak, after all) — that one wonders …

Could it have been Anna? An effect of entering into relations with her father?

To somehow assert primacy, in her father’s favors, over the Midwife, or even to attack her father indirectly if indeed Karli is his bastard?

This mystery bears further thought. Another viewing.

Murder — by his Eldest Son — or suicide are both plausible.

The mis en scene suggests murder, however: the man is not hanging from rafters, but rather hooked onto the wall of the shed, barely off the ground, and it seems he has been garroted.

It is the Peasant’s Second Son — who earlier mourned arm in arm with his rebellious older brother and then may have beaten the barons’ son Sigi — who discovers the body.

We see his shock, and all sorts of thoughts running through his head. Then he slowly closes the shed door, clearly having decided not to make a fuss, to go forward allied with his older brother.

Who else? The Steward’s Sons? Possibly. They were also a second-thought possibility as murderers of the Peasant Wife/Mother. But in each case the other alternative seems more likely.

Heneke, in the interview, offers this as something that might be deemed an accident.

By this time the Baronness and children have departed to Italy.

And the Doctor has returned from the hospital, and has examined the tree where the tripwire was strung.

His eyes flicker with the question of who did it — and he then comments on Anna’s advanced age (fourteen) and likeness to her mother.

He does nothing to accuse Anna, but speaks to her diffidently. If one feels he suspects her of complicity — with the Midwife — in the crime, then not only his mistreatment of the Midwife but also the sexual abuse he now begins to practice on Anna might all be imagined as redress.

As the barn blazes, the Steward’s kids watch from a nearby window.

Earlier, at the infant’s birth, the older son exclaimed bitterly at the news that it was a boy rather than a girl — and was furiously smacked in the puss by a nurse in attendance (not Mrs Wagner the Midwife).

Now, in dead of winter, the Doctor saves the infant with a late-night house call.

As he departs, the older son heaves a sigh of relief. The other son, at the window, watches the Doctor depart and looks to the older with ambiguous intent.

Erna, the Steward’s lovely daughter, later more or less tells the Schoolteacher of this attempted murder, relating it as her first prophetic dream.

The site — where the Peasant Mother died — suggests the Peasant’s hot-head Eldest Son, he who decapitated the cabbages.

But the Baron tells us he is satisfied the Eldest Son is innocent of Sigi’s beating.

Earlier the Peasant’s Second Son entered a room where his mother’s body was on view, looked at her face — then went to sit beside his elder brother in mourning, arm in arm.

It seems, then, the best guess that Sigi was beaten by the Peasant’s Second Son, assuming some responsibility for the family’s pride after his older brother’s freedom of action had been curtailed.

When the Baron exhonerates the Peasant’s Eldest Son — at the meeting in the church — the Second Son is present with his Father, as the two begin to leave the meeting having taken offense at the Baron’s opening remarks.

The Baron calls them back — declaring the Eldest Son innocent of Sigi’s beating — and as the Second Son sits back down on his bench … One may imagine things going on in his eyes.

If not he, then the best candidates seem the Steward’s Sons, whom later — on screen — take Sigi’s whistle and throw him in the river. Mafioso behavior asserting itself shamelessly.

When Sigi returns with his mother from Italy, the next spring, as he steps to enter the Baron’s home, the Steward’s Sons call him from afar, to come to them first. And he does so.

One might think this was concern, by the Steward’s Sons, to be sure that Sigi doesn’t rat on them for the initial beating.

Hard then, to choose, here, between the Peasant’s Second Son and the Steward’s Son.

After two viewings this seems indeed an accident.

Possibly one might suspect the Steward or his sons of arranging the accident, as a battle in a little war underway before the film’s story starts.

And, indeed, the Peasant’s Eldest Son points in this direction with his angry question at the mill, inspecting the “rotten” floor, as to who assigned his mother there that day.

In any case, the death serves to ignite long simmering resentment of the Peasant’s Eldest Son for his family’s lowly state. He destroys the cabbage patch, and argues violently with his father about how to respond to the death.

The honorable father then turns the son in, for the cabbage business, presumably by telling the Steward.

And when the son is released from jail, he finds that the family has been banished from the baron’s employ — economic disaster.

Thus, the Peasant Mother’s death is the first movement of a series that rents and all but ruins her family.

If it was an accident, one may yet find just complaint re the family’s ruin in its long pre-existing economic and psychological condition — the condition of the Serf.

This aspect of the Old Order was alienating, contradicted, an obstacle to the quest for Freedom (to speak as a Young Hegelian or a Marxist of the day). The Eldest Son’s anger has some basis, even if he’s wrong about his mother’s death.

If the Steward’s sons had something to do with it, then the Mafioso aspect of his social identity may influence one’s view of what’s really going on here. It’s another imperfect aspect of the Old Order, one that, when the Noble power atop the pile fades — or sleeps — comes into its own. Possibly here, in the mother’s death.

