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Down the Rabbit Hole: Watch Jonathan Miller’s Swinging Sixties ‘Alice in Wonderland’

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Jonathan Miller first considered the possibility of making a film of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland during a party in the early 1960s. Miller was discussing the book, over the percussive clink of ice cubes on glass and the tidal rise and fall from excited chattering voices, with the playwright Lillian Hellman. Miller explained that although Carroll’s book had been filmed before it had never been done properly. These previous efforts, he claimed, had been “too jokey, or else too literal..and…had always come unstuck by trying to recreate the style of Tenniel’s original illustrations.” Copying Tenniel might work in animation but never, oh never on film.

Miller considered Alice in Wonderland “an inward sort of work, more of a mood than a story.” Before he could turn it into a film he wanted to make, he had to discover “some new key” with which to unlock the book’s hidden feeling. To find the possible answer, Miller asked:

What was Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) about?

and:

What is the strange secret command of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)?

His answer, as he explained in article for Vogue, December 1966: “Nostalgia and remorse.”

Like so many Victorians, Dodgson was hung up on the romantic agony of childhood. The Victorians looked on infancy as a period of perilous wonder, when the world was experienced with such keen intensity that growing up seemed like a fail and a betrayal. And yet they seemed to do everything they could to smother this primal intensity of childhood. Instead of listening to these witnesses of innocence, they silenced them, taught them elaborate manners, and reminded them of their bounded duty to be seen and not heard.

Lewis Carroll’s novels about Alice in a magical wonderland were books “about the pains of growing up.”

Everyone Alice meets on the way…represents one of the different penalties of growing up. One after the other, the characters seem to be punished or pained by their maturity.

Cor blimey! The wonderful Mr. Miller had an incredible intellect, a polymath, an immensely talented polymath who seemed to want to rationalise everything he encountered. But often, perhaps too often, in doing so, the dear old doctor took some of the magic away. I greatly admired Jonathan Miller, he was one of my childhood heroes, but I am willing to believe in the rhinoceros under the table (or the elephant in the room) as much as there ever so might just be fairies at the bottom of the garden—as G. K. Chesterton (jokingly) believed. Or, as the great comedian Eric Morecambe once joked about religion: Two goldfish swimming in a goldfish bowl. One said to the other, “Do you believe in God?” “No, of course not. Why?” “Well,” the first replied, “Who changes the water?”

It’s all about perspective.
 
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Miller cut Carroll’s artifice of wonderfully exotic creatures (the White Rabbit, the Gryphon, the Caterpillar, and so on) and turned them into the academics he believed they were based on. A startlingly brilliant idea at a point in history when everyone was supposedly questioning everything about the Establishment and the old tenets of Queen and Country, religion and class—all of which were (rightly) under attack. As Miller noted:

The animal heads and playing cards are just camouflage. All the characters in the book are real, and the papier-mache disguises with which Carroll covers them all up do nothing to hide the indolent despair.

Once this was clear, the way to make the film fell neatly into place. No snouts, no whiskers, no carnival masks. Everyone could be just as he was. And Alice herself? Not the pretty sweetling of popular fancy. I advertised fro a solemn, sallow child, priggish and curiously plain. I knew exactly what she would be like when I found her. Still, haughty and indifferent, with a high smooth brow, long neck and a great head of Sphinx hair.

Apparently, seven hundred children applied, or at least their parents did, but Miller did not interview any of them, until he chanced upon a photograph of Anne-Marie Mallick, “a dignified schoolgirl of Indian-French stock with a mane of dark hair.” Who, as Miller’s biographer Kate Bassett notes, represented an Alice who “was exclusively a child of the director’s era, manifesting the auteur’s (rather than the original author’s) divided personality and ambivalence towards authority figures.”

The former co-star of Beyond the Fringe, recognised Carroll’s satire as “amusing youngsters by sending up old, sententious types” which “tallied with the spirit of the 1960s.”

Thus the perceptive viewer of the film was able to see double: the two decades translucently overlaid, though a century apart, as if it were a pleat in time.

Made for BBC Television, Alice in Wonderland was filmed over nine weeks in a dreamy English summer. Miller created a masterpiece of television and film—which was as much influenced by Orson Welles’ The Trial as it was by Ken Russell’s The Debussy Film or Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. All of which Miller acknowledged. Miller wrote the screenplay, and did collect one of the best casts imaginable including Peter Sellers, Peter Cook, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave. Alan Bennett, and Leo McKern, amongst others, all for a flat fee of £500 each. And the music score by Ravi Shankar is highly effective.
 

