Fassbinder's 'World on a Wire' (WDR-TV: 1973)
There have been a few reviews of the film in recent months, but I haven’t read any that really probe its most notable quality-its baroque visual style. While The Matrix and its ilk suggest artificial reality through the overt use of digital effects, Fassbinder and his cinematographer Michael Ballhaus use everyday objects, props, and mise-en-scene to suggest a fabricated world, and the results are both more subtle and compelling. Some standout motifs (with clickable examples):
Mirrors and a variety of glass and window panes that fragment and complicate space in the film. Many directors use mirror shots occasionally (with notable exceptions, such as Hitchock’s famous use of doubling reflections in Psycho), but Fassbinder-channeling Douglas Sirk-creates a virtual funhouse of duplicate imagery, invisible barriers, ambiguous spaces, and constant replications that emphasize the tricky division separating “real” and “artificial” realms.
Visual clutter on par with the work of Josef von Sternberg (whom Fassbinder homages with a Marlene Dietrich double twice) or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The plethora of props and competing abstract patterns on carpets, wall art, and glittering surfaces, suggest not sensory overload so much as handmade, randomly filled, manufactured space.
Spaces are often divided up by arbitrary lines: window blinds or screens, obfuscations dictated by the choice of camera angles. Like the slanting shadows of so many films noir, the visual lines suggest entrapment and a breaking up of space into puzzle-like mosaics.
Fassbinder enjoys filming his protagonist in long hallways and tunnels, as he passes through offices and city streets in a maze without end.
Some of these motifs overlap and reinforce one another, and there are more, such as the long and brisk tracking shots that isolate figures by emphasizing their surroundings, the often present canned muzak that intensifies the world’s sense of artificiality, and a motif in which background extras (“identity units”?) stand idly in statuesque poses. In fact, virtually every shot in the movie riffs on one or more of the elements cited here, yet it never feels studied or academic; it’s a movie that plays with the limitations and freedoms of the television format with a great deal of energy and vigor.
World on a Wire is a major work with a dense construction that rewards close examination. It’s also one more reminder that our knowledge of film history is constantly evolving as important works arrive but vanish, awaiting rediscovery. The fact that such an ambitious work from such a well-known filmmaker could elude genre discussions for so long might be depressing if the excitement of finally seeing it wasn’t so substantial.