The narrator tells us that Anna, the Doctor’s daughter, “saw this from her window” and immediately rushed out. Hmm … And her grief, as she tries to comfort her young brother, seems oddly overwrought with more than the mere panic of loss.

We meet the Schoolmaster and Karli, framed in the schoolhouse door. The Gang of Kids (sans Anna) nearby sneer at the retarded boy — or also at their teacher? — and the narrator tells us he thought it strange that the kids then marched out of the village in a troop.

This gang, including Minister’s children Karla and Martin, and Steward’s rough sons, then appears outside Anna’s window. She opens it and looks down upon them, and something strange is in the air.

The next day Anna and the Midwife confess to a policeman complete ignorance about the accident — and the tripwire’s disappearance.

Later we find the Doctor is sexually abusing Anna. But there are three indications that this abuse did not start until after his return from the hospital, post accident.

The Midwife we find has been involved with the Doctor for a long time. Upon his return from the hospital she professes love, but then finds his mistreatment of her unsurprising, and declares him “retarded” like her son, Karli.

And that Karli may be the Doctor’s bastard is in the air.

It would seem that we might suspect the gang of kids, sans Anna. Or Anna or the Midwife, alone or in league.

Best guess?

Not Anna. The sexual abuse has not yet occurred, and even as it occurs she seems allied with her father.

Possibly the Midwife — for her abuse at the Doctor’s hand has long been underway. Considering her allegorical identity — the Medieval Medico, precursor to the Modern Scientist — suggests her attempt to kill him might be imagined parallel to the Furies resisting the New Rational Law of Athena in the Oresteia — in each case with reasons rooted in a more Motherly grasp and feel for humankind.

Or, it could be the Gang of Kids (sans Anna). Motive? Nothing much in the film to provide one. Abstract Evil of the sort Christian fundamentalists like to talk about.

At the Social History level, the kids as Young Nazis don’t fit the bill, in that the Nazis embraced and forwarded Modern Science on the biological front — genetics, cancer …

Note that we first meet the Minister scolding his children for being late for dinner the evening of the Doctor’s accident — and the Minister complains fiercely of their “lying excuses” for being late.

Why did they lie? Wouldn’t a story about trying to comfort or help Anna have rung with Christian virtue? This again seems intended to make us think the kids strung the tripwire.

The next day we find Martin walking across the bridge railing, as if undergoing a Trial by Fire. He guesses, when done, that God doesn’t want him to die yet.

Did guilt about the stunt with the Doctor’s horse prompt this trial? Or was it a reaction to the Minister’s verbal thrashing, and the certain threat, that night, of ten strokes with the cane?

Why would the Young Nazis want to harm the Doctor?

Is the Midwife the best guess?

Does Anna perhaps know the Midwife did it? Did she aid or consent for reasons yet occult?

Q: It strikes me that in “Caché,” and perhaps in this film as well, there literally is no answer that explains what is happening.

HANEKE: [In English.] There could be an answer!

Q: Well, we can point back at you, the director of the film. Who is making those videotapes and sending them to the family? You are!

HANEKE: [Laughter.] Every interpretation is right.

END QUOTE

I take this as license to care about the answers that are present or may be surmised with some foundation.

The “disturbing events” unfold as follows:

How long before the country is unfit to live in?

2. Here’s an interview with Michael Haneke, the writer and director.

I note and like that he breaks into English to exclaim that there can be (are) answers to the film’s puzzles — having been baited by the Semiotics sophomore conducting the interview with a question supposing the structure was cleverly done to permit no solution.

He talks at length about dissolving feudalism, as a prime subject of the film, and seems to think its central theme is the downside of ideological politics.

After two viewings I don’t see that film SAYS much on this theme — and the interview here is again in tune, suggesting the author was happy to merely provide ground into which one might wander and meditate on the theme.

The ideologies explicit in the film are that of the Lutheran Minister and, to a lesser extent, his the Doctor. Anything else, past, present, future, one has to supply oneself. And Scott, the NY Times reviewer, seems to have come empty handed.

That is, one can imagine the Baroness joyously exploiting her new life in Milan, immersed in revolutionary arts and sciences, a Thoroughly Modern Millie …

Meanwhile the lone Baron, bereft of progeny, fiddles about the estate like Tolstoy’s stand-in in Anna Karenina, before finally blowing his brains out, or perhaps dying in a trap laid by the Steward’s eldest son.

One can imagine the ideas and practice of Cosa Nostra then taking root in the village — while young Adolph and Rudi, departed at story’s end with the Doctor, busy themselves founding the Nazi Party in Munich, reunited there with Martin …

But one has to do all this on one’s own. Haneke’s ski jump.