About this Event
The German Film Office and Goethe-Institut New York are pleased to present a screening of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 film World on a Wire in conjunction with the exhibition by artist Jonathan Joosten. Joosten will be joined by exhibition curator Emily Pretzsch to discuss the film.
Based on the 1964 science-fiction novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye, the two-part film follows cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller, who takes over a mysterious research project after the sudden death of his predecessor. Set in a near-future society, the project simulates a virtual world populated by conscious “identity units”, raising questions about reality and control. As Stiller investigates, people around him begin to disappear, suggesting that his own reality may itself be a simulation. The film combines a film noir atmosphere with early cyberpunk themes of artificial worlds, surveillance, and unstable identities.
The same novel later inspired the Hollywood film The Thirteenth Floor (Josef Rusnak, 1999), which reinterprets its ideas for a late-20th-century audience and functions as a remake of Fassbinder’s earlier adaptation. Joosten, whose practice looks to subvert the linear structuring of time, examines the different layers of interpretation of both films in his exhibition, investigating how categories of time and knowledge can be destabilized across shifting levels of reality.
ERASE / REWIND is on view through June 25 at Goethe-Institut New York.
Visit www.germanfilmoffice.us for more information.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Goethe-Institut New York, 30 Irving Place, New York, United States
USD 0.00
