Whity

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Movie
Original title Whity
Country of production Federal Republic of Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1971
length 92 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder
script Rainer Werner Fassbinder
production Peter Berling
Ulli Lommel
Peer Ravens
music Peer ravens
camera Michael Ballhaus
cut Thea Eymèsz
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (as Franz Walsh)
occupation

Whity is a German feature film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder from 1971. In this melodrama in the form of a western , Fassbinder deals with some of his favorite topics such as dysfunctional family relationships and the role of the loner in society. After its premiere at the Berlinale in 1971, Whity neither found a theatrical distribution nor was it shown on television. The film therefore remained one of Fassbinder's lesser-known works for a long time.

plot

The film is set in 1878 in a southwestern US state . The Nicholsons are a landowning family, headed by the despotic Ben Nicholson. His second wife Katherine, who is nymphomaniac and scheming, and his sons from his first marriage, the homosexual Frank and the moronic Davy, live in the household . Katherine wants Davy to be "put to sleep". Whity, the submissive servant of the family, comes from Ben's relationship with the black cook. Whity suffers from the broken conditions of his masters. He is humiliated and beaten. Whity's only support is the bar singer and prostitute Hanna, who loves him and wants to flee to the east with him. Whity refuses because he does not want to and cannot leave the Nicholsons because he loves them.

Katherine has an affair with Garcia, a Mexican who poses as a doctor and makes Ben seemingly diagnosed with an incurable disease. However, Ben is behind this conspiracy himself. When he is supposed to pay Garcia the agreed money, Ben shoots him. Hanna witnesses this scene, but surprisingly exposes Ben to the sheriff, whom he tells that Garcia raped Katherine. Ben pays Hanna for her lie.

Whity becomes the agent of the intrigues in the Nicholson house: Frank challenges him to kill his father and dares a sexual approach to Whity. Katherine tries to seduce Whity in order to induce him to murder Frank - the heir of the allegedly terminally ill Ben. Frank catches the two of them and tries to mock Katherine, but she slaps him extensively. The two vacillate between sexual attraction and mutual humiliation. Ben reads out his will to his family; on the one hand he wants to disembark Katherine, who still believes he is terminally ill, on the other hand he decrees that Davy and Whity should enjoy protection and a livelihood after his death.

Hanna calls on Whity to kill the family in order to finally free herself. After another humiliation, Frank tries to stab Katherine with a dagger, but Ben saves her. Whity appears at the Nicholson house with a revolver. Ben reveals to him that he is the only one of his sons who means anything to him and tells him to murder Frank, Davy and Katherine in order to take over his inheritance. However, Whity first shoots Ben before killing Katherine and Frank as well. Finally he shoots Davy, who gives him his consent. Whity flees into the desert with Hanna, the water supplies are running out. The two kiss and dance.

History of origin

Script and preproduction

The emergence of Whity fell Fassbinder in one of the most productive periods. Between April 1969 and November 1970 he directed eleven films and several theater productions. When Fassbinder came up with the idea of ​​making a western under the working title Whity went to the east , Ulli Lommel agreed to produce the film. The basis for the film budget was to be the DM 300,000 that had flowed to Fassbinder's team as endowment for the 1970 Federal Film Prize for Katzelmacher .

Lommel flew to Spain with executive producer Peter Berling to look for suitable locations. The prospect of making the film as an international co-production with a Spanish partner was not possible. Berling called Sergio Leone and asked him, the film crew, the rotary terrain near Almería , where Leone's spaghetti westerns to ask produced, free of charge. When Leone agreed, Fassbinder put his team together and distributed the tasks among the anti-theater members. Kurt Raab was to be the outfitter of the film, Harry Baer was to take on an assistant director in addition to a role in the film . Fassbinder had written the main role for Günther Kaufmann . The director added the American Ron Randell to his permanent cast . At the last minute - for the first time for a Fassbinder film - Michael Ballhaus was hired as the lighting cameraman , a veteran who had gained his experience in television.

