Reverse perspective and the normative body

Architecture and Art

Lydia Karagiannaki

reverse perspective and the normative body

KU Leuven/Sint Lucas BXL

January 2016

There is nothing specific about the zone. It’s purely a place where a certain limit is set.

You set a limit, you put a certain zone off-limit, and although things remain exactly the way they were, it’s perceived as another place. Precisely as the place onto which you can project your beliefs, your fears, things from your inner space. In other words, the zone is ultimately the very whiteness of the cinematic screen.

Slavoj Zizek on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, The Pevert’s Guide to Cinema (2006)

This is the accompanying booklet for my project But my dear, this is not wonderland and you are not Alice, presented in the framework of the course Architecture and Art at Sint Lucas Ghent in January 2016 and supervised by professors Wim Goes and Volkmar Mühleis.

It includes an elaboration of the concept of Reverse Perspective within the Arts History, notes and thoughts on discussions held during the weekly sessions, as well as the individual research trajectory leading to the final delivery.

Reverse Perspective is a term used in Arts History to describe a specific technique of spatial representation. In the context of this course, the notion of the ‘reverse’ is interpreted within a cultural-historical context. Systems of scale as well as of (ethical) evaluation of the primary and the normal are examined. The research focuses largely on the human body as represented in the arts, popular culture and bioethics and concludes in an installation inspired by Jan Švankmajer’s filmic adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.

Reasoning by Mathematics In order to have a reverse, one needs the principal one. Although this concept of principal/ initial/natural/normal will be deconstructed later on, let us start with the commonly acceptable notions of ‘Normal’ and ‘Reverse Perspective’.

Within the history of arts, the author of a painting/drawing who uses the ‘Normal Perspective’ is supposed to depict the world that (s)he sees in front of their eyes as accurately as possible, creating thus the illusion that the pictorial frame is an open window to the world. In order to do this, (s)he makes use of mathematical calculations which are according to a highly rationalised Euclidean/Kantian understanding of the world. Each point of the 3D world corresponds to a specific point of the pictorial plane, in a procedure similar to making snapshots of the reality with a photo camera.

The Renaissance is usually regarded as the period during which Perspective was invented and institutionalised, indicating a specific consciousness of a world which was coming out of the Middle Ages, a consciousness where Reason defeats Faith, and the Secular substitutes the Divine Law and the tyranny of the Church. The world was sought to be explained by means of science. Great ideas and personalities emerged, and the technique of Perspective was indeed systematized during that period. Nonetheless, mathematical Perspective was not the glorious invention of the Renaissance man. The basic principles of Perspective were already known to ancients Greeks, who used it for creating theatrical stage designs, and were passed on to the Romans, evident in a multitude of decorating reliefs and sculptures which aimed at deceiving the viewer. In the Arab world, the scientist Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039), better known under the Latinized name of Alhacen, had already written his Book of Optics, while Vitello’s (1226-1260) work Perspectiva was also known in the educated circles of Europe.

As a result, the systematization of perspectival drawing during the Renaissance doesn’t completely come out of the blue. Nevertheless, and as the result of the collective efforts of many Renaissance thinkers, in 1525 Albrecht Dürer issued his Underweysung der Messung, where he presented a collection of devices which helped constructing perspectively accurate drawings. This might be called the birth year of the reign of Perspective.

In the ‘Normal Perspective’ parallel lines converge towards a common vanishing point.

There might be multiple vanishing points, as there might be multiple bundles of parallel lines which have a different direction. All vanishing points lie on the line of the horizon, which is the height of the eye of the viewer/painter. To imagine the world like that, the viewer/painter becomes an apparatus, moreover a static apparatus, which absorbs, like a camera, the light rays ‘sent’ by the objects in a linear way. An illusion of reality, as seen through a camera lens or peep-hole, is created.

‘Reverse Perspective’ is a technique initially combined with the study of Byzantine icons.

