World on a Wire

"Astonishingly, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made his three-hour science-fiction epic “World on a Wire,” from 1973—an adaptation of a novel by Daniel F. Galouye about a “Matrix”-like projection of minds into virtual worlds—at the age of twenty-seven. It stars Klaus Löwitsch as an engineer who begins to suspect that the battalion of psychic avatars he’s designing is being programmed by his bosses for a macabre industrial-espionage plot. The movie was never released in the United States; when it premiered at MOMA, in 2010, Richard Brody wrote that “Fassbinder’s brilliantly sardonic approach decks the future out in high-gloss seventies kitsch (Plexiglas and mirrors, lacquered wood and chrome) and ubiquitous video screens, which reflect, distort, and multiply identities as readily as his panoply of zooms, pans, tracking shots, and shock cuts; his vision of a world out of joint resembles a video game gone haywire.”"
  The New Yorker