Alice, 1988

A particularly dark adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is Czech director Jan Svankmajer’s film. Inspired by such a famous work of art it needs no specific summary: Alice falls asleep and her dream is recounted. This film involves, however, more surrealism than the book despite less attention paid to the more fantastical elements of the novel and more consideration of the darker, quite disturbing aspects that are often overlooked. The most important factor of the film is this interest in the murky mysteries of Carroll and the use of subtle sexual symbolism surrounding his young girl. With the knowledge that we have today of him—that he photographed naked children, that possibly he was a paedophile or at any rate harbored the seedy and salacious dreams of one—the tone of the film becomes wholly disconcerting. The innocent Alice, thus, separates herself from the environment of puppets and dolls and dead things, yet is still influenced by them. Svankmajer asks us if we can, after completing the film and considering Lewis’ life, read anything again by him without mixing his canonical, dreamlike story with that sordid, mysterious air surrounding him. One of the best adapations one may find and the most important of the Alice interpretations put to film.

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