For these icons, such mathematical rules are non-applicable. As a matter of fact, any rules might be said to be non-applicable, as those paintings offer a diversity of artistic techniques and methods of representation. In a strict sense, parallel lines don’t converge but rather diverge from each other and their supposed vanishing point. It could be assumed that the vanishing point, which otherwise lies behind the pictorial image, is now situated between the picture and the viewer. This technique allows the image to look as if it ‘opens up’ the space. However, paintings of ‘Reverse Perspective’ don’t only depict forms in this way, but they also make use of multiple vanishing points (polycentricism), axonometric projection or completely distorted images of objects, which are being viewed from various points simultaneously.

Perspective as Weltanschauung Art non-corresponding to the Absolute Truth of the measurable Perspective! That was wrong, childish, even deviant. Painters under the loose term of ‘Reverse Perspective’ have long been mocked and ridiculed as ignorant or incapable of conducting works in ‘Normal Perspective’. But there is truth in a child too, and maybe much more than in the ‘educated adult’, patronized and almost blinded by his education. A child depicts the world as (s)he understands and perceives it, and isn’t this also the goal of great art, to offer an understanding of the world, different than its mere depiction? Art, unlike the ancient stage designs, doesn’t need to imitate the world by creating its illusion. It is not a decoration, a trompe l’oeil at the end of the corridor. Rather it tries to present the world as experienced by the artist and through their subjective truth, to measure the distance (or friction?) between their subjectivity and a possible universal, all-encompassing truth.

Art as a consolation and liberation, as a means for transgression.

It is this multiplicity that one encounters in ‘Reverse Perspective’. In the paintings which employ it, there is not one measurable space where objects are presented in theatrical assemblages, “a space that is qualitatively homogeneous, infinite and boundless, a space that is, so to speak, formless and devoid of individuality” (Florensky, 2002). Rather than that, the space gets differentiated qualities, is differently valued and weighted, is folded and deformed, enriched by the relations created between genuine objects/figures within it. Florensky, the Russian theologist and art critic, is imagining forms existing in nature as having their own centre within themselves and being subject to their own laws. As a result, there can be no impersonal/ indifferent way in which those forms exist to each other, rather they create weighted relations among them and between them and the viewer. Perspective, as a tool similar to colour and material, is employed to speak about those weighted and polycentric relations. And thus systems of measuring collide, the reference is not a calculable system of size and distance, but the intrinsic logics of the metaphysical space.

Does this differentiated intrinsic logic lead to a disintegration of the singular form within the pictorial image? Florensky argued against this interpretation. Individual objects transgress their singularity, they act like parts of a whole which are unthinkable outside of it, exactly as this whole is unimaginable without them. Respect of their inner truth and sincere coexistence with a multitude of otherness is what holds them together. “Conversely, the pathos of ancient man, and of medieval man too, is the acceptance, the grateful acknowledgment, and the affirmation of all kinds of reality as a blessing, for being is blessing and blessing is being” (Florensky, 2002).

What is equally unique for the ‘Reverse Perspective’ is that it embodies the notion of time inside the pictorial frame. Images seem distorted according to an objectified/ idealized eye, but the aim is not the faithful depiction of reality, rather than that, it strives to propose a concept of this reality by exposing symbols. Forms are depicted from various viewpoints and this can only happen if the painter moves around them in order to understand their essence, rather than remaining in the singular optical stimulus projected on him when standing still. This experience is holistic and demands time and movement, it requires an intellect much more sensitive and critical than a mute/passive observer who mechanically depicts the forms penetrating their retina. Only in the 20th century art has started contemplating again on the notion of time and movement i.e. the translation of the 4D into a 2D space. Most prominently, this was manifested in the early works of Cubism, such as the painting Demoiselles D’ Avignon by Pablo Picasso (1907). In a sense, 20th century painting brought back the notion of ambiguity and a deconstructivist/ relational thinking.

