In the years of trying to understand art, and what art is, and what qualifies as art, I have found the theory that most resonates with me at this point in my life is best summed up by Viktor Shklovsky: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important…” This idea is also theorized by Stan Brakhage, who points to the idea of making the camera like the eye of a bee or of an infant-- images without a habitualized meaning, images that force us to work in order to encounter them. Experimentation, like in the scientific world, is the catalyst for progressive movement in the arts and humanities. This movement tends to be cyclical: a work is produced, similar works are produced as a result, this method becomes tired, experimentation happens and a new kind of work is produced, repeat. This desire to break away from convention, to be avant-garde, often considered “weird” by the general public, is how culture evolves. Sometimes avant-garde is a return to tradition or a complete re-examining of fundamental definitions and frameworks. However it comes about, the avant-garde has found a new safe space in the modern era: children’s media. As we have counterbalanced child labor of the industrial era, we have assigned all sorts of effervescent and radical associations to childhood. Childhood is play, imagination, colorfulness, abstraction, impressionistic. These, as it turns out, are associations often assigned to art as well. We find it so important to allow our children to experiment in their youth: we give them paint and reward them with cheers and a photograph anytime they do anything out of the ordinary. Nothing is more amusing and worthy of celebration than a child putting a saucepan on their head. As adults, this kind of avant-garde behavior is seen as inappropriate and weird. As we have reserved this experimental behavior for childhood, we have also created a space for avant-garde artists to go: they can get away with pretty much anything if it’s in the name of child entertainment. And so Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and Jan Svankmajer adapted it into the surrealist czech retelling Alice (1988).
Alice cleverly passes as children’s media simply because it is an adaptation of a classic children’s piece, but it seems as though Svankmajer had no intention of creating a film meant for children. His intention goes back to the purpose of art and the avant-garde: to take a well known story and make it new again. To take a century old medium and make it “unfamiliar.” To create art. Alice mixes live action and stop motion. Alice is both a young girl and a porcelain doll. Puppets, paper cut outs, objects, and humans are mixed together in a world more fantastic and bizarre than any rendition of the classic tale out there.
Although Svankmajer may have been less interested in creating a children’s film than he was in creating art, he definitely displays a fondness for children, and this film seems to act as an ode of gratitude for the way children are able to easily abstract objects on their own and for the safe space their imaginations have created for artists like himself. The beginning scene shows young Alice sitting outside with an adult. Alice is the prominent figure in the frame and the adult is unmoving with her head cut off by the frame. Alice then talks directly into the camera as the opening titles are shown. Not only does this immediate tip the power structure to Alice, even when the adult slaps her hand, but several conventions are being broken and associated with Alice. This child, this world, and this film are set up to be different from what we are used to. Alice is our gatekeeper, perhaps the artist himself, into a world more fitting for a girl bored with her life in the English countryside who isn’t scared of breaking the fourth wall.
This is a small example of the experimentation that is this entire film. It would be easy to encounter this film and simply write it off as ‘bizarre’ but the true gift of this film is when you fully examine it as if a child, engage with it, seek to understand it, and ultimately become part of the avant-garde tradition.
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