World on a Wire (1973)

Perhaps no director in the history of cinema created so much art in such a short span of time as German provocateur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In his 37 years on the planet, he created over 40 feature films, two epic multi-part television miniseries, and one two-part miniseries World on a Wire (1973) that remains one of his most influential and talked-about endeavors. Predating The Matrix (1999) by 26 years, World on a Wire tells of a German supercomputer that hosts a societal simulation in which the 9000-plus individuals living inside of it are unaware that they're living in a computer simulation. When the program's technical director Professor Vollmer (Adrian Hoven) turns up dead under mysterious circumstances, his successor Dr. Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) is given all of his materials in order to continue his work. However, certain missing elements in the materials leads Stiller to believe that there's a vast conspiracy at play and when people inside the simulated world begin committing suicide, it points at something even more nefarious than anything Stiller could've dreamed possible. Stiller begins to suspect that he, too, is living in a simulation being controlled elsewhere and becomes obsessed with discovering whether or not he's actually living in the real world! Fassbinder's films often contain sexuality and nudity and World on a Wire is no exception, though it's not quite as skin-filled as you might be hoping. In the three and a half hour spectacle, there is one brief nude scene from Mascha Rabben, who bares her boobs and buns when she wakes up nude and discovers her man skipping out on her. There's even a full frontal flash when he hauls off and hits her, and we've slowed it down for you thanks to the miracle of Skin Vision!