In our positivist thinking, as the legacy of the Renaissance, evolution is achieved by Reason, Science and Proof. Concepts are right or wrong, and right is anything that helps us move forward by means of some rational, provable and applicable truth. Humanism, this is a concept celebrated in Renaissance. But rather than humanity, Humanism refers to the single human, the person, the agent of the Reason/Intellect. A collective understanding of the world, held together by the metaphysical notions described above, disintegrates in favour of the Man who brings forward Science and Evolution.

This is not irrelevant for art, as it moves from an esoteric, mystified image of the world, towards a rationalised and secular understanding of it. Renaissance art doesn’t lie in the sphere of the Church, but in the houses of the gentry seeking to gain control. True art has always been symbolic, in the way that it depicts the ideas of the society in which it has been created. The art of the Renaissance is doing exactly that: As Pavel Florensky (2002) notes, “When the religious stability of a Weltanschauung disintegrates and the sacred metaphysics of the general popular consciousness is eroded by the individual judgement of a single person with his single point of view, and moreover with a single point of view at this specific moment- then there also appears a perspective which is characteristic of a fragmented consciousness.”

In this passage, the ambivalent meaning of the word ‘perspective’ is wonderfully illustrated. It is both the subjectivity demanded by this secular new world in order to achieve progress, as well as the pictorial perspective of drawings and paintings. There lies the passage from a qualitative ‘Reverse Perspective’ to a quantitative ‘Normal’ one.

In the laboratory of the classroom And what has one learned from this journey across centuries and colour pigments, convergent, parallel and divergent lines? What is this relevant to? Is an application beyond artistic or architectural practice imaginable? Who says it is even desired?

In the laboratory of the classroom, we cautiously draw the outlines of the new territories.

This is a collection of ideas and thoughts, a draft of initial instructions.

1.Perspective is about relations. This already includes the question of relationality, as understood in philosophy. In our western model, a relation is established as long as there are in question two different points, A and B. It also requires an external spectator, point C, in order to evaluate/ perceive this relation. But this model is challenged as soon as it is called to operate outside its intrinsic axioms. For what might happen if points A and B might start approaching each other, to the point where they collide and become one?

Moreover, what happens if point C, the imagined viewer and evaluator of this relation, poses himself not outside, but within the very relation he is called to evaluate?

In general, the western model of dialectics is too rigid in its (pre)conditions. It regards the viewer as an ever-outsider of the relation, untouched by it, as if untouched by the struggles of his own effort to explain the world. He sees reality in absolute terms and polarities. But such polarities can easily be proven fraud. The distance between A and B is actually filled with endless points with their own intrinsic logic and reality. Likewise, sometimes A and B cannot be separated at all, as it might not always be possible to think about notions in absolute terms and closed systems. Such could be the example of the air and breathing, as one might want to regard them separately, but breathing is rendered impossible in the absence of air.

Thinking of A and B as two separate points is not a given truth, but rather a cultural understanding. For other cultures, especially for Asian ones, as soon as there is a relation between two points, it is impossible to regard them as separate. What is interesting here is the great leap between the two points, the passage from the one to the other, the threshold which needs to be crossed, or even the possibility to reside within this threshold.

In contrast to our anguished over-defining western language, it is said that the Japanese language allows for a way of communicating much more open to individual interpretations. Concepts don’t exist in absolute terms, as words do not possess definite meaning. A level of ambiguity is allowed, which takes a more concrete form as soon as a deeper link between the participants of the conversation is established. Meaning emerges out of this link, out of the very meeting of two individuals bringing together their concepts of reality. It is precisely their possibility to learn from the threshold which makes communication possible.

2. Space, unlike what the mathematically constructed perspectival model makes us believe, is not something that is read solely through optical stimuli. In the actual world, and as architects often forget, space is perceived through all our senses. Different parameters may bring different values. What would it be like to imagine not how a building looks, but how it feels. How is it to think about the sound or the smell of a building?

