“In a luxury hotel by the sea a film team awaits its director: a morbid company moving in front of a bleached shiny background already as if in a film.” Well, they are: Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore. “Their artificial nervosity exposes them as vampires waiting for their master. The director is expected by a pitiful collection of used-up passions and sickly sensitiveness. He arrives and has the choice of destroying their world or of forming it.... (T)he reason for their confusion, their sins and prayers: the movie, attracting them and detaching itself from them, the movie: a holy whore.” --Goethe Institute, “Fassbinder.”
Fassbinder developed Beware of a Holy Whore out of his failed Whity, a fiction film on which production was stopped as a result of difficulties on location and the dissolution of Fassbinder's antitheater team. Remaining in Almeria, he stuck with his castle in Spain, but, turning it inside out filmed this jagged chronicle of interpersonal confrontations and non-events among the remaining film crew, which includes Hanna Schygulla, Eddie Constantine as himself, Lou Castell as Fassbinder, and Fassbinder as the producer. Vincent Canby calls Beware of a Holy Whore “Fassbinder's comic, self-consciously absurd, slightly dizzy Contempt....” Like Godard, Fassbinder wishes to strip the medium of its mystique for the sole purpose of continuing to work in it, contempt and all. (JB)