Imagine a world somewhere between a David Lynch fever dream and an industrial design nightmare. That’s Brazil (1985), Terry Gilliam’s bizarre, wonderfully inventive film about the superficiality of consumerism and the crushing weight of totalitarian control. In the film’s dystopian vision of the future, cavernous buildings are clogged with pneumatic tubes, mountains of paperwork, and retro-fitted technology. It’s the kind of film that makes you wonder where on earth its director came up with all this stuff. While it owes an obvious debt to George Orwell’s 1984—the all-encompassing surveillance, the soul-crushing bureaucracy, the omnipresent sense of dread—Gilliam subverts that bleakness with a biting, absurd sense of black comedy that Orwell never intended. It’s also a stunning visual achievement that highlights the folly of an architectural and social design obsessed with efficiency at the expense of humanity, turning the built environment itself into a weapon against the individual.
Join us Friday, November 20th at the Lawrence Arts Center’s Microcinema (10th & Mass Studios) for Brazil. A brief Q&A with Lawrence Modern’s Tom Harper and KU design professor Tim Hossler will precede the screening. Tickets are $10 at the door or available in advance here. Runtime: 2 hours, 22 minutes. Don’t miss the chance to see this weird, wild, darkly funny masterpiece—unlike anything else ever to light up a movie screen.
—Tom, Bill, Dennis & Tim
Brazil original trailer | Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review (1985) | NYT Critic’s Picks | Lawrence Arts Center tickets
