I hoped to find more time to post in this thread – blame my job, which entails a lot of tedious spreadsheet-scraping and often puts my right hand out of action – but I’ve enjoyed reading along, and have very much enjoyed going on a Fassbinder-bender (Fassbender?) over the last few months.
Having previously seen only one of his films (
Maria Braun) I have now seen 22 (including
Eight Hours and
Berlin). Fassbinder will probably never be one of my favourite directors, and I definitely share some of the frustrations others have expressed here, but it’s been a fascinating and rewarding experience to binge-watch so many of his films. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a sustained run with a single director before, and the films have been varied enough to keep me engaged. That said, I did notice myself sighing hoarsely during some of the most recent viewings – I kind of wanted to hurl
Rio das Mortes out of a window – so I may need to take a break now...
One thing I’ve appreciated is that, as with Bergman, you get to see the repertory cast rotate through very different roles, only here the variations are even more drastic: it was genuinely thrilling to cycle through the many faces of Gottfried John, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, and others. But more than that, it was thrilling to sense the blurred edges between these films, to feel the paranoia of
World on a Wire and the abusive relationship in
Martha seeping into isolated moments of
Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, as if these films that were made so closely together, and (in my case) watched in quick succession, could start to infect each other. I guess this is a symptom of a director who has a consistent (and enjoyably toxic) worldview but who also takes on an eclectic range of different projects.
To draw another Bergman parallel, I was also struck by how Fassbinder is always reflecting on the medium(s) in which he is working – theatre, cinema, and television – and on their unique capacities and limitations. Here are some more thoughts on this in relation to
Effi Briest and
Berlin Alexanderplatz, and in reaction to some of the comments made so far:
Rayon Vert wrote:Like a lot of the Fassbinder’ films in this period, too, there’s both an emotional pull for the characters’ dilemmas and strong distancing through various means – the acting for one thing is particularly underplayed or inhibited… Christian Thomsen articulates well how the film consistently seems to “turn the film into a novel” instead of the other way around, for example in the way Fassbinder keeps the lengthy literary form of the dialogue, or the way the narrator will read lengthy passages of the text describing a scene or a plot development while visually we’re watching a much more banal scene, sometimes almost frozen. I quite enjoyed the observations by Erica Carter in the Arrow book essay on the film about that the way the omniscient narration imposes itself at times on the characters’ voices (it’s particularly striking and explicit towards the end in two scenes where the narrator and the characters’ voices actually audibly compete for attention), so that in the end the film isn’t only a critique of the society the novel depicts but also of literary realism itself.
zedz wrote:Fassbinder valorizes the literary original by the use of intertitular extracts, copious narration drawn from the novel (the scene that might be the film's emotional climax, when Effi sees Annie on the tram, is entirely conveyed by Fassbinder's narration), on-screen documents (letters, telegrams), and the use of 'blank pages' in the film's frequent fades to white and, profoundly, in the black-bordered empty frame accompanying the report of Effi's death… The literary and cinematic layers of the film are also beautifully integrated with its theatrical one, in which performances play out at length in long shot, using blocking to express shifting character relationships, and many of the actors wear heightened make-up that evokes the stage.
senseabove wrote:The first thirty minutes and the last thirty minutes of this are peak work, but I found the middle 4—was it four?—hours just a tortuously plodding journey, tree after tree after tree after tree, nary a forrest in sight. Basically from the arrival of Krampus until the fatal discovery, the development is neither severe enough, seductive enough, nor complex enough; everyone's motivations are, like Martha's, told not shown, or shown not told, and for Fassbinder's peculiar severity to truly succeed for me, I guess I just need those to be blended.
therewillbeblus wrote:I respectfully disagree with senseabove, for what's being shown and told in disconnect between image and text leaves the real (non)answers of complex psychology in the elisions… [At the end] we witness the parents ruminate on serious, deep, and most significantly unanswerable rhetorical questions from an aloof distance, before the father halts all introspection and avenues for emotional growth, with a sharp "That's much too vast a subject." These are the final lines of the film, but it doesn't end there; no, the pause is sustained in a painfully-long shot of them sitting stagnantly in silence- cementing the diagnosis of western individuals operating defense mechanisms of oversimplicity and shallow conversation to cover up these intangible holes, instead of working through the discomfort to fill them. Though, as Fassbinder might posit himself, while there may not be any solutions to these impediments, they demand to be explored.
