"Now you will see a film made for children... Perhaps.” So claims the opening sequence of Jan Švankmajer's Alice (1988), a romp into a kingdom populated by sentient household things. The movie re-interprets Lewis Carroll's 19th century works, the nonsensical Alice stories that remain a major contribution to the literary canon, while turning a ludic nose up at the simplistic decrees geared toward children in books, art, and culture-at-large. Švankmajer pays homage to the irreverence of Carroll's Wonderland by plunging its characters into his own realm of creaky furniture, taxidermied animals, and questionable foodstuffs. The result is a work of fantastic manipulation.
Alice begins with the child (Kristýna Kohoutová) chasing a frenzied old rabbit stuffed with sawdust. She follows him into narrow desk drawers and through little, locked doors. Švankmjaer’s agile combination of stop-motion with live-action sequences gives the choreography an air of factualness. A human's head could never squeeze into a four-inch-high drawer, for instance, but as the dummy torso and limbs come to double for Kohoutová’s body, disappearing in a matter of blinks into that crevice, something has made it inside, even if fragmentary and partly virtual.
Throughout, Alice sporadically toggles between human and miniature form by swallowing mouthfuls of magic ink and poppyseed kolaches. Sometimes it helps for her to be smaller so that she can make use of the doorways and stairs in the rodent-sized buildings; she turns into a doll, in the same dress and hairstyle as the human. Awkward as doll joints are for movement, she seems even less gainly as a girl. When, prodding around the rabbit's bedroom, she unexpectedly reverts to original form, her head hits the ceiling and, in a tantrum of sorts, she begins attacking the bewildered rabbit. Clumsily shrinking and expanding, unsure of her size, defensive and rather cruel, Alice seems to grapple with the early expressions of puberty.
A good story brings its audience somewhere different from where it started. The genre of stories made for children is a slippery one, but if it can be parsed, simply, into a good story that evokes being a growing creature—a universal experience if any—then Alice meets the mark without a doubt. What's more, there is a lesson here for those who seek it: it's not just in Wonderland that we are confronted with changes in size, contrasts in scale, and different permutations of objects. Real life is vast as well.
Alice screens this afternoon, January 25, at the Museum of Arts and Design as part of the series “Life in Plastic.”
