Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (1972)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e5/Alice-poster-1972.jpg

Dir. William Sterling

Having discussed films inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (1865), through Roman Polanski's What? (1972), its befitting to actually cover an adaptation of the story. With both the story and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), I've only experienced them within the last year or so. Material adapted, referencing or inspired by the stories though have been something I, along with many, have grown up with. My first encounter was probably with the Disney adaptation, but as I desire to find as many adaptations of the story as possible, it has been adapted in various ways from a Jan Svankmajer film with stop motion animation to porn. What stands out with the stories, within this drastically fluctuating body of versions, fan depictions and takes, is how unconventional they are and how good Carroll was as a writer to make this possible. Nonsensical material you could read to a child, but its developed as an obsession for many adults, myself now part of this grouping, because they provoke so many bold, elaborate ideas and have inspired numerous people. An absurdity, that thankfully translates into this adaptation, where all the parts in depicting it are as important to Carroll in showing the strange. The visual metaphors - playing cards, cats - that anyone can understand but are skewered. The symbolic and mathematical references. The dialogue full of puns and incomprehensible phrases that become sonic poetry, why Jabberwocky, his famous poem, is as famous. Other readings have been added too, possible because its open to many interpretations in its nature, a simplistic journey narrative to both stories that are both about the individual scenarios that Alice encounters on the way. From the clear satirical tone in the stories - like the farcical court room trial that takes place in the story - to the reading added by readers of sexual overtones, allowing British comic book writer Alan Moore and American seventies pornography to be awkward bedfellows. You can adapt it light heartedly, like in this film, or as a disturbing work like American McGee has.

Alice's Adventure In Wonderland is a pretty faithful take on the original, more well known Carroll story. Alice (Fiona Fullerton) falls asleep and ends up in Wonderland, full of size changing foods, mock turtles, a decapitation obsessed Queen of Hearts and enough multicolour, psychedelic foliage that it's no wonder Jefferson Airplane were inspired to link the white rabbit to LSD. Probably the draw for this one, before viewing it, is that, with the all-star British cast, it includes Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore and Spike Milligan. What makes the existence of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland greater for me too is that it's a piece of British art that is timeless, can still inspired people and does so while being a perfect proto-example of one of my favourite areas of artistry, absurdist and surrealist works. Surrealistic artists, especially the British contingent, praised Carroll for preceding them, and anyone, whether the result is good or not, from Poland's Roman Polanski to a Japanese manga artist, can take a crack at using these stories iconography to create intentionally odd and weird works. So what a better thing to do, despite a faithful adaptation being out-of-place next to sex comedies and the likes of Get Carter (1971), then to adapt it within a heyday of its offspring,  absurdist comedy that Sellers, Moore and Milligan were part of? Particularly as Sellers is the March Hair and Moore a narcoleptic Dormouse to the Mad Hatter played by Robert Helpmann.

From http://static2.dmcdn.net/static/video/680/799/51997086:jpeg_preview_large.jpg?20121109133833

Unfortunately this faithful adaptation is one that treats its source material with utmost care and respect as a national treasure...which means that it's too precious for its own good and ignores the greatest virtue of the stories. Even as quaint, Victorian English literature, the greatest virtue of the Alice stories are that they're anarchic and are madder in tone than a box of frogs, more greater in these areas in that it's done with a precise wit, whimsy and solid structures to the plotting. Most egregious to the story's original tone is that this is a musical, songs and the swelling orchestral backing behind them abrupt and too many in appearance, all really sounding the same. The original story is light hearted, but it's completely ridiculous too such a pronounced end. There is an unbridled, uninhibited nature to the stories that makes the polite, gentle tone of the film a betrayal of the original spirit. One where, along with being a mere bystander, has Alice back talking to the populous of Wonderland and nothing makes sense just to be purposely arbitrary to her. If there is a relief from this, it's that remnants of the original tone thankfully still exist. To do a faithful adaptation of the story, you have to include some of its best virtues without question. With its brightly coloured, overexaggerated and artificial looking Wonderland with giant flowers and tiny doors, it's another example of how the production designers are unsung heroes who stand out even in awful films. In fact the whole wholesome tone of the film becomes fittingly bizarre in aspects, especially the animal costumes actors have to wear and the obvious fake, shot-at- Shepperton-Studio look of the setting. If the film dampens the virtues of the story, that doesn't mean it's completely drained out. The moments of rampant verbal punning, bickering about the lack of logic and tangents, from the original story, are all amusing, the Mad Hatter and his compatriots stealing the show because of the actors playing them.

