Warnung vor einer heilungen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore, 1971) is the theater of an annulment. The actors devour themselves, and abandon and leave behind bodies full of passions which become polemical figures of a destitution inflicted upon you by a violence that is unspeakable since it is obvious. Just as a marionette's staccato gestures reveal where the strings controlling it are attached, the effigies of anxiety (shame, vileness, cowardice, indifference, formless stupidity) performed by the film's actors show what determines such moral solitude at each moment and in the most private spheres. Fassbinder elaborates an imaginary actor here who is pitiable and grotesque and undone by his or her own apathy; the actor responsible for playing the part of this dismal silhouette paints a terribly accusatory picture and invents a repertoire of gestures and actions through which the performance becomes an indictment against affective deprivation, against deprivation of the self.

Beware of a Holy Whore describes a few days in the life of a German film crew in Spain: a crew lacking film stock whose production has broken down and finds itself marooned in an enormous white hotel; sketches of solitude, various kinds of prostitution and love; the successive entrance of stars (Eddie Constantine, the cameraman, the director) who only add to the confusion; and a revolving cast of small, local figures (waiters, receptionist, job seekers) to vaguely recall that work exists. The scenario of a crew in exile more or less bound together via a film project might lead one to believe that Fassbinder’s film represented for the 1970s what Jean-Luc Godard's Le mépris (Contempt, 1963) was for the 1960s and what Wim Wenders’ The State of Things (1982) was for the 1980s: A moment to express some urgent thoughts about creation within a genre known pertinently in Hollywood as the backstage drama and finding in film what literature called the poetic arts.