Alice's adventures in 1866 and 1966

[imomus]

The best film version of Alice in Wonderland (which may be the most original work of fiction in the English language) is one you've probably never heard of, directed in 1966 by a tall Jewish atheist dilettante with a stratospheric intelligence. That director is Jonathan Miller, and he filled his undeservedly unfamous Alice with cameos from famous friends -- Peter Sellers, Malcolm Muggeridge, Alan Bennett, Eric Idle, Peter Cook. The film was made as a BBC Wednesday Play, with a freedom from commercial pressures today's BBC (let alone the film world beyond) could only dream of.



Miller's reading of Alice doesn't attempt to be "timeless" -- he fills the film with serene sitar music by 60s countercultural hero Ravi Shankar, and Alice's Eat Me and Drink Me experiences are made even more psychedelic by the use of wide-angle lenses, backwards sequences, disorienting editing, mirrors, and wide-eyed expressions from the beautiful Anne-Marie Mallik. But the Victorian house and garden setting is impeccable, filled with stuffed animals, tailor's dummies, gothic stained glass, greenhouses and croquet lawns, and the dusty saurian ectomorphs Alice encounters are the furthest thing you could imagine from 1960s hippies.

1866 and 1966 combine surprisingly well -- Shankar's music reminds one that the Britain of 1866 was intimately connected to its imperial dependency, India -- ruled over, in fact, by an "Empress of India" named Victoria, a more sedate version of the murderous Queen of Hearts, seen in this sequence demanding the decapitation of a bodiless cat:

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Miller shares Carroll's Oxbridge background and his interest in abstruse, absurdist philosophising, if not his Christianity and his preoccupation with pubescent girls. So both Carroll's and Miller's Alices are filled with fanciful philosophical speculations, usually explained by very old men to very young girls. In 19th century Oxbridge this seems to have been very much in the air: in 1866 John Ruskin published The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Chrystallisation. A sample of the dialogue:

Old Lecturer (of incalculable age): What is it to be alive?

Dora (aged 17 "on astronomical evidence"): There now; you're going to be provoking, I know.

Lecturer: I do not see why it should be provoking to be asked what it is to be alive. Do you think you don't know whether you are alive or not?



Isabel (11 years old) skips to the end of the room and back.

Lecturer: Yes, Isabel, that's all very fine; and you and I may call that being alive: but a modern philosopher calls it being in a "mode of motion." It requires a certain quantity of heat to take you to the sideboard; and exactly the same quantity to bring you back again. That's all.

Isabel: No, it isn't. And besides, I'm not hot.

Lecturer: I am, sometimes, at the way they talk.

Oddly enough, when Lewis Carroll fell out with Alice Liddell's mother, Ruskin (a good friend of Carroll's) took over the role of favourite non-family uncle.



These skittish philosophical investigations don't just represent Cambridge dons' playful, eccentric attitude to knowledge (an attitude still intact when Miller graduated from the university in 1957, then went straight into the Footlights review as a comedian) or a friskily ludic relationship between age and youth, they also express the existential growing pains of a girl of Alice's age. Miller captures this perfectly in a scene where Alice questions her own identity before a mirror. As Ravi Shankar's sensual notes and rhythms fade, Alice brushes her hair and whispers: "I'm sure I'm not Ada. She's got long ringlets, and my hair doesn't grow in ringlets at all. And I'm sure I can't be Mabel, cos I know all sorts of things, and she knows nothing. Besides, she's she, and I... Oh dear, how puzzling it all is." It's a puzzle drugs and encounters with dons can't clarify for the petulant Alice, although they do distract her from her own confusion.

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Miller only ever made one other film (1968's Whistle and I'll Come to You), and Mallik doesn't appear anywhere in public after incarnating Alice. Miller's brilliant dilettantism took him to other activities -- opera productions, gay rights activism, a series of television science lectures, writing, medicine. Perhaps he, like Alice, has never really known who he is, and perhaps he finds the existential puzzle more interesting than the solution.

