At 12.01am this morning the curtain rose on Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. If the last five months of hype have left you cold, how about being truly perverse and making today the day you watched the first Alice movie ever made?
Alice in Wonderand (1903), carefully restored by the British Film Institute’s National Archive, is now available online. In fact you can watch it right now, right here:
A fascinating article about the restoration project appears on the British Film Institute’s website. Apparently, the film featured the first British actor ever to be named in the credits of a film: it was the collie dog glimpsed at 3:16 minutes in, later to star in Rescued by Rover (1905). Now you know.
From the March 5th – 15th, the BFI will be hosting a “brief rabbit-hole retro,” with a selection of the most notable Alice films, from Paramount’s 1933 star-studded oddity, through to Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 masterpiece of taxidermy. All films will be shown at the London Southbank Centre. For a full schedule and ticket information, see the BFI website.
