Fontane Effi Briest

Exquisite black-and-white photography, gorgeous costumes, stunning landscapes, and actors photographed in mirrors and through laced-curtains are the highlights of this emotionally distant film. It is true, however, that the leading actress has her cathartic scene, but it comes late in the film. Too late to really make one care about the spoiled, rich young lady. But this is Fassbinder, and Fassbinder is always watchable, even at his most pretentious. One joy of this film is the presence of Irm Hermann, who can do more with one glare (she doesn't need dialogue as "The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant" proved for all time) then any actor I can think of. Schygulla and the other actors are mostly wooden. The beauty of the scene with the starkly handsome Lommel as the rich major and Schygulla picnicking at the beach makes one forgive the shortcomings of the film.

I consider Rainer Werner Fassbinder to be the single most overrated director of all times. I have desperately tried to understand what all the fuss is about when most of his movies seem like movie Experiments gone badly wrong. Effi Briest is at least an accomplished movie with a unique style, although at 2 hours 15 minutes it's pretty slow and overly long.

Fassbinder being an eccentric artiste, couldn't just use the title of the novel but came up with a monstrous title (which the IMDb spellchecker doesn't allow me to quote here) that doesn't make much sense in German, but seems to give the movie a Marxist twist (it alludes to "many know their possibilities and requirements but chose to support the ruling system"). The title is usually mercifully shortened to just "Fontane Effi Briest".

At the time, the sound recording of films was still a considerable technical problem, so that the entire film was dubbed (the voices and partially also the background noises were re-recorded in a studio and added to the film in post-production). The dubbing was done very meticulously so that the voices are in perfect synchronicity with the lip movements. The voices are in several cases not of the actual actors, for example Eva Mathes was dubbed by another actress, and voiced yet another actress). This gives the film a touch of artificiality and a sense of heightened reality, which goes well with the slow pace of the story.

So, for a Fassbinder, it's a surprisingly watchable movie. At the same time, there is no narration, no tension, nothing is building up to anything. It's love it and sit through it, or switch off the video.

Interestingly, Fassbinder also has no intention of putting a new angle on the jaded story of the romantic girl falling victim to an uncaring world. I would love to see Effi as a competent woman trying to make her own rules, or even as a femme fatale for a change.

Maybe Theodor Fontane does not belong to the outstanding writers of world literature (he would be too provincial for the whole wide world perhaps), but nevertheless, his poetic realism and his sophisticated powers of observation lead his stories to a deep, often radical criticism of social conventions.

That's probably the reason why Fassbinder adopted Fontane's most famous novel "Effi Briest" - to tell the story from the writer's very point of view, as far as possible and to make the social mechanisms of oppression and the assimilation of the individual to that obvious. His concern is already pointed out in the exceptionally long title of the film, which I can imagine is the longest in history and translates something like this: Fontane – Effi Briest or: Many who have a notion of their abilities and needs and nevertheless accept the current regime in their minds through their deeds and therefore stabilize and pretty much affirm it

The atmosphere of coldness, of distance (which is, thanks to Fassbinder, at times really excruciating), of alienation is thematised through the cinematic techniques: mirror shots of the actors with a sometimes very blurred camera, misalignment of the camera by statues, flowers or curtains, cross-fades of dialogues and blindingly white fade-outs which sometimes abruptly interrupts a scene. In this sense, Fassbinder tightened Fontane's criticism to a maximum, but he wouldn't be Fassbinder otherwise.

a highly philosophical, political, deep, beautiful masterpiece of Fontane, reiterated by Fassbinder. I believe that Fassbinder chose this book because it's reflects his own story of "Angst", in his case, the guilt that if we know the mistakes of our society but still hesitate to rebel.this movie, as most Fassbinder titles is no superficial hollywood entertainment, it made me think.

Fassbinder's Effie Briest is a tremendous film. it is not an 'adaptation' of the book. it is much more complicated than that. the title as it appears in the film is:

Fontane // Effie Briest // oder

then followed by a long quotation in the next frame. the word 'oder' (or) works as a hinge holding the first title onto its meaning (erklarung). the whole of Fontane's book is framed within the title. and the film is a meditation on the limits of enframement. mirrors are everywhere, doubling and re-doubling the images and framings. to anyone that thinks the camera-work is sub par was obviously not paying attention. the execution of some of these scenes is unsurpassed by anyone.

the film consists of several different layers. there are inter titles, narration (direct quotations from Fontane), and then dialog. this would be the three orders of representation. then there are the layers of sense. as an example take the figure of Effie Briest. she is never a unified subject that we can refer to as an individual. she is the contested site of a number of different forces in a number of fields of discourse. the most obvious evidence of this is the contestation of the name: Effie. Effie Briest? Effie Von Instetten? the film is about this change. and the possibilities of refusal. what would it be to have ones own name and not the name of an other? she cannot. or as her father (who is always called by the signifier 'Briest') continually says 'Das ist ein zu weites Feld'. he pronounces the limits of thought in its foreclosure. it is always a command and always ends the dialog: there is nothing left to say on this subject because we CANNOT think THAT (the repressed idea, which reveals itself as thinkable through the fathers disavowal of its thinkability).