Dick's early stories and novels, especially Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint, when he sat down to write Simulacron-3 (aka Counterfeit World), the novel that led to World on a Wire. Indeed, the premise of World on a Wire is explicitly a riff on Plato's allegory of the cave from The Republic, although I wouldn't be surprised if Galouye had been at least vaguely familiar with Philip K. But those themes and ideas have been around at least since Plato. Had the film had wider distribution originally, we would be tempted to say many later movies, especially The Matrix, ripped off its themes and ideas. Galouye, shown on German television in the fall of 1973, seldom seen again until a version beautifully restored by the Fassbinder Foundation began to make its way through Europe and the U.K. The picture I have described is the first shot of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's two-part television film World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), based on a science fiction novel by Daniel F. Welcome to the future-which is also Paris in the winter of 1973. The swaying of the banners and the liquid image contrast with the solidity of the buildings, cars, and men in trench coats and fedoras. Two white banners hang inconspicuously on either side of the road. A car drives toward us through soft sleet that shimmers the image blue. A picture: a city in which the architecture is all vertical or horizontal lines.
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