Fassbinder’s Visionary Science-Fiction Thriller to Have a Weeklong Run at MoMA

NEW YORK, NY.- World on a Wire (1973), written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (German, 1945–1982) and based on the novel Simulacron-3 by American author Daniel F. Galouve, will have a weeklong run at MoMA, from April 14 through April 19, 2010. Originally made for German television in 1973, Fassbinder’s revolutionary adaptation has only been shown in America once before, in 1997, as part of a comprehensive Fassbinder retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. Fassbinder is considered one of the most important representatives of the New German Cinema, and in World on a Wire—a prescient, fluid, and eccentric film—he touches on many ideas that were presented nearly a quarter-century later in The Matrix (1999). MoMA Presents: World on a Wire is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, and Rajendra Roy, the Celeste Bartos Chief Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

"World on a Wire", 1973. Germany. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Pictured: Barbara Valentin. Courtesy: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation

MoMA’s Department of Film recently participated in a restoration of the film, and will present screenings of a luminous new 35mm theatrical print in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters. Working from the original 16mm negative and a digital transfer, Juliane Lorenz, director of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation and Michael Ballhaus, the film’s original cameraman, supervised the making of the new print. The restored film had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February of this year, and will now become part of MoMA’s collection.

As Fassbinder once described it, World on a Wire is ―a very beautiful story that depicts a world where one is able to make projections of people using a computer. And, of course, this leads to the uncertainty of whether someone himself is a projection, since in the virtual world projections resemble reality. Perhaps another, larger world has made us as a virtual one? In this sense it deals with the old philosophical model, which here takes on a certain horror.

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