Jan Švankmajer
Alice

The original title is "Something from Alice" (Něco z Alenky), where Švankmajer plays almost by chance, and recklessly shares the essence of this disappearance. He plays detached and impersonal, as we endure the game from the whisperers, quite a difference indeed. He takes pieces of an impossible puzzle to complete and even solves it for us with a limited tool like cinema. And when one, using stop-motion, mystifies the transfiguration of non-thought, where "everything happens" takes the place of misleading free wills, we can feast on Epiphany.

There's no reinterpretation but a catharsis of Carroll's work. It goes way overboard, abundantly. It lines up, in a nauseating psychic tornado, the essence that Lewis revealed in the form of a tale grinding compulsive reincarnations, through sawdust replacing stardust. There is no growth without the "stomach aches" given by the spasms of the gym called life. Symbolism becomes the means to achieve the result of showing the invisible where the purpose oscillates without footholds. He overdid it, but it was finally needed, oh how it was needed. In a ruthless absence, it stimulates in each of us the uncovering of conscious sufferings.

What more to say about those accumulations, accelerations, grindings, deconstructions, putrefactions, if not that they serve as a link with marking our past and future eternity, merging memory with expectation, throwing us into the arena of immediacy that mixes wakefulness with the dreamlike, matter with the rarefied, flesh with soul. And the dream welds with rational reality and tries to give a passage in absence of thought to the shock of the revelation that we are not this body but we are here. And it hacks away at all those universes inside and outside of us that pass through us and we pass through them in a concatenation of endless boredom that cuts eternal returns.

And we go to find in those rooms, in those drawers, in those galleries and caves, gigantographs, and miniaturizations of the reflections of our "carriage," of the time marked by the stopped clock of the White Rabbit, of the psyche filled subliminally by the Mad Hatter and confessed by the March Hare, bringing the deception of life to the royal court for a masquerade ball of the final representation of our carcass meeting our corpse playing cards. And here too the power of childhood is reiterated to absorb the enormities of inevitable evolution where we realize that the raven is the writing desk, and this alone is enough to be "one".

How many battles to reach the solitude of Paradise.