It’s easy enough to lose track of substance-abusing workaholic genius Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s sprawling filmography, but here’s a real rarity – a two-part film originally broadcast in 1973, never shown in cinemas and virtually unseen in the intervening 27 years. Restored and released on DVD, Welt am Draht (World on a Wire) turns out to be a minor master­piece and a revelation, and not just for Fassbinder fans. It’s a thinking person’s SF classic up there with Kubrick’s 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris. What will strike most contemporary viewers is the film’s uncannily prescient use of the idea of virtual reality, and this a good decade before William Gibson even penned Neuromancer.

Simulacron 1 is a highly advanced computer simulation in which scientists monitor the actions of virtual people – known as ‘identity units’ – to predict the human future. The project runs into trouble when business interests attempt to use it for their own ends and its director – talking about a discovery that could destroy the world – commits suicide. His successor, Dr Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), soon starts to show similar signs of mental instability, claiming that people working on the project have disappeared, even though no-one can remember them having existed in the first place, and that identity units are somehow crossing into the real world. In essence, Fassbinder turns in an intelligent, arthouse version of The Matrix 25 years ahead of time, stuffing it with references to Hitchcock, Lang, von Sternberg and Godard – there’s even a cheeky cameo from Alphaville’s own Lemmy Caution – and 70s interiors so retro they’re probably fashion­able again by now. A miraculous find.