Wednesday, September 27 at 7:30 PM — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1970
In German with English subtitles
“Do some work, you lazy bitch!” Based on the real-life troubled production of his film Whity, Beware of a Holy Whore stars Fassbinder and his usual band of collaborators as an international motley crew of selfish (yet fashionable!) whiners and sex pests, lazing around a Spanish seaside villa as the filming of their movie gets repeatedly derailed by a tyrannical director and various financial mishaps. Emotional cruelty, pettiness, incessant name-calling, and acerbic one-liners abound in the hangout movie from hell, where casual hookups and daytime drinking seem about as pleasurable as a root canal and a soundtrack of Leonard Cohen ballads does little to soften the blows. Holy Whore suggests that Fassbinder’s impressive output of films is nothing short of miraculous, because not only is making underground, conceptually rigorous art with your weirdo friends difficult, and likely to unleash monstrous behavior from everyone involved, but there’s a high probability that your cast and crew might eat each other alive before anything is actually finished. But when you’re someone who cannot, under any circumstances, stop making art, at least these hellish experiences can serve as hilarious and psychotic fodder for future films. Starring Lou Castel, and Fassbinder stalwarts like Hanna Schygulla, Ulli Lommel, and Kurt Raab, plus French icon Eddie Constantine as himself. (RL)
104 min • Antiteater-X-Film • 35mm from Janus Films
Preceded by: German safety commercials – ~5 min – 35mm from Chicago Film Society Collections
NEXT UP: Three Films by Gautam Valluri at the Chicago Cultural Center
