Click here to read The Times' review of The White Ribbon I Our critics pick their top ten films at Cannes

A two-and-a-half hour black and white film about German village life in 1913 with no music in the soundtrack won top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Michael Haneke last night.

The German director was among the favourites for the Palme d’Or four years ago for his enigmatic thriller Hidden, which became an international art house favourite but lost out to the Belgian Dardenne brothers.

His success yesterday was greeted with roars of delight at the Grand Theatre Lumiere on a night when major awards went to two of the critics’ favourites and the rest were shared out between some of the most controversial, even ridiculed films in the competition.

Like Hidden, The White Ribbon is a complex and demanding whodunit without a straightforward resolution. After the premiere, Haneke told The Times: “I see my films as a ski jump. It’s up to the spectator to decide whether to take off.” Critics have interpreted the film as an investigation of the roots of German fascism, but Haneke said that he intended it to have a much wider resonance as a warning about how any absolute value system leads eventually to terrorism.

The second prize, known as the Grand Prix, went to A Prophet, a gripping French prison drama directed by Jacques Audiard, which was the best reviewed film of the festival overall.But most of the other awards came drenched in gore.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, the daughter of the French singer Serge Gainsbourg and the British actress Jane Birkin, won Best Actress for Antichrist, in which she tortures Willem Dafoe and mutilates her own genitals. Christoph Waltz, who plays a suave but vicious Nazi known as the Jew hunter in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, was named Best Actor. He demonstrated a similar ability in languages as his character, making his acceptance speech in French, English and German.

The biggest shock of the night was the Best Director award, which went to the Filipino Brillante Mendoza for his grisly kidnap film Kinatay, one of the most reviled films in the competition. Apart from Gainsbourg, the only recognition for British talent was for Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, which jointly took the Jury Prize (effectively third place) with Thirst, a Korean vampire film.

Arnold, almost certainly the first former dancer on Top of the Pops to be honoured as a director in Cannes, said: “It’s a small film and this gives it a great start in life.” She won the Jury Prize for the second time, having taken it for her 2006 debut, Red Road.

The 2009 festival was one of the most eagerly awaited in years because of the number of major directors with new films, including Ken Loach, Jane Campion, Ang Lee, Lars Von Trier and Pedro Almodóvar.

Variety, the film industry’s trade newspaper, billed it as a “heavyweight auteur smackdown”. Although several individual films disappointed — notably Lee’s easygoing but bland Taking Woodstock and Gaspar Noé’s messy and very long Enter The Void — the overall quality was high.

There was a starry Hollywood event — the premiere of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds with Brad Pitt — and one of the most shocking films ever screened in Cannes — Antichrist. Both sharply divided the critics.

However, until the moment that this year’s jury president, the actress Isabelle Huppert, announced “with a certain emotion” that the Palme d’Or would go to a director she had worked with twice herself, the result was in doubt. There were tears in her eyes as she hugged Haneke on stage.

This morning the Croisette, the beachfront strip where the festival takes place, has relinquished its temporary status as showbusiness capital of the world. Even at its busiest on the first weekend, the festival covers a surprisingly small area. J.G. Ballard described in his novel Super-Cannes how “the film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez (the smartest hotel on the beach) to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep . . . for a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a façade, the largest stage set in the world”.

Exhausted film fans, industry professionals and journalists have been streaming out of Cannes all weekend. With the last of the stragglers heading home today, the streets once again belong to leathery old ladies with sunglasses and tiny dogs for another year.

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