A young girl creates a bizarre, fantastical world in Jan Švankmajer’s unique retelling of Lewis Carroll classic
ALICE (NĚCO Z ALENKY) (Jan Švankmajer, 1988)
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd.
Wednesday, August 19, free, 7:00
718-956-1819
socratessculpturepark.org
Czech master Jan Švankmajer’s debut feature-length film is a unique and unusual trip inside Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But this being Švankmajer, who began making creepy and fun stop-motion animated shorts in 1964, this is not a traditional telling. “Alice thought to herself, Now you will see a film made for children — perhaps,” Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) says at the beginning. “But — I nearly forgot — you must close your eyes. Otherwise, you won’t see anything.” Sitting on the bank of a river, Alice tries to look at the book being read by her older sister (the figure is possibly a doll; the audience never sees the head), but Alice gets slapped, so she soon creates her own story in her head, as a taxidermied white rabbit comes alive and she follows it into a desk drawer and enters a weird, fantastical land where she alternates between being a regular-sized girl, a giantess, and a small doll. She encounters Carroll’s Mad Hatter, the beheading-crazed queen, a live piglet, and his other oddball creatures as she keeps finding keys that lead her into stranger and stranger places. She never smiles as her curiosity grows, very much a child with natural fears about what awaits her in the future. Alice gives different voices to all the characters as she narrates the tale, with all the lines identifying the speaker (“said the white rabbit,” “cried out the Mad Hatter and the March Hare”) accompanied by an extreme and disconcerting close-up of Alice’s mouth saying the words. Alice has constructed a dark world in her imagination, one that is not nearly as playful as the one created by Carroll. Švankmajer’s (Faust, Little Otik) use of dolls, puppets, and bizarre sets is impressively peculiar as the story takes grotesque twists and turns that are certainly not for younger children. Alice is screening August 19 as part of the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema series and will be preceded by a live performance by Brooklyn electronics duo Xeno and Oaklander, and Eastern European food will be available from Bear; the summer festival concludes August 26 with Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. And be sure to get there early to check out the summer art installations in the park. (Švankmajer, who at eighty years old is hard at work on his next project, was a major influence on the Quay Brothers, and you can see just how much in “The Quay Brothers — on 35MM,” running August 19-25 at Film Forum.)