Fassbinder’s only — and far ahead of its time — work in the science fiction genre. Special screening as part of The Sunset Fired a Hundred Suns programme.
World on a Wire
- Date:
2 Dec 2023
- Age restrictions
- 18+
Welt am Draht
1973, Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany
212 minutes, German with Russian subtitles
Starring: Klaus Löwitsch, Mascha Rabben, Karl-Heinz Vosgerau, Günter Lamprecht
The 1970s. A supercomputer Simulacron-3000 is launched at the Institute of Cybernetics and Future Science: it is capable of creating virtual worlds populated by thousands of human simulacra, convinced of their own reality. These two worlds are indistinguishable in the film, which gives the film a lingering, disorienting feeling of growing paranoia. The stories of realities within realities in The Matrix and Inception seem simplistic in comparison to Fassbinder’s work.
![](https://cdn.v-a-c.org/v-a-c-static/store/verstkaimage/material_translation-4918/image_desktop/a844c4a0e88ad4166b9358438eff3dce_small.jpg)
Shot from Welt am Draht, 1973
World on a Wire is about something more than just the digital future: Fassbinder uses computer simulation as a metaphor to think about his own métier, film and television, as a form of virtual reality.
— Ed Halter, The Criterion Current