Fassbinder Diary #3: Beware a Holy Whore
If Truffaut’s Day for Night is about the joy of making movies and Godard’s Contempt is about the ordeal, Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (71) is about the ordeal of not making movies—the squandering of inspiration and the despair of the neutered artist. A film crew languishes in a Spanish hotel, waiting for the director to arrive, then waiting for materials to arrive, then waiting for motivation to arrive, and then… just waiting.
Fassbinder, who wrote and directed the film and plays the role of embattled production manager Sascha, uses this prolonged stasis as a springboard to explore the dynamics of a team of individuals under duress. His unsurprising conclusion is that creative beings denied the means to create will turn their energies to destruction. By the end, the poison of inertia has blighted friendships and marriages, obliterated the semblance of hierarchy and decorum, and led to a stillborn production.
Fassbinder made Beware of a Holy Whore near the beginning of a 13-year blitzkrieg which produced 40 feature films. Reportedly based on his experience filming Whity (71) in Spain, Holy Whore can be seen as Fassbinder’s retailoring of Contempt to suit his fixations, with a touch of Warholian codependency. Where Godard saw collaboration as the seedbed of soul-shriveling compromise, Fassbinder recognizes it as the impetus for latent cruelty and brutality to come to the fore.
The director in Beware, Jeff (Lou Castel), is a volatile, bisexual alcoholic with impossible standards, which is to say he is Fassbinder’s surrogate. Lest the connection be overlooked, Jeff wears Fassbinder’s trademark leather jacket (part of a lack of costume changes that subtly contributes to the grubby feel of the film). The cast and crew, like Fassbinder’s stock company, seem united by some blend of habit, masochism, shared pariah status, and deranged faith in the necessity of their art. They know each other well enough to have abandoned all pretenses to civility, their encounters now suffused with viperish asides, inquisitions both pitiless and inane, unabashed chemical reliance, and aimless, nearly random copulation. Far from the plucky, no-crisis-we-can’t-lick fraternity of Day for Night, the Holy Whore ensemble is more a confederacy of enablement.
Jeff himself betrays, exploits, or disillusions everyone he’s meant to inspire. His directing cred is established once, briefly, as he describes an elaborate shot he hopes to achieve. For a moment there is purposeful energy on the set, and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus animates his camera in dialogue with Castel’s fiery declamation, dashing about the room as if grateful to be pressed into service. The rest of the film is pitched at a low boil—one feels the effect of time standing still, the entropy of relentless infighting. Here Fassbinder seems determined to use his Anti-Theater precepts to create a kind of Anti-Cinema, drained of forward momentum. The blocking is reminiscent of a play, with its train of exits as characters adjourn to drink and fornicate, and entrances as they rejoin the fray. Indeed the action does not leave the hotel lobby for the entire first hour. As in Sirk, vibrant colors contrast with frustrated human subjects.
As the crew gets sufficiently mired in ennui and drunken stupor to play the childhood “red hands” slap game, Fassbinder suggests the sadism endemic to boredom, the physical and psychological abuse that stems from prolonged close quarters. He ends with a quote from Thomas Mann: “And I say to you that I am weary to death of depicting humanity without partaking of humanity.” Perhaps Fassbinder, who for over a decade seemed to hardly look up from his script or away from the camera viewfinder, was saving the last word of his most scathing critique for himself.
