World on a Wire

Critics were agog last year over the rediscovery, restoration, and re-release of World on a Wire, an ultra-rare, ahead-of-its-time sci-fi epic, set in a future of cyberspace and virtual reality, made by Fassbinder back in 1973. “There are movies that make news and movies that are news. World on a Wire is one of the latter. Suddenly: a virtually unknown, newly restored, two-part tele-film directed by long-gone wunderkind R.W. Fassbinder at the height of his powers ...Adapted from Daniel F. Galouye's 1964 sci-fi novel Simulacron-3 and predicated on the notion of a computer-generated reality populated by ‘identity units’ who believe themselves human, the movie looks back at The Creation of the Humanoids, forward to The Matrix, and directly at Fassbinder's notoriously cult-like power over his acting ensemble ...World on a Wire mixes the pop art effrontery of Godard’s Alphaville with the cyber-phobic metaphysics of Kubrick’s 2001 (to name the two movies most bluntly referenced) while remaining wholly Fassbinderian in its insolently lugubrious ironies ...[The film’s] power-elite conspiracy yarn [is] played out on two levels of reality — virtual and real, both suffused with free-floating paranoia ... It's remarkable how current it all seems” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). “An extraordinary work — prescient, eccentric, and as wildly compelling as any of Fassbinder’s other masterpieces” (Museum of Modern Art, New York). “World on a Wire is the discovery of the season” (Jonathan Rothkopf, Time Out New York). Colour, 35mm, in German with English subtitles. 209 mins. (Part I: 104 mins. Part II: 105 mins.