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.

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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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.

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.

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).