Goethe-Kino: Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Beware of a Holy Whore

As part of this month’s Goethe‑Kino, we present Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s mordantly sardonic portrait of a film cast and crew suspended between desire, apathy, and dysfunction, in dialogue with the retrospective Anguish and Ecstasy - The Cinema of Werner Schroeter at the ICA in London. The film admiringly references Schroeter's Eika Katappa – the retrospective’s opening title – and includes appearances by Schroeter himself and his iconic performer Maria Montezuma.

Set in a hotel somewhere on the Spanish coast, the film follows a stranded production team – technicians, actors, and producers – waiting for the director, the lead actor, the film stock, and the production funds. As they linger in the lobby and at the bar, they watch one another, yearn for one another, talk, quarrel, and drift into fragile alliances. When the egomaniacal director finally arrives, tensions sharpen: jealousy, humiliation, injury, and disappointment unfold in cycles of melodramatic suffering and fleeting moments of triumph.

The film opens with the young Werner Schroeter filmed against a pale sky, wearing a black hat and recounting a Disney cartoon featuring Goofy that involves cross‑dressing and deception – a tale that sets the tone for the emotional masquerades to follow. The film also shows Schroeter alongside Magdalena Montezuma, the star of many of his films and one of his closest collaborators. Fassbinder gives Montezuma an orange‑blond wig, the name “Irm,” and the voice of actress Irm Hermann, a devoted member of the Fassbinder circle who was often subjected to his humiliations – mirroring the way Montezuma is belittled by the film’s fictional director, a figure through whom Fassbinder offers a caustic self‑portrait of his own inclination toward power plays.

Montezuma’s poignant escape from this destructive dynamic is staged in a striking sequence: she glides away from shore in a small boat, her face and hair vivid against the sea and coastline, the sunlight on her neck beautifully caught by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. This moment of calm, inserted into an otherwise tense film, echoes a scene in Schroeter’s Eika Katappa – the opening film of the retrospective – in which a young man departs from Naples by boat. Fassbinder asked Schroeter for permission to “copy” this shot, which Schroeter interpreted as a “dedication, an homage.” Fassbinder includes another quotation from Eika Katappa: the line “Life is so precious – even right now,” spoken in his film by Hanna Schygulla.

After the opening, Schroeter’s appearances in the film become intermittent. When he is not seen beside Montezuma, he appears in group compositions – always at the margins, silent, both part and not part of the crew. This quietly liminal presence seems to capture the complex connection between Schroeter and the New German Cinema: admiration, distance, influence, and a shared commitment to exploring different ways of creating a new cinema.

West Germany 1971, colour, 104 mins. With English subtitles.
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Marquard Bohm, Lou Castel, Eddie Constantine, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hannes Fuchs, Ulli Lommel, Maria Montezuma, Kurt Raab, Karl Scheydt, Werner Schroeter, Hanna Schygulla, Monica Teuber, Margarethe von Trotta, et al.