Alice: Švankmajer's Stop-Motion Wonderland

Every screen Wonderland has the same problem: Lewis Carroll wrote a book about a child being bullied by objects, and cinema keeps adapting it as a book about a child having an adventure. Disney softened it into a pageant. Tim Burton turned it into a prophecy with a sword in it. Both had to invent a plot, because Carroll declined to supply one, and both had to invent charm, because Carroll’s Wonderland is mostly rude.

Jan Švankmajer’s Něco z Alenky (1988) — Something from Alice, released in English as Alice — is the version that reads the source correctly. It runs about eighty-six minutes. It has exactly one human performer. It contains no music. And it is, by a wide margin, the most faithful Carroll film ever made, because Švankmajer noticed the thing everyone else edits around: nothing in Wonderland is on Alice’s side.

One girl and a house full of dead things

Kristýna Kohoutová plays Alice, and she is the only living actor in the picture. Everything else is a made thing — a puppet, a skeleton, a bit of taxidermy, a sock, a set of dentures.

Švankmajer’s frame is a dilapidated house rather than a garden. Alice sits with her sister by a stream, throwing pebbles, bored to the point of pain, and then she is in a room, and in that room there is a glass display case with a stuffed white rabbit in it. The rabbit pulls the nails out of its own stand, cracks the glass, takes a pocket watch from a drawer in its chest, and leaves. Sawdust leaks from a split in its side, and it stops, periodically, to scoop the sawdust back in and eat it. The rabbit carries scissors the way other rabbits carry watches, and it uses them.

That single sequence tells you the film’s whole thesis. Wonderland is a museum after hours. Everything in it was alive once, has been mounted, and is now moving anyway — which is a very different proposition to a talking animal. When the White Rabbit checks the time and hurries off, he is doing it with a hole in his chest and his stuffing on the floor.

Alice follows him through a desk drawer. The drawer is a door. That is the whole geography of the film: every passage into deeper Wonderland is a piece of household furniture behaving as an architectural feature, and the effect is claustrophobia rather than wonder. She goes further into the house, and the house keeps producing more house.

The mechanics: why the lips are the best idea in the film

Here is the device that makes the film work, and it costs almost nothing.

There is no dialogue in Alice. When a line of Carroll needs speaking, Švankmajer cuts to a huge close-up of Kohoutová’s mouth, and the mouth says the line — including the attributions. Alice’s lips say her own words, then say “said the White Rabbit”, then say the Rabbit’s words. Every voice in Wonderland is hers. Every “said” tag is spoken aloud, as though a child were reading a book to herself and doing the voices.

This is a masterstroke on four separate counts. It solves the puppet-voice problem, which sinks nine adaptations in ten. It makes the film’s dream logic explicit without a single frame of exposition — this is Alice’s narration, so of course everything obeys her nightmares. It preserves Carroll’s actual prose, attribution tags and all, which no other adaptation dares. And it is deeply, physically unsettling, because a mouth in extreme close-up, isolated from a face, stops looking like speech and starts looking like an organ.

The rest of the craft follows the same logic. Švankmajer trained as a puppeteer and animates with a fetishist’s attention to surface: wood grain, tacky glue, worn felt, sawdust, real meat. The soundtrack is foley pushed past naturalism until every drawer, every footstep, every mouthful is an assault. There is no score to tell you how to feel, so the texture does it, and texture is a far cruder instrument — it can only report what a thing would be like to touch. Wonderland, reported that way, is splinters, cold porcelain, damp felt and raw meat. The same instinct, scaled up to feature-length domestic horror, runs Little Otik twelve years later; the same instinct, aimed at bodies instead of objects, runs Conspirators of Pleasure.

And the shrinking is done with a substitution that nobody else would have risked: when Alice gets small, she becomes a porcelain doll. A doll with painted-on hair, animated frame by frame, and Kohoutová returns when the size returns. Švankmajer is saying something quite hard here about what happens to a child inside her own imagination. She loses her body and becomes a toy — and then she has to break out of the doll to get it back.

