9 May 2010 1903 Alice in Wonderland

Today Sam and I spent the afternoon with a visiting colleague of AC’s whom we had known in the Bay Area. We took her by bus to a neighborhood we’d never been to before. We walked up to a house, inhabited by people we didn’t know. We knocked. We were let in and allowed to wander through the sitting room and the kitchen. Then we went out to the back yard and sat in a tiny garden shed where a continuous loop of 8 minutes of the very first filmed version of Alice in Wonderland (from 1903! directed by Percy Stow and Cecil Hepworth) was playing.

It’s Artist Open House season in Brighton this month. So not only do we get to see what the local artists are up to, but we also get to see their living spaces, and in today’s case, the inside of their garden sheds. The mini-cinema is part of a sub-festival, called House, which explores the relationship between art and domestic space. The clip we saw of the 1903 Alice is a restoration of an incomplete print that was found quite recently in someone’s house in Hove (actually!). It is the last known surviving print of the film, which at its original 12 minutes, was the longest English film of its era.

Rescued from a dusty attic and now playing in a two-seater garden shed, the film actually looks great. We watched key scenes from Alice’s dreamy adventures jump and crackle on a large flat-screen television set mounted on the wall opposite two cracked red vinyl cinema seats. It was an odd marriage of private and public space, old and new technology. Plus, there were bunny ears for Sam to wear. All in all it was surreal and delightful, just like Lewis Carroll’s novel.