Victorian Visual Culture

It is clear that Alice continues to be a popular figure in our culture today, and one of the many telling factors is her presence in film. Wikipedia’s entry on Alice in Wonderland offers an extensive though apparently incomplete list of Alice’s appearances in cinema and television, from the 1903 Hepworth and Stow production Meghan just posted, to a 1999 television movie. Going back to the disambiguation page for Alice in Wonderland, there are three more adaptations listed: a  (2005) Malayalam-language film, a  (2009 miniseries), which is “a modern interpretation TV miniseries broadcast on Syfy,” and of course, Tim Burton’s oft-bashed (2010) Disney film.

In Thirteen Ways of Looking At Alice in Wonderland in Film, Jan Susina (The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature) writes “One of the great strengths of the Alice books is how various directors have been able to create distinctive and original films based on the same text,” before discussing her selections and directing readers to David Schaefer’s “Alice on the Screen” in the Annotated Alice text we are using.

As I am guessing all of us have seen at least one Alice adaptation in our life thus far, I was interested in what everyone finds so fascinating about Alice, and what exactly you think makes Lewis Carroll’s story so ageless and continuously interesting to audiences and inspirational to artists up to this day? Since two of the blog posts on Alice have already been on film adaptations, I was particularly interested in that particular medium’s interpretations of her story. What are your favorite film (or otherwise!) versions of the story?

I just watched Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 “Alice” this weekend, and was hugely impressed with it.

Here’s a short clip,  just for fun –