Recently, I watched the film Welt am Draht, or World on a Wire. It’s like four hours long, a made-for-German-television mini-series from 1973 that sprang from the mind of one Rainer Werner Fassbinder. (He was adapting a sci-fi novel.) The film concerns a computer scientist who works for a private institute that receives some state funds for its experimental programs involving simulated worlds. First we learn that there’s a world-within-a-world, which is controlled by the institute’s huge, blinking mainframe and populated by 10,000 “identity units” programmed to believe themselves and their world to be real. (One, the so-called Einstein unit, exists with the knowledge that all is part of a simulation, and is tortured by his awareness of the world above.) Slowly, over the course of the movie, the computer scientist comes to suspect that the world he perceives as reality is a simulation from above in itself. That is, unless he’s simply losing his mind.
So Welt am Draht is a sort of proto-Matrix, shot in lurid ’70s color, populated by men in suits and turtlenecks and woman in pussy-bow blouses. The interiors — modular furniture, chrome that throws fun-house reflections, shag carpets — are to die for. Everybody drinks. Nobody gets drunk. Fassbinder’s camera has a habit of looming over a scene in a way that could express languor or foreboding. There are several times when he films one character saying a line, then pivots the camera with aching exactitude, taking in low-slung couches, lucite tables, and mirrored screens with equanimity, until the other character slides into the frame, and delivers his reply. Everything’s chilling and precise and sexy.
And the clothes. The female lead, Mascha Rabben, had me coveting her entire wardrobe, every item of which was very sultry and understated and slinky, and no item of which seemed to require a bra. I wore a vintage black jumpsuit and platform sandals out of the house last week, and I hold her responsible.
It also doesn’t hurt that the blonde Rabben, with her high forehead, wide-set eyes, and Cupid’s-bow mouth is a dead ringer for Hanne-Gaby Odiele, one of my favorite models working today.
I’ve been dressing super 1970s since I saw the film. Actually, since before. Maybe it was the Céline collection? Or re-watching Annie Hall? Or perhaps it’s that, at least as I remember it, the aesthetics of the ’90s were the aesthetics of the ’70s V. 2.0 — so what with all the ’90s love as of late, I’m seeking the stylistic headwaters? Whatever the cause, lately all I want to wear are wrap dresses and caftans and silk scarves and anything that either shows lots of leg or décolleté. I want big sunglasses and big, curly hair that isn’t frizzy. Basically, if I could live inside a Francesco Scavullo photograph for the summer, I would.
And, she’s back!
Don’t leave it 9 months next time!
just saw world on a wire last night, and i craved some of those outfits (and hairdos).. fassbinder seems to have used the same costume designer for many of his films, which are full of amazing clothes–have you seen marriage of maria braun? the postwar style clothes are phenomenal. and mascha rabben! how gorgeous was she?
Nice comments, the fashion is beautiful in the film and almost seems like one of the characters! I just saw it for the first time and although not a masterpiece like In a Year of 13 Moons or his best films, it was really well made and interesting. I loved all the lingering shots on mirrors and people watching one another in a film about simulation.