Beware of the 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 ICA’s Werner Schroeter retrospective. Partly an homage to Schroeter – whom Fassbinder deeply admired – the film also gestures toward the looseness and ambivalence of Schroeter’s affiliation with the New German Cinema.

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 uneasy 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 Goofy cartoon involving cross‑dressing and deception which sets the tone for the emotional masquerades to follow. The film also allows us to see Schroeter alongside Magdalena Montezuma, the star of many of his films and one of his closest collaborators. Fassbinder gives Montezuma an orange‑blond wig and dubs her voice with that of actress Irm Hermann, a frequent Fassbinder performer 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 inclinations to for power plays.

Montezuma’s escape from this destructive dynamic culminates 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 near‑identical scene in Schroeter’s Eika Katappa – the opening film of the retrospective – in which a young man departs from Naples by boat. Fassbinder famously 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 Beware of the Holy Whore become intermittent. When not seen beside Montezuma, he appears in group compositions – always at the margins, silent, detached, both part of the crew and curiously removed from it. This quietly liminal presence captures the complex bond between Fassbinder and Schroeter: admiration, distance, influence, and a shared commitment to cinema as a volatile, intensely collaborative art.

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.

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