Directed by Jan Švankmajer.
“Close your eyes, otherwise you won’t see anything.”
This is such an important film to me. It’s a beautiful dark delirium that shifts between reality and fantasy like the lucid dream/nightmare of an imaginative child that is filled with dread and delight. I was in high school when I first saw it and it totally blew my mind. I mean some sort of internal paradigm shift occurred during the course of watching this fantastic re-envisioning of Alice in Wonderland. I don’t know if I can pinpoint it exactly. Ultimately, I think it helped me understand how to be who I needed to be. After all, I was little weirdo growing up in a very conservative environment and my “strange” ideas were not always well received. I needed a mentor and this film was the freaky fairy dust that would set my mind free. It’s so great to re-visit Alice. It has lost none of its power to inspire and enthrall me. It’s also a great reminder that you can be inspired by something that already exists in the world, use it as the basis for your own work by bringing something unique to it. Hasn’t everything already been done anyway? But not by me!