What the hell is Steampunk? A sub-genre of a sub-genre? A Sci-fi send up? Or something more interesting all together? Trauma's Steampunk season aims to answer some of these question with the screening of three classic steampunk films.

Steampunk emerged from a sub-genre of science fiction in the late 1980s and early 1990s that came to be termed ‘Cyberpunk’. Cyberpunk dealt with the alienation and dystopic reality of an ever mechanised future by imagining those futures in literature and cinema. Cyberpunk texts include William Gibson’s seminal Cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, the Matrix trilogy, Bladerunner, Strange Days, and A Scanner Darkly. In cyberpunk, technology is typically, virtually, invisible, and above all, it is to be coveted while the unaltered body is written off as obsolete. Technology in cyberpunk resides under the surface of things. Cyberspace is not a physical place. It exists in the cerebrum or it is a consensual hallucination.



Cyberpunk as a genre depicts nightmare futures, truly alienated humanity. And yet, 16 years after Gibson wrote his novel, Neuromancer reads less like one. Would the Matrix really be so bad if we all got to be Neo? Possibly this is because of the ubiquitous nature of modern technology. It is harder to see, and therefore harder to be wary of.
Steampunk as a genre allows for the same fears outlined in early Cyberpunk to be expressed by turning the tables. Mike Tooel at www.animejump.com states that ‘Steampunk could loosely be described as ‘an alternate history, where the industrial revolution of the 1800s ran wild, giving us high-powered land vehicles, mechanized combat, and computers decades before the real-life modern age would develop them’.



Steampunk’s retro-futuristic narratives uncover human relationships to technology by reintroducing its strangeness, and this occurs with the distortion of the timeline. The clinical, minimalist, and hypnotic beauty of modern technology – and of course of Cyberpunk - is replaced by the obscenity of the overtly mechanical nature of similar devices existing during the long Victorian age. Noise, steam, pistons, and engines never allow such innovations to appear natural, as they do today, and in profoundly disturbing the nature of man’s special relationship with technology, it allows for reflection upon it.

The first film in this season is the animae flick Steamboy. Released in 2004 and set in 1866 in Manchester where all the characters speak Japanese, capturing exactly the geopolitical ahistorical nature of Steampunk as a genre.



Production began for the film in 1994. It is an unprecedented Japanese animation production by Katsuhiro Otomo. He was born in 1954 in Miyagi Prefecture. In 1973 he made his debuted in a special edition of Manga Action with the short story ‘Jyu-sei’. He started the Akira series in 1982 in Young Magazine, releasing the cinematic version in 1988. Otomo followed this in 1995 with Memories, an early version of Steamboy – shorter, less developed, and non–computer animated. Finally, he released Steamboy took 9 years to make, cost 2.4 billion yen – which is around $20 million, making it the most expensive animated Japanese film ever made - and is comprised of over 180 thousand drawings, taking about ten years to complete. It won the Best Animated Film at the 2004 Catalonian International Film Festival.

Much of Steamboy centers around an event called the ‘International Exhibition’.
This is based on the Great Exhibition which was held in Crystal Palace 1st May -October 15th 1851. It was the first in a series of World fairs or Expositions. The Eiffel Tower was constructed specifically for France’s World Fair in 1900 and the Crystal Palace was purposefully constructed for London’s. Between 1851 - 1938 Expositions were based around industrialisation, trade, and technological advancement. 6 million people visited England’s World Fair, the equivalent of 1/3 of the population of Great Britain.

Otomo himself said: ‘The theme of this movie is humanity versus technology’. If think that’s true for all the films in this season.







The whole conceit of Steampunk centres around the real ideas of a historical figure called Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer who – after noticing the high degree of human error in mathematical calculations at the time – designed and partly built what is, by today’s standards, the first computer. He called it the Difference Engine. It was comprised of 25,000 parts, weighed over 15 tonnes, and stood at around eight feet high. He never completed his Difference Engine - partly due to funding and partly due to frustration at the design, but shortly afterwards designed a more complex and sophisticated machine he called Difference Engine No. 2, which was never built during his lifetime. However, in 1989-1991, the London Science Museum constructed Difference Engine No. 2, using 19th Century components and methods. It worked.



Computers have had such a profound affect on humanity and human relationships towards each other, to technology, and to our environment, that the profundity of the earlier advent of computing machines has fuelled the imaginations of a whole generation of writers. William Gibson’s seminal Steampunk novel, and arguably the first in the genre, is called The Difference Engine, and refers to Charles Babbage throughout. It deals with the spread and use of Difference Engines throughout Europe and the revolutionary ramifications that it has.

Last week’s film Steamboy was set, as most Steampunk is, during the re-imagined Victorian/Industrial age. The frenzy of invention and innovation occurring alongside poverty and oppression and political unrest makes the period a rich setting for Steampunk literature and cinema. Tonight’s film, however, is an example of a different tendency within Steampunk. Having established the advent of modern technology in a much earlier age, films like tonight’s screening Brazil build upon that re-imagined past in order to re-imagine the present. In showing such alternate (and yet highly possible) realities, Steampunk once again allows for a reflection on the present through its alteration of the past.



Working with the notion of a genre that built upon a past that did not - has never – existed, it’s hard to escape the concept of Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra’, defined as a copy without an original. Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation is a keystone text in cultural and critical theory. In a chapter entitled ‘Simulation and Science Fiction’, he theorises the two.

