HopkinsCinemAddicts

A Different Take on Dreams and Nightmare in 1988's Alice (Steven)

Jan Švankmajer’s 1988 film Alice, one of many adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s well-known work, mixes stop-motion and live action footage to depict an unsettling, dream-like Alice in Wonderland. Jan’s Wonderland is an old house. Both timeless and inconstant, it’s a place where cracked walls repair themselves and threadbare creatures sew holes back up. Each shot is cramped and detailed. Jan focuses on objects and poses rather than vistas or facial expressions. The Wonderland house resembles a twisted I Spy book with its piles of wooden toys, bones, tattered cloth, sawdust, and leaves.

Unlike many dream-inspired films, the sensations in Alice are rooted and immediate. There are no psychedelic washes of color or vague mists here: it’s a world of sharp sounds and sharp corners. Jan achieves strangeness not through otherworldly imagery but by placing and attaching familiar things in unfamiliar ways. This collage-like method reflects the laziness of our subconscious. Rarely are dreams original creations of our minds; instead, they steal ideas and images from our waking lives and put them together in often nonsensical ways.

Jan is eerily in tune with the tones of our childhood dreams, and he’s not afraid to present an honest portrait of them. There’s no shortage of nightmare in the film. The sounds, which, of course, can’t be traditionally produced due to the stop animation, always feel a little louder and more staccato than they need to be. Even in the cases where a normal recording of the sounds of the scene could have been used, Jan often uses a similar sound from a completely different origin, as when Alice claps her hands and produces a noise much harsher and shriller than a normal clap. This sharp soundtrack heightens the unease of creepy moments, but the unfamiliarity also makes the watcher listen more consciously to sounds which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. There’s no score outside of the title credits, but sometimes these noises approach musique concrète in their rhythmic insistency.

While there are no jump scares or gore, the film does not have a dearth of visual creepiness, either. Death, decay, and violence reoccur as motifs. Skulls hatch from chicken eggs and scuttle into the shadows, skeletal chimeras march along dirty floors, and a flank of steak flops to a new hiding spot when disturbed. The “Drink Me” bottle not only makes Alice small, it also turns her into an uncanny doll. In one scene, the minified Alice is forced by dead animals to walk the plank into a pot of milk, which turns out to be another transformative liquid with an unsettling effect: Alice grows again, but instead of a girl or a doll she becomes a girl entombed alive in a doll-shaped sarcophagus.

Taste, or more accurately hunger, is also a consistent theme both in Jan’s adaptation and in the original book. In Alice, the white rabbit is introduced as a taxidermied specimen in Alice’s room. It creaks itself free of the supports and chatters incessantly through big yellow teeth. It greedily licks sawdust from the timepiece it keeps lodged inside its own body cavity. Once in Wonderland, Alice tries to eat anything that looks edible, but jelly jars are filled with tacks and nails sprout from loaves of bread, and most of the things she does manage to consume coincide with the size-changing substances from the book. Her narration is frequently paired with extreme close-up shots of her mouth pronouncing the words. Hunger is an astute choice from Lewis Carroll, as young children think about it quite often, both inside and outside of sleep. Jan Švankmajer makes sure to point out that they also think of death and violence more than most adults would like to admit.

Alice manages to marry creepiness with wonder in its surrealist exploration. As with most of Jan’s work, the film carries with it a dose of absurdist humor. He breaks the fourth wall early in the film with an odd bit of narration from Alice’s lips: “Now you will see a film… made for children. Perhaps.” A film for brave children, perhaps, or a film for adults to think and dream and have nightmares as kids for an hour.

Motion as a Foundation: Len Lye's Free Radicals (Steven)

Len Lye, an artist from New Zealand, endeavored to treat motion as a foundational element of art, much like color or sound. With this idea in focus, he created works in a number of mediums, including kinetic sculpture, poetry, painting, and film. In many of his films, he employed direct animation: manually scratching or painting the film. While he wasn't the first to use this technique, he was largely responsible for its rise out of complete obscurity following his release of A Colour Box in 1935.

In the four-minute short Free Radicals, which Lye first released in 1958 and then finished in 1979, white etchings in black film leader throb to a drum and vocal solo performed by the Bagirmi tribe of Chad. Free radicals are unstable and reactive chemical species. Of course, the title can also be read as radicals who are free, and Lye's attempt to realize a new movement-based medium is certainly non-traditional. Lye's frames are bonded to the tradition and regularity of the music, but, at the same time, such a rhythmically-focused art form may also have been different and new to many in his audiences. As the title might suggest, the forms Lye creates are incessantly unstable. They writhe and contort until blinking into blackness, lasting between several seconds and a single frame. 

