Alice

(Jan Svankmajer’s “Decalogue” reveals his opinions and insights about creation, childhood, and consciousness. Reading this piece after viewing the film for this week’s topic has helped to inform my interpretation of and response to it:

https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-3-issue-1-spring-2006/decalogue/ )

Children’s media has a significant overlap with the horror genre. The experience of childhood is an inherently vulnerable one, and the psyche of a child is closer to the surface than the psyche of an adult. A child has not had the experience, the understanding, or the social conditioning to fully understand what to fear and how to react to that fear. And so darkness and anxiety are often present in the stories we relate to children.

To paraphrase one conclusion from our in-class discussion, media for children might not (at some point, should not) be deliberately terrifying to its tender audience members. But creating media about childhood without including an aspect of fear would be doing childhood a disservice. And so when Alice tells us in an extreme close-up that Jan Svankmajer’s film “is for children, perhaps!” we can guess what we are in for.

Children’s films are often highly sensory. We saw bright and lush worlds during our class discussion on imagination; even despite the foreboding nature of the environments in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Pan’s Labyrinth, they are beautiful and jewel-like places. Jan Svankmajer’s Alice is also highly sensory world, but in a very different way. This world is dusty, dirty, grimy, and grim, packed with uncomfortable and often dangerous items and textures. Alice is a prickliest, scratchiest film I’ve ever seen, full of dirty socks and splinters and skinned knees and chipped paint. The other senses are engaged in an unusual way here too: Alice tastes everything, drinking bottles of ink and licking oil off a key in a sardine tin, eating pieces of "mushroom" (bits of wood from a sock darner) and trying a bit of sawdust (which, as the stuffing for the bizarre, mash-up taxidermy animals residing in this world, actually functions as their blood and innards. They all seem to enjoy eating it). 

As Alice wanders through rooms and dives through drawers, shrinking and growing and meeting all kinds of strange creatures, we realize this is a game where the rules change. There is ambiguity to what forces are in charge. Is it a dream? Is it Alice’s imagination as she plays by herself? The characters in this world are morphed and anthropomorphized iterations of the mundane belongings in her room. A dream, particularly one without the control that comes from lucidity, picks out details from a person’s waking state and gives them a subconscious weight. The weight of things in this Alice's trip to Wonderland is that of hostility, violence, and morbidity. 

I really liked that this “version” of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is actually a straight reading of the text, superimposed onto a child’s twisted and splintered idea of the space in which she resides. So while Svankmajer’s representations of the original text’s characters and situations are not "literal", the film actually functions more as an ambivalent commentary on childhood imagination. Without much hesitation, Alice plunges into spaces she does not fit. Her magical, subconscious world is violent and Alice is violent right back.

The use of stop-motion fills in the magical and surreal aspects of the narrative. Stop-motion is an imperfect technology which, when used in a children’s horror/fantasy story, emphasizes the uncanny nature of both living things that aren’t alive and living things that shouldn’t be. Alice is interested in things that toe the line between familiarity and discomfort; dolls, masks, taxidermy, puppets. Is the cutting and biting and disembodiment of these things made benign by their "unrealistic" natures? Or is it made even more disconcerting?

The hostility of the subconscious is explored through Alice's journey. And though Alice comes away unharmed when she leaves her Wonderland, in her waking world, the white rabbit, the catalyst of it all, is still unfettered, still uncaged, and still missing. With a sly voice Alice ponders whether she'll cut off his head. 

The Graveyard Book (A Late and Truncated Assessment)

“It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will,” said Silas, “take a graveyard” (22).

In The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman’s spooky take on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Nobody Owens is a live human boy living amongst the dead in a graveyard. His family is brutally murdered when Bod is just a baby, so the cemetery residents adopt him when The Lady on the Grey, the peaceful and wise personification of death, tells them, “The dead should have charity” (29).

The novel spans Bod’s childhood and the beginning of his adolescence. His interactions, adventures, experiences, and instructions evolve with him. The members of the graveyard work together to raise him. He learns to talk, learns to ask questions. “The adults would do their best to answer his questions, but their answers were often confusing, or contradictory, and then Bod would walk down to the old chapel and talk to Silas… His guardian could always be counted upon to explain matters clearly and lucidly and as simply as Bod needed in order to understand” (35).

