American Cinematographer - July 2010 - 68

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Restoring Fassbinder’s World on a Wire By Iain Stasukevich

Clockwise from top left: In a frame from World on a Wire, Gloria (Barbara Valentin) reflects on her dangerous attraction to Dr. Stiller; Ulrich Prinz (left), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (at camera) and Michael Ballhaus (partially visible) set up a shot of actor Adrian Hoven; in another frame from the film, Dr. Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) prepares to enter the artificial world of Simulacron 1.

Film restoration often leads audiences to discover classic pictures they have only heard about but never seen, and World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and shot by future ASC member Michael Ballhaus, seems ripe for rediscovery given its pedigree, extreme stylization and heady ideas. Created for West German television in 1973, the film was adapted from the 1964 American novel Simulacron 3. In the film, Dr. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) is a research scientist with the Simulacron 1 program, a computer designed to concoct theoretical models of future social, economic and political events as they would occur in reality, complete with a simulated world and simulated inhabitants. When a colleague on the project begins to act strangely and then commits what appears to be suicide, Stiller’s investigation takes him inside Simulacron 1, and soon his perceptions of which reality he actually inhabits are turned upside-down. Because of copyright problems, TV reruns of World on a Wire were rare, and theatrical screenings rarer still. The film has been screened just twice in the past 15 years, in New York and Paris, where an unretouched 35mm copy produced in 1996 by the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation was shown. Juliane Lorenz, president and managing director of the Fassbinder Foundation, has spent more than a decade trying to preserve the filmmaker’s most important works. In 2006, the foundation partnered with New York’s Museum of Modern Art to restore the 151⁄2hour telefilm Berlin Alexanderplatz, which, like World on a Wire, seemed unusually ambitious for the small screen. As Lorenz notes, “The special thing about Fassbinder is that he didn’t care where the
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viewers came from — he was happy to make films for television. In his mind, he was still making a movie.” Recently, the Fassbinder Foundation and MoMA reteamed to restore World on a Wire, and Ballhaus served as the project’s creative director. (The cinematographer was unavailable at press time, so his comments have been taken from an interview he gave Lorenz to publicize the restoration.) “Rainer was never prepared, but he always knew what he wanted: the camera would be constantly moving and all the imagery rather unusual,” Ballhaus says of the project, which he shot on 16mm Ektachrome color reversal stock. “Also, there’s a tremendous amount of smoking in this film. All the stars whiffed like smokestacks, but I find smoke in film wonderful to look at. A bit of smoke in the room makes for a much nicer atmosphere; it makes the image a little

American Cinematographer

Images courtesy of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art.

American Cinematographer - July 2010

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