a sheep in wolf’s
clothing
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director)
Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore) / 1971
1971 was an amazing year for filmmaker Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, even for a man who made many films every year; that year he
managed to shoot five feature films: Rio das Mortes, Pioneers in
Ingolstadt, Whity, Beware of a Holy Whore, and The
Merchant of Four Seasons, while both he and his communal-living cast were
recovering from the particularly exhausting film, Whity.
Beware
of a Holy Whore, reportedly, recounts some of the difficulties the group
had while shooting Whity, not only the delays in promised governmental
grants, but with materials—both that film and Holy Whore were shot in
Spain, where sets, shooting locations, and equipment were more difficult to
procure—while also being mired in the numerous interpersonal relationships
between the actors and crew. Even applying for the grants was an arduous
business; as Fassbinder joked, “I can make an entire film in the time it takes
others to read the small print of a grant application form.”
It is no wonder, accordingly, that the director, Jeff, depicted in Holy
Whore (the dark-haired, somewhat overweight Fassbinder being played,
ironically by the handsome Germanic looking blond and blue-eyed Lou Castel) is
seemingly disinterested in making the film for which the cast and crew are
huddled in a semi-luxury hotel, awaiting his arrival. By film’s end, Jeff is
utterly exhausted, an empty shell of a human being.
It is the same kind of exhaustion we witness also in two models that
Fassbinder surely used for this film, Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and
Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, the exhaustion not only from the
never-ending demands creation makes, but from the kind of decadent world that
seemingly accompany films and their multiple creators. Godard’s film, like
Fassbinder’s, is also about violence and brutality, both sexual and
intellectual, while 8½ clearly humorously and seriously accounts a mini-history
of both.
For those who know about the Fassbinder “commune,” as one character
describes it, there are many in-jokes in this film—Fassbinder, himself, plays
the harried directorial assistant, Sasha, and Magdalena Montezuma plays a
character to whom the director had once been married, named Irm, while Irm
Hermann, who played in 19 of Fassbinder’s films, is nowhere to be seen in this
one; and Fassbinder’s real-life, short-term wife, Ingrid Craven here appears as
a married woman desiring a bit role; and there are also several subtle
references to previous Fassbinder films—but to read the movie as entirely
autobiographical, I believe, would be a mistake.
Certainly, the various sexual goings-on in this film—heterosexual,
lesbian, gay, and, in particular, bi-sexual—which we are forced time and time
again to observe through various voyeuristic tableaus—may have been part and
parcel of a Fassbinder shoot. At some points it appears almost as if every one
of the numerous cast and crew members are determined to get each other into
their beds or least upon a lobby couch. And by film’s end, they do seem to be
entwined into a large group grope similar to the comical goings-on in Jack
Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Yet behind the basically satirical vision of Holy
Whore there are also a great many serious issues which seem far more
personal, as the director character attempts to work them out, than general. If
this should not be understood precisely as a group autobiography, it is
certainly one of Fassbinder’s most personal works, even though he uses a
stand-in for himself.
d, given the almost bi-polar shifts in Jeff’s behavior once he does
fly in on a plane (procured evidently from another isolated paradise, Ischia)
it would have been almost unbearable to actually see Fassbinder playing
himself. At once, instead of hugging his boy-toy of the moment, Ricky (Marquard
Bohm), Jeff puts his arms around his hunky assistant-director, David (Hannes
Fuchs) and then hugs several of his women actors, including Hanna Schygulla,
playing herself.
Soon after he slaps Irm, and when she drunkenly shouts out about his
abuse of her, slaps her several more times and fires her on the spot, demanding
she leave the site. The drugged-out cameraman, Deiters (played by Fassbinder’s
openly gay filmmaker friend, Werner Schroeter) has already abused her, telling
her, after a brief kissing session, that she needs to clean her teeth more
often. Yet she is the only one saved from the emotional abuses which follow.
By the next morning Jeff is shouting for and at nearly everyone, furious
about the shooting location, the Spanish equipment, and the cinematographer’s
inability to immediately comprehend his rather complex instructions. The actors
take too long to get into costume, and the group translator is seen in the
distance, for long hours at a time, entwined in a kiss with a driver.
Furthermore, the money from Bonn has not yet come through. Both Jeff and Ricky
wish for one another’s complete “destruction.”
If Jeff is explosively violent, he can also, at moments, be tender in
his manipulation of his cast. But the film he intends to make is utterly
brutal: As he describes it to his actor,
Eddie Constantine, who has complained that he cannot give a karate chop to his
female victim, “Lemmy Caution is always such a gentleman, so noble. What I want
to show here is the guy at the height of power. Brutal cold-blooded,
capitalistic, rational, cold as ice. I don’t want to show a rain of sympathy
for people who cat in the name of some fascist government."
In short, the world of drink, drugs, and sex which these characters
inhabit is also, in a more political sense, what the movie-within-the-movie is
itself about.
The two worlds, the satirical film about filmmaking and the murderous
film at Holy Whore’s heart, accordingly, are oddly mirror images, one
comic and one tragic, but both suggesting that all of these figures, “real” and
“imagined,” in giving their lives over to art and artifice, allow themselves to
feel a sense of holiness, while still whoring for their own sense of control
over one another and reality. In this world, status, even being one of
Fassbinder’s original Munich group members, having grown up in a better
financial situation, or imagining future scenarios for their lives, is crucial
and, in the end, self-destructive.
Of course, the real holy whore is art itself. The support that the
German government lavished on film and theater during the 1970s and 80s, as
Thomas Elsaesser intelligently reminds us in the DVD liner-essay, encouraged
directors such as Fassbinder to become “clowns and professional enfant
terribles,” in part to justify the control and power the government had
built up to delimit such behavior in everyday life. Each, directors and
government, needed the other to justify their existences and to satisfy their
desires, the fact of which the young Fassbinder immediately perceived.
Fassbinder’s films are almost always centered on real moral issues, but
are presented, as here, in a manner which forces you to see them for what they
are: artificed creations. If they are actually whores, things which make you
want to love them, they, at least, are honest enough to make it very clear that
they are not entirely holy, that their beauty is a created one through make-up,
camera tricks, and clever acting.
Perhaps none of the great filmmaker’s works revealed this so clearly as Beware
of a Holy Whore, a work which you can simultaneously love and find utterly
perverse. These are beautiful people acting quite brilliantly, but they’re only
to be let out of their box for one or occasional nights. Art, alas, is not
life—a fact, despite his utter dedication to it, of which Fassbinder was only
too aware.
The film ends with a statement by another bisexual author, Thomas
Mann:
"I tell you that I am often deadly tired
of representing humankind without participating in humanity."
By
the end of 1971, Fassbinder must have exhausted. In 1972 he made only one film,
The Bitter Tears of Petra Kant.
Los Angeles, September 14, 2016
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2016).
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