Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)
The full title of Fassbinder’s adaptation of the Theodor Fontane classic is Fontane Effi Briest oder Viele, die eine Ahnung haben von ihren Möglichkeiten und Bedürfnissen und dennoch das herrschende System in ihrem Kopf akzeptieren durch ihre Taten und es somit festigen und durchaus bestätigen. That translates as ‘Fontane Effi Briest or Many who have a notion of their potential and needs, and who nevertheless in their heads accept the ruling system and thereby consolidate and downright confirm it’. In an interview for the German film magazine Kino, which was used as the BFI programme note, Fassbinder explains as follows:
‘… it isn’t a film about a woman, but a film about Fontane, about this writer’s attitude towards his society. … It’s important to me that people don’t experience the film as they do other films, which appeal to the heart or the emotions; it’s an attempt to make a film that’s clearly for the mind, a film in which people don’t stop thinking, but rather actually begin to think … even though there are images there, you can fill them again with your own imagination, your own emotions. What makes that possible is the triple alienation effect: the mirrors, the fade-ins and fade-outs, and the emotionless acting style. …’
It would be difficult to argue that Fassbinder fails to achieve what he sets out to achieve – at any rate in the sixty minutes of Effi Briest that I watched before we parted company (with another eighty minutes to go). In my case, though, the only thought the film provoked was ‘Why is he doing this?’ It may well that his approach depends on knowledge of Fontane’s novel[1], or of the novelist himself, that I don’t have. The beautiful black-and-white images are constructed so deliberately that you’re conscious only of their artfulness. They appear to be reiterating the same point: individuals or pairs or groups of people are frozen in tableaux – often, as Fassbinder says, through mirrors – to show them fixed in the power and social structures that they inhabit. A main subject of Effi Briest is narrative. There are shots of pages in books and we sometimes hear a voiceover even while the characters are seen moving around and talking – soundlessly – to one another. The acting too seems to amount to narration rather than characterisation. The cast deliver their lines so as to suggest that they realise these lines belong to Fontane. It’s as if Fassbinder and his cinematographers, Dietrich Lohmann and Jürgen Jürges, mean to reproduce the novelist’s physical descriptions and the actors his dialogue. They do indeed speak emotionlessly – that is to say monotonously. In the case of Hanna Schygulla, who plays Effi, the effect is fascinating at first because there’s such a tension between her natural animation and Fassbinder’s suppression of it, between what Schygulla has done in other roles and what she’s asked not to do here. There are lovely, striking moments – one when Effi does no more than very slightly widen her eyes – but keeping Hanna Schygulla under wraps soon becomes frustrating. The other actors are frictionless – they merely appear well cast for Fassbinder’s purposes. I’d meant to see Effi Briest for well over thirty years but I know now I’ll never see it through.
10 July 2012
[1] See note on the 2009 film version, directed by Hermine Huntgeburth, for more about the novel.
