Experimentation in Alice

Alice (1987) - Jan Svankmajer

Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1987) is an astounding achievement in film. Svankmajer interprets Carol’s work masterfully. In his interpretation, the rabbit hole does not just transport Alice to a new world, it carries its audience to a new dimension of the filmic arts. In Alice, the transformative narrative allows Svankmajer to experiment with the boundaries of film, presenting viewers with dimensions of the medium they have never before encountered. These experiments do not just amaze, they also delve deep into the human experience.

Svankmajer’s exploration of the visual medium is both methodical and gleefully spontaneous. From the very beginning of the film, he lays before you the subjects of his experimentation. The roving camera in Alice’s room reveals the teacup, the jars of buttons and tacks, the doll, the playing cards, the tarts, even the white rabbit. These are the building blocks that Svankmajer will experiment with through the entire film. In this way, he is methodical, carefully taking each individual prop and re-arranging it again and again, to experiment with it in every possible way.

Despite this methodical introduction, the actual experimentation is wild and courageous.

As is true of all of his work, Svankmajer introduces a sense of texture into Alice that is rare in film. Each successive sequence introduces a new tactile character: the rabbit’s flaky sawdust entrails, the slimy pickled thumb tacks, the coarse sock caterpillars, the limp cut of meat, and the crisp playing cards. Svankmajer sets each one up carefully. At first, we simply see the object. But as the experimentation is pushed farther the character moves and interacts with the space around it in unexpected ways. Finally, Svankmajer’s characters often go through a tactile examination or destruction of some kind. The sawdust is consumed, the pickled tacks spread across Alice’s fingers, the socks first crushed and then inflated again, the cards snipped to bits. This is Svankmajer’s ingenious experimentation at work. It is not enough for us to simply see something in his films, we must see it transformed, destroyed, or consumed for us to truly feel its texture and understand it as a tactile object.

Svankmajer’s experimentations extend beyond the formal elements of the film. He examines the causal nature of storytelling as well. As exemplified in the tea party scene, Svankmajer questions the very nature of progress and agency. The March Hare and the Mad Hatter repeat themselves endlessly, their actions leading to no improvement in their condition or relief from their quotidian worries. Alice is caught in a similar cycle.  Her body is often at the whims of the confusing world around her, a fact that she can do little to change. The juice and tarts, which either shrink or enlarge her body, seem to follow no logical rules, and any attempt to use their powers productively are mostly unsuccessful. In the haunting court scene at the conclusion of the film, Alice’s head is suddenly replaced, in dizzying flashes, with the heads of the other characters she has met on her adventure. She cannot control her own body, not to mention the outcomes of her future. When she is returned safely to her room, it is by no doing of her own. She is plucked helplessly from her plight, her body just another experimental object in the hands of fate.

Svankmajer is not content with simply telling us a story. He wants us to experiment with it, see it destroyed, consume it, watch it be transformed and mutated before our eyes. In this way, we come to understand it that much better. This is not just true with the host of fascinating creatures we encounter in Alice, it is true of the titular character herself. As Alice is transformed, disfigured, and examined from every possible angle, we come to understand her more clearly. Svankmajer’s experimentation is more than just an exercise in artistic limits, it is a method of exposing us to new aspects of the human condition.