World on a Wire

A dystopic science-fiction epic, World on a Wire is German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s gloriously cracked, boundlessly inventive take on future paranoia. With dashes of Kubrick, Vonnegut, and Dick, but a flavor entirely his own, World on a Wire is the noir-spiked tale of reluctant action hero Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), a cybernetics engineer who uncovers a massive corporate and governmental conspiracy. At risk? Our entire reality as we know it. This long unseen three-and-a-half-hour labyrinth is a satiric and surreal look at the weird world of tomorrow from one of cinema’s kinkiest geniuses. “An analog-age Avatar, a movie that anticipates Blade Runner in its meditation on artificial and human intelligence and The Matrix in its conception of reality as a computer-generated illusion… Fassbinder’s love of mirrors as décor and alienation devices, inherited from his idol Douglas Sirk, reaches a dizzying peak in World on a Wire. Almost every shot features at least one mirror image; faces and bodies are reflected in tabletops, refracted through lamps, caught between infinity mirrors.”—Dennis Lim, The New York Times.
Bing Theater |  $10 general admission. $7 museum members, seniors (62+), students with valid ID | Tickets: 323 857-6010 or purchase online.