10 · 07 · 10

Terry Gilliam: Nightmare of the Human Dream

Joaquín Rodríguez, Programador del FICM

In the first film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, released in 1975, Gilliam debuted as co-director with Terry Jones. Two years later, he directed Jabberwocky on his own, which served as a transition between his work with the Pythons and his more personal approach to filmmaking.  In Jabberwocky, a dark medieval fantasy, he reveals his fascination for interior journeys of self-discovery in which dreams and nightmares alternate in order to construct surrealist worlds where bitter and pessimistic humor prevails. In the first film, Gilliam resorts to a poem by Lewis Carroll as a source of inspiration, and makes clear his fondness for referring to literature, music, poetry, visual art and cinema itself.

His association with Monty Python continued with brilliant and colorful farces like Life of Brian (1979) and Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (1983).  In the second film, he was the author of the initial sequence -- a small work of art in itself that shows the best characteristics of his future filmography.

In 1981, Gilliam released Time Bandits, the first film of a glorious trilogy that includes Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). In these three works – that many critics regard as his best films -- the director explores the impact of imagination on the life of a man (infancy, maturity, old age) as he takes his baroque visual style to the limits of delirium.  It’s not surprising that these films created problems for him with the studios in Hollywood  --even though they have an extensive history of cultivating fantasy cinema, they were incapable of assimilating the freedom, anarchy and lack of self complacency of someone like Gilliam whose imagination and creativity have no limits.

Nevertheless, Hollywood promoted other projects by the director like The Fisher King (1991), Twelve Monkeys (1995) and even the incomprehensible Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), an adaptation of the novel by Hunter S. Thompson that is clearly his most arbitrary and unclassifiable film.

Several of Terry Gilliam’s more recent projects have confronted production problems, but he has been able to continue expressing his unique vision of the world in movies like The Brothers Grimm (2005), Tideland (2005) – another incomprehensible film that explores the darkest and most devastating aspects of the human mind – and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009), proof that this creative filmmaker is as fresh and alive as he was 30 years ago.

For the Morelia International Film Festival it is a privilege to present the filmography of Terry Gilliam: true cult director, icon of a generation, perpetual dreamer, philosopher, indispensable exponent of contemporary film and above all, an indisputable genius of the seventh art.