Fontane Effi Briest

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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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).

I did not find Fassbinder's filmmaking static and boring. I found it brash and exciting. His style is superb. HOWEVER, I have to say that I found the story, with which I am unfamiliar, incredibly bland. How many 19th and early 20th Century novels have this exact same plot? It's the simplistic "fallen wife" scenario without a spark of invention, it seems to me. In that way, I could not stand this film and was trying hard not to pass out. However, Fassbinder's miraculous filmmaking, cinematography, mise-en-scene, direction, music, even the acting, kept me at least interested. I give it a 6/10.

In the nineteenth century, seventeen year old Effi Briest is married to the older Baron von Instetten and moves into a house, that she believes has a ghost, in a small isolated Baltic town.

Similarities between "Effi Briest" and 20th-century Germany were easily found, helping to explain the popularity of the book and its subsequent film adaptions there. During the 1970s, West Germany was being racked by civil unrest as people sought to effect change, among these movements was the women's civil rights movement, which became a major influence for the film, as it compared the repressive nature in society between 19th century Prussia and 1970s West Germany.

Fassbinder is one of the giants of new German cinema (by "new" I mean post-WWII), and here he demonstrates his prowess. Epic in length, using black and white to its fullest extent... this is one of those films that made him great, even if it may not be the most-remembered of Fassbinder films.

This film has everything one could ask for: astonishing visual intelligence and imagination, wonderfully evocative, impeccably composed images that draw on silent cinema and painting, all perfectly adapted to the very moving story being told, and the period/milieu in which it unfolds: Effie Briest is presented as enclosed in the many different spaces (most of them - especially the interiors - saturated with stifling formality, social rectitude and conformity) through which she moves and in which she lives, or tries to live (the bird in the cage being a transparent symbol of all this). Quite simply, Fassbinder knows - knew - what "mise en scene" really means. The passage of time is brilliantly handled (through, for example, the use of the fade to white, intertitles and a moving voice-over narration), and the cast is flawless, as well as being flawlessly directed. A film of immense dignity and power, yet it somehow remains understated...