Victorian Visual Culture

There have been countless adaptations and (re)interpretations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, all varying in presentation (and quality) — a particularly effective one, though, especially in light of our course themes, would be Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer’s 1988 Alice. Its original title is Něco z Alenky which can be translated as “Something from Alice.” Švankmajer’s “something” combines live-action and stop-motion animation, all coming together to create a peculiar and whimsically frightening cinematic experience. Kristýna Kohoutová delivers a compelling performance as both Alice herself as well as the film’s narrator; she also voices every single other character. Each time another character speaks, it is followed by a zoom-in on Alice’s mouth, where she’ll say “said [character].” It truly cements the feeling that this is a story, Alice’s story, and an incredibly dreamlike one at that. Alice’s perspective is privileged above-all—as it is her tale to tell—and this is clear in no adaptation more-so than this one. It is equal parts unusual and beautiful; imaginative and a little demented. It features puppets and taxidermies, strange props and non-human things with too-human eyes, the fancies of children’s nightmares. The smooth movements of the human Alice juxtaposed with the clicky, disjointed movements of the puppets and figures of the other characters makes everything feel slow, off. The settings are just as dreamy as they are disheveled. 

On its own Carroll’s tale is odd and wonderful but the perhaps disquieting visuals Švankmajer is able to dream up are truly fantastic. Here, Alice turns into a little china doll each time she shrinks; the White Rabbit is the taxidermic White Bunny, a creature who comes to life and breaks through his glass-box-confines with a pair of scissors; his version of Carroll’s Bill the Lizard is a sawdust-filled reptile wearing a skull for a head; the Caterpillar is a sock or stocking with huge eyes and dentures. That which is pictured in Alice is no less fanciful than the more classic illustrations of John Tenniel, although to some it might come off as more disturbing. Still, Tenniel’s illustrations are not without their creepier qualities; the illustration of Alice with her neck stretching ever upwards at the start of Chapter 11 (“The Pool of Tears”) comes to mind. Carroll’s tale, and Tenniel’s illustrations, are weird. Švankmajer just happens to be weirder. What purpose, I wonder, does it serve to be weird(er)? That is a rhetorical question; I have my answer. Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland plays with size—zooming in, zooming out, growing larger, shrinking down again. This is only magnified tenfold in the 1988 Alice, where everything is both small and large, innocuous and world-shattering.

This is not a fairy tale, but a dream, and that is why it needs to get weird. Like, super weird; sock-with-dentures-weird. Švankmajer said it perfectly himself. When he was interviewed for Electric Sheep Magazine, he said that, “So far all adaptations of Alice present it as a fairy tale, but Carroll wrote it as a dream. And between a dream and a fairy tale there is a fundamental difference. While a fairy tale has got an educational aspect – it works with the moral of the lifted forefinger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realization of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realized dream.”

Sources:

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1869.

VirginieSelavy. “Interview with Jan Švankmajer.” Electric Sheep, June 14, 2011. http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/2011/06/14/interview-with-jan-352vankmajer/.