Rainer Werner Fassbinder's
World on a Wire, a TV mini-series shot
during a break on Fassbinder's biggest and most prestigious project to
date,
Effie Briest, and broadcast on German television in 1973,
begins as a corporate conspiracy thriller by way of a psychodrama, a
stylized piece of pulp fiction in a near-future world. Fred Stiller
(Klaus Löwitsch), a computer engineer working on the prize project of
the Institute for Cybernetics and Futurology (IKZ), is suddenly put in
charge when his boss and mentor (Adrian Hoven) dies in a freak accident,
right after confessing to Fred that he has come into information too
fantastic to believe. It's alarming enough that a scientific genius
electrocutes himself on his own equipment in an act that is appears to
be either suicide or assassination, but when Lause (Ivan Desny), Fred's
confidante and the company's head of security, disappears without a
trace days later, Fred's world is all but turned inside out. And
"without a trace" is an understatement: it's as if he's been erased (or,
dare I say it, deleted?) from the records and memories of the entire
company.
That's when this corporate conspiracy thriller -- complete with a CEO
shadowed by silent bodyguards dressed like movie gangsters, a buxom
secretary (Barbara Valentin) personally sent by the front office to
"help out" the hero, and the gorgeous daughter (Mascha Rabben) of the
dead inventor who slips into Fred's life and takes on femme fatale
dimensions -- tips into something more cerebral.
World on a Wire is (to the best of knowledge) the first feature
to take on the concept of virtual reality, an idea rare enough in
science fiction literature in 1973. Scripted by Fritz Müller-Scherz and
Fassbinder, from a novel by Daniel F. Galouye called "Simulacron-3"
(which later became the basis for the 1999 American film
The
Thirteenth Floor), it traffics in the same paranoid anxieties and
questions of identity and reality and perception that Philip K. Dick was
exploring in his work since the 1950s (albeit with hardboiled attitude
and Fassbinder's satirical perspective). It anticipates films as diverse
as "Videodrome," "Tron" and "The Matrix," to name just a few, only
Fassbinder does it without special effects or cyber imagery. You might
say that he does it all with mirrors.
As Fred follows his hunches (and fights off the attempt from one virtual
creation to escape the Simulacron into his world), the rest of the
company starts to question his sanity, which makes it easier for him to
be framed for murder and corporate espionage. Part of Fassbinder's
cheeky satire is that it's not clear which crime is considered worse in
this particular corporate culture. As if that's not enough to drive Fred
into a paranoid spiral, the world itself seems out to get him: cars
suddenly shoot out of control, trees fall as if aimed at him, a safe
house explodes out of nowhere, and at times reality seems to unravel
before his eyes. Meanwhile, the company shrouds its experiments in
virtual reality with ever more secrecy while setting the employees
against Fred. In any other film, our hero would either turn into a
twitchy basket-case or a mad rebel guerilla who arms up to fight the
power. In this reality, he's too cool to panic, like a pulp private eye
hero who keeps himself just above the cesspool of his city, only here it
plays out in the business culture of a gleaming near-future of glass and
steel and concrete, where the lies and schemes are hidden behind smiles
and handshakes and policy statements, and no one is who they purport to
be.
Though (like many of his features) it was made for television,
World
on a Wire has the visual density of Fassbinder's theatrical films.
Fassbinder and production designer Kurt Raab create a near future out of
modern architecture (some of the locations were in the midst of
construction when Fassbinder and company moved in for their shoot),
gangster-movie fashions, futuristic bric-a-brac, and more glass and
mirrors than a high-fashion showroom. There are no flashy special
effects (slipping into the virtual world is a matter of close-circuit
video, space-age helmets, and a woozy first-person POV camera) and
minimal action but Fassbinder and director of photography Michael
Ballhaus energize the dialogue scenes with a camera that constantly,
restlessly roams for a better look or a different perspective, or simply
tracks through the increasingly alienated world of his reluctant hero
like a fascinated voyeur.
Fassbinder was a master at frames within frames, shooting through
windows and doorways and isolating characters on the screen, and using
distancing devices to distance audiences from identifying with the drama
and accentuate the theatrical devices of his storytelling. That
aesthetic gives
World on a Wire an added dimension, however, as
he fractures the screen with mirrors and reflections, distancing
characters from each other and from any sense of grounding in their
environment. It's no coincidence that Fred spends so much of the film
interacting with video images and reflections of other people. The very
question of who and what is real becomes the film's central concern.
To claim that
World on a Wire influenced the science fiction
cinema of subsequent decades would may be presumptuous. Until its
restoration and belated American release in 2011, this was one of the
least seen and least accessible of Fassbinder's films, for most people a
title in a filmography that even the most exhaustive surveys of his
films had little to say about. It did, however, anticipate the future of
science fiction filmmaking and the conceptual movement of the genre.
Perhaps that's why audiences were unprepared for just how accomplished,
sophisticated, and conceptually prescient this film turned out to be
when it finally arrived stateside forty years after it was finished.
Almost thirty years after his death, it's like we've been gifted with a
previously unknown, newly unearthed Fassbinder classic. With a small
budget, a daring concept, and a 3 ½ hour running time, Fassbinder
creates a heady, witty, stylistically audacious, highly compelling, and
very entertaining science fiction thriller years ahead of its time.
On Blu-ray and DVD, mastered from the original 16mm A/B reversal roles
in a transfer supervised by director of photography Michael Ballhaus.
Supplements include the 50-minute documentary "Fassbinder's World on a
Wire: Looking Ahead to Today," a look back at the making of and the
restoration of the film directed by Juliane Lorenz (the head of the
Rainer Werner Fassbinder and a former Fassbinder collaborator who edited
many of his films), with co-writer Fritz Müller-Scherz, cinematographer
Michael Ballhaus, and co-star Karl-Heinz Vosgerau discussing the
production, and video essay on the film by German-film scholar Gerd
Gemünden, plus a booklet with an essay by film critic Ed Halter.
For more information about
World on a Wire, visit
The Criterion Collection. To order
World on a Wire, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
