Episode 41 - Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) (with Hope Dickson Leach)
Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Events take a turn for the dystopian in Episode 41, as Chris and Alex venture to Brazil (1985), Terry Gilliam’s nightmarish and absurdist satire of bureaucratic totalitarianism and governmental red tape. They are joined for this latest instalment by very special guest, filmmaker Hope Dickson Leach, whose work includes drama The Levelling (2015), which premiered internationally at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a number of successful short films such as Morning Echo (2010) and Silly Girl (2016). In October 2016, Hope was awarded the inaugural IWC Filmmaker Bursary Award in Association with the BFI at the London Film Festival, was named a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit in October 2017, and a month later won a Scottish BAFTA for Best Screenwriter for The Levelling. Listen as they discuss distraction, delusion, dreaming and desire; the film’s technological commentary on cinema that gestures to the medium’s relationship to fiction; Brazil’s caricaturist logic that contributes to its surrealist horror; and how Gilliam creates the frustration of a vacuous fantasy for protagonist Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) that - thanks to the film’s uncooperative fictional society - can never be enacted.
Suggested Readings
Wells, Paul. 2020. “The Disruptive Metamorphoses of an Impish God: Gilliam’s Satiric Animation.” In And Now For Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python. eds. Kate Egan and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 91 -106. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Winnicott, D.W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications.