Effi Briest

One the tablets used by Fassbinder in this movie (the same method he shall use 6 years later in "Berlin Alexanerplatz") shows the text: "He put her under pressure wherever he could. So-to-say a calculus of fear" (Fontane). As any other calculi, also the calculus of fear consists of theorems. Speaking about the relationship between Von Instetten and Effi, we have: 1. Never treat her without menacing, but do not show the menace open, so that you can deny it after. 2. Isolate her from society, best make her a child as soon as possible so that she does not get bored. 3. Never praise her for what she is doing, unless in the presence of foreigners. 4. Praise her in front of her parents with whom you should establish a good friendship. If she is complaining later about her marriage, the guilt will be given to her.

As the sub-title of the movie says (the longest ever used in a movie): The movie is about those people who are capable to see the unjustness of social rules but don't help changing them, and by doing so, confirm them. "Effi Briest" is therefore a typical Fassbinder movie which he liked to call "melodramas" and thus also a predecessor of his later "women-movies" about Maria Braun, Lola, Lili Marleen and Veronika Voss.

That this film is an outstanding masterpiece has nowadays been recognized by all leading film experts around the world. Although Fassbinder let himself sometimes inspire by works of literature, Fontane's "Effi Briest" is one of his only three explicit literature adaptations, besides "Berlin Alexanderplatz" and "Querelle". One could perhaps go as far and say: While in "Effi Briest", society is criticized at the hand of one single, individual fate, in "Berlin Alexanderplatz" a society as a whole is put in the pillory, and in "Querelle" a possible alternative world after all the disgust is shown. Fassbinder made this long way in societal criticism in only eight years, during which he approached the society of the time in which he lived, by systematically coming closer to reach the 50ies of the 20th century (Lola). His movies can be seen as chronicles of different means of suppression by using calculi which turn out to be independent of time.

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).

Theatrical rigidity becomes part and parcel of R.W. Fassbinder's fetchingly monochromatic period drama, an adaptation of Theodor Fontane's novel, EFFI BRIEST, predominantly accompanied by its own author's ur-texts in voiceover, narration or title cards, stars Hanna Schygulla as our titular heroine, a Prussian young girl consents to the marriage proposal of Baron Geert von Instetten (Schenck), a former suitor of her mother Louise (Pempeit), out of a desire for prestige, although she is only 18, and her husband is over twice of her age.

Fassbinder stridently retains its source novel's poetic realism through the film's gorgeous costumes, furnitures and a repressive air of solemnity, a matter-of-factness in probing into Effi and Geert's turbulent and unbalanced marriage, wherein a trophy wife's seemingly perfect life is under constant gaslighting and doctrinaire manipulation from her haughty husband, and Fassbinder counterintuitively keeps a perverse remove from key incidents, totally relies on wording to elucidate thoughts and relentless long takes to consistently test audience's patience, it is a bold move, but on the strength of the picture's uncannily stylish compositions (mirrors and doors are key partitions to transmit the despondent feeling of alienation, detachment, even cruelty)...

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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.