In April 1970 the film team traveled to Almería and moved into a hotel near the location. As is often the case under Fassbinder's leadership, the mood was full of conflict and emotion. Harry Baer remembers: "The preparations before the start of shooting consist mainly of mass gatherings at the bar, of drunken roaring at each other and of roaring room battles until late at night."

production

Spaich describes the production of Whity as a "traumatic event" . The conditions of a foreign filming location and the unfamiliar collaboration with foreign colleagues gave Fassbinder a hard time. Added to this was the complex network of relationships among the anti-theater troupe, amorous entanglements in the team and Fassbinder's authoritarian role in the deeply anti-authoritarian environment of his permanent actors and employees. Only Hanna Schygulla and the newcomer Ballhaus stayed out of the resulting chaotic situations .

Fassbinder began to use the Cuba Libre excessively in order to withstand the pressure of the 16 to 18 hour filming days. The actors suffered from his whims; so he had Harry Baer's hair dyed hydrogen blonde for the role and ordered Hanna Schygulla to wear a costume that was as "slutty" as possible. The Lommel / Schaake couple had to repeat a scene in which they slapped him violently and continuously until Lommel burst into tears. On the third day of shooting there was a tangible argument between Fassbinder and Berling: the director was afraid of staging a crowd scene and wanted to let Baer take over the direction for that day, against which Berling intervened.

From this point on, the relationship between Berling and Fassbinder was characterized by mutual distrust. They only communicated through Baer. In organizational matters, Baer and Berling entered into an alliance with Ballhaus, which was also initially edited by Fassbinder, until the director was convinced of the cameraman's quick and professional work after viewing the first samples.

Meanwhile, production ran out of money. The costs had risen to more than DM 600,000. Lommel managed to borrow DM 40,000 over the phone from a Munich restaurateur, but the financing gap was so great that Lommel decided to settle all pending bills only with a credit card . When the film ran out and there was none available on credit, Berling's secretary got some rolls of 35mm film from the materials assistant of a neighboring western production with whom she had a relationship , so that the film could be completed. After 20 days of shooting, the film team traveled back to the Federal Republic of Germany, the actors remained without a fee.

reception

Publication and contemporary criticism

Whity had its world premiere on July 2, 1971 on the occasion of the Berlinale 1971 . Fassbinder had put an insert “ For Peter Berling” in front of the film as a dedication, which reconciled Berling with Fassbinder. Neither the premiere audience nor the film critics were particularly impressed with Whity . Only Karsten Peters wrote a single review of the film in the Münchner Abendzeitung under the title “Fassbinder in Fassbinder's Trap”, and in it dealt very critically with the work. All other mentions of the film in the daily press were joint reviews of the festival, such as Wilfried Wiegand's “From De Sica to Fassbinder” and Peter W. Jansen's “Magic in Cinema and Healthy Prayer” in the FAZ and Alf Brustellin's “Show of Extreme” in the SZ . The tenor of the reviews was the criticism that the film lacks the claim to say anything about the social conditions in the Federal Republic. The melodramatic mood was also criticized. Brustellin explains that the film also seems "strange" because the German viewer lacks the cultural reference to it, because "almost all of the 'original films' for this film never achieved festival honors."

In the aftermath of the premiere, the film was not distributed because no company wanted to cover the cost of the copier. Television, an otherwise popular venue for Fassbinder's films that were rejected for the cinema, also showed no interest in Whity . So the film disappeared in the archive after the premiere. It was first broadcast on TV in 1989 on Pro7 , and the film was first available for theatrical release in 1992. In 2006 the Fassbinder Foundation succeeded in finally clarifying the legal situation for marketing; Whity was released on DVD .

Awards

For her portrayal in Whity , Hanna Schygulla received the Federal Film Prize for Best Actress in 1971 , while Kurt Raab was honored for the best equipment .

aftermath

Although Fassbinder made other films with the anti-theater group immediately after the shooting of Whity ( The Niklashauser Fart in May 1970, The American Soldier in August 1970), Whity is considered a turning point in the collaboration with the troupe; an end was in sight. Fassbinder put the experiences of filming Whity in a new cinematic context in September 1970. The film Warning of a Holy Whore is about the production of the fictional film Patria o muerte and recapitulates the conflicts of the Whity shoot. Each actor slipped into the role of a real person from the filming of Whity , with only Raab and Schygulla playing "themselves". The subject of the film was the investigation of group dynamics, in particular the mechanisms that give rise to authoritarian leadership structures and the effects of these structures on the individual in the group.