Brazil is set not in the Victorian past but in a present – at least at the time of its release - based around the idea of a Steampunk past. It’s debatable whether or not we should call this type of cinema Steampunk or Retro-Futurism, or Retro-Science Fiction. For the purposes of this season, the terms are interchangeable. The film is directed by Terry Gilliam, a former Python whose works include the highly successful 12 Monkeys, the most famous film never-made The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Much of his work has a heavy Steampunk or retro-futuristic element.



Movie critic Jack Mathews characterized Brazil as "satirizing the bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving [Gilliam] crazy all his life”. Gilliam has described it as being about the ‘craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it through whatever means possible” while co-writer Tom Stoppard stated ‘It tells us about our relationships between people in a world that’s lost its humanity’.
Total Film rated Brazil the 20th greatest British movie of all time in 2004 and Film 4 rated it as one of the 50 Films to See Before You Die in 2006.

Being released in 1985, Brazil can seem a little dated, especially during the dream sequences. It also suffers from a suspect sense of 80s fashion, and Gilliam’s almost trademark meandering structure, but it’s all worth it if only to see Robert De Niro in one of the most surprising turns of his career, for Michael Palin’s darkly comic character, and for the depiction of consumerism, terrorism, and heating ducts.











La Cite Des Enfants Perdus or The City of Lost Children is a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, the same team that made Delicatessen, and Amelie, and later worked together on Jeunet’s Hollywood project Alien: Resurrection. In an interview with the two, Jeunet says:

[we] were thinking of world depopulated of dreams, dark and gloomy. That someone who didn't dream but, just the same, lived very well, yet would want to see, in dreams, a greater dimension of the imagination. For us, someone who is deprived of that is condemned to die. That's part of what we wanted to say...If one cannot dream and imagine things, and if one is sentenced to the everyday, to reality, it's awful.

In The City of Lost Children, it is one character that is forced to live without imagination; in Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation, it is not only the individual that is condemned so:

It is no longer possible to manufacture the unreal from the real, to create the imaginary from the data of reality. The process will be rather the reverse: to put in place "decentered" situations, models of simulation, and then to strive to give them the colors of the real, the banal, the lived; to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because the real has disappeared from our lives. A hallucination of the real, of the lived, of the everyday—but reconstituted, sometimes even unto its most disconcertingly unusual details, recreated like an animal park or a botanical garden, presented with transparent precision, but totally lacking substance, having been derealized and hyperrealized (Simulacra and Simulation)



Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy, which was a ten year project to painstakingly recreate a Victorian Manchester and London that never was, and last week’s film Brazil that take the idea of a Steampunk past and extrapolate the present from it. The City of Lost Children is not is not so easy to locate historically. Steamboy, for instance, begins with the words ‘Manchester 1866’, and Brazil starts with the words ‘somewhere in the twentieth century, at 8.49PM’. The City of Lost Children, on the other hand, only suggests it occurs somewhere in the long Victorian age. It employs many techniques and devices that place it somewhere in the past but refuses to be specific. It is, therefore, more self-reflexive upon its depiction of history, and of Baudrilliard’s declaration that history is ‘our last great myth’.

Perhaps more so than the other two films shown in this season, The City of Lost Children highlights the connections between Steampunk and the Gothic. The film goes to great lengths to construct a particular mood and atmosphere, and its themes and conceits bring into mind a multitude of Gothic literatures and cinematic texts, from Frankenstein to Alien.

If contradiction is at the heart of the Gothic, it is most certainly also at the heart of Steampunk, most noticeably in the contradictory effects of technology in society. Steampunk, refuses to allow technology to seamlessly integrate into the societies it represents. Technology is never allowed to appear organic or natural, but must allows be shown on the outside gleaming in brass and with the innards of its machinery on display, and against every positive, its negatives are posited. The Cyclops army in The City of Lost Children have the benefit of a third eye – a device called the ‘Optacon’ that enables them to ‘see through sound’. For this, however, they had to give up part of their biology, a real eye, and suffer from the discomfort of everyday sounds – like the chewing of food.



The film also depicts a group of clones, who are almost unable to function due to their constant bickering over which of them is the original. Technological advancement, in The City of Lost Children, seems to be about losing something utterly human, in fact in all the films in this season, technology is positioned against humanity. It would be a ludicrous and reactionary standpoint to desire a time before technology. Even fire and the wheel are technologies, and so there is no time within human memory where technology did not exist. But it is clear that, sometime during or after the Industrial Revolution, and entrenched during the Silicon Age, the relationship between humanity and technology has altered fundamentally. This season has been about trying to identify the films that aim to understand that shifting relationship, but by no means are the films screened over the three weeks to be considered the only films in which these ideas can be seen at play.

The cinematographer in The City of Lost Children was Darius Khondji, who shot Delicatessen but also, and probably more famously, shot Se7en, the costume design was by Jean-Paul Gaultier, and the score was composed by Angelo Badalamenti, a long time collaborator with David Lynch, working with him on Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mullholland Drive.

Ron Perlman was cast as One, the strongman whose ambiguous relationship with the girl Miette serves as a key theme for the film. Ron Perlman is an American actor who cannot speak French at all. He learnt all his lines by memory and referred back to the English translations he had to make sure he understood what he was saying. Jeunet and Caro chose Perlman over the French candidates they had auditioned because of his unique physical features. Jeunet later used Perlman in Alien: Resurrection as Johner, and, as an interesting aside, Perlman made his acting breakthrough playing the lion-faced Vincent in that TV version of Beauty and the Beast back in the late 1980s.



The City of Lost Children is visually a stunning piece of cinema. It was the first French film in over 40 years to be shot entirely in studio. There were intricate sets built against green screens, which enabled matte painting and computer generated images to be applied in post-production, adding extra depths and dimensions to the artwork which Caro supplied as many of the backgrounds.