Alice in Wonderland (1966)

'We're all mad here...'

‘Anne-Marie Mallik: a barrister’s daughter…’

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die:

Every drifting down the stream—

Lingering in the golden gleam—

Life, what is it? But a dream?

Lewis Carroll.

As we move— tentatively— ha!— into a London summer, I’m planning a series of internationally-themed summer posts. We’ll be lounging by Long Island swimming pools, picnicking on Aboriginal rock, midsommering in the darkest Swedish countryside, frolicking love-struck through Danish meadows, sweltering in English country houses, and chasing pretty French girls on fashionable Breton beaches. I like films that capture that bittersweet, wistful, nostalgic melancholy of summer, whatever that means. It’s hard to define exactly. But films with a sense of place. 

Julia Margaret Cameron meets Charles Lutwidge Dodgson…

One of the best in the genre is Jonathan Miller's Alice in Wonderland (1966), a black and white television film made for the BBC and broadcast for the first time, bizarrely, over the Christmas and New Year holidays. Miller's Alice isn't anthropomorphic, as such. Instead, the human actors pretend to be animals— nobody's dressed up as a white rabbit, frog footman, or sleepy dormouse. As Jonathan Miller said, "Once you take the animal heads off, you begin to see what it's all about. A small child, surrounded by hurrying, worried people, thinking 'Is that what being grown up is like?’”

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879): Maud, "There has Fallen a splendid Tear From the Passion Flower at the Gate", 1875.