Yes, it's bad that this wraps the original material up in cotton wool, but it still survives in some way despite this. This is why I enjoyed the film nonetheless, but I viewed it as entertaining especially as an example of someone else adapting Carroll's work in its own way, faithful adaptation or not. So far the best version has, paradoxically, been the one that's taken the most liberties while still retaining the tone perfectly, Jan Svankmajer's Alice (1988), reviewed a long time ago on this blog if you search the tool bars. I guess not having to work with something that's your own national heritage gives you advantage. I'll see if this is true as more Alices go through more Wonderlands in my future viewings. 

From http://cinemanostalgia.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Alice-White-Rabbit.jpg

What? (1972)

From http://filmfanatic.org/reviews/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/What-Poster.jpg

Dir. Roman Polanski

I admit that rather than dig into an auteur's canon through the best work, as according to canon, I sometimes end up drifting to the lesser knowns of their careers or the oddities. Failures and miscreants. As much as F For Fake (1973) is a masterpiece from Orson Welles, usually its Touch of Evil (1958) after Citizen Kane (1941) in people's minds while I'm more inclined to dive for the former. My habit connected to how DVDs are released, snapping on the first time releases of an obscurity like a dog on fire. Or when rare screenings are shown on TV that are not easily available. But this habit, because of my peculiar "grab-the-film-in-proximity" mentality, has meant I've had a new side to the question of what auteurism means. Rewatching What?, how am I going to view this as a Roman Polanski film, as I've only seen a couple, and by itself? What exactly is What? By itself, and why has it got that title let alone is how it is? Along with Louis Malle's Black Moon (1975) and Claude Chabrol's Alice Or The Last Escapade (1977), this is another European auteur who decides to do something different by riffing on Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland.

Nancy (Sydne Rome) escapes from a group of men in a taxi, a wide eyed naive American on vacation in Italy, only to end up at a holiday villa cut off in its own eccentric world. Legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni is Alex, a former pimp turned masculine lizard with an eye on Nancy and many peculiar fetishes. There are a pair of British lads, the third friend Polanski himself as Mosquito, with his "Little Stinger", a harpoon in a dumb sex reference. The owner of the villa (Hugh Griffith) is near death and has the eye for Nancy, as does everyone else, such a shambolic man who can play Mozart despite arthritis in his hands. Add a priest, an older American couple, and two women, one usually completely naked, to the mix and a wacky sex comedy is the result. The villa itself is as much of a character. Full of art - Francis Bacon above the bed, Roy Lichtenstein printed on the carpet - and is placed next to an idyllic coast line. Nancy has to both deal with the people in the villa and the villa itself - déjà vu, objects breaking when she just touches them, and more and more of her clothes being stolen and torn. Honestly What? is a weird film. I've overused this word, something I've had to kerb, but it applies for this film. [My Collins Gem dictionary defines weird as "strange or bizarre; unearthly or eerie"] Films that I have praised have been defined as weird because they've broken away from convention; unfortunately I've over the years clouded the term with a vagueness, as someone whose only actually looked at its meaning in the dictionary. What? is weird, but unfortunately it's also slight.

It looks beautiful at least. Two cinematographers - Marcello Gatti and Giuseppe Ruzzolini - and the setting for the erotic farce is perfect for the cinema screen. Expansive ocean. Old Italian architecture.  A tower. Vast corridors. Passage ways and balconies. To reach a room just above you, where a ping pong ball has fallen from which Alex has an irresistible urge to crush to hear the crunching sound, you have to pass through a lengthy journey inside to reach it. Hidden away in obscurity until a few years back, the premise of What? would have worked beautifully, and it does stand out as an absurdist work. Alice In Wonderland but as conceived as more directly sexual and about cross cultural relations, the American in not only Europe but the cinema of Europe, a Polish director, Rome an Italian actress of American birth, Mastroianni and a cross pollination of actors including from Britain. The problems, on a second viewing, is the execution that is full of flabbiness and vagueness. Its tone is immediately off, with discomfort, as a comedy when it starts with Nancy escaping a gang rape in a taxi, which is immediately setting up the film as prickly in its content. The real life events of Polanski causes a problem when viewing this film because, as an erotic absurdist piece, the crime he committed in real life, whether you can separate this from his films or find him completely reprehensible, have a bitter taste to some of the content in What?. It's not that Nancy is continually naked or in a state of undress for most of the film. Nor the kinky and lurid tone. The problems are both how asinine, and merely crass, the sex jokes are and how insipid Nancy is as a main character. It's a problem that the opening involves a near-gang rape done in a jokey way, her backside is continually pinched and she's lusted over by all the men because she is such a blank individual who doesn't take consideration of what's fully going on, the only register that of a deer caught in the headlights. Her submissiveness to Alex is bad not because she's submissive to him but there's no sense of reasonable depth to it even for a sex farce. The tone that would try a gang rape as a joke makes this worse . (Such a tricky, discomforting concept like rape has only been justifiable as a joke, and a good one, from what I've seen in Pedro Almodóvar's Kika (1993) because the joke is on the patheticness of the rapist.)

