“That’s the Effect of Living Backwards”:
Technological Change, Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books, and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
Keywords:
Alice books, cinema, Tim Burton, Lewis Carroll, neo-Victorianism, nineteenth century, photography, technology, John Tenniel, visual cultureAbstract
Lewis Carroll’s Alice books have enjoyed a long neo-Victorian afterlife, particularly in the cinema, and this essay examines the ways in which the books themselves encourage such cinematic endurance. Situating my reading of Carroll within the neo-Victorian context created by Tim Burton’s recent Alice film (2010), and relying heavily on the alternative history of technological change posited by Brian Winston in his 1996 work Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television, I argue that the Alice books enact a movement from the photographic to the cinematic and, furthermore, that they participated in a shifting nineteenth-century desire for – as well as anxiety over – moving pictures. Ultimately, this essay suggests that Burton’s film employs a hybridisation of narrative and technology and works within a continuum of emerging cinematic processes that are always already located in Carroll’s narratives.
