Fassbinder Again, One of My Favorites
Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), its striking title just one of the components making this early Rainer Werner Fassbinder film a fascinating thing to watch, deals with a German film company on the Spanish Riviera struggling due to a lack of film stock and a director, Jeff (Lou Castel) himself undergoing something like a nervous breakdown.
Most of the movie covers the period of a long delay in a beautiful sunny place. The actors, actresses, crew, producer, all have too much time on their hands. They hook up, argue, drink great volumes of liquor and beer, smoke hundreds of cigarettes, brood, ostracize one of the lead actors (Eddie Constantine playing Eddie Constantine), erupt into screaming matches, break glasses in the bar and lounge area of the hotel where they're staying, play Leonard Cohen endlessly on the bar's jukebox.
In the background can be seen towering bright cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, a wide open vista showing the natural world plus indifference.
Jeff, though he's been married to one of the crew, has a thing going on with one of the actors, Ricky (Marquard Bohm). The nature of their relationship seemed opaque to me, but that could be the result of just one viewing. Overall, I was so impressed by Fassbinder's exploration of this group of about thirty people, I realized I missed many subtleties. Hanna Schygulla (in so many of the director's films she could be regarded as his muse) is one of many interesting performers, which shows how the ensemble of Fassbinder performers in those early years worked to benefit the whole of his productions, without standing forth as "major movie stars." Still, she's Hanna Schygulla, one of the great actresses of European cinema, here playing the leading lady of the film within the film--the film stuttering its way to getting finished.
Eddie Constantine (familiar to viewers of Godard's Alphaville), an American actor who worked mainly in Europe, here speaks French, thus leading to a language barrier between the German actors, crew, and himself. Hanna (Hanna Schygulla) goes from making fun of him to becoming his lover. One thing Fassbinder depicts in many of his films is something not often seen in the works of other directors: mockery, the common cruelty of little moments of shitty behavior as someone awkward in a social circle is treated with indifference, contempt, and the pettiest form of malice. One of the German actresses spends a minute insulting a waiter (who only speaks Spanish). She had called him over supposedly to order a drink or some food, but instead just wants to belittle him in German, making fun of his workingman's profession, his appearance, his uniform. It's sickening to watch, yet utterly believable.
After the film stock arrives, Jeff has to start directing. His pathologies burst forth at irregular intervals. At times he's focused, at others he's apt to scream at people for no reason. He fires a Spanish production assistant, she's too slow when she moves. He gets a humiliating visit from a Spanish official for firing this woman. It's not his place to dismiss local crew members.
All through, the steadiest crew member is the production manager, Sascha (Rainer Werner Fassbinder himself). Fassbinder, a great filmmaker, was also a great actor. His performance, for instance, in Fox and His Friends, is an extraordinary work of acting, playing lead in a great film he also directed. He's a natural, big, sloppy-looking dark-haired man who appears often as if he just woke up after being up all night and got about twenty minutes of sleep. I don't know if this film reflects Fassbinder's direct observations of the filmmaking business, but he did have a strong understanding of group dynamics--this, reflected throughout his works. The characters in his films have a knack for driving each other nuts, for digging into each other's emotional cores. The unsettling feelings an audience member can get from watching and listening to this kind of thing indicates how true to life his showing of human existence really is.
The movie within the movie does get made, Jeff is practically a non-person to everyone who knows him by the end. This could be Fassbinder's statement: that the director of a film feels and sees things no one else working on the same film experiences, an isolating job rewarded only afterwards, when audiences (who know nothing of the struggles involved in the film's creation) see the final work.
Vic Neptune
Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), its striking title just one of the components making this early Rainer Werner Fassbinder film a fascinating thing to watch, deals with a German film company on the Spanish Riviera struggling due to a lack of film stock and a director, Jeff (Lou Castel) himself undergoing something like a nervous breakdown.
Most of the movie covers the period of a long delay in a beautiful sunny place. The actors, actresses, crew, producer, all have too much time on their hands. They hook up, argue, drink great volumes of liquor and beer, smoke hundreds of cigarettes, brood, ostracize one of the lead actors (Eddie Constantine playing Eddie Constantine), erupt into screaming matches, break glasses in the bar and lounge area of the hotel where they're staying, play Leonard Cohen endlessly on the bar's jukebox.
In the background can be seen towering bright cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, a wide open vista showing the natural world plus indifference.
Jeff, though he's been married to one of the crew, has a thing going on with one of the actors, Ricky (Marquard Bohm). The nature of their relationship seemed opaque to me, but that could be the result of just one viewing. Overall, I was so impressed by Fassbinder's exploration of this group of about thirty people, I realized I missed many subtleties. Hanna Schygulla (in so many of the director's films she could be regarded as his muse) is one of many interesting performers, which shows how the ensemble of Fassbinder performers in those early years worked to benefit the whole of his productions, without standing forth as "major movie stars." Still, she's Hanna Schygulla, one of the great actresses of European cinema, here playing the leading lady of the film within the film--the film stuttering its way to getting finished.
Eddie Constantine (familiar to viewers of Godard's Alphaville), an American actor who worked mainly in Europe, here speaks French, thus leading to a language barrier between the German actors, crew, and himself. Hanna (Hanna Schygulla) goes from making fun of him to becoming his lover. One thing Fassbinder depicts in many of his films is something not often seen in the works of other directors: mockery, the common cruelty of little moments of shitty behavior as someone awkward in a social circle is treated with indifference, contempt, and the pettiest form of malice. One of the German actresses spends a minute insulting a waiter (who only speaks Spanish). She had called him over supposedly to order a drink or some food, but instead just wants to belittle him in German, making fun of his workingman's profession, his appearance, his uniform. It's sickening to watch, yet utterly believable.
After the film stock arrives, Jeff has to start directing. His pathologies burst forth at irregular intervals. At times he's focused, at others he's apt to scream at people for no reason. He fires a Spanish production assistant, she's too slow when she moves. He gets a humiliating visit from a Spanish official for firing this woman. It's not his place to dismiss local crew members.
All through, the steadiest crew member is the production manager, Sascha (Rainer Werner Fassbinder himself). Fassbinder, a great filmmaker, was also a great actor. His performance, for instance, in Fox and His Friends, is an extraordinary work of acting, playing lead in a great film he also directed. He's a natural, big, sloppy-looking dark-haired man who appears often as if he just woke up after being up all night and got about twenty minutes of sleep. I don't know if this film reflects Fassbinder's direct observations of the filmmaking business, but he did have a strong understanding of group dynamics--this, reflected throughout his works. The characters in his films have a knack for driving each other nuts, for digging into each other's emotional cores. The unsettling feelings an audience member can get from watching and listening to this kind of thing indicates how true to life his showing of human existence really is.
The movie within the movie does get made, Jeff is practically a non-person to everyone who knows him by the end. This could be Fassbinder's statement: that the director of a film feels and sees things no one else working on the same film experiences, an isolating job rewarded only afterwards, when audiences (who know nothing of the struggles involved in the film's creation) see the final work.
Vic Neptune
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