The bestiary

The Caterpillar is a sock with a set of dentures and two glass eyes sewn on, burrowing through a wooden floor and stitching its own eyelids shut to sleep. The March Hare is a wind-up stuffed hare whose mechanism has to be cranked and which keeps running down mid-sentence. The Mad Hatter is a wooden marionette on visible strings. The tea party is a loop of pouring, spilling and cranking that goes on past comfort, because Carroll’s tea party is a loop that goes on past comfort. The Queen’s court are flat playing cards on stands, and the executions are performed with a lath and a snip.

All of these designs are cheap, ostentatiously so, and that is the point.

Watch what Švankmajer does with the Rabbit’s scissors across the film and you get his method in miniature. They appear first as an absurdity — a piece of sewing equipment in a waistcoat pocket. They recur as an instrument of office when the Rabbit becomes the Queen’s executioner, snipping heads off card courtiers with the bored competence of a man trimming hedges. By the end they are simply the sharpest object in the room, and the film has taught you to track them. Carroll’s Wonderland runs on nonsense objects that turn out to have jobs. Švankmajer runs the same gag with a props table and no jokes, and it is far more frightening than any pantomime Jabberwock, because the scissors were always just scissors, and someone was always going to pick them up. Švankmajer made this in 1988, in a Czechoslovakia four years off the end of state socialism, working with junk-shop materials in a country where junk-shop materials were the materials. Wonderland here is what a clever, isolated child builds out of the contents of an old house because nothing else is available. The film’s poverty is its realism.

The real ancestor

Reach past Disney. The ancestor of Alice is the Czech animation tradition that produced Jiří Trnka’s puppet films and Karel Zeman’s contraptions, run through the wing of Prague surrealism that Švankmajer belonged to for real — he was a member of the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group, an underground affiliation that carried real costs in a state with firm opinions about surrealists.

Its closest sibling in world cinema is Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, another Czech film about a girl walking through an adult world that has been rendered as a set of predatory objects. Its clearest descendants are the Quay Brothers, whose debt to Švankmajer is explicit and acknowledged — they made a short film in tribute — and whose Institute Benjamenta is the same aesthetic asking what happens when you put a person inside it. And anyone who came out of Eraserhead with a taste for household objects behaving badly will find Alice has been waiting for them since 1988.

The honest case against

Eighty-six minutes of relentless tactile unpleasantness with no music, no dialogue and one facial performance is a genuine endurance test, and I will defend anybody who taps out at the tea party. Švankmajer’s animation is deliberately unlovely and deliberately repetitive; the film’s rhythm is a series of loops, and if the loops are not doing anything for you by the forty-minute mark they will not start.

The bigger charge is that Alice is all texture and no arc. Carroll’s episodic structure is preserved intact, which means the film has no accumulation — it stops rather than concludes. Švankmajer would say the accumulation happens in the viewer, and he is mostly right, but “mostly right” is doing some work there.

The verdict lands on the film’s honesty. Every other Alice asks you to enjoy Wonderland. This one asks what it would actually be like to be a small girl in a locked house where the furniture is hostile, the animals are dead, and the only voice explaining anything is your own. That is Carroll’s book. The whimsy was always something we added afterwards to make it bearable.

Where to find it: Alice has been well served on disc for years and drifts through the arthouse streaming tier. Watch it before Faust — it is the gentler of the two, which tells you something about Faust.

Spoilers below

The film’s closing move is the reason it holds together. Alice wakes in her room, back in the frame, with the display case in front of her — and the case is empty. The rabbit is gone, in the waking world, where a stuffed rabbit has no business going anywhere.

She looks at the drawer where the scissors live. She reaches for it. Švankmajer cuts, and her mouth delivers the last line, which is a plan: she will cut off his head. The child who has spent an hour and a half being threatened, shrunk, boxed, and sentenced has finished her dream by identifying the person responsible and deciding to do something about it.

It is the most convincing ending any Carroll adaptation has managed, precisely because it refuses the “it was all a dream” exhale that Carroll himself supplies. In the book, Alice’s sister wakes her and the terror dissolves into a summer afternoon. Here the terror survives contact with daylight and hands Alice a pair of scissors. Wonderland came back with her, and what it taught her was appetite.