From http://images10.knack.be/images/resized/119/469/558/521/0/
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Rome is merely pulled along as Nancy, without any real interest for herself onscreen for us to care about her. The Alice In Wonderland scenario, depending on the version, is usually of an onlooker to the scenarios played out, but they can still interact with what happens with some spirit to them. Mentioning Black Moon, actress Cathryn Harrison's protagonist still interacts constantly to the events that take place, as does Sylvia Kristel's in ...the Last Escapade. Nancy could have worked as a character, a stereotype of the youth, the American, who believes in expanding her mind - bell bottom jeans,  yoga, travelling the world - yet has no idea what the old continent of Europe actually is, befitting a subject for the Polish Polanski if he was actually at his best. Her asking of someone's Zodiac abruptly to deaf ears or talking about a philosophy book she's read, she's a caricature of the middle class youth who believes in improving the world but is pretty useless in contributing anything of use, which unfortunately is not used enough. Most of the film is of Nancy in increasingly less interesting sexual scenarios. The character never progresses enough from her views being bashed by the lustings of mad perverts. Rome is just a pretty face, her voice is too thin when you need to depict an extremely naive woman who slowly realises the place she's in is alien to her.

It's a film made on a lark, which would have worked if it was actually daring and chaotic to befit a Wonderland scenario. It has its virtues indeed, but only really in style and Mastroianni. To see him, who dominated La Dolce Vita (1960)  and 8 1/2 (1963), in a tiger suit being whipped is on for the bucket list of viewing experiences, but even if it wasn't his voice heard in the English dub, he still brings a damn fine performance physically to the work. Moments where a better film exists are there. The curtain rail of Nancy's rail falling off and literally every object is almost against her.  A random moment where her left thigh is painted blue. All of this would as madness where nothing for her is going to assist her in the villa, as time repeats over and over again. But the film eventually peters out. After trying to admire it as a flawed gem, I eventually gave up from when Hugh Griffith is introduced. Eventually the most the other characters say to Nancy are directions around the villa or how they admire her breasts, something I found a mere flaw, without any real glee in the sexual humour like a good bawdy work, but just becomes irritating and questionable. It adds a creepiness in its lifelessness without even mentioning Polanski's real life events. The tone, after I stopped deluding myself, is just off, not working at all. The jokes are obvious or non-existent, the lost potential for this scenario felt, worse when its director knew how to do the abstract in his darker material. It's a film that's pleased with itself but fails miserably barring a few virtues.

It does beg the question of what an auteur means when this exists in the director's filmography. It's a fascinating and memorable work, but surely this upsets what Polanski's career means with its existence? And what does it mean if there are people like Jonathan Rosenbaum who put it amongst his essential films of cinema's existence? Am I blind? I fully endorse auteurism as a theory, worship at the shrine of it honestly, but my belief is counter balanced with the realisation that cinema is both the work of many people and that, no matter much I try, there'll always be the odd ones out that prevent the theory from being complete truth. What? eventually drags on, never progressing in tone like the other films referenced in this review. By the end it merely finishes. Leaving the film the viewer finally finds out what the title means, which is, an intended baffling of the audience. "It's the title of the movie!" Nancy shouts to Alex, leaving in the back of a truck, completely naked, full of pigs, suddenly breaking the forth wall. It lacks the subversive and abrupt undermining of it Jean-Luc Godard did very well in two of his late sixties films, Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Week End (1967). Instead it comes off as laboured and missing the point of what it should be doing with its ideas. What? sits at odds in a really tumultuous time in Polanski's life, and even without this in the back of my mind, the film comes off as a bad surreal film. I thought I could appreciate all 'weird' films, but this one is laboured by its end, proving there is a difference when one actually has the spontaneity and creativity that make them great. What? as a title perfectly sums it up, ill-advisedly, in that its title suggests befuddlement in the film because nothing of interest is explained. 

From http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/what.jpg

B Is For... Black Moon (1975)

From http://24.media.tumblr.com/1b587ff0ad3f70034cd3b0fb590011d2
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Dir. Louis Malle

When I watched the whole of a Louis Malle boxset, it because obvious Black Moon was drastically different from any of his other films within it. It still feels like the other four films in that set, which does give a sense of a director who was able, for a movie or two, to shift style and still create something that fitting his filmography perfectly. It also feels like a Freudian romp through Alice In Wonderland with a Andy Warhol/Paulo Morrissey star and a shabby unicorn along for the trip, which is great too.

The only film of Malle's said to be close to this is Zazie dans le Metro (1960), which will be an interesting viewing experience.

Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/15585/b-is-for-black-moon-%E2%80%93-1975-director-louis-malle/

Alice (1988)

Dir. Jan Svankmajer

Czechoslovakia-Switzerland-West Germany-UK

Note: At least with the UK DVD release, the original language version of the film is available, so don’t be put off if the English dub shown in this clip is off-putting.

What Is It?

A pretty faithful adaptation of the Lewis Carroll story Alice in Wonderland viewed through the eyes of surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer, who made his feature film debut after a few decades of acclaimed shorts.

And?

Alice is almost a continuation from Jabberwocky (1971), which combined another Lewis Carroll work of the same name with Svankmajer’s perception of childhood, existing in the same universe as each other. Immediately from the start of the film, it is less a children’s film and more of a surrealist fantasy art film, where Wonderland is interpreted through corridors of a home and its habitants are stop motion creations made from bone, fur, thread etc. It also separates itself from many children’s films in that its child protagonist is not an idolised version of a child, innocent and yet aware of their surroundings, doing what they can to be kind to others. The Alice in this is a more accurate portrait of a young child, very naive and learning about the fantasy environment very slowly, more slowly than the viewer. Also in one scene, at least for myself, where she is trapped in the White Rabbit’s house made of toy bricks, she shows a selfish spitefulness without any malice where she does not follow the requests of others for the sake of it, a rarity in child characters in mainstream cinema.

For those who have not encountered Svankmajer’s work – and you really should, as they are not just for animation fans, but for any film viewer - his work is distinctive in that the man-made aspect of his animation (and even the positioning of real people as actors) and their textures are upfront and as much part of the films as everything else in them. His stop-motion, and surrealistic flourishes, are usually created using everyday objects both man-made (paper, tools and utensils etc.) and natural objects that are manipulated by human beings (stones, taxidermy animals and bones); he has worked with paper animation and puppetry as well amongst other things, but the emphasis on the materials, and their textures and appearances, is still apparent. (Both these styles appear in Alice as well, and are completely inseparable from everything else). Every scene feels like it has by crafted by someone’s own hands, with the flaws of manipulating and moulding everything into place as much part of generating the atmosphere of his work, be it a short or feature film work.

In the context of other adaptations of Carroll’s story, Svankmajer’s style looks far more ‘creepy’ and ‘unsettling’ compared to something like Disney's, an aspect which is purposely emphasised by having such images as loaves of bread suddenly spurting nails from inside them or the White Rabbit continually losing sawdust from the gaping tear in his chest. However the style is able to go from this to charming and humorous as well, the later a definite part of many of the director’s other work even if its black humour. For its source material it is perfect, adding to the adult sense of whimsy which appears in the original story (which, as well as being a surreal fantasy, satirised attitudes of the British culture of that period, as seen when Alice is put on trial by the King and Queen of Hearts). As an interpretation of childhood, it is just as good, enforced by the use of old style toys that look Victorian at times in appearances. A universal nature in Jan Svankmajer’s work can be seen in the fact that these everyday items are ones that viewers probably possessed or know of greatly – owned by themselves or relatives, found in their attics, or even found on car boot sales and in antique stores – regardless of their country of origin. Svankmajer is also an imaginative filmmaker who, as a practicing Surrealist who works in other mediums as well as cinema, has a keen eye for inspired contrasts and juxtapositions. How fitting is it that the portals to Wonderland and between each part are desk’s drawers, part of a piece of furniture stories like this would be planned and written upon?

Sadly Svankmajer’s other feature work after Alice have been hard to find in the United Kingdom, but having seen Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) and Little Otik (2000) he has affectively taken all of his obsessions from his short work and combined them into longer form narratives that show the craft of a talented veteran filmmaker. Also worthy of praise, especially with Alice, is Welsh film producer Keith Griffiths who helped this film, and other Svankmajer works, to be made. I ask of you the reader to look at his IMDB page, which I will provide in this post, and look at his producer credits. Even though I have disliked or hated some of the films he has produced, Griffiths has contributed to cinema in general immensely, helping such filmmakers aside from Svankmajer like Chris Petit, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the Quay Brothers (who are huge admirers of Svankmajer and made a short work in tribute to him) to make interesting and unique works. Having Alice and Conspirators of Pleasure in one’s producer credits is worth applauding, but Griffiths’ is even more incredible than this.

Alice is not my favourite Svankmajer feature (that would be Conspirators of Pleasure) let alone out of all of his filmography, but it is a great achievement, a fantastical and surreal work which matches its subject material like a hand to a glove. The film was finally released on UK DVD this year thanks to the British Film Institution, part of a sudden surge of interest in Alice in Wonderland in cinema that started in 2010. Hopefully his other feature films will be made available, but this by itself was worth the wait for me.

Keith Griffiths’ IMDB Page - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0341702/