24 February, 2010

Curiouser and Curiouser

I just got back from my first visit to the British Library, where I attended Curiouser and Curiouser, a talk on Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll. Christopher Lee and Michael Sheen did fantastic readings from the text, and the writer Will Self blew my mind with his gigantic unpretentious vocabulary and thoughts on Wonderland.  (I have an intellectual crush on Will Self now- I want to rape his brain. If anyone knows him, please let him know.) And now I am obsessed with an idea he brought up during his talk, and want to use it for my next collection: interior exteriors. Sky underground. Etc

The BFI is now in possession of the only remaining copy of the 1900something film of Alice in Wonderland. At twelve minutes, it was deemed too long to watch as a whole film back then. You see this was only a few years after the invention of film and most movies were one or two minutes long, so cinema owners used to only buy one scene to show of this epic extravaganza. Because of this, most people never saw the film in its entirety. At the time, the cast of 100+ and the wild special effects were outrageous and fantastic- the world had never seen anything like it! The film will soon be available to view in the BFI archives, but we were the first people to see the film in full in over 100 years! I highly recommend that you take a few minutes out of your day and watch it (I've posted it below for your viewing pleasure)




My brain is going wild!

1 comment:

Charlie Snowgarden said...

That talk sounded fantastic, wish I'd seen that was on! Did Christopher Lee appear as lovely as he seems?