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.