With this stylised and satirical study of a film cast and crew grounded in a Spanish seaside hotel awaiting the arrival of the director, the star, the funding, and the film stock, Fassbinder reflects on his experience of filmmaking so far, specifically of shooting Whity months earlier in Spain. The private and professional jealousies and constant infighting among the group as well as the volatile behaviour of the increasingly frustrated director after his arrival, suggest a negative result of Fassbinder’s stocktaking. Though often funny in its exaggerations, it is ultimately Fassbinder’s swan song of the anti-theatre and the possibility of a collective creative process.
This sense of disillusion also pervades Olivier Assayas’s depiction of a film shoot gone wrong in Irma Vep.
West Germany/Italy, 1971, colour, 103 mins. With English subtitles. Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Lou Castel, Eddie Constantine, R.W. Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Marquard Bohm.
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