Brazil (1985)

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Movie
German title Brazil
Original title Brazil
Country of production Great Britain
original language English
Publishing year 1985
length 142 minutes
Age rating FSK 12 (previously 18)
Rod
Director Terry Gilliam
script Terry Gilliam,
Tom Stoppard and
Charles McKeown
production Arnon Milchan and Patrick Cassavetti
music Michael Kamen
camera Roger Pratt
cut Julian Doyle
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen

Brazil is a 1985 dystopian feature film with elements of grotesque and black comedy directed by Terry Gilliam , who co- wrote the script with Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown. The film was shown for the first time in Germany in February 1985 at the Berlin International Film Festival .

action

Sam Lowry is a small clerk in the archives of the information retrieval department of the all-powerful "Ministry of Information" (MOI) in a dark, bureaucratized, and technologically advanced world . In his dreams, as a winged hero in shimmering armor, he meets a blonde beauty in flowing white . In real life, he would like to live inconspicuously. His influential mother, who is competing with her friend Mrs. Terrain for the better plastic surgeon, arranges a promotion, but Sam refuses.

A misprint leads to a confusion with serious consequences: instead of a freelance heating installer named Tuttle, who is wanted as a “terrorist” and who evades the dominant bureaucratic apparatus of this company, an innocent family man named Buttle is arrested and tortured to death . Sam is given the bureaucratic post-processing of this error. He personally delivers the reimbursement check for the intended "information reparation payment" to the widow. He meets the woman from his dreams, the truck driver Jill Layton, a neighbor of Buttles.

In order to find her again, he accepts the promotion and at the same time uses the contact with his ambitious friend Jack, who is in a high position in a secret job. He reports to Sam about the planned arrest of Jill. While Sam's apartment becomes uninhabitable due to a heating failure despite Tuttles help, Sam's dreams develop into nightmares in which he has to fight against overpowering opponents, while Jill threatens to slip away from him. He tries to save Jill from persecution by recording her death in the Ministry's database. In Sam's mother's apartment, however, both are taken by surprise, with Sam arrested and Jill apparently killed.

Sam is handcuffed to a chair at the Ministry and Jack comes to interrogate him; Sam recognizes him despite a mask. Before Jack can start the torture, however, he is shot, and Sam is rescued by Tuttle and a group of "terrorists". After a wild escape with Jill, they both finally find refuge in an idyllic landscape. In the end, however, this escape turns out to be a dream of Sam, who lost his mind during the interrogation and in this way escaped his torturers.

Remarks

“Brazil was a movie that had been on my head for years; I mean, I've been thinking about things like this for about ten years. On a simple level, this film was cleansing for me. Most of all, it seems to be about my own frustrations and my apparent inability to achieve what I want to achieve and my inability to effectively hit a system that is completely wrong. Brazil’s fears do not actually concern the danger that the world might slip out of our hands because of the system, because we are the system. What Brazil is really about is that the system is not made up of great leaders or great machinists to control it. It's made up of individuals just doing their job as a little cog and Sam decides to stay a little cog and in the end he pays the price for it. [...] On the other hand, I noticed that there is an ideal that says that if we all do our little bit, the world would one day get better. Then there are the pessimists who say: 'Enough of this gossip, it doesn't make any difference anyway, in the end we fall off the cliff like lemmings'. This gave rise to the question: 'How do you escape this world?' and Sam escapes by going insane. I started this film with the question in the back of my mind, can you make a film where the happy ending is someone going crazy? ... "

- Terry Gilliam : Excerpts from an interview on the South Bank Show on June 29, 1991.

backgrounds

Headquarters of the real Ministry of Information during the Second World War in London

Brazil is a dark, Kafkaesque dystopia that makes use of the stylistic devices of grotesque comedy. For the then head of Universal Studios , Sid Sheinberg , the hopeless end of the film was too gloomy; he really wanted to bring out a version with a happy ending. The dispute between Gilliam and Sheinberg escalated and culminated in a full-page advertisement in the industry newspaper Variety , in which Gilliam asked Sheinberg to release the film with the following words:

“Dear Sid Sheinberg,
When do you actually want to release my film BRAZIL?
Terry Gilliam. "

As a result of the dispute, Brazil was released in two different versions: in Europe in a 142-minute version (PAL runtime: 136 minutes), which largely corresponded to Gilliam's ideas, and in the USA in a shortened 132-minute version. For the American Laserdisc publication in the Criterion Collection , Gilliam created a 143-minute Director's Cut based on the European cut in 1993 . There is also a version shown on American television, the so-called “Love Conquers All” version (also called Sheinberg Edit), which after “editing” by the studio only takes 94 minutes: numerous scenes were cut out that were intended for distribution appeared negative, especially the ending that reveals the "happy ending" as a mere dream of the tortured Sam Lowry.

The original title was "1984 and ½" - an allusion to both George Orwell's famous novel and Federico Fellini's film 8½ - an objection from Orwell's heirs prevented this.

The final title is an allusion to the samba "Brazil" (original title: Aquarela do Brasil ) by Ary Barroso (1939), which in a version by Geoff Muldaur forms the title melody of the film and appears in various variations in the film. The film music often counteracts the images shown or the plot.