Bod is Mowgli. Silas is Bagheera, the fierce and wise but soft-voiced guardian over the human child. Both Gaiman’s and Kipling’s guardian characters straddle the disparate arenas each narrative is concerned with; life and death in The Graveyard Book and wildness and civilization in The Jungle Book. Mr. and Mrs. Owens are the father and mother wolf. The host of ghostly residents in Bod’s graveyard home, who hail from a variety of eras and are of a variety of dispositions, are the myriad of jungle creatures. They act as parents and teachers, guardians and relatives of every parental sort. They represent the multiplicity of morality. This is best represented in a frank and surprisingly beautiful discussion of suicide, wherein Bod, curious about the unmarked graves outside of the cemetery gates, asks the adult ghosts about the people who were buried there. They respond with fear, disdain, and dismissal. He then finds out for himself by befriending the ghost of a witch named Liza, and helping her get her own headstone.

No matter the opinions of the properly buried ghosts, and even the sound advice from his most trusted guardian, Bod had to engage with the “other” in order to make his own assessment about an ignored and ostracized person’s worth, and in doing so, establishes his own sense of morality.

Where the morality of The Jungle Book is complicated because animals are animals and not people, The Graveyard Book insists that morality is complicated because those teaching morality are generally not as present within the world they are evaluating as the people who are looking for moral direction.

The child protagonist’s humanness is paramount in each story. (The ghouls are analogous to the monkeys in The Jungle Book, taking on the titles of prestigious persons so they might feel as important and powerful as humans. The man Jack is Shere Khan, both vicious murderers threatened by the young protagonist’s very nature.) The dead are different from the living, according to The Graveyard Book, in terms of their potential: “You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you’re dead, it’s gone. Over. You’ve made what you’ve made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished."

But youth is humanness unadulterated, and pure potential. In Disney’s 1967 film The Jungle Book the jungle is fun and feral and wild and dangerous and Mowgli must leave it in order to join civilization and become a productive contributor to the realm of man where he belongs. The graveyard is home for Bod. Though it is an environment associated with darkness and death, for Bod it is what is comfortable, what is familiar, what is safe. For the most part, though there are threats within this space, it is the things from outside the graveyard that are dangerous, and over half of the narrative involves Bod’s guardians telling him, “As long as you stay here, you are safe” (35). But by the last third of the novel The Graveyard Book tells youth they must leave home, make mistakes, find themselves, and learn what the world has to teach them. The morality of the home and of the family is a crucial safe place to begin in. Bod must leave the known and enter the unknown to fulfill his potential.

Not One Less

The function of documentary and documentation within children’s media is to present and represent realities. It’s interesting that firmer assertions of actuality often have the connotation of hardship. This makes it difficult to know what would be most useful for children to view. As a child I disliked Harold and the Purple Crayon simply because his parents appeared to be nonexistent. I do not think I had the capacity to appreciate the devastating social and political realities which affect the smallest and weakest among us. It would have hurt me too much. But because empathy is crucial to foster in all audiences, young and old alike, there is a gradient to be aware of and to interact with, by which portrayals of suffering can eventually be appropriate and useful.

Segments of Sesame Street brought real children and real adults to interact with each other and with the Monsters, and it introduced me to types of people I would have been unfamiliar with otherwise. Arthur’s “And Now A Word from Us Kids!” was a short documentary segment between episodes. I remember the one about students from a school for the blind making chocolate chip cookies together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Dh_oTOnRI

A is for Autism is one of the most empathetic documentary shorts I have ever seen. It pairs the audio of interviews with autistic people with animated illustrations representing their inner spaces and exterior experiences. It is cluttered, chaotic, childlike, educational, and profoundly eye opening, and functions to bring its viewers into the mindset of an autistic life experience. Because its form follows its function, it encourages a deep and unusual kind of empathy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxt3FBVq8Jg

Another empathetic documentation about children and hardship, but probably for older audiences, is Not One Less, a film that proves the documentary power of even fictional narratives. Not One Less plays out like a desperate and insistent filmic rendition of “There’s A Hole in the Bucket, Dear Liza” taking place in China during the education reform. I have seen and read and listened to accounts of an underprivileged or in someway disabled person fighting all odds and achieving their goals through their determination and sheer willpower. Without being dismissive of one-armed wrestlers and paraplegic windsurfers, the inherent systematic degradation portrayed and fought against in Not One Less is the greatest display of determination and persistence I have ever seen.

Wei Minzhi is a thirteen-year-old teacher of an impoverished rural Chinese classroom. When one of her students, Zhang Huike, runs away to the city of Zhangjiakou she tries to get him back, first by attempting to earn her way, and then by walking there herself, scouring the city to find him and bring him back to school. Wei Minzhi’s tenacity is herculean. The film is one deadlock situation after the next, tedious and minute defenses against the deep and vast offense of bureaucratically enforced inequality. It is aggravating to watch because of the logistical impossibilities of the circumstance set against the duration and repetition involved with fighting it.

