I was rewatching this film the other day(Post 9/11 it seems strangely and disturbingly revelent) and for some strange reason, was trying to make sense of the technology level shown in the film.
Due the to fact they have a mini-switchboard on each of their phones, it implies to me that this society made a wrong turn sometime in the 1940’s(maybe it is supposed to be the 1940’s, but many of the IR goons carry M-16’s…why am I trying to make sense of this?) and the transistor was never invented.
Computers seem to be huge and Bulky like the old mainframes, with all the computers seemingly only terminals connected to such mainframes. All the printers are old dot-matrixish teletypes it seems.
There’s also the fact there are no TV’s or computer screens, but rather small versions of CRTs. I don’t know if that means that they weren’t able to create CRTs or just mini-versions or what.
There’s also the matter of the Ducts. Anyone whose seen the movie knows that they are everywhere in Brazil. I wonder if it’s because air conditioning technology never advanced beyond 1940’s forced air or if it’s more of stylistic approach.
Any comments? Unfortunatly, I really only know about computer tech history. The rest I can’t tell if it’s purely asethic or really represents a 1940’s sense of tech that never advanced.
Interesting theory, but the Germans weren’t exactly opposed to technological advancement. Hell, We borrowed a lot of their technology to improve our military once the war was over.
The other thing, what was the deal with the prevelence of those thick glass cubes(I don’t know what it’s called)? They even had the elevated trains made of them.
Whee…an excuse to dig up an short paper I wrote on Brazil back in college for a film class…
My thought was that it was to make clear how technology can make life more complicated and difficult. It also makes clear that ill-thought out and buggy technology can dominate humans rather than serving them as it should.
But unlike Terminator where an sentient computer uses technology to dominate people, Brazil shows a world where an unseen group of people somewhere behind the bureaucracy depicted in the film dominate people through the technology they’ve created and subverted. Consider the simple, low-tech tools of torture that Jack/Michael Palin uses vs. almost every other element in the film.
Somehow I managed to get 4 double spaced pages out of that…
The technology in Brazil is not supposed to reflect an era. It represents what happens when a society is controlled by a bureaucracy that doesn’t care about efficiency or quality of life. All the devices in the movie are nearly impossible to use, and would be replaced with better technology in any society that was remotely functional.
This is certainly not the whole answer, but Brazil seems to be loosely based on (or just extremely influenced by) “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. That novel is a bitter satire of the totalitarian governments in the late-40s, but projected thirty-some-odd years into the future. I suspect that this is the origin for the aesthetics of “Brazil”.
Another possibility is that the 1930/40s are often associated with the rise of totalitarianism and facism, so maybe “Brazil” is simply using this as visual shorthand.
Of course, the idea of using painfully obsolete technology well into the present day is not unknown in autocratic governments. I often hear about the prevalence of fifty year old cars in Cuba.
Maybe most importantly is that it simply had a sense of humor and surreality.
I always thought of the ever-present ductwork as a visual metaphor for the beurocracy, right down to the impossiblity of ever getting it fixed without going outside the law.
I enjoyed the joke of the computer screens shrunk so small that they now need magnifiers to see them again.
Also, the everyday terrorist attacks and constant paranoia seem striking now under Bush and Ashcroft’s america. But remember, the movie was made, and brilliantly comments on, a world that was pretty much the same as it is now (mid-1980’s). Americans were in the me-decade and the terrorist activity in Beruit and elsewhere was far far away. Now we’re in the me,dammit-decade and the terrorist activity has reached us but we still think of it as far far away.
There are 50-year-old cars in Cuba because of a combination of poverty and the U.S. trade embargo - and the poverty has a lot to do with the embargo. It’s hardly government policy that old Pontiacs be nursed along, year after year. It’s been said that trade embargoes produce virtuoso mechanics - how many 1950s-era American land yachts are still on the road here?!
