In 2020 we started the series Focus on Fassbinder - a special program based on the work of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Corona threw a spanner in the works. After more than two years, there was one film that we still owed the audience: Welt am Draht, Teil I & 2. On Monday September 12 we screen it in Rialto De Pijp. And of course it will be something special, because the film will be introduced by Dana Linssen (NRC).
This film night is made possible by the Goethe Institute.
Welt am Draht, Teil 1 & 2
In 1964, the science fiction novel Simulacron-3 by the American writer Daniel F. Galouye was published,, a philosophical story of the nature of human consciousness. In 1973, Fassbinder adapted the story as a two-part miniseries, today seen as a precursor to films as Alex Proyas' Dark City, David Cronenberg's eXistenZ and the Wachowski Sisters' The Matrix.
In the present day, a supercomputer has been developed at the Institute for Cybernetics and Future Science, running software called Simulacron, which includes an artificial world with over 9,000 "identity units" living as human beings, though unaware that their world is a simulation. The program's technical director Professor Vollmer is on the verge of making an incredible discovery, when he dies mysteriously. His successor, Dr. Fred Stiller, has a discussion with the institute's security adviser Günther Lause, but then the latter suddenly disappears without a trace. More mysterious still is the fact that no one else seems to have any memory of Lause. Stiller investigates the strange case — what he finds is even stranger.
The film will be screened with English subtitles.