047 - World on a Wire, 1973, Germany. Dir. Werner Rainer Fassbinder.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

047 - World on a Wire, 1973, Germany. Dir Werner Rainer Fassbinder.

Are you for real?

What if you are the product of someone else's dream?  Or what if you live in a video game or a computer?  What if you are a character in a movie, a TV show, or a novel?  What if you are a toy, a stuffed animal, or an imaginary friend in someone's play world?

Before Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010),
before the Wachowskis' The Matrix (1999),
before Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo (1985),
before David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983),
before Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982),
before Steven Lisberger's Tron (1982),
before Captain Kangaroo's Simon,
before Gumby,

before all of them, there was World on a Wire (1973).  Based on the Daniel F. Galouye novel Simulacron-3 (1964).

Before that, there was the Philip K. Dick novel Time Out of Joint (1959).

Before that, there was Pinocchio.

Before all of it there was The Allegory of the Cave.

Plato wins.  He came first.

Fred Stiller is a programmer for IKZ, the Institute for Cybernetics and Future Science.  He creates "identity units," programmed objects inside the computer universe that function like people.  He and his team do such a good job that the identity units begin to think like people, have human problems, and desire to be real people.

The Science of Behavioral Modeling.

Stiller's boss, Henry Vollmer, discovers something in the process, and he dies suddenly.  The head of security for the company, Gunther Lause, disappears.  Stiller's secretary Maya disappears.  Vollmer's daughter Eva disappears and reappears.  Something is going on.

Stiller is promoted to Technical Director, taking Vollmer's position.  He gets a new secretary, Gloria Fromm, whose job description seems to be to distract him.  He goes inside the computer, to visit the world he created.  The first time, something goes wrong.  The second time, he meets with Einstein, the one identity unit (No. 0001) who knows what is going on.  They created one like this as a "contact unit."  Einstein was programmed to be smart and to understand the situation so that he can communicate with the programmers and other people outside the computer.  When Einstein sees Fred Stiller inside his own world, Einstein begs him to take him back with him.  He longs to be a real human being.

This film is entertaining, with a charming, athletic man of action as its lead.  Made when the James Bond franchise was smoking hot, World on a Wire features a Corvette Stingray, action, adventure, suspense, intrigue, romance, whiskey (instead of a vodka martini) and lots of chases by car and by foot.  Fred Stiller spends some of the time with the women in his life--his secretary Maya, his secretary Gloria, and Vollmer's daughter, Eva--some of the time on the job, doing good work and trying to solve a complex puzzle, and some of the time running for his life.

Will he crack the code or will he crack up?  Will he survive or will he be killed?  Will he find love or will he be forever alone?  He is like a film noir detective in this sense, the loner with a code of honor.

It is a science fiction film that acts like a detective action thriller.

And at over three hours it does not feel too long.  It was shown on two nights on German television, and the pacing is just right.

It was shot by the now legendary cinematographer Michael Ballhous, who made sixteen (16) movies with Fassbinder.  Through these films he became internationally known, and he would go on to shoot seven (7) movies with Martin Scorsese, as well as films for Francis Ford Coppola, John Sayles, James L. Brooks, Frank Oz, Mike Nichols, Irwin Winkler, Barry Levinson, Barry Sonenfeld, Nancy Meyers, and Robert Redford.

The camera work in World on a Wire is alive and exciting.  The camera moves a lot, and in unusual ways.  He dollies it across the floor.  He zooms in from a long shot to an extreme close-up.  He pans in full circles, and across multiple mirrors.  He starts on the main speaker in the scene and then moves behind a group of people and across a table of food, while the speaker is still speaking.  He cuts quickly.  He doesn't cut at all.  He does lots of things with the camera.  You can see why Scorsese would want to work with him.

Mirror, mirror on the wall!

And on the table.  And on the column.  And on the floor.  And in the car.  Mirrors, mirrors everywhere.  This film may very well have more mirrors in it than any film you have seen.  And just try seeing the cameraman or a crew member in a mirror.  They worked hard on this one.

The casting is also intriguing.  Fassbinder casts the leads from his company of regulars.  Margit Carstensen, whom we saw yesterday as the lead Petra Von Kant, comes back today in a supporting role as secretary Maya.  Several others from other Fassbinder movies do the same.  Then he fills out the other roles with veteran German actors from the past two or three decades, faces who are familiar to the audience of the time from having grown up with them.

Think about how Quentin Tarantino does this now, bringing back hot actors from the 1970s.  Fassbinder did it in the 1970s, bringing back hot actors from the 1950s.

One prime example is Eddie Constantine, who has a solid role in the second-half of the film, as the man in the Rolls Royce.  He himself had starred in Jean-Luc Godard's science-fiction film Alphaville (1965), nearly a decade before, and he himself had been popular for two decades.

World on a Wire for a long time was a lost film.  It aired over two nights on German television in 1973.  It aired once again in the late 1970s.  It was shown at a retrospective in 1992.  Beyond that it was almost never seen.  It was resurrected in 2010 by the Fassbinder Foundation and restored.  So for most of us it is as though it were a brand new movie.  Newly discovered.  Fresh and alive and exciting.

Let me know when you have seen it.  And let me know what you think.  So that I can ask you,

Are you for real?