#mascha rabben

[irina-irina-irina]

Mascha Rabben

[thenotsobad-thebad-andtheugly]

Deadlock (1970)

[301-302]

Welt am Draht (World on a Wire | Rainer Werner Fassbinder | 1973)

[iforgottohitplay]

[metabotulism]

[byneddiedingo]

World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)

Cast: Klaus Löwitsch, Barbara Valentin, Mascha Rabben, Karl Heinz Vosgerau, Wolfgang Schenck, Günther Lamprecht, Uili Lommel, Adrian Hoven, Ivan Desny, Kurt Raab, Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fritz Müller-Scherz, based on a novel by Daniel F. Galouye. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus, Ulrich Prinz. Production design: Horst Giese, Walter Koch, Kurt Raab. Film editing: Ursula Elles, Marie Anne Gerhardt. Music: Gottfried Hüngsberg.

What we call "reality" is, as we all know, a construct, the product of the limitations of our senses. But what if we, too, are part of the construct, put here by some other entity and blinded to the reality that lies beyond the senses? That way lies religion -- "Now we see through a glass darkly...." -- and metaphysics -- now largely dismissed as "asking unanswerable questions" -- but also science fiction. Witness the popularity of a film like The Matrix (Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, 1999) and its sequels. In fact, Rainer Werner Fassbinder got there more than two decades before the Wachowskis. In 1973 he created a two-part television series, World on a Wire, that aired in Germany, and then became a kind of cult hit via file-sharing on the internet before being restored in 2010 and screened at the Berlin Film Festival. In it, a German research institute has created a simulated world in its supercomputer. The inhabitants of this world have been given consciousness, but only one of them has knowledge of the world outside the computer. He serves as a contact between the programmers and the simulated beings. But then the sudden death of the head of the program puts his second-in-command, Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), in charge of investigating not only the death of his predecessor but also the suicide of one of the simulated beings. Stranger and stranger things begin to happen, until Stiller learns that he is also a simulation in his own simulated world. He also learns that the institute's simulated world is being used for commercial purposes, something that violates its agreement with the government funding it. As he comes to terms with this knowledge, his increasingly erratic behavior makes him a target for assassins, and his one hope is to find the contact with the level above that's simulating him. Got that? The head-spinning premise of the film comes from a novel, Simulacron-3, by the American writer Daniel F. Galouye, adapted by Fassbinder and Fritz Müller-Scherz. Fassbinder gives it a good deal of his characteristic style in the adaptation: The women in Stiller's world, for example, always wear cocktail dresses, even at work, and rooms are filled with mirrors to suggest the layers of reflected reality in the three levels. It was filmed in 16 mm for television, which means there's some graininess and focus problems in parts of the restored film, but the cinematography is by Fassbinder's frequent collaborator Michael Ballhaus, along with Ulrich Prinz. Löwitsch is very good as Stiller, taking on a kind of James Bondian role, and the paranoid atmosphere prevails even when the plot gets a bit snarled in its own premise.

[rwpohl]

[moviemosaics]

World on a Wire

directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973

[ozu-teapot]

Welt am Draht (World on a Wire) | Rainer Werner Fassbinder | 1973

Mascha Rabben, Klaus Löwitsch

[scenesandscreens]

World on a Wire (1973)

Director - Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Cinematography - Michael Ballhaus & Ulrich Prinz

"For your own sake, forget everything you've seen. Or your life's not worth a dime."

[iliketigers]

[waste-it-on-something-useful]

Welt am Draht (World on a Wire, 1973, R.W. Fassbinder)

[higherentity]

[crispypines]

World on a Wire (1973) dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

[rrrauschen]

Helma Sanders-Brahms, {1974} Die letzten Tage von Gomorrha (The Last Days Of Gomorrah)

[elcineasta]

World on a Wire | dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973)