By Chris Hyde

September 3, 2003

In 1971, a young filmmaker named Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed a work that centers directly on the filmmaking process itself; today, it stands out as one of the greatest achievements of the German bad boy director's career.

Fassbinder's mercurial life and death have been covered extensively in film journals as well as tabloid newspapers (though North American fans still await the definitive English language biography of the man), yet he remains somewhat of an elusive figure. Perhaps the largest personage in the New German Cinema that emerged at the end of the 1960s in the European country, Fassbinder would direct a phenomenal 43 movies between 1966 and 1982, when an overdose finally brought the director's life to a halt. During that tenure as a movie helmsman, Fassbinder would use his jaundiced eye to create some of the finest celluloid works of the period and which remain today as lasting masterpieces. At the same time, however, his personal life would reveal him as a bitter, conflicted person given to wielding his power in a manner that would often leave his cast members and personal acquaintances emotionally and physically drained.

Fassbinder was not unaware of his cruel ability to manipulate his actor's emotions in such a way as to elicit the sort of performances he desired from his crew; in fact, it seems as though he took an almost perverse pleasure in working in this human puppet show. While only 25 at the time he made Beware of a Holy Whore, the director had already been behind the camera for over ten films and had an obvious grasp of the way in which the real world business of films was executed. Fassbinder was also a man who understood implicitly the politics of personal relationships and whose vision was so great that he could see all the various levels of interaction and abstraction that emerge from the process of bringing work in celluloid to the screen. With this reflexive, audacious work he was to bring the world a meta-film that exists as a cutting, satiric look at both the world of cinema as well as the director himself.

The film is set in a Spanish beach resort where a mostly German production crew has come to make a movie. As they await the money that they need to complete their work, the bored crew loiters in the hotel lobby drinking cuba libre after cuba libre and carrying on a multiplicity of emotional interactions. The ostensible star of the production, Eddie Constantine, carries on an affair with co-star Hanna Schygulla; the dictatorial director (Lou Castel) toys with the feelings of cast members both male and female; production manager Sascha (played by Fassbinder himself) barks orders and fights with his girlfriend Babs (Margarethe von Trotta); and the other members of the crew assemble and disassemble romantically in varied permutations. With the crashing waves of a bucolic retreat falling in the background, these myriad characters from the film-within-the-film ooze enmity and despair as they get drunk, smash glasses on the floor, and attempt to make their movie.

This backdrop setting of Beware of a Holy Whore was supposedly inspired by Fassbinder's experiences in Spain while making his pseudo-Western Whity, and the autobiographical angle of the film deliberately hones the edge of the skewering that it gives to the business. While in the main this is a simple film concerning human beings' complicated relationships with each other, the work doesn't hesitate to make brutally satirical comments on the industry along the way. The entire moviemaking process is itself held up to the light with this fictional account, and the results here are far less flattering than in other films that have tackled this theme such as Fellini's 8 ½ and Truffaut's Day For Night. Perhaps most telling is the director's completely undisguised portrait of himself -- Lou Castel's moody portrayal as Jeff doesn't flinch at all from showing the character as a vicious and arbitrary figure given to vitriolic outbursts and capable of the most cutting cruelties. Wearing the trademark Fassbinder leather jacket, this director casually cuts people off emotionally and castigates them publicly; and much like the real life filmmaker, he is depicted here as being almost impossible to work with. Yet the power of Fassbinder was so great that many of his actors and crew would return to make picture after picture with him -- the pull of his personality and the greatness of his art being so entrancing that many were willing to put up with the most debasing experiences just to remain in his orbit.

Beware of a Holy Whore stands out both as one of the best pieces of film about film ever made as well as one of the seminal movies of this great German filmmaker. Fittingly, its transition to the DVD format has been handled by Wellspring, perhaps the best DVD outfit to be omitted from the recent wrapup of the top companies in the format that appeared in this space. A brand new telecine transfer was made for this release under the direction of the Fassbinder Foundation, and the film looks just spectacular here. The sound is also top-notch, being available in both its original mono and in Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround. As far as extras go things are a bit skimpy, but there is the original trailer and a filmography are available on the disc. Also included is the booklet that comes with all of Wellspring's Fassbinder releases, which contains an excellent essay by Thomas Elsaesser entitled "The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: A Cinema of Vicious Circles".

Overall, then, this DVD reissue is a high quality representation of a great film by one of the top filmmakers of the latter half of the twentieth century. A rumination on both film and relationships, the movie manages to celebrate the process of the making of films while at the same time exposing the proverbially seamy underbelly of the industry and its backstage antics. Though sharply critical in tone, the film is certainly not without moments of satire and humor that help lighten the deeply pessimistic mood. Also instructive is Fassbinder's cold-light-of-day portrayal of himself, both in the producer character that he plays in addition to his delineation of Jeff, the film's authoritarian director. While holding out all sorts of human interaction here for microscopic examination under the camera lens, Fassbinder reserves some of the most biting commentary for his own sort of petulant and power mad behavior. By not excepting himself from the brutal glare of examination, the director collapses all the levels of abstraction on display in Beware of a Holy Whore down into a brilliant autobiographical statement that is far more insightful than any of the material that's ever been written about the man. The end result is a celluloid work that is worthy of a place amongst the finest works of cinema on cinema that have ever graced the screens of the world's movie houses; and as such this is a film that no student of the medium should miss. It's just that good.