Movie Details
| Title: | World on a Wire | |
| Director: | Rainer Werner Fassbender | |
| Year: | 1973 | |
| Genre: | Science Fiction | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.11.20 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.11.20 | Blu-ray | This Screening is part of event: DVRfest 2020 roll: 9 Goddamn it. Totally jinxed. Technically, this is a three and a half hour tv mini-series, not a movie... but it feels pretty cheap to roll again. I knew full well what it meant to include (I also have Oliver Assayas' Carlos but chose not to include that due to it being five and a half hours), I want to watch it, time has proven that I never will unless forced to through some exercise like this... I'm just going to start it and watch as much as I can then finish the rest tomorrow. I think it's split into two parts so hopefully I can make it through half before passing out, and I guess if I rolled this earlier I wouldn't have gotten to see Ghost Dog. All day it's felt like this would come up. I think I watched the one before this in the list and the one after. So be it. The dice gods have spoken, let's dive in. Yep, had to watch the second half in the morning. Which is a shame because the first half is pretty much all set-up and the second half is where things get really good. Really good in a 70s sci-fi way, but augmented by several factors. For one, the story (which I think was adapted from a book) is very similar to the Westworld TV show (specifically the show's second season onward, with the first mostly taking inspiration from Michael Crichton's movie) and the Alex Garland show Devs. Like suspiciously so... although I guess once you get in this domain certain ideas are universal. Still, this is almost 50 years ago doing the same stuff as cutting edge sci-fi shows today. Another huge factor is its director. This is only the second Fassbinder thing that I've seen, but I'm totally getting why people hold this guy up so high. There's a real paradox going on with this movie in that certain aspects very much make it feel like a TV mini-series (which it was). It's shot on 16mm with dirty gates in many shots, many of the sets look kinda cheap and thrown together, there's not much action to speak of, and it's largely just a lot of scenes of people talking to one another. It feels like they churned out the production very quickly, yet every scene is so meticulously staged and photographed. Nearly every scene feels like it has at least one crazy set-up where the camera pans, zooms, and dollies to get two, three, four angles on the actors. It reminded me very much of some of Max Ophuls' work in films like Lola Montes. The scenes are made more interesting by these puzzling moves to frame people in mirrors or revolve around them to keep others in frame or even to rotate in 360 degrees as an actor walks through an entire house all in one shot. I can't imagine these orchestrations being easy or quick to set up... so I'm left kind of astounded at what went on during the making of this. Furthermore, Fassbinder's career is pretty famous for being a case of burning the candle at both ends. Something like 44 films in 20 years, dead at 37, work all day party all night. He made this when he was less than 30 yet less than 10 years before his death. It's also a 4-hour miniseries the same year he wrote and directed another 5-episode series and a movie. And all of this were his 'early years' before Ali: Fear Eats the Soul earned any sort of international acclaim. So the dude must have been a genius and a machine to have this output. So... since I'm relatively new to this Fassbinder style, the first half of the film seems very unreal. Yes it's people talking but the staging and acting is often so stilted and bizarre. I couldn't tell if that's this film or his style in general. People do weird things like spin around in chairs or dive into pools very poorly, all while we're in this ever-moving camera's eye that surrounds and gets into everyone's faces. It's very disorienting at first. Plus I'm not sure if the sets are meant to be a cheap version of the future or just how early 70s Germany looked. It's nowhere near as overt as 2001 or Logan's Run, but there are still touches like the amazing video phones and computer room set that were clearly not normal. One thing I liked about both this and Stalker is that they manage to tell pretty esoteric sci-fi stories without any visual effects or space-suits. They both deal with concepts more than aliens but still manage to transport the viewer to a different place entirely. This is a technique that Primer would get a lot of credit for much later. Anyway, once the second part starts, it becomes clear that all of these choices with the sets and mirrors and framing and acting are intentional thematic choices. They may also be Fassbinder's style but they happen to thematically fit the story perfectly. From there, it's a whole second movie's worth of unravelling and all the stuff we've seen in 3 seasons of a hit HBO show. By the time it's all said and done, it's a remarkable piece of filmmaking that is somehow at odds with itself and in perfect harmony. I still don't understand the environment that produced this, but I'm really impressed that it exists. I also suspect this will be the Fassbinder film I like most, since it seems like all of his other stuff are pretty intense social dramas. This is his only sci-fi film which is what engrossed me on a story level while he did all his genius stuff behind the camera. I do have another film in the random pool but that will have to wait for another roll. And that ends this year's Criterion Random Roll. Decent films for the most part but pretty brutal on run-times. I'm glad I watched all of them though. |
