a sheep in wolf’s clothing
by
Douglas Messerli
Rainer
Werner Fassbinder (writer 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, and
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 8 ½ 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.
Indeed, 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 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, a 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 human kind without participating in humanity."
"I tell you that I am often deadly tired of representing human kind without participating in humanity."
Yes, 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
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