‘Alice’

On Monday, 30 September, the LRB in partnership with MUBI screened Jan Švankmajer’s film ‘Alice’ at the Garden Cinema as the latest in a series of events exploring the art of literary adaptation. Devorah Baum introduced it.

‘Now you will see a film,’ says a close-up of a mouth with not much face to go with it. It’s a mouth that, though not floating so free from its body as the smile of the Cheshire Cat, recalls the disembodied mouth that speaks in Samuel Beckett’s Not I – a mouth that makes the identity of the one who says ‘I’ a lot less self-evident. In this film, however, we recognise the mouth and the voice with which it speaks as belonging to the picture-perfect girl with the straight blonde hair and pretty pink dress we’ve previously seen in a state of furious boredom hurling stones into a stream.

Her older sister, meanwhile, who sits alongside her on the bank, prim, upright and reading a book, has no mouth, no face and no head: they’ve been cut off by the camera’s frame. Here is a childhood idyll in which the only available authority figure appears curiously decapitated. After which, things only get curiouser. While the voice we hear is a young girl’s, the words she speaks are more like those of a controlling adult, such as an author or director. Her mouth does not say ‘I’, but narrates what’s happening in the third person: ‘Alice thought to herself, “Now you will see a film. Made for children. Perhaps.”’

What I thought to myself when I first saw Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (1988) was: definitely not for children. The Czech director’s later films include Lunacy, featuring the Marquis de Sade, who wouldn’t be entirely out of place in the earlier feature either. But Alice has a PG certificate, and my own children confirmed that it certainly was made for them. They liked the violent bits best, they said. So who was I kidding? To watch the movie with young children is to sense your parental authority getting joyously decapitated, scene by grisly scene, making this a film for children also in the sense of wreaking vengeance on the grown-ups in the room by chewing up every saccharine image of childhood and every morally prescriptive children’s story and spitting them out again. We may think we know what’s ‘for children’, but can we even say for sure what a child is?

Or what an adult is, for that matter. Such uncertainties hover over the movie, just as they do over the oblique discretion of its PG certificate. What ‘guidance’ can a parent offer a child watching a girl adventure into a world where jars of jam contain pins, sardine tins conceal wooden lice, vegetables sprout rusty nails, and animal skeletons gang up on a porcelain doll? ‘Don’t eat pins’? ‘Don’t throw rocks’? ‘Don’t weaponise scissors’? There are of course questions of identity in Lewis Carroll’s book, too, where Alice discusses her experiences with a similarly afflicted caterpillar: ‘I know who I WAS when I got up this morning,’ she says, ‘but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’ One moment she’s tiny, the next she’s enormous; one moment she’s endangered, the next she’s endangering.

Because children are more likely than adults to sense the potential for a sock to turn into a caterpillar, or a drawer handle into a mushroom, they should make better guides to a wonderland concocted out of everyday bric-a-brac: objects that are chipped and decaying, but also refiguring and revivifying into the Unheimlich of the Freudian dreamworld. The rabbit hole that Alice falls through to enter that world is another desk drawer – full of compasses, protractors and other pieces of mathematical equipment that Charles Dodgson might have used. Such tools make a very different sort of sense in the dreamworld, however, where the rules of logic, causality and non-contradiction no longer apply. In the land of dreams, instruments of knowledge look a lot like weapons of war.

Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, chases a different sort of knowledge down the rabbit hole. In the unconscious, Freud said, there is neither time nor chronology, and therefore nothing especially persuasive about mortality. Yet still, in our dreams there’s often that white rabbit feeling of running behind for something terribly important, or of finding oneself, like Josef K, guilty without charge. Not that it’s clear how anyone can be charged in a space where everyone’s simultaneously someone else and oneself; both ‘I’ and ‘Not I’. When the royal court accuses Alice of a capital crime, she shakes her head. However, her head is quickly replaced by a series of other heads, some of which were previously scissored off by the White Rabbit at the order of the Queen of Hearts, but the last of which is the Queen’s own. ‘Which one? Which one?’ Alice’s voiceover asks.

The Queen’s head isn’t a bad candidate, as we see when Alice, upon waking and with scissors in hand, contemplates the white rabbit: ‘He’s late as usual. I think I’ll cut his head off.’ It’s a conclusion that marks a radical departure from the book, in which Alice awakens from her dream to find that it’s she who is late for tea, admonished by her queenly sister. Is Švankmajer’s ending a warning to the purveyors of politesse, prettiness and punctuality? I mean, what is a girl to do in such a world?

Afternoon tea, a meal not proffered strictly for the sake of sustenance, could seem dedicated to indulgence. There, on the laden table, are all the tarts you could wish for. It is simply not done, however, to eat all the tarts. Rather, it’s as if the tea party is organised to stimulate one’s appetites only in order to have those appetites exposed, disciplined and punished. Little wonder this quintessentially English pastime struck Carroll as an activity perfectly suited to the Mad Hatter. Nor is it surprising to find the English form adapting itself to the Czech wonderland of Švankmajer’s Alice, whose tea party isn’t a million miles away from the picnic scene in A Report on the Party and the Guests, the banned satire of life under the Soviet party system directed by Švankmajer’s fellow surrealist Jan Němec in 1966. Alice, in other words, may be the sort of heroine who appeals to us most in contexts of severe repression – sexual, political or otherwise – by joining the subversive tradition of children who call out, in one way or another, the nakedness of the emperor.

Alice, for all that her head is spinning, never loses her mind or appetite over the course of her adventures. If something says ‘drink me,’ she drinks. If something says ‘eat me,’ she eats. No matter her education in etiquette, she remains curious about the taste of things. The first thing she tastes in Alice is a prick of her own blood, suggestive perhaps of a character driven by a taste for danger, or a taste for death. And yet the curious child who wonders about the taste of her own blood is also exhibiting a taste for life, and a taste for herself. For those willing to follow Švankmajer down the rabbit hole, ‘a taste for life’ could even be an answer to the question of what a child really is. Perhaps.

If you weren’t able to attend the screening you can watch ‘Alice’ by signing up for thirty days free on MUBI.