I remember vividly visiting St. Agnes in Berlin, a former modernist church turned into an art gallery. I was climbing in a dimly lit stairwell constructed in exposed concrete, which felt like an evacuation funnel, to approach its upper level. My bowels were viciously shaken by a very loud bass noise. I sensed a feeling of fear, mixed with an expectation of something important about to happen. Upstairs: a curtain - there was nothing behind it.

The artwork was exactly this experience of elevation in the concrete stairwell, under the loud noise.

In the Poetics of Space, Bachelard describes how going up a stair is a fundamentally different experience than walking it downwards. Movement has an enormous effect on the perception of space. Most significantly, it presupposes the notion of time in order to achieve a more complete understanding of space, as mentioned above for the ‘Reverse Perspective’. Dancing is a way to appreciate how the space itself is transformed and challenged by each bodily movement. Furthermore, movements might create rituals and thus attribute a specific meaning and function to a place. And most interestingly, what happens to rituals if they get detached from the place of their creation and transferred to another space, in another time?

3. Coming back to the relation between points A, B and C. In a simpler scheme, A is the object to be seen and C the viewer. What happens if we reverse this model? When the viewer/agent becomes the spectacle? This shift brings suddenly the viewer from an active into a passive state. Into a state where (s)he might become the stimulus and recipient of information or action. The viewer sets himself into the threshold, like in a void. It is the void’s stillness and contemplation, passivity’s acceptance to otherness, which might allow for new meanings to emerge. It is the void that allows us to be.

4. In the ‘Normal Perspective’ there is a window through which you see. You have to position yourself in order to frame the scene and make the illusion possible. In the ‘Reverse Perspective’, you are inside the landscape. You don’t stand outside, framing it, but you get overwhelmed by it. Overwhelmed just as the experience of encountering an icon, where a religious person will fall on their knees and kiss the surface of the icon, ideally penetrating it in order to find themselves within the pictorial plane. In the ‘Normal Perspective’ you are expected to stand still, in the ‘Reverse Perspective’ you are demanded to be part of it, by indulging to the image and moving within this meta-space. Illusions get stripped, as every façade is proved to have a backside.

In order to even possess a front side, one needs a backside. I started noting down similar concepts (all deriving from my architectural/urbanistic background): A city needs the countryside/hinterland. Main streets and their activity need side streets with their supportive activities. The Centre Pompidou in Paris even made an architectural concept out of the thematization of its backside/ supportive structure, of all the otherwise hidden parts of the building.

5. Shifting perspective by occupying the position of the Other. The concept of cannibalism, as a possible interpretation of acceptance and awe for the Other, reaching to such extremes of fascination that one believes by consuming the Other, they can become the item of admiration and inherit their qualities. There was an intensive discussion on that, and I am grateful about it. The initial question being ‘to which extent you accept the Other’ is rephrased into ‘to which extent you accept the Other as the Other’. Thereby another nuance of the question arises, to which extent you allow the Other to be the Other. And certainly, its extinction by means of killing and eating it up only means that you take its position on Earth and substitute it. No matter how successful this incarnation has been or not- that Other doesn’t exist anymore. So the question, from a humanist perspective, might sound more like ‘How can I not only accept the Other, but also let it be in its own right’. Florensky’s “for being is blessing and blessing is being” whispers into my ears.

References of work I started working on my individual project with a model trying to simulate reverse perspective in its physicality. On a piece of cardboard, I placed scale models of humans in scale 1:100 in the background, 1:200 in the foreground. Although the people in the foreground were actually smaller than those in the background, their positioning made them look bigger as long as you were viewing the model from a specific spectrum of distance. The closest you got to them, to bigger they became, while the humans in the background hardly changed size for the perception of the eye. Ultimately, there was exactly one point from which to view the model, where the humans of both scales seemed to have the same size. At the same time, what was interesting is that you couldn’t actively see them simultaneously. You either focused on the foreground, blurring the background people, or vice versa.