Classification and evaluation

Spaich refers to the quality of the work as a modification of a genre film and judges that Whity is “ in no way inferior to the popular works of Corbucci and Leone in terms of originality […] .” The film is “the only serious attempt to create something of its own with the possibilities of the Western create " . Whity is "one of the most interesting early films by Fassbinder" . Töteberg also sees Fassbinder's will to make "great" cinema for the first time with Whity and calls the film "a veritable Hollywood story, a true cinema opera"

Roth judges that Whity is "not a great movie" . Although he is characterized by "a new, more professional, freer way of dealing with the medium of film" , he lacks "the direct view of suburban films" ; Whity is "quasi an etude, an attempt to make a film for a large audience by connecting to the film knowledge and viewing experience of the audience" . In 1972, Wolfgang Limmer wrote in the SZ on the occasion of a retrospective of Fassbinder's previous work that the director had failed with Whity "when he first tried pure fiction in a genre that was alien to him, in an environment that was alien to him" .

Film analysis

Staging

Visual style

Color design and mise-en-scène

Whity was one of the director's first films in color and his only one in Cinemascope . He used the tools of the big Hollywood productions for the first time and turned a bit away from the intimate, reduction-based character of his earlier black and white films. Although his design of the cinematic space often remains flat and theatrical due to background images parallel to the picture, the color in costume, set design and decor brings a new aspect to Fassbinder's work, which mainly serves to alienate . The Nicholsons' domicile becomes "a kind of crypt" , as Wiegand notes , thanks to the wood paneling and the prominent floral decorations

In the mask, too, Fassbinder aims for grotesque and alienating effects: The members of the Nicholson family appear in pale make-up as, according to Spaich, "caricatures of human existences [...] with clownish make-up" ; Kaufmann looks “like Al Jolson ” with his lips painted white . The cook, Whity's mother, is portrayed by a white actress with black make-up .

Lighting and camera work

In contrast to the harsh light-dark contrasts of the earlier Fassbinder films, the lighting created by Ballhaus in Whity ensures more even and more conventional lighting situations that appear less artificial. Ballhaus confirms that his light and camera work was based on genre models, such as Leone's films, for example when a pair of eyes is shown in detail . Wiegand also recognizes the recourse to cinematic models in the cadre , for example when in the first scene of the film an opening doorknob is combined with the scream of Whity's mother; this is "the type of close-up that is part of the Hollywood film's strategy of misleading"

Ballhaus's technical talent encouraged Fassbinder to break away from the static or slowly and linearly moving camera for the first time with Whity. In a saloon scene, an artful plan sequence leads Whity's camera, who is standing on the gallery, down the stairs, on to the bar, to the table of the card players and finally to Hanna, who is on the stage.

dramaturgy

The director portrays his characters in long shots as, according to Töteberg, "people who have no goal, who don't know where to go, and ultimately just wait for death" . Fassbinder himself classifies these long shots, often held above emotional climaxes, as "anti-theater monotony" as a stylistic device that contradicts viewing habits.

Fassbinder doesn't end the story with a happy ending . The dance of the two lovers in the desert is, as Roth notes, nothing more than a “defiant gesture” that does not cancel out the pessimism of the story; the two are doomed to die. Elsaesser adds that in Fassbinder's cinematic world “there can be no happy ending for the heterosexual couple” .

Themes and motifs

Between western and melodrama

Sang-Joon Bae notes that Whity shows a “ post-modern originality” because the film is “constructed from the links between the set pieces of the well-known Western rituals and the melodramatic sentiments” . The western motifs recorded by Fassbinder refer primarily back to the genre works of the 1940s and 1950s, in which a psychological connection is created between the lawlessness of the West and an ominous, because unhindered, instinct development. According to Joe Hembus , Whity “ looks like a revised version of Duel in the Sun ” , with the role of mad Davy being comparable to that of Gregory Peck in Vidor's film.

