LRB Screen returns from its summer break to continue its year-long exploration of the art of literary adaptation in partnership with MUBI.

Alice (1988), the first feature by the great Czech stop-motion artist and animator Jan Švankmajer, who turns 90 this month, has perhaps come closest of all Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland adaptations in successfully translating Lewis Carroll’s singular vision for the screen. Fusing animation and live-action, with Alice as protagonist and narrator, it is at once a faithful adaptation and a characteristically idiosyncratic take by a veteran Surrealist, who saw the original narrative less as a fairy tale and more like a kind of amoral dream. The story perfectly serves Švankmajer’s almost unparalleled ability to animate objects, not only in motion terms but also in an anarchic and metaphysical, even animistic way. Brilliantly witty, always visually astonishing, and welcoming both to adults and children – who will delight in its wayward, anti-authoritarian impulses – it is both one of Švankmajer’s greatest works and a milestone in the history of animated films.

*Czech with English Subtitiles*

Responding to the film, and especially its psychoanalytic depths, will be the author, film-maker and professor of literature and psychoanalysis, Devorah Baum. She’ll be discussing humour, childhood, dreams and depictions of the psyche transformed with series host, Gareth Evans.

Cast:
Kristýna Kohoutová