Contemporary Literary Criticism | Fassbinder, Rainer Werner - Stanley Kauffmann

STANLEY KAUFFMANN

[Effi Briest] is beautiful. It renders [Theodor Fontane's] book as fully and texturally as could be possible in 140 minutes, and it's a work in and of itself, intrinsically cinematic. What's more, it shows that Fassbinder is probably going to keep astonishing us….

Effi Briest doesn't have the tragic dimensions of Madame Bovary or of Kate Chopin's The Awakening because Effi is much more a victim than a rebel, but her extramarital affair is fated from the start and so is her sorry finish….

The fadeouts all through the picture constitute a visual theme. Every fade is to white, not black—a "burn to white," as the trade more properly puts it. These fadeouts convey a feeling of the age's worship of purity…. (p. 20)

Throughout the film the register of emotion is cool. Feelings are perfectly credible, but always portrayed rather than meant to move us. Perhaps Fassbinder wanted to "contain" the...

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