More than the external conventions of Westerns, the film has a more melodrama effect through its conception of content, through the concentration on romanticism and sentimentality. Fassbinder mentions Raoul Walsh's Weeping for the Damned ( Band of Angels , 1957) as a direct influence , which he describes as "one of the greatest films I have ever known" . In Band of Angels , a half-breed girl is saved from persecution by a slave trader played by Clark Gable . What Fassbinder admired most about Walsh's film was the way in which the narration is counteracted by the images and the viewer inevitably distrusts the narrated happy ending through the scenic composition. Fassbinder explains: "The good directors can deliver happy endings, so that you are still not satisfied with the end of the film" .

Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930), in which a dancer, played by Marlene Dietrich , prefers a simple soldier to her wealthy admirer and escapes into the desert with him , is mentioned as a further influence on Whity from the fund of melodramatic films . Elsaesser also called Minnelli's Home from the Hill ( Home from the Hill , 1959) and Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ( The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , 1948).

Family and group relationships

In his synopsis on Whity, Fassbinder sketches on the subject of the film: “If you need intrigue, there are many. And flowers. And hatred. ” For Spaich,“ intrigue ”is the film's key word; it is about the “loss of solidarity in the family”. According to Töteberg, the Nicholson family is “a paragon of decadence, perversion and immorality” : the father a despot, the sons feeble-minded and gay, the woman scheming. In the interaction of this family, the feelings of hatred, jealousy and envy dominate, all of which arise from crippling lethargy and ultimately lead to catastrophe; this topic refers to many other Fassbinder films such as Katzelmacher , Why is Mr. R. running amok? , Four Seasons Dealer and Chinese Roulette .

Spaich analyzes that Whity is in relation to this family a Franz Biberkopf who longs for love and recognition, who wants the good, but fails because of the depravity of the others. Elsaesser draws a parallel to Pasolini's film Teorema, which was made a year earlier . There, too, an outsider, loved and hated at the same time, becomes the culmination of family conflicts. There, too, the film ends in the desert after violence caused a catharsis of the rotten conditions.

Some authors relate the presented dysfunction to the internal relationship of Fassbinder's troop. According to Spaich Whity, this is a “key story about the end of a 'group'” . Fassbinder confirms that the antiteater community had already started to dissolve while filming Whity : "The group got out of the Munich stew while filming Whity and only then understood that they had never been a group." And: " From the outside, many relationships in Spain have emerged as either non-existent or completely different. “ The failure of the community during the filming of Whity re-contextualized Fassbinder on film in warning of a holy hooker .

Racism and rebellion against society

Spaich comments on Whity : "As always with Fassbinder, the private, the current state of relationships with people who are close to him, and the socio-political context belong to a unit from which the film is conceived." Fassbinder notes in the synopsis: “It's always about ownership. [...] The strong torture the weak. ” In the early stages of the film's creation, the film's political and socially critical aspect was even more pronounced. In a first version, titled Whity - Angel of Terror , there were several scenes with a political accent, which Fassbinder rejected again: in one scene passers-by whispered after Hanna because she got involved with a black man. Another scene should illustrate the economic exploitation of blacks: Davy passes a field where black servants toil. When they see him, they sing a revolutionary song.

The original ending of Fassbinder's first version also presented the aspects of rebellion and revolution more clearly: Whity shed his livery , put on work clothes, left Hanna behind and set off on her own. Fassbinder emphasizes that he has not made an explicit film about racism and revolution. For him, it was more important to depict the interpersonal phenomena that lead to catastrophic situations, namely the dependency and the lack of solidarity. The director explains: “Whity ends in a rebellion, but in reality the whole film is against the Negro because he hesitates all the time and doesn't defend himself against the injustices. [...] He understands his situation, but does not act accordingly. "

