Event

WORLD ON A WIRE

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's
WORLD ON A WIRE

Wednesday, November 30 at 7pm New 35mm Print
Members $9 Public $13

It would be serious understatement to label Rainer
Werner Fassbinder's visionary 1973 film, World
on a Wire, a mere science-fiction film for the crucial reason that many of its concepts have a firm hold in reality. Like any truly visionary
film, World on a Wire embeds into the minds of the audience palpable and unsettling fears about the world as we know it. It also was
the nucleus for films such as The Matrix, Inception, and Synecdoche, New York. World on a Wire is told through the viewpoint of Dr.
Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), the newly appointed head of a computer company that claims it has created simulacraan alternate
reality programmed to be identical to our world. Stiller begins to suspect and eventually uncover a conspiracy that leads him to question
his reality and spiral into paranoia. What makes the film so unnerving is Fassbinder's calculating, even subdued sense of restraint. Literally
ground-breaking secrets are revealed through more subtle means, such as ambient noise and Fassbinder's own meticulous direction. In
a scene where Stiller starts to earnestly believe that his surrounding world along with his own existence is a façade, the camera follows
him as he rises from a chair, walks across a room and proceeds to open a large set of double-doors, only to reveal another set of sliding
doors and yet another. Once Stiller has fought his way through these endless doorways, he ends up back to where he started his farcical
journey, sitting in the chair. One of the many profound questions that World on a Wire asks is "what defines the self?" With this film,
and his other classic works, Fassbinder defined himself in the world of cinema as a truly inspired force. Vanessa Graniello