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.