literature

  • Sang-Joon Bae: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his film aesthetic stylization Gardez! Verlag Remscheid 2005. 3-89796-163-6.
  • Harry Baer , Maurus Pacher: I can sleep when I'm dead - the breathless life of Rainer Werner Fassbinder . Kiepenheuer & Witsch Cologne 1982. ISBN 3-462-01543-5
  • Peter Berling : The 13 years of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His films, his friends, his enemies. Gustav Lübbe Verlag Bergisch Gladbach 1992. ISBN 3-7857-0643-X
  • Robert Fischer (Hrsg.): Fassbinder on Fassbinder Verlag of the authors Frankfurt am Main 2004. ISBN 3-88661-268-6
  • Thomas Elsaesser : Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Bertz Verlag Berlin 2001. ISBN 3-929470-79-9 .
  • Peter W. Jansen / Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Film series 2. Carl Hanser Verlag Munich Vienna. 3rd edition 1979. ISBN 3-446-12946-4
  • Wolfgang Limmer / Rolf Rietzler (documentation): Rainer Werner Fassbinder, filmmaker. Mirror book. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag Hamburg 1981. ISBN 3-499-33008-3
  • Herbert Spaich: Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Life and Work Beltz Verlag, Weinheim 1992. ISBN 3-407-85104-9 .
  • Michael Töteberg (Hrsg.): Fassbinder's films 2nd publishing house of the authors Frankfurt am Main 1990. ISBN 3-88661-105-1 .
  • Michael Töteberg: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag 2002. ISBN 3-499-50458-8 .
  • Tom Tykwer / Thomas Binotto (adaptation): The flying eye - Michael Ballhaus - Director of Photography in conversation with Tom Tykwer Berlin Verlag 2nd edition 2003. ISBN 3-8270-0460-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Töteberg 1990: p. 251
  2. ↑ a b Berling: p. 87
  3. ↑ Baer / Pacher: p. 42
  4. ↑ a b c Spaich: p. 138
  5. ↑ Baer / Pacher: p. 42ff
  6. ↑ Berling: p. 92
  7. ^ Berling: p. 89
  8. ↑ Berling: p. 88
  9. ↑ Tykwer / Binotto: p. 31
  10. ↑ Baer / Pacher: p. 53
  11. ↑ Berling: p. 96
  12. ↑ Berling: p.158
  13. ↑ Berling: 159
  14. ↑ quoted in: Jansen / Schütte: p.107
  15. ^ Whity in the Lexicon of International Films
  16. ↑ German Film Awards 1951 to the present day ( Memento of the original from July 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Deutsche-Filmakademie.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.deutsche-filmakademie.de
  17. ↑ Bae: pp.204f.
  18. ↑ Töteberg 1990: p.253
  19. ↑ a b c d Spaich: p.146
  20. ↑ a b Töteberg 1990: 250
  21. ^ Wilhelm Roth: Annotated filmography in: Jansen / Schütte: S.107
  22. ↑ quoted in: Berling: p.189
  23. ↑ Spaich claims that Whity was shot in Technicolor (Spaich: p.146), but all film databases speak of the cheaper Eastmancolor material
  24. ^ Töteberg 2002: 50
  25. ↑ Wilfried Wiegand: The doll in the doll. Observations on Fassbinder's films in: Jansen / Schütte: p.37
  26. ↑ a b c d Wilhelm Roth: Annotated filmography in: Jansen / Schütte: S.108
  27. ↑ Tywker / Binotto: p.34
  28. ↑ Wilfried Wiegand: The doll in the doll. Observations on Fassbinder's films in: Jansen / Schütte: p.36
  29. ↑ Tykwer / Binotto: p.37
  30. ↑ Christian Braad Thomsen: My films are about addiction - Reiner Werner Fassbinder about Whity in: Fischer: S.222
  31. ↑ a b c Elsaesser: p.435
  32. ↑ Bae: p.361
  33. ^ Joe Hembus: Western Lexicon - 1272 films from 1894-1975. Carl Hanser Verlag Munich Vienna 2nd edition 1977. ISBN 3-446-12189-7 , p. 696.
  34. ↑ quoted in: Töteberg 1990: p.249
  35. ↑ quoted in: Christian Braad Thomsen: My films are about addiction - Reiner Werner Fassbinder about Whity in: Fischer: S.221
  36. ↑ a b Elsaesser: p.434
  37. ↑ a b quoted in: Spaich: p.140
  38. ↑ Töteberg 2002: p.54
  39. ↑ Spaich: p.147
  40. ↑ quoted in: Limmer / Rietzler: p.56
  41. ↑ quoted in: Limmer / Rietzler: p.73
  42. ↑ quoted in: Christian Braad Thomsen: My films are about addiction - Reiner Werner Fassbinder on Whity in: Fischer: S.223