In an earlier post, I talked about how
Nora Helmer drains
A Doll’s House of almost all emotive and even dramatic content, creating a very powerful ‘distanced’ or ‘alienated’ effect, and the same process has been applied in adapting Fontane’s novel. Reading
Effi Briest after watching the film, I was surprised by how engaging, human, and sympathetic it was. Many of the characters – Effi’s parents, Innstetten, and especially Johanna – are transformed by Fassbinder into much colder, almost robotic versions of their counterparts in the novel. Fontane’s Johanna, for instance, is essentially a kind and well-meaning presence in Effi’s life, secretly delighting in her sense of superiority to Roswitha, and secretly proud of her bond with Innstetten (whom she appears to be in love with) following the divorce, but nothing like the machete-faced Irm Hermann performance we see in the film.
Not only are the characters severely de-humanised, but the story is also robbed of much of its flow and momentum, being carefully divided up into a series of polished fragments. This is a common – and often very effective – approach to distilling a novel into a feature film, and in this case it reminded me a lot of Terence Davies’
The House of Mirth. (Side-note: I think that film borrows its place-and-date bookends from
In a Year With 13 Moons.) But it can make it hard to engage with the narrative, as senseabove’s comment suggests, especially when the fragments are as inscrutable as they are here. The inclusion of literary ‘chunks’ in the narration and intertitles doesn’t help to smooth things over but instead makes the edges even rougher: it’s like a deliberately awkward, imperfect translation, a meditation on an ‘un-filmable’ novel rather than an earnest attempt to re-tell Fontane’s story.
The strange thing is that when Fassbinder actually does film an un-filmable novel –
Berlin Alexanderplatz – he takes the opposite approach, heightening rather than dampening the emotions and the drama, and making the narrative more comprehensible rather than less so. But the effect is similar, because again this feels like a knowingly compromised version of the original text.
I found Döblin’s novel very challenging and confusing due to its constant blending together of voices, often within a single paragraph or even a single sentence, and without any guidelines for the reader about who is speaking or what tone they’re using. You almost have to read it out loud at times in order to follow the story, piecing together the meaning from various contextual clues as you read and re-read them. It’s a lot like
Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (which came out two years earlier), in that it evokes very powerfully the cacophony of voices that constitute urban life, but it demands even more from an audience looking to make sense out of this apparent chaos. At times I felt like I was close to ‘tuning in’ to the book’s wavelength, but a lot of the time I just felt impressed, and interested, but alienated. It’s as if Döblin were trying to write an un-writable novel, showcasing all the ways in which text-on-a-page is unable to reproduce the sensory and emotional overload of Berlin (low)life.
The TV series, by definition, is unable to reproduce the types of confusion that you get in the novel, because we can always see who is speaking and hear their tone of voice; and, not by definition but by virtue of limited resources, the series is also unable to contain all the details and the range of characters, stories, and settings found in the novel. As has been said in the film’s own thread, it strongly resembles filmed theatre at times, with long takes, often shot from a great distance (for the small screen!), in a limited number of sets. When passages from the novel are recited, either by the characters or by the narrator, this feels like a proud admission of failure on Fassbinder’s part, all the more so when these passages are recited over the same flashback sequence over and over again.
Fassbinder forces the viewer to think about the infrastructure around these cultural artefacts: what does this story mean as a novel, as a play, as a film, or as a TV series? How does it change when transposed between these frameworks? And how can it test, disrupt, and subvert each of these frameworks, as well as conforming to them? In other words, much the same questions Fassbinder wants us to ask about people and the various structures (marriage, the workplace, etc.) they inhabit or are appropriated by. Seeing this common theme treated in such a kaleidoscopic way has been one of the great pleasures of this project for me.