Lye complements the tones and timbres of the music with his animation. The vocals are accompanied by long, swaying lines which reach from the bottom to top of the screen, reflecting the rich, full tones of the vocalist. The more staccato drumbeats receive smaller jagged lines. Lye uses many different instruments to scratch the film, and the resultant textures also tie in to the associated music, with vocal lines being smoother than drum lines.

The most striking element of the film is the hypnotically convincing animation of the forms. Curved lines are projected into space through the emulation of rotation: narrowing sections become more and more foreshortened until they disappear and appear again, reversed, on the other side of the form. Even without the rigid constraints of perspective drawing, simple lines are given shape and mass. The lines bulge and twist around one another, responding and reacting to the beat of the music. Shortly after the halfway point in the film, the only line currently on screen grows and explodes into dozens of tiny strokes, which give way to yet more lines, these sinuous and fat.

In the last minute of the film, events begin to pass more hurriedly. Lines rush towards each other from either side of the screen and meld into one, asterisk-like constructs warp from location to location and then disintegrate into toothy lines, and brushy textures coalesce into dots. There's a sensation of ritualistic intensity and the indeterminate scope of the forms becomes evident: are these forms subatomic particles, bolts of lightning, or galaxies? Foremost, they are motion and light, and anything else is more suggestion than symbolism.

For the most part, Lye's other films employ a greater variety of colors and shades. There is a particular rawness and power to his approach in Free Radicals, though. The dichromatic, spare style strips away everything but the sensation of movement and sound, yet the film is far from the austere perfectionism of many minimalists. It's a primeval, kinesthetic minimalism, closer to cave paintings than to Piet Mondrian. The gritty, imperfect scratches reinforce the idea that this film represents the first few stumblings into a new artform, or rather, one which had always been hiding in film, waiting for Len Lye to recognize, extract, and purify it.

Stroszek: Truth and Power (Steven)

Stroszek, Werner Herzog's 1977 tragic comedy, concerns the lives of three friends: Bruno, a street musician; Eva, a prostitute; and Scheitz, an older retiree. It begins with Bruno's release from prison in Berlin and an attack from Eva's pimps and tracks the friends as they try to make a new life in Wisconsin, where Bruno becomes employed with Scheitz's nephew Clayton. While Scheitz is an old eccentric, Bruno comes across as innocent (in both the usual sense and the more archaic meaning of mentally ill), if we can ignore the inherent ridiculousness of using that term to describe an alcoholic who has lived through prison and learned how to get by as an accordion player in Berlin's grimy squares. Eva has a more average outlook, but as the bills in Wisconsin pile up she becomes increasingly apathetic and depressed, spending many of her shots eating on the bed or couch or being forced back into her old job as prostitute. The hopeless defiance with which she thrusts one of their last payments at the man who collects their bills contrasts harshly with the happiness we saw when she got the money for the trip to America. Both of these sums come from what seems like the only way the impoverished friends can make any upward strides against their debts: Eva's prostitution. Bruno certainly never appears to make much money at all, and it's possible Clayton is underpaying him.

In Stroszek, Herzog explores the boundary between truth and fiction in an unusual way. While he implements many documentary-like techniques, such as a lack of saturation, a quick and low-budget shooting, a cast of non-professional actors who often play as themselves, an impartial, almost indifferent gaze, and a tarnished, peeling-paint realism, the plot is bizarre and dream-like and the characters, especially Bruno and Scheitz, bring with them an atmosphere of unpredictability. This juxtaposition lets a bleak film double as a very watchable comedy. In one scene, Scheitz walks along a grain-surrounded fence, testing the wood with a voltmeter. He comes across two American hunters and asks, in German, whether he can test a strange theory about “animal magnetism”. The bemusement we share with the hunters, who react naturally (and were probably not actors), is what makes the scene so humorous. They play along, not understanding German, but we know that even if they did it wouldn't matter since Scheitz's theory is so incomprehensible.

A Farm in Wisconsin. Licensed under CC at wikimedia commons.

When viewing Stroszek as a documentary, we naturally search for a slant. The most obvious one is its indictment, perhaps not of capitalism itself, but of its tendency to build and reinforce income and power inequalities. To build upon this premise, Herzog inverts many of the promises of America and wealth. The friends' tragic arc is a sad shadow of the American dream, and the predatory tendencies brought about by power are revealed through pimps' harassment, through an immigration office's confiscation of Bruno's bird (which occurs off-screen and gives Bruno yet another darkly funny line), and through the gleam from the gold rings of a painfully apologetic “man from the bank”. The auction, a staple representative of citizens' purchasing power, acts as a ruthless reminder of these cruelties. Rather than the fine art or antiques auctions so often portrayed in film, this one is for the humble prefabricated house on which Bruno and Scheitz have been unable to keep up with the payments. As the auction ends, Bruno walks aimlessly backwards with his usual inscrutable expression, homeless, while dogs cross the scene looking for food or attention. It's winter still and everything is a dull brown smeared with white and the trees are leafless against the drab sky.