Many people who are aware of their own capabilities and needs, yet acquiesce to the prevailing system in their thoughts and deeds, thereby confirm and reinforce it.
Prologue to Effi Briest

Effi Briest was the sixteenth feature film of the prolific but short-lived Rainer Werner Fassbinder and arguably the best film from the early part of his career. It is a period piece about morality and societal repression in the Prussia of the 1880’s. Effi Briest covers roughly the same thematic territory as the novels (and films) Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary

Historical Background: Fassbinder was the knight in shining armor of the German resurgence in filmmaking of the 1970’s – or perhaps the knight in black armor. He was unflinching in his quest for truth and uncompromising in his criticism of the narrow restrictions and perverse proclivities of society – past and present alike. He dropped out of high school, dressed sloppily or in leather, and taunted contemporary mores with his bisexual (mainly gay) lifestyle. He targeted racism, sexism, homophobia, pragmatism, and capitalistic exploitation. Fassbinder once stated that “Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings.” Fassbinder constructed the dynamic tension of his films around conflicting social forces, emotional impasse, or moral ambiguity. Most of his films present insolvable conflicts or paradoxes.

Fassbinder admired the technical proficiency of Hollywood but rejected the thematic shallowness of American cinema. “The American method of making [films] left the audience with emotions and nothing else. I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is feeling.” Read that last quotation again, because it is the key to understanding Fassbinder’s intentions in this film, Effi Briest.

The Story: Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla), a 17-year-old innocent and something of a tom-boy, agrees to marry Baron Geert Von Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck), a man twenty years her senior and on the rise as a Prussian diplomat. Instetten had years earlier sought the hand of Effi’s mother, losing out because of inferior station to Herr Briest (Herbert Steinmetz). His situation having improved, however, he is judged a suitable match for the young but attractive Effi. Effi accepts, despite the magnitude of the age difference, because she is socially ambitious and enjoys being pampered.

Effi and Geert settle into an estate in the remote Baltic town of Kessin where the society is rather limited. Geert proves to be a gentle, soft-spoken, and kindly husband, though unaffectionate and excessively constrained by conventions of behavior. He is a man of great probity. His only mistreatment of Effi takes the form of ghost stories about a Chinese servant and imagined footsteps aimed at keeping the impressionable Effi in line out of a general sense of dread and foreboding. Effi finds herself only tolerated by the housekeeper Johanna (Irm Hermann), who is an usually severe and dispassionate woman. The local society is somewhat put-off by Effi’s combination of extreme youth and relatively lofty station and make her the subject of gossip, some concluding that her dress is overly lavish and others that it is insufficiently becoming. She receives kindly treatment only from Gieshübler (Mark Bohm), a bespectacled geek, who adores her and would die for her if he but dared . When Effi becomes pregnant, she is permitted to hire a nursemaid and nanny and chooses the good-hearted Roswitha (Ursula Strätz), who is a lapsed Catholic. Out of boredom, Effi is drawn into something of an affair with a libertine womanizer, Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel), by this partly valid and partly glib reasoning:

Life wouldn’t be worth living if all the random rules had to be observed.
The finest things lie beyond them. Learn to delight in these things.”

The casual romance only lasts a short time and Effi is actually relieved when she learns from Geert that they are to move to Berlin. Six years pass and life in Berlin is somewhat more to Effi’s liking than was Kessin. The stuffy housekeeper, Johanna discovers love letters from Crampas to Effi at the bottom of one of her clothing drawers and turns them over to Geert. In the key scene of the film, Geert consults at length with his best friend Wullersdorf (Karlheinz Böhm) about the necessity of demanding satisfaction from Crampas despite the passage of six years and his continuing love for his charming wife. “It’s not a matter of hatred or personal happiness,” says Innstetten. “That tyrannical social element is not concerned with charm or love or the lapse of time. I have no choice.” He is compelled to act against his own interest and those of Effi and their daughter because he would be judged as dishonored by those in his social circle if he acted otherwise.

The dual is arranged, Instetten shoots Crampas to death, and Effi is ostracized from her entire social class in Moscow and cut off from contact with her daughter. Even her own parents will not permit her to return to their home – it would send the wrong message of indulging immorality. Effi is permitted one visit with her daughter, Annie (Andrea Schober), but quickly discovers that she has been set against her mother. Effi’s health begins to fail and, at the urging of her physician and a priest, her parents permit her to return to her childhood home, where she dies after a brief period of emotional resignation.

Themes: The primary theme of Effi Briest is the suffocating effect of social constraints and the human suffering thereby produced. In his heart, Instetten doesn’t truly feel the necessity of dueling Crampas. He loves his wife, and treasures her companionship, and would just as soon forgive and forget. He nevertheless feels compelled to demand justice and reject his wife only because he would be judged to be dishonored by his social circle if he acted otherwise. Similarly, social standards require that Effi’s parents sacrifice their love and relationship with their daughter rather than appear to be condoning immorality.