 
Watch the rest of Miller’s ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.12.2019
05:34 am
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A Classic Ghost Story for Christmas: ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’
12.26.2018
09:31 am
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The sole object of a ghost story, wrote M. R. James, is to inspire “a pleasing terror in the reader”. James was an academic and writer who reinvented the ghost story for a new era. He believed ghosts should be “malevolent or odious” rather than those “amiable and helpful apparitions” that appeared in stories by authors like Charles Dickens in say A Christmas Carol. In an essay on ghost stories, he claimed the most successful tales “make us envisage a definite time and place, and give us plenty of clear-cut and matter-of-fact detail” but:

...when the climax is reached, allow us to be just a little in the dark as to the working of their machinery. We do not want to see the bones of their theory about the supernatural.

Montague Rhodes James was a scholar of medieval history, who served as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge University. Each Christmas Eve, he would invite a small group of friends and colleagues and students to share some sherry around a fire while he read his latest ghost story. He wrote one story a year and most of his tales of the eerie and the supernatural were set in the world of antiquities and academia, where an individual might accidentally stumble across some ancient secret or forgotten artefact that unleashes unnameable horror. 
 
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Among the best known of James’ short stories is “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904) in which a rational, you might say somewhat skeptical, and bookish academic called Parkins discovers an ancient whistle among the dunes of a deserted beach while on holiday. The whistle has strange occult markings on one side and an inscription on the other that reads “Quis est iste, qui venit?” which Parkins translates as “Who is this, who is coming?” By removing the whistle from its burial place, Parkins soon finds out what rather than who it is that comes after him.
 
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In 1968, the multi-talented Jonathan Miller brought the tale to television. Miller edged more towards a psychological (if not quite Freudian) drama in his adaptation of James’ tale which made the film’s supernatural elements all the more disturbing. Parkins or rather Parkin as he is called in Miller’s film, was played by Michael Hordern as a slightly stuffy, retiring man, who mutters and mumbles his way through the story—much of his performance was improvised—as if he is subconsciously aware his actions in finding the whistle symbolizes his own repressed desires and fears. Or as horror writer Kim Newman put it:

...a case of severe sexual frustration leading to absolute dementia

It’s a classic tale beautifully told and one of television’s most chilling and effective ghost stories.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Haunted: Mark Gatiss goes in search of the ghost writer M.R. James
Ghosts in the machine: Occult fun with trick photography
‘Ghosts’ photobomb portraits of their loved ones
The Victorian woman who drew pictures of ghosts
Spectropia, the popular 19th-century method of conjuring demons and ghosts

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.26.2018
09:31 am
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A young Patti Smith and Jonathan Miller star in a 1971 BBC doc about New York City


 
Jonathan Miller became famous in the cast of the great 1960s comedy show Beyond the Fringe, sharing the stage with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and—I can’t tell if a heart emoji would be out of place here—playwright Alan Bennett. To this day, Dr. Miller is well-known in the UK as a public intellectual, prominent atheist, TV documentarian and opera director. (During the early 1980s, Miller was briefly famous in America, too, as the host of the popular PBS history of medicine, The Body in Question, and as the author of the best-selling book of the same title. He was often a guest on Dick Cavett’s talk show for an entire week at a time.)

In 1971—YouTube says ‘72, but I’ll take Miller’s biographer’s date—Miller returned to New York, a city he’d first visited when Beyond the Fringe played Broadway a decade before, and he brought a BBC camera crew. West Side Stories: Two Journeys into New York City juxtaposed his impressions of New York City and those of a very young Patti Smith.
 

 
She looks and sounds like Rimbaud if he just stepped away from a stickball game, which is to say she’s already, as Oliver Stone made Ray Manzarek say, “making the myths.” Patti talks Godard, rock journalism, “slopping the hogs,” spending the whole day on 42nd Street for fifty cents, and the first porno double feature she watched (Orgy at Lil’s Place and Blonde on a Bum Trip), all with unusual verbal facility and charm for a 24-year-old.

In my whole life, no matter where I lived—Chattanooga, Chicago, South Jersey—I was always an outcast. Y’know, even in my own neighborhood, even in my own family. I looked different than my whole family. I always felt alien. Not that I wasn’t loved, but people thought I was weird-lookin’ and skinny and all that. I had an eyepatch which I’ve since got rid of. And I never had no friends or boyfriends. When I came to the city, my whole life changed.

