World on a Wire
The career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the wonders of the modern cinema—of the entire history of cinema—but it would be hard to assess on the sole basis of the few of his films that are available here on DVD and the peculiar relative rarity of screenings of his work (a complete retrospective is called for, but it would occupy a screen for quite a long time—he made forty-one features plus the fifteen-hour mini-series “Berlin Alexanderplatz” in fifteen years, and died at thirty-seven in 1982). He didn’t undo and recompose the elements of cinema, as did his immediate precursor in the prolific—namely, Jean-Luc Godard—but he delved deep into the world of his time as it was informed, even formed, emotionally and socially, by the cinema, as in his 1973 science-fiction thriller “World on a Wire,” which is only now getting its American theatrical premiere, at IFC Center. This belated release is cause for celebration as well as for a serious shaking of the head: where has it been all these years? At the time of its “advance” screening at MOMA this April, I wrote about it in the magazine with astonishment:
Fassbinder’s brilliantly sardonic approach decks the future out in high-gloss seventies kitsch (Plexiglas and mirrors, lacquered wood and chrome) and ubiquitous video screens, which reflect, distort, and multiply identities as readily as his panoply of zooms, pans, tracking shots, and shock cuts….
What I just learned, from an article on the film at the French site Le Post (it came out there on DVD last year), is the extraordinary way it was shot, according to its cameraman, and frequent Fassbinder collaborator, Michael Ballhaus:
A large part of the film was shot in Paris, where, moreover, the screenplay was worked out in a little bistrot. The difficulty was how to represent the future. A near-future. The search for an architect of the future. In Paris, everything was changing. The new neighborhoods greatly interested us. No little gardens, it had a futurist point of view, with big cubes. Shooting also in shopping centers, which didn’t exist in Germany at the time. Subterranean ones, where we could already find everything, shops, restaurants … snack bars, refreshment stands….
The shoot took only six weeks; the astounding virtuosity with which Fassbinder conjures material and virtual worlds with both a concrete plausibility and a disturbingly precise yet diverse display of inner agitation suggests his profoundly ingrained assimilation of the cinema, classic and modern; a shocking familiarity with psychological extremes; a ferociously clear anger at the corporate verities of the West German “miracle”; and a wildly sardonic sense of visual and dramatic excitement, of pure and ecstatic B-movie fun.
