It is Fassbinder's previously unseen Whity that is the real discovery of the weekend. Hitherto Whity has been known only for the trauma of its gestation, commemorated in the director's well-known film about the psychoses of filmmaking, Beware of a Holy Whore, which screens with Whity on Saturday and again next Thursday. A sort of chamber made-in-Spain western, Whity oscillates between a Tara-like Southern plantation inexplicably located in the Old West, and a saloon/brothel populated by a singing Hannah Schygulla and Fassbinder as a racist lout. The heart of the film is GYnther Kauffmann's turn as the one competent member of a family of weaklings -- he's black and decent, while his depraved brethren are simpering albinos. Yet he has accepted the virtues of white civilization, and his bitter mother, the family maid, is seen as right to call him "Whity" for that sin. Fassbinder's use of the venerable genre of the western looks forward to the director's great melodramas of the mid-1970s, his most successful blend of politics and drama, for which Whity the film is a not inconsiderable sketch.
-- Gregg Rickman
The retrospective "Rainer Werner Fassbinder" runs through August at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and July 25 to Aug. 7 at the Castro in S.F. For a complete schedule, see Reps Etc., Page 75.