From then on I concentrated on the tools of my project and their potential meaning: scaled people and objects as models of reality. I became interested in doll-houses as miniatures of real situations. Unlike the architectural model, which might be much more conceptual, doll-houses were aimed at depicting reality in faithful accuracy. One can find scale models of animals even in archaeological museums, as they were used as children’s toys since prehistoric times. In the 17th century, another function of the dollhouse emerges: On the one hand it is an object of display and pride within aristocratic homes, similar to a piece of decoration. At the same time, it is an educational object for young girls and future housewifes, displaying the organisation of the household and the responsibilities they would soon have to fulfil.

On a very different level is the work of Frances Glessner Lee, an aristocratic woman of the late 19th century whose class and social status did not allow her to work, but who nevertheless devoted herself to her passion: forensic and crime scene investigation.

Glessner Lee revolutionised forensic investigation by means of her dioramas, a series of models of actual crime scenes where students and researchers exercised their methods of forensic investigation. What was characteristic of her dioramas was that the fourth wall of the model was missing, therefore creating the feeling that the investigator was diving into the scene of the crime while he was examining the model. Glessner Lee’s dioramas were conceived and executed as accurate to reality as possible, showcasing not only the murdered victims in the exact position they were found and the furniture of the house, but even details such as stains of blood and cigarette ashes. It was not only the faithfulness to reality which fascinated me in those models, but rather the feeling of deviation and abnormality which they created, a feeling of peculiarity approaching fear and danger.

The research continues with references of models displaying abnormality, such as the ones by artist Lori Nix, but also vice versa, with stage design made to look like peculiar models of doll-houses, such as the setting for CafĂŠ MĂźller by Pina Bausch. In the work of Thomas Demand I admired his deliberate deception of the viewer. The artist photographs scale models of spaces made of paper, which look astonishingly similar to real everyday environments. In all these works the real and the imitation collide. It is exactly the moment of this collision which is exposed as the artistic object to the viewer.

The next part of the research concerns the collision not of the real and the imagined, but essentially of two systems of scale reference. As a random and instant glimpse of the superimposition of those two systems involves no evaluation of which one is the primary (from a moral point of view the ‘correct’) one, one of the two will be helplessly depicted as always too small while the other one will be always too big. Without an external reference and evaluation system, one cannot decide which came first, which is the normal, where does the deviation lie. Here I display images by the films Being John Malkovich by Spike Jonse (1999) and Austin Powers, the spy who shagged me by Jay Roach (1999), as well as illustrations for Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726). For a first-time viewer, one cannot know if Gulliver is too big or the Lilliputs too small, exactly as one doesn’t know if the people in Being John Malkovich are giants or if their offices are designed in a wrong scale. Because if that is the case, who would build offices so small, and why?

In the last part of the research I focus more on the peculiarities emerging out of the collision of two systems of reference in the real world (meaning not film/illustration) and the feeling of unease that this collision might create. The research has moved from the space (the doll-house as miniature) towards the human body itself (formerly by means of filmic imagination). Here, the deployed images investigate common concepts about normality and deviation in the human measurements, as well as the cult created around non-normative bodies. For this part, I used photographs of Diane Arbus (a photographer largely concerned with deviation, abnormality and various forms of illnesses) and Weegee (a photographer interested in deviant/ underground cultures and criminality in 40s New York), as well as photographs of ‘freaks’ performing in sideshow attractions.

The normative body In the discrepancy between the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ body lies a system of evaluation similar to the one of ‘Normal’ and ‘Reverse’ Perspective. For as it has been already mentioned, the normality of the ‘Normal’ Perspective can be founded neither on its historical priority, nor in its qualitative superiority. ‘Normality’ has been a value attributed to a system of thought by the predominant cultural tradition prevailing in our Western societies, the one of the Renaissance.

Similarly, the research for my individual project had reached a point where the evaluation conducted by an external ‘jury’ had to be questioned. In this case, it was the notion of the normative body.

