Those who feel like reading a good book about films, different from the same old ones, not academic and talky, can get The Battle of Brazil, by Jack Mathews (Applause Theatre Book, 1998); on the cover stands out the striking sentence: "the Most Spectacular Title Bout in the Blood-Soaked History of Hollywood". That is quite true: Brazil represents one of the most incredible production stories in film history, one of those cases in which the story of the film outshines the story in the film.

There are three versions of Brazil.
The first, wanted by Terry Gilliam, lasted 142 minutes. It was considered too long and incomplete by Universal Studios' boss Sheinberg, who didn't allow the film to come out in American cinemas and asked Gilliam to change its end.

The second version is just rubbish. It is not the same film, but instead a love story taking place within an apocalyptic society. The result is the opposite of what Terry Gilliam had meant Brazil to be. This version was strongly desired by Sheinberg, who had to yield to the pressure of the whole production team and of Gilliam himself, who started to secretly organize for critics special on-demand screenings in Canada. The film was hailed by American critics and became a big story: a very much talked-about film that nobody in the US had seen yet.

The third version lasted 132 minutes, some scenes had been cut off and the end was the one Shienberg had wanted. At the Italian box office, where the film was a relative flop, the distributed version was the third one. In reality, Terry Gilliam has edited the film once again as he wanted it to be, making a fourth version that is different from the first one. The director's cut has now been available on DVD for some years, but there are still doubts about its philological accuracy. Which is the real Brazil?

The search for the perfect Brazil, for its different versions, could have come to an end. Instead, people planning a comprehensive retrospective on Terry Gilliam have to face more problems.

Where did Brazil end up?

The original prints of the film burnt, and have been rescued only thanks to some clever as well as elusive collectors. Film libraries all over the world cannot but acknowledge this irremediable "void" in their immense archives.

Have you got Brazil? No, or maybe yes. We have to check it. We'll let you know. No, we don't.

Big distributors don't know where to look for it. They release the film, but they don't know where it is. Ask London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris. No, even there the film is not available.

You do find it in some places, subtitled in unintelligible languages. But which version will that be? No, we really didn't know there are different versions of it...

The task of finding the print of Brazil seems to be as unlucky, accident-prone, and unpredictable as all stories in Gilliam's films. And it really looks like one of Gilliam's films, in which for each possibility you exclude, ten more open up, and no answer is to be found...

However, this is the most exciting and fascinating part of it, both for those who look for Brazil, and for those who watch them with interest, as if they were searching for an ancient manuscript belonging to some great historical figure...