Product Details

• Actors: Ron Randell, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake, Harry Baer, Ulli Lommel
• Directors: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Writers: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Producers: Ulli Lommel, Peter Berling, Peer Raben
• Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: German (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
• Subtitles: English
• Region: All Regions
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Fantoma
• DVD Release Date: August 26, 2003
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00005Y8UH
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #93,833 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Whity" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's seventh feature is a widescreen mix of hothouse southern gothic melodrama and edgy spaghetti western in sunbaked color. Whity (Günther Kaufmann, a longtime Fassbinder regular), the obedient family butler, is the illegitimate mulatto son of sadistic, bullwhip-wielding patriarch Ben Nicholson (American B-movie actor Ron Randell). The ghoulish Nicholson family members include a nymphomaniacal young wife and a brutal, homosexual eldest son (coproducer and future director Ulli Lommell) who abuse yet secretly love Whity, and a developmentally disabled youngest son whom Whity protects from the others like a brother. It's a grotesque portrait even for Fassbinder, who cakes the Nicholson family faces with gray makeup--they look and at times act like dead-eyed zombies--and sets them plotting against each other. Hannah Schygulla costars as a saloon singer who warbles Kurt Weill-like tunes, and Fassbinder himself plays a gambler who whips Whity for fun. It was Fassbinder's first feature abroad--he shot it on Sergio Leone's western sets in Almeria, Spain--and the first of many collaborations with Michael Ballhaus. The behind-the-scenes drama was so eventful that it inspired Beware of a Holy Whore only months later. --Sean Axmaker

Product Description

WHITY - DVD Movie

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Get up!, October 18, 2011

By 

lakeqi - See all my reviews

This review is from: Whity (DVD)

I was first introduced to Fassbinder back in college, circa 1988. The Merchant of Four Seasons, was a masterpiece. The Ali: fear eats the Soul and a few others I don't remember. I finally got the chance to see another Fassbinder movie after all of these years.Fassbinder seems to be saying in this movie, that if your life is so uneventful, if you're so depressed, or pretentious, that you can actually sit through this movie without leaving, you should simply kill yourself.That said, there is a good shot of Hanna's tatas. I only made it though about 35 minutes. No reason in the world to watch this one, drugs or no drugs.

5.0 out of 5 stars Rarely screened, but must be seen by all lovers of the German New Wave, Fassbinder in particular, and high camp, December 16, 2010

By 

inakaboy5000 "inakaboy" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Whity (DVD)

(From my original 1999 review on IMDB. Thanks to DVD, I think the film is better known now.)
Rarely screened, forgotten by even the most devoted admirers of Fassbinder, "Whity" is nonetheless a crucial film in Fassbinder's own development as a film-artist. For one, the style of the film marks Fassbinder's turn away from his earlier, Neo-realistic efforts (notably "Katzelmacher" and "Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?") and turn towards the flamboyant, melodramatic form favored by him until his untimely death in 1982.

Melodrama turns out to be the best possible style for the film's story, which chronicles the fall of the seigniorial Nicholson family in the Mexican 19th century. Indeed, this film should be seen for no other reason than the inescapable weirdness one feels in watching German actors play Mexicans in the Old West. It's like seeing Peter Lorre playing John Wayne: ridiculous, if only it weren't so creepy. "Decadent" and "dysfunctional" are words redefined by the Nicholson family: the patriarch, Ben Nicholson, is remote and cruel, the wife a nymphomaniac, the older son a flaming homosexual, and his brother a severely retarded adolescent.

Then there's Whity, the ironically named mulatto slave of the Nicholson family, an inadvertent focus point of each family member's perverse obsessions. It is this mutual obsession with Whity (an obsession shared by the viewer by film's end) which allows Fassbinder to explore the themes which were to comprise his greatest contribution to film's development as a medium, including: dominance and submission, the role of the Other, sexuality, the doppelganger, the economy of familial relationships, and the obstacles fate puts in the way of consummating love.

These issues gain complexity when one considers that the slave Whity is played by Fassbinder's then-lover, Gunther Kaufmann. Given this, what is the viewer to make of such stylistic scenes as when Whity is disciplined by his master, while the other family members garrulously look on--knowing that Fassbinder himself is also watching from his director/dictator's chair? (The complex inter-relationships of Fassbinder and the actors during the filming of "Whity" were later chronicled by Fassbinder in his film "Beware of a Holy Whore," which is based on the real-life melodrama that occurred off the set of "Whity.")

