Something In Alice In Wonderland Analysis

There has been great debate over the difference between the surrealist and the avant-garde, and whether or not they are simply different branches of the same movement, that surrealism is just a romanticised extension of the avant-garde. André Breton, the movement’s considered leader, regarded surrealism as a belief in superior forms of reality in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, and irrespective of more contemporary arguments over the exact definition or difference, was above all explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was a revolutionary movement.
It is challenging to define the avant-garde, due to its heavy reliance on the self and the psychological nature of man, as opposed to physical aesthetics or a standard chain of events. Linda Williams’ …show more content…
Alice tells the audience that they “must close your eyes, otherwise you won't see anything” and it is this use of language that formerly presents the concept of surrealism, the “backbone of nonsense” (Flescher, 1969, p.128). The implications of this dialogue places the audience in unfamiliar territory, where they must disregard personal reality for the vast depths of the mind. The themes of the original novel, penned about the bizarre discontinuities of everyday life in the 19th century, are recognised in this film through the reflective use of “the mundane with the fantastical and the morbid with the sublime to create a thoroughly eerie and unsettling dreamscape” (Shankel, 2014) concluded with the expenditure of contrasting live action, clay animation and stop motion. Švankmajer, already renowned in Czechoslovakia for an auteurist style that interrogates societal norms and expresses a disillusionment with bourgeoisie hegemony, makes use of the view that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is riddled with satirical attacks on the real world structure, and that it is not an uncommon opinion that the events within the book are disturbing and cruel, as opposed to childish and whimsical. There is detailed entrapment in a bewildering and absurd nightmare world, and the often distressed …show more content…
While full immersion into Wonderland is made impossible, the dialogue dictates in the first sequence that “this is a film made for children, perhaps…” and leaves the film, like the novel which inspired it, open for multifarious readings. The new reality presented to the audience is left open ended and insipid, where character and audience communication through subjectivity, objectivity and psychology becomes intertwined and blurred, until there is little left to be seen on the surface of either