As Stephens (2005) notes, scientific and medical analyses of the body are always cultural constructions of corporeality, a fact often obscured by their claims to empiricism and objective data. If medicine (and what is more to it, bioethics) is understood as a cultural product equal to any system of evaluation, one can recognize the influence classical ideals exercise on it. Concepts of health and disease rely on specific ideas about the perfection of mental and physical function, whereas deviations from those ideal states become the basis for defining disease and ill-health. This process of defining health and illness is vastly depending on the notion of the ‘normal’ and is therefore creating normative concepts about the body’s health and disease, sometimes even combining medical with ethical/moral arguments about deviation. To define health and normativity is still a controversial question which rases debate. Dominic Murphy (2015) is concerned with questions seemingly easier than the boundaries between mental health and illness, like the definition of a well-functioning organ. According to him (t)he Boorsian tradition has tried to deal with the problem of variation by tying assessments of function and malfunction to reference classes, which Boorse (1977) treated as natural classes of organisms that share a uniform blueprint. Kingma (2007, 2010) has recently argued that reference classes cannot be established without normative judgements, contra Boorse, who believed them to be objectively discoverable parts of the natural order.

Despite medicine’s inability to provide a satisfying definition of the concepts of normality and variation, ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ bodies have been widely exoticised in popular culture.

In this regard the cultural-historical definition of ‘freakery’ has been interesting for my research, as it displays the fluid definitions of ab/normality and disease. The body of the ‘freak’ has traditionally reflected the believes of the societies within which it was created and most interestingly, it was exactly during periods of cultural shifts where the very concept of the ‘freak’ took on a new meaning and interpretation. Until the late 19th century, ‘freaks’ were associated with the monstrous, with something unexplained/ inconceivable.

In the Middle Ages freaks were thought to be sent as omens by God, whereas in the following centuries the secular society has employed them as objects of exhibition and amusement. From the 1930s onwards, though, and as a result of scientific progress, ‘born freaks’ had shifted place in the cultural imagination from monsters belonging to the sphere of the spectacle and the Sideshow to people in need for medical help.

During the 19th century, freak shows received wide acceptance and great excitement by their audiences, despite being criticized from their very beginning for exploiting their performers and disparagingly characterizing them as ‘freaks’. Modern-era freak shows have largely shifted from ‘born’ freak performers to ‘made’ freaks. It is precisely in this “instability of the body’s meaning, its dynamic resignification within the spaces of public exhibition” (Stephens, 2005) where social narratives of normativity and abnormality/ deviation become apparent and negotiated.

The dream of Alice To conclude my research in the individual project, I came to the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, which summarizes and interprets all important notions discussed above. It is a story about a child’s journey into an imaginary world, which I define as the territory of dreams. It is not a story for children though, as it rather elaborates on the concept of the subconscious. In her journey Alice is confronted with fragments of her real everyday life, but these fragments are constantly de- and re-contextualized.

It is about her confrontation with the world of the adults, a world that she seeks to understand. Dreams are a significant mechanism to work with our unconscious hopes and fears, creating a sort of second/parallel life. The dream-territory might have the same qualities as the pictorial frame of a painting in Reverse Perspective, where the rules of Reason give way to a more powerful and multidimensional interpretation of the world.

Minor objects or incidents acquire special significance. Images become blurry or change colours, objects and people are found in odd constellations. A feeling of vertigo occures, of undefined danger and anguish. The space-time-continuum gets distorted. Systems of scale collide. One might change their size multiple times according to the context, exactly as Alice, exactly as forms in Reverse Perspective.

Within this framework of dreams and narrations, what has been equally important to my understanding are the cultural differences between the tradition of the fairy tale in Great Britain and the United States. In her article Why the British tell better Children’s Stories, Colleen Gillard (2016) argues that the American tradition of fairy tales focuses largely on the moral education acquired through the narration. On the contrary, British story-telling, with its rich tradition of pagan myths, focuses mostly on the evoked imagination and the atmospheric reconstruction of enchanted worlds. This confrontation and elaboration of the magical moment helps children elaborate feelings of anxiety towards the unknown.

