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Electronic Data Processing Ð an Elegy
The German national TV station ARD broadcast Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “World on a Wire” on Sunday, October 14 and Tuesday, October 16, 1973
At the end of part one, the electronic fairytale offered an initial explanation that was as fantastic as it was poetic: The gigantic institute for cybernetics and all its staff were themselves just a world on a wire, the experimental lab of a higher, hyper-real sphere. This was nothing but a simulation model, brainchild of a mega-computer named “Simulacron,” a technical monster with the ability to simulate certain “identity units” so realistically that they walk around like real people.
This is a computer dream play, celebrated like a psychedelic ecstasy. Suggestive camera movements in an obstreperous and barren suburbia rendered in IBM design create an alienated mixture of “2001,” Jugendstil, Crate & Barrel, and futurism. The images are laden with gestures, sentences and movements; we encounter mysterious and miserable figures, artificial creatures and puppets on strings and then again “normal” and natural characters.
There were irritations, mystifications: People suddenly disappeared and no witnesses admit to ever having seen them (this is where Hitchcock said hello). The hero, on the other hand, confused time levels, people and contexts. This Dr. Stiller: Was he crazy, schizophrenic? Were the figures and the occurrences that surrounded him only fabrications of his sick brain? It was his panic over being but a number, an electronic product, a lifeless, randomly erasable design created by some higher being in a “programmed” underworld—that drove him directly into the arms of a “contact unit” from the upper-world who likes the underworld projection of her lover better than the original...
This is neither an ideological nor an action-filled science-fiction, but an elegy. Visually compelling and full of imagination, this is a professional, perfect composition the likes of which no one but Fassbinder is capable of pulling off in German film these days. Especially after his rather drab family serial “Eight Hours do not make up a Day” one doubted his ability to produce something of this caliber. He dissolves everything into extremely artificial optical processes: The relativity of time and reality, Stiller’s smashed up conscience. The interdependencies between fiction, vision and real action turn into a vague, permanently slightly unreal and irritating game. Reflections become reflexes and mirror images; mental intimations resurface as blurred effects rendered in glass, light or color. There was little action, the dialogues were slight and haphazard; everything was confused and lacked suspense. It was sadly beautiful. And those fluorescent images sufficed: They were empty receptacles, pleasantly dazzling.
In part two, the scenery was slightly more concrete; the magic spook was rather terrestrial in parts. But just at the right moment, the multi-facetted quality reemerged; the music (Bach, tangos, unsteady electronic bleeping and chirping preceded by ‘Tristan,’ Mahler, Gregorian chants, Strauß- waltzes) made the piece unreal and unnatural once more and turned it into a fairytale. The actors, too, became visibly artificial creatures: By casting an impressive number of the old established stars, Fassbinder paid homage to the old cinema. He then also began to quote directly from Sternberg’s “Dishonored”, Zadek’s “Pott”, Godard’s “Alphaville”, Truffaut’s “Fahrenheit,” Kubrick’s “2001”, Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” — and thus transformed the figures once more.
Wolf Donner
DIE ZEIT, No. 43, October 19, 1973
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