Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Alice
1988 · Jan Švankmajer · Alice on Sightlines
Sawdust.
The White Rabbit in this film is a taxidermy specimen. It gets up off its stand and goes, and something in the getting up has opened a seam in its chest, so it leaks the whole time it runs. Later it stops, takes out a spoon, scoops the sawdust off the floor, and eats it back in.
Everything Jan Švankmajer knows is in that spoon.
The usual words for Alice are surrealism and nightmare. Both are accurate, and neither explains why the film sits on your chest the way it does. This is not a film that frightens you with meanings. It frightens you with appetite. The objects in the apartment want things, and what they want is small, physical, and non-negotiable.
Deleuze has a name for a cinema built that way, and it isn't one of the famous ones. He calls it the impulse-image, and the world it belongs to naturalism. The idea: some films aren't organised by people sizing up a situation and acting on it. They're organised by drives working underneath the situation — hunger, hoarding, tearing — and by the fact that a drive always uses something up. He assembled the category out of Stroheim and Buñuel, and Buñuel sits directly in this film's ancestry, so the fit isn't a stretch.
Deleuze splits such a world in two. There is the derived milieu, the ordinary place you can point at: here, a cramped apartment of drawers, jars and stains, so specific you could smell it. And there is the originary world showing through it, which has no furniture at all, only appetites. Bread sprouts nails. Socks come out of a drawer and burrow like worms, and you understand at once that wool was always animal. Skeletal creatures assemble themselves from museum scraps and go looking. The apartment is real. What runs it is not.
The spoon belongs to the other half of the category, what Deleuze calls the line of slope: the downward run of a naturalist world toward exhaustion. The rabbit is losing its stuffing, and the only repair available to it is to eat the loss. That's the joke, and it is also the physics of the whole film. Nothing here is being maintained. Everything is being spent. Taxidermy is Švankmajer's basic material, and taxidermy is entropy held still with wire.
Which brings up the invention that is his: he animates found dead matter instead of designed puppets, and he shoots it so close that touch organises the image, not sight. The close-up is where films normally put a face. He puts a drawer handle there. Or a spoon. In Deleuze's vocabulary these are fetishes, pieces torn out of the world and loaded with drive, and Švankmajer's cinema is made of almost nothing else. It's why you leave the film remembering textures rather than events.
Now the animation itself, because here the technique is the concept.
Deleuze opens his first cinema book by defending the cartoon. A drawing that moves gives you no pose, no stylised peak moment; it gives movement built out of equidistant, nothing-special instants — the any-instant-whatever. Švankmajer takes that to the end of the road. The movement of these objects exists nowhere except between frames. Every step is a hand entering the set, shifting a dead thing a millimetre, and leaving. Part of the unease is precisely that: you are watching movement with no body producing it.
It also produces what Deleuze calls the movement of world, the case where the character goes still and the world moves instead, the way a dance picks up a dancer and carries her. Here it's built into the production. Kristýna Kohoutová is the only human in the film; everything else is animated. So she watches, and is carried, and the technique delivers the dream-figure without anyone having to write it. Notice what the film refuses, too: no dissolve, no wobble, no waking frame to announce that the dream has started. This is the dream-image done properly. It's shot like a hardware inventory. That is what dreams are actually like, and it is the first thing Carroll's sweeter adapters sand off.
Space follows the same rule. Doors open into drawers. Rooms don't add up. Deleuze's term for space that has stopped serving as a setting for action and become a run of disconnected fragments is any-space-whatever. The grammar comes straight from Un Chien Andalou (1929), which established that a cut can obey association, not geometry — a room opening onto a beach — and that you play it deadpan. Švankmajer keeps the deadpan and adds floorboards.