If nothing else, "Whity" deserves to be included in with the other Fassbinder films, such as "Despair," which are so justly celebrated for their psychological depth and complexity. Beyond this, two aspects of Fassbinder's technique in making "Whity" deserve special mention. The first is that in "Whity," one of the first of his films to employ a half-way reputable color process, Fassbinder shows himself to be a great colorist in the tradition of Delacroix, bathing the eyes with the lushest oranges, browns, and reds to be seen this side of a sunset. The palette is one that seems to have existed in film only in the late 60s and early 70s, finding similarly gorgeous expression in Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 451," Boorman's "Point Blank," Godard's "La Chinoise," and Nicolas Roeg's early efforts ("A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to The Forum," "Performance," "Walkabout," "Don't Look Now," "The Man Who Fell to Earth").

The second aspect of noteworthy technique is a camera movement that truly has no precedent in film history--a fact which makes the obscurity of "Whity" among film scholars all the more remarkable. The best example of the technique occurs in a scene in which Ben Nicholson reads his last will and testament to the silent family members surrounding him. During an unbroken ten-minute take, the actors remain virtually motionless, as if posed in some Rembrantian tableaux (and in this way recalling Dreyer's "Day of Wrath"). Against this stasis, the camera pans slowly from one family member to another, following their own sight-lines, as if the camera were recording the trace of their attention. For ten minutes the camera repeats this zig-zag path with methodical precision, while Raben's psychedelic, trance-inducing music drones in the background.

The greatest merit of the technique (seen also in an equally static scene between Whity and the retarded son in the horse barn) is that it allows the viewer time enough to meditate on the relationships among the characters involved in the tableaux--in this case most profoundly on the relationships of power among family members. It's as if Fassbinder, using film technique, took a snapshot of the family, and then spent ten minutes tracing out with his finger exactly who is dominated by whom, who resents the domination, who is perceiving whom and how, and so on. The technique, which to my knowledge Fassbinder never used again to such great effect, can only be seen as the great innovation that it is, and as such, a powerful tool for the revelation of psychological truth.

However, let none of these deeper concerns eclipse the enjoyment to be had watching this bizarre, Teutonic "Dallas" unfold. Like the best moments in a Warhol film, the high camp of "Whity" is very, very funny to watch--certainly because it is absurd, which is not to say it is without profound meaning.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Oh! Whity!, March 7, 2009

By 

Cody K. (Jamokidence, Rhode Island, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Whity (DVD)

It's like a George Romero prequel to "Mandingo". Wretched and lurid, "Whity"'s a movie that could only have been made in the early years of the seventies, when Paul Morrisey's Warhol films were running in art houses alongside whacked-out gems like "Pink Flamingos" and "Eraserhead". Fassbinder had made (or would soon make) "Love is Colder than Death", "Katzelmacher", "Gods of the Plague" and "Beware of a Holy Whore" by this time, all replete with bizarre touches imported from his Antitheater stage productions.

None of these reach -- or even reach for -- the level of bizarrerie in "Whity". Beginning with the choice of American b-actor Ron Randell as patriarch Ben Nicolson, "Whity" feels like a vicious lampoon of American TV western shows like "Gunsmoke" and a stinging satire on the western genre in general, with its patriotic depictions of the Great American Struggle to Tame the West using God, guns, and gumption. The Nicolson family in "Whity" is as depraved as the Maxwell family in "Mandingo" could ever dream of being. Miss Kitty on "Gunsmoke", for all her Wild West pizazz, never pranced around a saloon crooning what are basically demented art songs the way Hanna Schygulla does in "Whity". And for all Ken Norton's Mede puts up with in "Mandingo", he's never given the burden of a simmering self-loathing that undercuts his rage at every turn.

"Whity" isn't always helped by the way it heaps on grotesqueries, from the ghoulish pancake makeup of the white folks -- sometimes rather greenish, actually -- or the coal-black masque of Elaine Baker as Whity's housemaid mother, Marpessa, a caricature who sings a garbled version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic while fixing dinner. Even Whity himself, though largely spared the clownish makeup of the others, is given white lips. Gunther Kaufmann -- at his most gorgeous here, apart from the lips -- is, like Mede, a kind of a noble savage and the object of both desire and revulsion. The relentless camp qualities of the film turn everyone involved into caricatures of the archetypes of the Western film and TV genre, resulting in an often annoying and seriously flawed film that's acceptable only when viewed in the context of Fassbinder's career to that point. Viewed by any standards other than the stagy, subversive meta-situation that Fassbinder gives it, "Whity" sucks. But it's exactly the strange uniqueness that Fassbinder's vision presents that makes it worth watching.