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Wonderland, Australian Centre for the Moving Image: Alice in all her forms

The imaginative power of quasi-archetypal figures resonates even in the most childish versions of Alice in Wonderland.

Actor Mia Wasikowska as Alice in Tim Burton’s 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland. All images from the exhibition Wonderland, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
Actor Mia Wasikowska as Alice in Tim Burton’s 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland. All images from the exhibition Wonderland, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

The Victorian period represented in some respects the climax of the Enlightenm­ent project of rationality, whose validity seemed confirmed by the spectacular achievements of the Industrial Revolution. The world was changing, becoming faster, more efficient and smaller with the development of mechanised factories, railways, steamships and the telegraph. The superior technology of the West was beginning to change the lives of all humans, and the power of that technology seemed to justify the colonisation of less-advanced parts of the world.

Some of the most characteristic philosophies of the time asserted the primacy of science as a form of knowledge of the world. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), in France, taught the philosophy of positivism. In England, building on the earlier utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and Comte’s friend John Stuart Mill (1806-73), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) proclaimed a ­similar doctrine: only scientific knowledge was real and useful. The word scientific became­ a touchstone for everything that was modern and progressive and good.

Yet the 19th century also had absorbed and remained profoundly shaped by the romantic movement, which had upheld values and interests often incompatible with the spirit of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Romanticism had dwelt on the dark and mysterious aspects of human nature, including dreams, madness and altered states induced by drugs and alcohol, and it considered nature as a living organism rather than the clockwork mechanism of the more radical 18th-century materialists. God and religion­, banished to a realm beyond the materia­l world by early modern science, returned­ as immanent forces within nature.

Illustration by Sir John Tenniel, coloured by Diz Wallis, extracted from The Complete Alice by Lewis Carroll.
Illustration by Sir John Tenniel, coloured by Diz Wallis, extracted from The Complete Alice by Lewis Carroll.

At the same time, the progress of science­ and scholarship in the 19th century, which was in many ways a golden age for universities and academic research, had uncovered disturbing facts and proposed difficult theories. Already, in the 18th century, geology had suggested that the earth was infinitely older than the date extrapolated from adding up the life­spans of the biblical patriarchs. The explosion of chemistry, biology and botany in the late 18th century prepared the way for the new discoveries of Charles Darwin about the evolution of species.

Many of these new scientific theories were deeply disturbing to people with entrenched and inflexible views of religion. For several decades before Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman proclaimed God was dead, thinking people were preoccupied about the implications of the new ­science. But if the religious basis of Western ­society was under stress, other areas of science and philosophy raised difficulties for the hum­anist­ic vein of modern culture. The theorie­s of modern economics, most dramatic­ally those of Karl Marx, suggested history was the product of long-term and impersonal economic and technological developments rather than the decisions, good or bad, of human beings.

Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951).
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951).

Even the new disciplines of anthropology and historical and comparative linguistics implied­ that much of what individuals thought or felt was conditioned by the culture in which they had been born and the language they spoke; this was on top of the Marxists’ assertion that many of our fundamental assumptions were determined by our social class. It appeared that the space for human freedom, for rational­ity and responsibility, was forever shrinking. Later in the century, all this was aggravat­ed by the progress of modern psychology, which claimed that much of our behaviour and thinking was affected by factors below the threshold of consciousness. It appeared that drives and instincts we thought we had under control could be influencing us covertly, and that psychic wounds in our earliest years, covered over by a kind of mental scar tissue, still could be causing us to be unhappy or dysfunctional in adult life.

All of these disturbing influences help to ­explain the eruption of modernist styles in the decade before World War I, but a renewed ­interest in the irrational arose much earlier. On the one hand, there was a fascination with the occult and Eastern spiritual traditions; on the other, there was a vein of ­absurdism, even horror, that runs from the ­stories of Edgar Allan Poe to those of Franz Kafka, including books such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), which also touch on the favourite Victorian theme of the double life.

An Alice in Wonderland magic lantern slide (1905).
An Alice in Wonderland magic lantern slide (1905).

It is in this tradition that we should place Lewis Carroll’s remarkable classics Alice’s ­Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), ostensibly intended for children yet which somehow have achieved an impact on the modern imagination at least equal to that of any of the works just mentioned. The way that the story of Alice became a part of the modern imagination is testimony to Carroll’s unique ­reflection — as a mathematician and logician — on the flaws in the modern rational view of the world. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s ambitious exhibition shows how Carroll’s story has continued to ­fascinate us, and perhaps to elude us, ever since.

Alice Liddell, aged 7, photographed by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).
Alice Liddell, aged 7, photographed by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).

