Go see WORLD ON A WIRE at MoMA! Brilliant! Sexist! Self-aware!

The 1973 German sci-fi  classic World on a Wire (or Welt am Draht), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is not readily available to U.S. audiences, and it doesn’t seem that there are any plans to bring it overseas.  The film originally aired as a 2 part miniseries on German television, and has never had the chance to enjoy widespread American viewership. So, with that said, imagine my delight when I found out that the Museum of Modern Art would be screening this film for the next couple of weeks.  I didn’t know what to expect from the film: I only knew that I had to go.

In World on a Wire, Klaus Lowitsch plays Fred Stiller, a brooding, badass scientist who heads the development of megacomputer “Simulacron,” which runs a vast artificial intelligence program in order to predict societal behavior over the next 20 years.  The world within “Simulacron” is much like the world it imitates, populated by more than 90’000 artificial people who all have independent desires.  Much like The Matrix or Existenz (although World on a Wire predates both of these), the film centers around the concept of existence and what we know to be true, following Stiller through a series of philosophical questions as his world begins to fall apart around him.

The complete film is 210 minutes, so Fassbinder has time to explore ever corner and facet of the world he created.  After the first 20 minutes of viewing, I was afraid that I had walked into the kind of pretentious art-house cinema that has earned the reputation of being disingenuous and unapproachable; every line seemed heavy-handed, the camera work made me nauseous (always zooming in or pulling back), and the characters were unlikeable.  But, after the film found its pacing, and after I learned to enjoy the self-aware humor of the whole ordeal (because this movie does not take itself too seriously), I found myself loving every moment of it.  The only thing I can’t look past is completely subservient role of women that Fassbinder seems obsessed with (seriously, almost to the point of absurdity).  Other than that, the twists are timed perfectly, the monologues are monumental, and Frank Stiller will have you cheering for him through three hours of fantastic cinema.

World on a Wire is playing at MoMA three more times:

• Saturday, April 17, 2010, 7:00 p.m.
• Sunday, April 18, 2010, 1:00 p.m.
• Monday, April 19, 2010, 4:00 p.m.

I’d give it a 9/10.