Alice (The American's Guide to Czech Movies) (Patreon)

The world of Alice in Wonderland adaptations is a Wonderland unto itself. Lewis Carroll has been co-opted and bowdlerized by Disney, eviscerated by Tim Burton, cleverly re-interpreted by Jonathan Miller, and turned opaque by Grace Slick. The Alice books are malleable, infinitely readable texts which have only been done justice on screen a handful of times.

But only Czech stop-motion filmmaker Jan Švankmajer’s Něco z Alenky, or Something from Alice, has rivaled Lewis Carroll for sheer weirdness. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is certainly a source for Švankmajer’s Alice, but it’s hardly sufficient to describe the latter work as an adaptation. Švankmajer transforms Alice not just aesthetically but culturally. He strips away the source material’s Britishness and turns the underlying story into a uniquely Czech nightmare. The result is one of the most singular, enrapturing, and incomparable pieces of batshit lunacy ever committed to film.

The bulk of Alice adaptations highlight the ostensible tweeness of the source material. Alice will often be a sweet little girl lost in the machinations of adults playing children’s games. The 1951 Disney movie, which tragically has overtaken Carroll and John Tenniel’s brilliant work in the cultural imagination, defangs the books considerably, reducing Wonderland into a fairy tale rather than the nightmare it is. Tim Burton attempts to emphasize the nightmare of Wonderland, but really only succeeds at making an insipid, hideous, joyless world where post-Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Johnny Depp is supposed to pass for charming.

Meanwhile, Jan Švankmajer puts the Alice stories in an important space in Czech culture in the final years of the Berlin Wall. Alice is the first post-Czech New Wave film we’ve covered in this series, and there’s a reason for that. Most of the acclaimed Czech movies come from the New Wave era or impactful moments in Bohemian-Moravian-Silesian history. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Czech lands saw a period of normalizace (normalization), where the status of day-to-day life was brought up to speed with Moscow’s way of doing things. Films like The Joke and The Cremator were banned. Milan Kundera fled Czechoslovakia. Nobody looks to the Seventies and Eighties as a highlight of Czech history.

So Švankmajer’s Alice is a pivotal work in Czech cinema, precisely because of the sheer bizarreness it offers in such a cold moment in history. It is a distinctly Czech movie, stripping away the Victorian Englishness of Carroll and supplanting it with the quotidian yet eerie horrors of Czech domesticity. Czech folklore is rife with child deaths, comeuppance, and frog men who drown you. History gets related through puppet shows, a tradition that’s still popular in Prague. Everything Czech has a degree of eeriness to it, like something crept into the heart of Central Europe that no empire has managed to tame.

As such, Alice looks surprisingly down-to-earth and organic — it combines stop-motion with live-action sequences where the most expensive props seem to be doll houses. It only features one human actor with dialogue, Kristýna Kohoutová as Alenka, who, in the tradition of the Czech New Wave, was a non-actor who never appeared in another movie. And there are a handful of puppets, another Bohemian tradition, animating a story where mythical creatures are not friends but eldritch horrors, such as a taxidermic White Rabbit who eats his own innards and tries to saw Alenka’s hand off. Alice is gobsmackingly weird in a way not managed by Burton’s half-hearted “epic” interpretation or Disney’s twee evisceration of Carroll.

Yet there’s nothing cynical about Alice, or even truly revisionist about it. It simply capitalizes on the text in an extraordinarily unique way. Instead of focusing on the children’s games aspect of Carroll, or — God forbid — misinterpreting the book as a fairy tale, Švankmajer turns Wonderland into a bad dream. He does so by rendering Wonderland scary in that uniquely childlike way where adults are too emotionally distant to guide you and their world is too confusing to be successfully navigated and must be escaped (after a while, at least). It's as close to L. Frank Baum as it is to Carroll, since Oz is another dreamscape of permanent entropy where everything is sentient and breaks down but nothing ever dies (I think my next project will be an overview of the Oz books).

And moreover, he follows dream logic to truly horrifying extents, mirroring my own nightmares (I once had a dream about a house full of dolls made of dismembered children — this is pretty close to Alice’s aesthetic). Wonderland in Carroll’s books was always a bit creepy in how the adult world — the Victorian adult world — was unresponsive and uncaring. In Švankmajer’s Alice, a water rat in a sailor’s hat (my favorite character in anything) might passively row through a pool of your tears to start a campfire on your head. The adults are gone — they’ve made a space where your greatest nightmares can thrive. Not even the comforts of Wonderland’s iconography remain — the Mad Hatter is a broken-down marionette, the Caterpillar is a sentient stocking with googly eyes and dentures, and the Cheshire Cat is more thoroughly absent than his body in the other adaptations. All we have left are the cold comforts of home and the imagination of a little girl — a dreamscape so transfixing that it’ll take off with your head before the Queen of Hearts can get around to it.