The uploader of this footage, YouTube user Pheidias Ictinus, claims it was the cameraman’s idea to interview Patti:

This film was made by the director Tristram Powell. At the suggestion of his cameraman he went to meet Patti and she ended up as an integral part of the film he was making with Jonathan Miller. The decision was made on the fly, during filming in New York, it was not part of the original concept. That’s what you call creative freedom.

Who would Jonathan Miller’s cameraman tell him to interview in today’s Manhattan? Some tech guy? I can’t wait to turn on the TV in 2047 and hear some tech guy reminisce about New York on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. Lord, take me now. . .
 
Watch after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.07.2016
09:05 am
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‘The Body in Question’ explains life itself, like Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ explained the solar system
10.23.2013
04:19 pm
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First broadcast in America by PBS in 1979 (in Great Britain it aired the year before) Jonathan Miller’s classic 13-part series on the history of medicine, The Body in Question, was one of the most celebrated PBS “big events” of that decade. The creator’s goal? To explain life itself to a mainstream television audience.

The Body in Question, an internationally funded production spearheaded by the BBC, did for medical science and physiology what Lord Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos did for Western art, history and our understanding of the universe. Like these other series, Miller’s program is regarded as a landmark in long-form television documentaries, but unlike them, it has curiously never been made available for the home video market. This is beyond tragic, but The Body in Question can now be seen on YouTube.

Although Jonathan Miller is a well-known and (generally) much-beloved pillar of British society—a member of that endangered species they used to refer to as “public intellectuals”—sadly, he is less recognized as a freakishly smart cultural treasure in the former colonies. This was not always true. For a few years at least, Miller was actually somewhat of a frequent sight on American television. More than once he appeared on five daily episodes of Dick Cavett’s PBS series in a row. These marathon conversations made for some of the most fascinating television I’d ever seen and I recall taping the audio from the TV speaker so I could at least listen to them again. Although I have not heard these tapes since I was probably 15, I can still hear, in my mind’s ear, Miller explaining to Cavett about Franz Mesmer, “mesmerism” and hypnotism. (And indeed here that show is, via Dick Cavett’s New York Times blog.)

When I was a kid, Jonathan Miller seemed absolutely heroically brilliant to me (he still does, I hasten to add). I didn’t find out about him via The Body in Question or the Cavett shows, I knew of him because of the “Original Broadway Cast Recording” (the American version, in other words) of the Tony-winning satirical revue, Beyond The Fringe (which also starred Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and the great playwright Alan Bennett). A friend of mine’s father had seen the show on Broadway in the 60s and he owned the record. Because I was such a Monty Python nerd, I’d read about Beyond the Fringe. Eventually, I was pulling it out and listening to it every time I was at their house and he told me I could just have it. I still have it. I also still have my copy of the coffee table book of the series, as seen above. When The Body in Question aired, to my pre-teen mind, it was hosted by the comedian who did the Bertrand Russell imitation—not to mention the Shakespearean character who refuses to die (“Now is steel ‘twixt gut and bladder interposed!”)—in Beyond The Fringe. He was also a doctor? And he directed Gilbert and Sullivan?

Jonathan Miller seemed to be the single most erudite man alive.

But back to the series, The Body in Question is on YouTube in decent quality, and if you’ve never seen it, it’s an amazing treat. I guarantee that you will be smarter after you’ve watched it. Miller was the first person ever to perform an autopsy on a human cadaver on television, an act that would have seen him put to death just a few centuries earlier, not that they had TV back then, of course.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.23.2013
04:19 pm
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Jonathan Miller’s ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’
12.26.2010
06:14 pm
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It terrified the audience on its first transmission in 1968—not surprising as its author, M. R. James, was the master of ghost stories, who re-invented the genre with his tales of the supernatural. Whistle and I’ll Come to You starred Michael Hordern, and was produced and directed by Jonathan Miller, the former star, along with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, of Beyond the Fringe. Miller had already made his mark directing The Drinking Party, The Death of Socrates and Alice in Wonderland for the BBC before making this classic chiller, one described as:

A masterpiece of economical horror that remains every bit as chilling as the day it was first broadcast.

 

 
Parts 2 and 3 of ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.26.2010
06:14 pm
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2012 Is For Suckers and Lapsed Christians

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Straightforward article from AP about the 2012 doomsday silliness. Worth reading. The bit about kids and young mothers buying into this BS is sad and depressing.

Pure and simple this is Christian apocalyptism being projected onto the ancient Maya (in retrospect, even!) and various New Age theories (