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.