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Comments

FYI

[skazat.livejournal.com]

You gotta runaway tag somewhere ()

Re: FYI

[skazat.livejournal.com]

And... it's fixed!

[eptified.livejournal.com]

I always thought this version was woefully underrated. Peter Cook was born to play the Mad Hatter. Jan Svankmajer's Alice should also be mentioned, though -- amazing to look at, even if it is, admittedly, not as good.

I was listening to Homemade Soup today - both versions. It really is a wonderful melody. I would love to hear you resurrect it yet again -- even noisier this time, so it hurts -- like Stephen Merritt and Distortion, except good.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, that old thing (http://imomus.com/homemadesoup.mp3)!

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Svankmajer's Alice does have the peculiar advantage of being the only film I've ever seen that was improved by sloppy dubbing.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

I've never seen his "Alice..." but I love "Whistle And I'll Come To You" (although the best MR James adaptations are the Lawrence Gordon Clark ones).

FYI

[reader23.livejournal.com]

May I humbly note that both Carroll and Ruskin were Oxonians.

Re: FYI

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Christ, you're right, I was thinking that Christchurch was a Cambridge college.

In my partial defence I will say that by 1866 Ruskin was running an art school in Cambridge: it later became Anglia Ruskin College.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I've seen Jonathan Miller's Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You. Michael Horden is excellent in it, and it manages to capture that corner-of-the-eye, goosefleshy feeling of M.R. James's tales.

I'm not sure I've seen this version of Alice in Wonderland, though. It looks excellent.

What do you think of Jan Svankmajer's version? Oh, I've just seen someone else has mentioned it, if not asked your opinion.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I like Svankmajer's version too, although there's something a little too manic about it -- the same feeling I get from Terry Gilliam's work.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"So both Carroll's and Miller's Alices are filled with fanciful philosophical speculations, usually explained by very old men to very young girls."

This is why I'm glad to be a grown up. Though I was always a glorious disappointment to any old men who did try to lecture me so I think I had my moment of triumph there.

*vomits all over Rushkins shoes*

Telly Savalas as the Cheshire Cat; Karl Malden as the Walrus

[(Anonymous)]

And Ringo Starr as the Mock Turtle. Many bizarre cameos in this 1985 US TV version.

Re: Telly Savalas as the Cheshire Cat; Karl Malden as the Walrus

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Good lord, I have the same reaction to that as I do to Billy Kristal voicing the fire in Howl's Moving Castle!

Re: Telly Savalas as the Cheshire Cat; Karl Malden as the Walrus

[god-jr.livejournal.com]

room in this world for all things. millar's wonderland looks amazing, completely dream-like in the way everything is what it is without question (though not without posing questions), and i agree that peter cook is one of the best mad hatter's ever. still, looking at the line-up for this cheesy made for television version i get all a tingle. why it's everyone that ever rode on the love boat and then some. of course who could expect any less star-studding from the man who filled disaster with big name cameos, irwin allen? wow!

Re: Telly Savalas as the Cheshire Cat; Karl Malden as the Walrus

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I'll watch anything with Roddy McDowall!!

[(Anonymous)]

Jonathan Miller also made a really fascinating documentary about Clive Wearing, a musicologist who, following illness, suffered catastrophic anterograde amnesia. Oliver Sacks has also written about the case:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_sacks?printable=true

Great topic

[bug-girlx.livejournal.com]

I have heard of that movie Alice, but I have not been able to get access to the movie. It was reviewed on one of these movie review TV shows. I am interested in seeing a DVD of Alice. The stills do look a bit disturbing.

that's strange

[(Anonymous)]

i always though this version was alot better known than it (apparently) is... i had picked it up on a whim after catching sight of it while browsing the racks at my local library. maybe i just live in an area with a disproportionate affinity for lewis carroll or the bbc, cause i often notice it out. hmm!