Wei Minzhi’s endeavor is so small and specific that you could never guess how endlessly complicated and arduous it is and keeps being. It is fascinating to compare Not One Less to Maidentrip (the documentary I watched last week for “Adventure”), wherein Laura Dekker, a fourteen-year-old girl from Holland, drops out of school so she can achieve her dream of sailing around the world solo. Wei Minzhi understands that education is the only thing they have, and, completely without resources, experience, education, or support, goes on a journey that renders Maidentrip frankly indulgent.

Not only is Not One Less a narrative without the fuss, without the press, and without the capitalistic individualism driving a teenager to abandon other responsibilities, but because the actors are all non-professionals playing versions of themselves within a neorealist filming style, reality and fiction are blurred into a highly applicable and metaphorical narrative pertaining to all individuals caught in a bureaucratic system of inequality and poverty. This gives Not One Less great documentary power in portraying a hopeless situation and the gloriously persevering mindset that is able to conquer it.

Maidentrip

As the principal cameraman in Maidentrip, Laura Dekker, a fifteen-year-old girl from Holland, has all the means to make an introspective autobiography about her solo journey around the world, and she toys with this sometimes – she tells us about feeling displaced, and the complications of her fragmented family. She weeps when dolphins swim alongside her sailboat, beautiful companions after so much loneliness. But despite the intimacy of this voyage, its extent, its expanse, we never learn much about Laura. Adolescence tends to hold others at arm’s length. Maidentrip tends to, as well.

Laura Dekker is no documentarian. She is a sailor and a teenager. Her footage is light on the processes and the challenges that would bulk up and inform a documentary of this caliber. This is no doubt due in part to the fact that those were the very moments she was busiest, but because of this logistical decision and because of what adolescence is, Maidentrip lacks a handle on duration, patience, composition, experimentation, and self-reflection – except, notably, when the camera is handed to an adult.

Laura doesn’t have to be a documentarian. Her accomplishment is unheard of. Her confidence is astounding. She is prepared and capable and resilient. At sea for 519 days, traveling over 27,000 nautical miles, she successfully realized her dream of sailing around the world by herself. She is as bona fide an adventuress as anyone, and she feels invincible.

But it is remarkable that the form of this film downplays the adventure of it. Vulnerability, danger, weakness, and doubt, the necessary opponents of success, are quite nearly foregone in this 80 minute long documentary.

As recorded by Laura, Maidentrip is a travelogue. Laura listens to pop music, dyes her hair red, and dances around her beloved ship Guppy. Her eyes often waver between the camera lens and the viewfinder, always conscious of her appearance but not self-conscious enough to not stick her tongue out. She dabbles in angst and the f-word. In one scene she is visiting the Pacific Islands and dealing with the customs office there, finding it preposterous that someone would think to bother her about her itinerary. The moment simultaneously represents the insolence of adventure and the inconvenience of systems. Both people are right to be annoyed. Laura’s platitudes about dreams coming true seem like flaccid excuses to dismiss the mundane and the routine. She expresses disdain for the Dutch way of life, indignant about the prescribed pattern of getting things: a car, a job, a house, a baby. This is why she left that world, she says. Everything at home is boring and stupid.

But of course she feels that way, and of course her emphasis is on her invincibility without ever giving us the details about it. What is more egotistical than adolescence? What is more contradictory? What shifts and morphs as frequently as the oceans? But here is an important irony; sailing is a supremely monotonous task punctuated by duress and excitement. Laura Dekker must appreciate "nothingness" more than she realizes. Her journey makes it clear that she understands what the means to an end are, and that she understands that an end isn’t the point at all. And when examined, this point opens up more than she intended.

Maidentrip zips by too quickly without ever really letting us in. This is a brief and snappy documentary about a long and arduous expedition. It seems that everything that goes unsaid or unshown in Maidentrip is where the truth and the significance of Laura’s adventure really is: the process, the boredom, the loneliness, the emotions, the opinions, the danger, the growth. Leaving is a classical notion, indeed, archetypal. As such, Laura’s is a hero’s journey, and if life is a journey then adolescence is a particularly tricky leg to navigate. Her age prevents her from complete objectivity but it also makes her wary of addressing her own subjectivity. There is one shot in the very beginning of the film where we see Laura from far above, minuscule in her tiny boat, in the expanse of blue. The shot, taken by an adult at a distance, represents more truth about her situation, both as a sailor and as a teenager, than she is able to capture in her handheld camcorder, held at arm's length and pointed at herself.