Lewis Carroll was in fact a pen name based on the reversal of the first two of the author’s real names, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98). He was a brilliant young scholar, educated­ at Rugby School and Christ Church College at Oxford, where he obtained first-class honours in mathematics in 1854, and where he lived and taught for the remainder of his life. In 1856, Henry Liddell — best remembered today as the co-author of the still fundamental reference work Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon — became dean of Christ Church and his family became close friends of the author. Their daughter Alice is generally believed to be the ­inspiration for the character in his books.

Rereading Alice in Wonderland today, there are many questions to ponder: why, for ­example, is a little girl the protagonist of the story? No doubt a girl is more receptive, patient and curious than a boy, who may be inclined to rush in and react without thinking. This is a story that needs a main character with a ­capacity for reflection, yet Alice is by no means passive. Although both memory and reason can become confused in Wonderland, she is capable of being assertive and has a spirit of adventure.

Perhaps the key, in a book in which a key plays an important part, and in which the author­ is constantly echoing and parodying other literary texts, is that Alice’s adventures are a varia­tion on boys’ adventure books. Only here the protagonist is a girl, and the adventures are inward, in a myster­ious underground dream world that is a metaphor of the unconscious mind, more than a generation before the public­ation of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899).

A John Tenniel illustration from the first edition of  Alice in Wonderland (1865).
A John Tenniel illustration from the first edition of Alice in Wonderland (1865).

The exhibition begins with a section devoted to the original books, and photos and memorabilia setting the scene in Victorian Eng­land. The experience of the story begins with a re-creation of the hallway lined with locked doors, a subtly nightmarish scenario that could come equally from Poe, Freud or Alfred Hitchcock.

The main part of the exhibition, however, is devoted to film adaptations of Carroll’s stories, and here two main questions arise: the first is how to visualise his world of paradoxical creat­ures and situations, although significantly John Tenniel’s great illustrations in the original books had provided memorable points of departure. The approaches adopted by filmmakers have fallen broadly into the two alternatives of animation and live action, even if the borderline between the two is not always watertight.

On the face of it, animation (most famously in the 1951 Disney version) gives filmmakers the freedom to imagine a world as flu­id as Alice’s height, as she shrinks, then grows, ­before re­sum­ing her normal height as she wakes at story’s end.

Yet the constraints of live act­ion­, as in Jona­than Miller’s 1966 or William Sterling’s 1972 versions, can produce zanier and more memorable images — scenes such as the swimming in the pool of tears, of which different clips are shown. A third alternative, adopted in Czech director Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 interpretation, is to use puppetry­ and stop-motion animation.

A still from Czech Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1988).
A still from Czech Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1988).

Here the effect is far less fluent and superficially illusionistic than in animated or live-action ­versions, and emphasises the strangeness of everything that happens in Wonderland, from the disproportion between figures and their settings to the pervasive sense of absurdity and menace, particularly in the episode­ inside the rabbit’s house, which is filled with uncanny and sinister details.

This brings us to the other great question facing filmmakers in adapting Carroll’s work: how to interpret the meaning of the stories? It is a delicate question, as the power of any great ­literary work lies in its simultaneous clarity of focus and openness to ambiguity. The author­ himself was complex and ambiguous: a man of ostensibly conservative views, politically and in church matters, yet also highly indiv­idual, original, imaginative, even eccentric.

Similarly, Alice is entirely conceived within the upper-middle-class framework of the protag­onist’s family, of which we are subtly reminded­ through references to everything from her dim recollection of lessons to a familiar­ity with marine life mainly as it appears on the dining table. Yet the book parodies moral­istic and pious nursery rhymes, sends up the standard school curriculum, and ridicules figures of authority and the vacuities of legalism. Even in the age of the much-loved Queen Victoria, the character of the Red Queen is ­irascible and ridiculous.

Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Heart’s in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010).
Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Heart’s in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010).

It is partly a carnivalesque inversion of the real world, achieved through the simple conceit of a dream, but is also a serious satire of the pomposities of the adult world, made possible by Carroll’s ability to enter imaginatively into the perspective of children. These nuances are not easy to convey in film versions aimed at children, yet the imaginative power of quasi-archetypal figures and situations resonates even in the most seemingly childish versions.

The most extreme, if still ambiguous rather than explicit, interpretation is offered in the post-Freudian Czech puppetry version, which takes the story as an anticipation of the terrors of puberty and incipient sexuality. Striking as this film is, its psychoanalytically inspired extrapolation limits the suggestiveness and complexity of Carroll’s tale and thus remains, oddly enough, less evocative and less perennial than the story itself and its more ­ostensibly predictable cinematic renderings.

Wonderland

Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. Until October 7.

Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen has been The Australian's national art critic since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/wonderland-australian-centre-for-the-moving-image-alice-in-all-her-forms/news-story/abb19943a6d5d3e96d63d039ad5bfc9b