Production Values: Effi Briest is a film that is highly praised by some and dismissed by others. Those that don’t respond well to the film complain that it fails to make you care about the characters. The muted emotionality, however, was Fassbinder’s express intention and it rather ingeniously and precisely expresses the principal theme of the film. The flat emotional contours of the film aptly depict a society suffocating in its own rigidity. Fassbinder demanded that his cast put no inflection into their speech. There is also little action or movement. In fact, the characters sometimes appear to be bound in place, signifying the constraints imposed upon them by rigid social expectations. Viewers can object to the tactic on grounds of personal taste, but there is nothing at all accidental about Fassbinder’s approach. Fassbinder fully comprehends that he is breaking more than one cardinal rule of filmmaking. His genius is in breaking those rules for a precise purpose – to serve the thematic requirements of the film. Every potentially emotional scene of the story, save Effi’s final farewell scene with her mother, takes place largely off-screen and is merely reported by narration. We learn, for example, that “Effi never missed her walks,” rather than witnessing her “affair” with the Major. The dual begins with the firing of the pistol, with none of the usual suspenseful buildup when duals are depicted on film. Fassbinder’s point is that the 1880’s were a time of such utter social rigidity in this social class that the eye could not so much as stand the sight of violations of propriety.

One reviewer states that “When emotion must be hidden at all costs, this leaves nothing for the audience to get a hold of.” It may leave nothing for an average American film-viewer to get hold of – weaned as we are on Hollywood’s crassly emotional fare but it does leave precisely what Fassbinder intended: reflective thought. For viewers unwilling to engage the movie mainly in the cognitive domain, Effi Briest will inevitably be experienced as a largely empty container. For those prepared to accept Fassbinder’s intent and to engage that intent, Effi Briest is a brilliantly creative film. It only seems “tough and impenetrable” (in the words of another reviewer) if one is stuck on trying to penetrate the film on the visceral level. It is both clear and compelling on the level of reflection.

Fassbinder’s absolute control of the technical aspects of his film is exceptional and reminiscent of the greatness of Eisenstein (in Ivan the Terrible – see Eisenstein: The Sound Years) and Renoir (in Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game). With the aid of cinematographers Jürgen Jürges and Dietrich Lohmann, Fassbinder generates a highly stylized and elegant work with carefully controlled mise-en-scene and photography. The content and placement of objects in each shot is carefully designed to create a sense of restriction and claustrophobia. Mirrors abound and some shots occur via reflection. Symbols are lifted verbatim from Victorian paintings, such as Effi’s childhood swing as the representation of freedom. The high contrast monochrome photography blurs the background while riveting attention on the faces and forms in the foreground. The result is a ghostly, Gothic atmosphere, a bit like that of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Each frame resembles a highly stylized painting of the romantic period. It’s as if we are looking at pictures at an exhibition while our guide reads passages from Theodor Fontane’s 1895 novel Effi Briest, and the paintings are ones inspired by that book. Each short scene, with its extensive voice-over narration, ends with a fade – not to black which is the usual custom in films that use fades – but to white, as if one were turning a page in the book. Interleafs sometimes highlight key passages between chapters – to aid the reflective thought that Fassbinder is after.

Hanna Schygulla performs brilliantly as Effi though she seems somewhat too mature for Effi’s teen years. Working within the constraints imposed by Fassbinder’s concept, she delivers a performance of magnificent delicacy and reserve. Schygulla had been a regular in Fassbinder films, but after Effi Briest, she was so fed up with the beastly and over-exacting director that she refused thereafter to work with him for four years, but their reconciliation occurred in time for a brilliant return in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). She later appeared in his films Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979) and Lili Marleen (1981). She was one of a very few performers in Fassbinder’s fledging company that was able to launch later a successful independent career. She had successes in Circle of Deceit (1981) and La Nuit de Varennes (1982).

There is one legitimate difficulty with this film for non-German audiences. It is difficult to keep up with the subtitles, especially when the eye is drawn magnetically to Fassbinder’s gorgeous images. It is also said that English translation does not do justice to the quintessentially Germanic Fontane text. Fassbinder himself indicated that Effi Briest was not a work for a non-German audience. Well, perhaps. Perhaps this masterpiece would be all that much more fulfilling for viewers conversant in German, but it is still not to be missed – English subtitles and all.

Bottom-Line: Effi Briest is one of Fassbinder’s finest works and among the best to come out of Germany post-World War II. Critical appraisal of the film is highly divergent and basically reflects willingness or unwillingness to accept this film on its own terms – for its cognitive elements and extraordinary execution – rather than demanding of it what Fassbinder expressly chose to expunge. Effi Briest is in German with English subtitles and has a running time of 140 minutes. I highly recommend it for those who enjoy cerebral films. There is little emotional engagement in this film but a high ride in the visual and verbal domains.

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older