Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Surreal Dystopian Film ‘World on a Wire’ Gets Criterion Release

The television movie got a theatrical release in 2010 and is now being readied for DVD and Blu-Ray release by the purveyors of auteur films Criterion Collection.

In 1973, German auteur and provocateur Rainier Werner Fassbinder directed a television movie called “World on a Wire,” which approximates the worlds created by science fiction authors Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard, as well as Stanley Kubrick SF films, while also incorporating (perhaps unconsciously) the post-modern and critical theory of Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord and Michel Foucault. We might even say it shares some of the characteristics of Alfred Bioy Casares’ mindbending classic “The Invention of Morel.”

The film was, in fact, adapted from “Simulacron-3,” written by SF author Daniel Francis Galouye. More recently, a three-hour cut was discovered that gives the film a more labyrinthine flavor.

“World on a Wire” concerns one Fred Stiller (Klaus Lowitsch), a cybernetics engineer who uncovers a massive corporate conspiracy, involving simulacra, market research programs and virtual reality.

Included in Criterion Collection’s release, according to the website, is the newly restored high-speed resolution three-hour cut of the film; Fassbinder’s “World on a Wire”: Looking Ahead to Today, a fifty-minute documentary about the making of the film by Juliane Lorenz; interview with German-film scholar Gerd Gemünden; and a booklet featuring an essay by film critic Ed Halter.

Watch the trailer below.