In the featurette What is Brazil? Gilliam comments on the film title like this:

“The film originally started in Port Talbot , Wales . Steel is produced in Port Talbot. The beach is completely black from the coal dust. Ships run into the islands and huge conveyor belts transport the coal, everything is full of dust, the beach is pitch black. There I sat at sunset. I just saw the picture of a guy in front of me watching the sunset while his radio was receiving strange music, like Brazil, Latin American, romantic music. That's how it all started. And that's still what the film is about. It's about someone who wants to escape from everything, who believes there is a way to escape. "

Locations

The film was made at Lee International Film Studios in Wembley as well as in various locations in Great Britain and France. Was shot u. a. in the Espaces d'Abraxas , a building complex designed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill and built in Noisy-le-Grand in 1982 . In one scene, there is a vehicle chase in the access area of ​​the 19-storey, monumentally designed social housing. This area is freely accessible (near the Noisy Le Grand RER station). The high-rise apartment in which Sam Lowry lives in the film is accessed via an open arcade and is also located in Bofill's bombastic apartment complex. However, the exact position cannot be determined with certainty. The archway, which in the film serves as access to Mrs. Terrain's funeral service, is also in the d'Abraxas area.

Recordings of the access area of ​​the Shangri-La skyscraper, in which the Buttle family lives, as well as the offices of the archive, in which Sam is employed at the beginning of the film, show the former CWS flour mill at the Royal Victoria Dock in London. The practice room of Dr. Jaffee is actually the Arab Hall in Leighton House in Holland Park . Further recordings were made in the National Liberal Club on Whitehall Place, in the Rainbow Room in Kensington , all in London, and in the Mentmore Towers in Mentmore in Buckinghamshire . The location of the torture scene was the inside of one of the cooling towers of the Croydon B power station in the London borough of the same name . External photos of the Ministry of Information were also taken at the power plant. This was shut down in 1984 and the complex was largely demolished in the early 1990s. The rural area in which Sam and Jill can supposedly escape is shown in Newlands Valley near Keswick in the Lake District .

Reviews

“The story is told in a mixture of surrealistic dream visions, rapid action turbulence and bitter satire: cinema as a ghost train ride. Perfectly staged, but relying too much on overpowering the senses. "

- Lexicon of International Films

“It's hard to believe that the brilliantly bizarre grotesque has not been broadcast at any reasonable airtime for over eleven years. The visually stunning stroke of genius by Terry Gilliam (' Time Bandits ') is one of the great cult works in film history - located between Franz Kafka , George Orwell and crazy Monty Python anarchy. Conclusion: words are not enough - you have to see it! "

- Cinema

"A highly influential, not least visually outstanding contribution to the science fiction genre, which thanks to its overabundance of ideas and its consistently great ensemble has long since blossomed into a classic."

- Film headquarters

Awards

The film was at the Academy Awards 1986 in the categories of Best Original Screenplay and Production Design Best nominated.

The film won the 1985 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards for Best Picture , Best Screenplay, and Best Director .

The British Film Institute chose Brazil in 1999 at number 54 of the best British films of the 20th century . The film was also selected in the 2005 Time selection of the best 100 films from 1923 to 2005 .

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating particularly valuable.

Trivia

Scammell S24

When Sam Lowry steps into the neighboring office after his promotion and asks his colleague for his name, the latter replies with "Harvey Lime." This is very reminiscent of Harry Lime , the name of the protagonist portrayed by Orson Welles in The Third Man , whose famous theme music is on the Zither is called Harry Lime Theme .

The scene in which Sam is saved by Tuttle and then fights the government on the stairs is a reference to Sergej Eisenstein's famous staircase scene from the movie Battleship Potemkin . In both films there is a close-up of a woman who is shot in the eye and her glasses burst. While a pram with a baby then falls down the stairs at Eisenstein, it is a vacuum cleaner at Gilliam. Both films are about a so-called attraction montage (as it was justified by Eisenstein), as the mechanical rhythmic movements of the soldiers' troops contrast with the helpless movements of the revolutionaries or victims, and are repeatedly cut back and forth between the two poles.

The vehicle with which Sam is traveling is a modified Messerschmitt cabin scooter , Jill's truck is a Scammell S 24. The silver police vehicles are based on the All Terrain Mobility Platform from the British manufacturer Supacat.

A brief appearance as cosmetic surgeon Dr. Chapman has Jack Purvis , who starred in Gilliam's Time Bandits . Several of the other actors had previously appeared in Time Bandits.

literature

  • Jack Mathews: The Battle of Brazil. Terry Gilliam v Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut. Applause Books, New York 1987, 1998, ISBN 1-55783-347-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brazil on Reelstreets.com, accessed November 5, 2018
  2. ↑ Brazil Film Locations at movie-locations.com, accessed on May 6, 2014 (English)
  3. ^ Croydon 'B' Power Station, Purley Way, South London. In: NMR. English Heritage , February 1991, archived from the original on May 6, 2014 ; accessed on November 22, 2019 (English).
  4. ↑ Brazil (1985) at british-film-locations.com, accessed on May 6, 2014 (English)
  5. ↑ Brazil on the Internet Movie Cars Database website, accessed May 6, 2014