Then the mouth. Alice speaks every part herself, and each line is punctuated by an extreme close-up of her lips. Deleuze distinguishes two kinds of close-up face: the reflecting one, a whole face holding a single quality, and the intensive one, a face collapsed into a working feature. Kohoutová's lips are the second. And the voices are all in the wrong place: the Rabbit's words come out of the girl. Sound and body have come apart. An image like that can't be taken at face value, so you have to read it, which is what Deleuze means by a lectosign, an image that turns legible. The lip insert is the caption, and the caption always names the same speaker. Wonderland is her ventriloquism. It is also the neatest solution to the adaptation problem anyone has found: a children's book is a mouth reading aloud, so he gives you the mouth.
The debts here are all craft debts. Méliès stopping his camera in 1896 to swap one object for another is the engine of every metamorphosis in the film. Starewicz animating real dead insects in 1912 established the principle: animate a corpse, not a fabrication. Trnka's The Hand (1965) gave Czech animation the marionette menaced by authority, and Švankmajer keeps the puppet-as-vulnerable-body while swapping the puppet for a live girl. Zeman's Invention for Destruction (1958) worked out the hybrid grammar for standing a real performer inside animated artifice. Borowczyk's Renaissance (1964) filmed broken things reassembling in close-up, destruction run backwards; you can see it in the museum-scrap creatures putting themselves together.
Downstream, the Quay Brothers, Terry Gilliam and Guillermo del Toro have all acknowledged what they took. The general inheritance is simpler than any single image. Before Alice, a feature-length animated film had to be charming or it had to be a stunt. After it, a feature could be ninety minutes of secondhand dead material handled at close range, addressed to adults, and hold.
He was fifty-three when he made it, after two decades of shorts that kept running afoul of Czechoslovak censors. You can feel that arrangement in the film without it ever hardening into allegory: a small person in a room where the rules are issued by things that outnumber her, looking for the way out.
The prologue says the film is for children, then adds: perhaps. Take the joke seriously for a moment. Children know a drawer is not only a drawer, and that some objects are edible and some bite. Adults get it trained out of them. Watch it again and keep track of what each thing wants. Every one of them wants something, and none of them can be talked out of it.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — The taxidermied rabbit leaking sawdust from its chest and spooning it back in: behaviour driven by appetite and expenditure rather than by any goal or situation to be resolved.
- naturalism — Socks that burrow like worms and bread that sprouts nails — a world of raw drives erupting through the surface of an ordinary domestic interior.
- derived-milieu — The cramped, wholly specific apartment-world of drawers, jars and stains that Alice moves through.
- originary-world — That apartment revealed as a savage world with no furniture and only appetites in it: skeletal creatures assembling themselves from museum scraps and going hunting.
- fetish — Švankmajer's extreme close-ups put part-objects where a face would normally go — a spoon, a nail in the bread, a slab of raw meat, all charged with compulsive force.
- entropy / degradation — The rabbit's chest seam: it loses its stuffing continuously and its only available repair is to eat the loss back. Taxidermy as entropy held still with wire.
- asw-disconnection — Doors that open into drawers; an apartment whose rooms don't add up — space cut into affective fragments joined by association, inherited from Un Chien Andalou's room-onto-a-beach cut.
- any-instant-whatever — Frame-by-frame stop-motion of dead objects: movement built from equidistant ordinary instants and existing nowhere but between frames, with no body producing it.
- movement of world — Kristýna Kohoutová is the film's only human and the only live-action element; she watches and is carried while the animated world does the moving around her.
- onirosign — A dream with no waking frame, no dissolve and no soft focus — Carroll's Victorian whimsy stripped out and the dream's matter-of-fact, tactile register restored.
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — Every line punctuated by an extreme close-up of Alice's lips: the face collapsed into a single working feature rather than held as a reflecting whole.
- audiovisual-disjunction — Alice speaks every character's voice herself, so the White Rabbit's words issue from the girl's mouth — sound detached from the bodies we watch.
- the readable image — The recurring lip insert functions as a caption naming the speaker; the image can no longer be taken at sensory-motor face value and has to be read.