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Wow, I am currently reading the book. It also have the follow-up Through the looking-glass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking-Glass) too. Through the looking-glass is an interesting read too since it's literary style differs from Wonderland.


Psst, by the way, I got Otto Spooky in the mail two days ago. In my household it will be called "Oh, so goodky" from now on! There is indeed an artistic continuity between Otto and Ocky. Otto is more acoustic than Oskar's.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I just had a dream in which I was recording a follow-up to these albums on a cassette tape 4-track machine. A lot of homemade reggae was featured.

Then (still in the dream) I was reading an interview in the Sunday Times with David Bowie, who was all Botoxed up and had grown a rather unattractive beard. He was touring with a band called the McPhersons, who were all brothers and sisters, and the interviewer intimated that relations between Bowie and the prim, Presbyterian band were growing rather strained as the tour wore on.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Good article, I have never seen this adaptation and I will track it down, am particularly intrigued as I remember seeing his 'Whisle My And I'll Come To You' as a wee fella and being properly frightened by it.

On something of a tangent some of today's other posters also warmed to this M.R. James tale of the supernatural and would also probably also like the Henry James 'Turn Of The Screw' adaptation 'The Innocence' with Deborah Kerr,
Suspect Quentin S. is well au fait with the latter however!
The commonality of both these latter films being their exemplification of two the very few occassions when a ghost story has with intelligence - and with genuinely chilling effect - been transcribed to film.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Read:
"The commonality of both these latter films being their exemplification of two of the very few occassions..." in above.

Whistle And I'll Come To You:

me, mysel, f,

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Periwinkle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdrqAFa_TUE&feature=related) Pussycat (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WQT1DxMY2c&feature=related)

Re: me, mysel, f,

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Apropos?

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Have you ever been to Disneyland, my dear Momus? Or, more importantly, have you seen the live-action Alice in Wonderland children's show on the Disney Channel with puppets? I'm imagining that you'd be disgusted, but sometimes you surprise me.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

UGH, it's worse than I'd remembered! And I remember being absolutely disgusted by this show back then!

Correction

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Jonathan Miller isn't gay. His involvement in gay rights, such as it is, has been along these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_ally) lines. I think a correction would be in order.

Incidentally, even if he was, wouldn't it be pretty much irrelevant to mention it. I find it bizarre that peoples' sexual preferences are linked to their lists of achievements. I keep wondering when we, as a society, will have become grown up enough not to feel the need to categorise. Would you expect to see "heterosexual" - or something more appropriate that you'd prefer - alongside a list of yours?

Whistle and Alice are works of genius. A little like Charles Laughton's singe venture into direction, one ends up wondering what else there could have been.

Re: Correction

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're absolutely right, Jonathan Miller isn't gay (http://www.filmreference.com/film/15/Jonathan-Miller.html). I've taken the word out of my first paragraph.

Incidentally, even if he was, wouldn't it be pretty much irrelevant to mention it. I find it bizarre that peoples' sexual preferences are linked to their lists of achievements.

But should their sexual preferences be the only thing omitted from a list of things about them? What about that list of things Miller is -- tall, Jewish, atheist, dilettante, intelligent. Are those okay? Without them we'd have a pretty grey image of the person being described.

I think it's important that labels like those are right, but also that there's a plethora of them -- that they're also many, giving an impression of the person's multi-dimensionality. But I wouldn't be against a very in-depth, speculative study of the relationships between sexual orientation and work -- Lewis Carroll certainly got a few tomes like that in the 1990s! And think of a study of D.H. Lawrence that didn't consider his sexuality! It would be a slim volume indeed.

[simasima.livejournal.com]

That's weird. I was just thinking of this guy the other day. My high school biology teacher showed us Miller's "Body in Question" TV series, which was great. Later in college I watched a BBC version of "Taming of the Shrew" with John Cleese that Miller directed. It was terrible.

Lesson learned: Dilettante intellectuals aren't equally talented at everything they attempt.

thanks

[restglam.livejournal.com]

very interesting. need to find out more about him now.