BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE

BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE turns the making of a film into a study of boredom, ego, dependency and creative cruelty.

A film crew is stranded in a hotel on the Spanish coast waiting for three things: their director, their star and the money required to actually begin shooting. With nothing to do, the group drinks, sleeps together, argues and reorganises itself into constantly shifting alliances. When director Jeff finally arrives with actor Eddie Constantine, playing himself, production doesn’t become any calmer. Jeff simply gives everyone a new person to depend on, resent and eventually rebel against. 

The film is unusually personal for Fassbinder. He made it in the aftermath of the difficult production of WHITY, drawing directly on the tensions within the group of actors and collaborators who surrounded him at the beginning of his career. Many of them appear here, including Hanna Schygulla, Margarethe von Trotta, Ulli Lommel and Ingrid Caven, while Fassbinder himself plays the production manager Sascha. It plays partly as self-criticism and partly as an account of what happens when friendship, work, sex and artistic authority become impossible to separate. 

Michael Ballhaus, who would later shoot films for Martin Scorsese including GOODFELLAS and THE DEPARTED, photographs the hotel with restless tracking shots that move between conversations, arguments and people sitting around waiting for something to happen. The soundtrack moves through Leonard Cohen, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and classical music, giving all that inactivity its own rhythm. Problems securing the music rights later kept the film largely out of circulation for years before an authorised version returned to cinemas in 1992.

BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1971. It’s one of Fassbinder’s most revealing films about filmmaking itself, made when he was only 25 and already surrounded by the collaborators, rivalries and working methods that would define one of the most prolific careers in European cinema. 

The title refers to cinema itself. In the film’s original press notes Fassbinder described filmmaking as something that simultaneously attracts and evades the people devoted to it, calling the film itself “a holy whore.” It’s an appropriately contradictory phrase for a director who saw cinema as both an object of almost religious devotion and a profession capable of exploiting everyone prepared to surrender themselves to it.