“Kids think through their problems by creating fantasy worlds in ways adults don’t,” Griswold says. “Within these parallel universes, things can be solved, shaped and understood.” Just as children learn best through hands-on activities, they tend to process their feelings through metaphorical reenactments. “Stories,” Griswold notes, “serve a purpose beyond pleasure, a purpose encoded in analogies. Story arcs, like dreams, have an almost biological function” (Gillard, 2016).

Moreover, for the final installation I draw inspiration from the filmic adaptation of Alice’s story by the Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, Něco z Alenky. The particularity of Švankmajer’s interpretation of the story and his filmic techniques (such as the use of puppets, dolls and stop-motion animation) give Alice a much darker atmosphere than the Disney version.

In the film, Alice is both the protagonist and the narrator of her story. Through frequent close-ups to her lips, she becomes the mediator of the creatures’ quotes as well as of her own thoughts. The opening lines “And now, said Alice, you will see a film for children.

Perhaps. But you must remember to keep your eyes shut, or you won’t see anything!” demarcate the context of whatever follows. As she indicates that the story is one directed to adults, Alice advises them to keep their eyes shut and thus remain in a dream-state, in the world of illusions and symbolism. Moreover, through her repeated narration, Alice even objectifies her position within the story and takes distance from it, recognizing that the incidents are not real, but the product of fiction, of a tale which has to be narrated.

Alice wanders around her imaginary world without any apparent purpose or even emotion, in a scenery dirty, worn out and dangerous. There is a lot of physical pain inherent in the adaptation: “eggs break open to let loose scurrying chicken skulls; loaves sprout nails; raw meat slithers lubriciously. The crook-toothed White Rabbit hauls himself from a taxidermist’s vitrine and tugs his watch out of a sawdust-leaking chest cavity; the animals that come to his aid are mismatched bone beasts, all snapping jaws and bug eyes, dragging themselves clumsily in crowds after Alice” (Sinker, 2010). The most violent scenes are the fights between Alice and the White Rabbit. While in one scene she crashes his hand against a door to keep him outside, later on the Rabbit cuts her hand with a saw. Indeed nothing seems welcoming, pleasant or even with an educating moral purpose in the world Švankmajer has created for his heroine.

Alice fluctuates between sizes in order either to proceed her journey through a doll-sized door or to find herself stuck within the confines of a room. In a particular scene, she even gets trapped within the porcelain body of a human-sized doll, which she has to break down in order to liberate herself. Nevertheless, during the whole journey through the subconscious and the declared war against the objects of adult life, Alice doesn’t seem to get discouraged for one moment. Even during her trial under the Queen of Hearts, she denies the conformity to the given script, to the odd external rules imposed on her. As she returns to her familiar room and finds everything in place except of the White Rabbit, the question about the nature of her journey remains.

There is no doubt about Švankmajer’s Wonderland, that it is a land of nightmares rather than wonders. Exactly as our subconscious is the refuge not only of our imaginations, but also of our innermost fears. A little bit like Stalker’s Zone, a place embracing absolute beauty together with the most terrifying dangers. And most importantly: All this is invisible to the eye. And eluding any rationalisation.

Bibliography Florensky, Pavel. (2002) ‘Reverse Perspective’. In: Misler, N. ed. Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art. Clerkenwell: Reaktion Books.

Gillard, C. (2016) Why the British tell better Children’s stories. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/why-the-british-tell-better-childrens-stories/422859/ (Accessed 10 January 2016)

Murphy, D. ‘Concepts of Disease and Health’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta ed.

Stephens, E. (2005) ‘Twenty-first century freak show: Recent transformations in the exhibition of non-normative bodies’. Disability Studies Quarterly, 25(3).

Woods, S. (2007) The Social and Ethical Challenge of Body Dysmorphia.