Focus on R.W. FASSBINDER II: Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)

I love a director who works in periods. And Fassbinder has periods in spades. After his noir/nouvelle vague-inflected early works, and his chaotic, Brechtian experimentation, Beware of a Holy Whore places us at the cusp of his most impressive era (the time of Four Seasons, Petra, Fox and Ali). Here we're on the verge of a seismic Sirkian shift. We're staring down a melodrama injection. And, surprisingly, this curious meta-film has the prescience to know it.

Beware of a Holy Whore riffs off the eventful production of Fassbinder's earlier film, Whity, which he and his Antitheater entourage shot in Spain. (On a side note, the film is ostensibly shot in Spain, though it doesn't look like Spain, none of the surrounding advertising is from Spain, the director arrives in a helicopter that is not on a route within Spain - the film was actually shot in Sorrento, Italy... artifice or laziness?)

Fassbinder is on record as saying his film is "a film about why living and working together as a group doesn't function, even with people who want it to and for whom the group is life itself." That's upbeat, especially for a director who surrounded himself with such a core troupe of collaborators. Granted they weren't the most functional bunch and with Fassbinder himself as the eye of the storm, the group's psycho-sexual, socio-artistic lives were never going to be calm. Beware of a Holy Whore, then, is a fascinating in-joke and an interesting peer into the filmmaking dysfunction that was soon to yield such ripe fruit.

There's a whole lot going on here, and a whole lot not going on. I hear tell the film captures the tortuous down time of film sets, this time brought about by the absence of its director (and then his artistic capriciousness) and the halting pan-sexual relations that spark the various players into various levels of artistic and emotional breakdown.

Dispassionate hilarity ensues. Initially it is mapped to a single room, the lobby of the almost-Spanish hotel, with Michael Ballhaus' camera in full flight. There's a thrilling pretense to it all. The film's second half, which kicks off once the director arrives and actually (nearly, almost) gets his act together, gets a little more cutty with the frame and the scenes. It also takes the sexual politics up a notch. Filming is still on hold though - the ultimate expression that Fassbinder's present approach to creation had hit a wall. Well, barring actually stopping production completely.

Fassbinder, it seems, couldn't help acting out his artistic epiphanies in spectacular fashion. And leaving a cinematic record.

As he later said:

"With that film, we buried the Antitheater, which was our first dream. I didn't know what would happen from then on, but I knew it had to change."

And change it did.

Next up: Martha...

This post contributes to Director Focus: Rainer Werner Fassbinder II.