Inspired by Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland and Through
the Looking-Glass
in Wonderland and Through
the Looking-Glass
FILM ADAPTATIONS
The wonderfully curious Alice has been appearing
on the silver screen since 1903, the year she debuted in British
director Cecil Hepworth’s Alice in Wonderland, a silent,
eight-minute movie that depicts the young girl’s propensity to grow
and shrink. Alice, played by May Clark, encounters the White Rabbit
and the Queen (both played by Hepworth’s wife), the Frog-Footman
(Hepworth himself), and a slew of playing cards who walk upright in
the Tenniel-drawn fashion. In 1910 Thomas Edison’s film company
produced the second Alice adaptation, also a silent film,
this time ten minutes long. Shot in the Bronx, Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (A Fairy Comedy), features similar
growing and shrinking effects on the part of Alice, played by
Gladys Hulette. The first full-length Alice in Wonderland
(running time: fifty-two minutes) premiered in 1915 under the
stewardship of director W. W. Young. Starring Viola Savoy as Alice
and shot on Long Island, this film’s imagery derives, as faithfully
as the technology of the time would allow, from Tenniel’s
illustrations.
The first “talkie” of Alice was released
in 1931, a film with Ruth Gilbert as Alice that was eclipsed in
popularity by Paramount’s all-star production of 1933, directed by
Norman McLeod. The Paramount Alice in Wonderland features
Charlotte Henry as Alice, Gary Cooper as the White Knight, W.C.
Fields as Humpty Dumpty, and Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle. In the
first film to blend elements of Alice with Through the
Looking-Glass, director McLeod remained consistently loyal to
Tenniel’s visual style. Walt Disney’s well-known animated feature
Alice in Wonderland was released in 1951, with Kathryn
Beaumont as the voice of Alice. Disney used seven songwriters to
score this musical adaptation of the Alice books. William
Sterling’s musical Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972)
took the story back to live action. Featuring music by John Barry
and lyrics by Don Black, this stunningly colorful production stars
such British notables as Dudley Moore and Peter Sellers.
Alice’s adventures have also been the subject of
numerous films made for television, most notably the BBC’s 1966
production directed by Jonathan Miller and, in 1999, a three-hour
epic, directed by Nick Willing, with an all-star cast: Robbie
Coltrane, Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Kingsley, Miranda Richardson, Martin
Short, and Gene Wilder, among others. In 1977 Monty Python’s Terry
Gilliam made his directorial debut with Jabberwocky , a
loose interpretation of Carroll’s nonsense poem that showcases an
amazingly nasty monster. Dreamchild (1985) details the
real-life events of Alice Liddell’s trip to America in 1932, the
centennial of Lewis Carroll’s birth. The film intercuts scenes from
the journey with fantastical flashbacks of Alice’s childhood spent
with Carroll, who is played by Ian Holm.
“WHAT THE TORTOISE SAID TO ACHILLES”
Lewis Carroll published the following short
piece, with the title given above, in the April 1895 issue of the
journal Mind.
Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had
seated himself comfortably on its back.
“So you’ve got to the end of our race-course?”
said the Tortoise. “Even though it does consist of an infinite
series of distances? I thought some wiseacre or other had proved
that the thing couldn’t be done?”
“It can be done,” said Achilles. “It
has been done! Solvitur ambulando. You see the
distances were constantly diminishing; and so—”
“But if they had been constantly
increasing?” the Tortoise interrupted. “How then?”
“Then I shouldn’t be here,” Achilles
modestly replied; “and you would have got several times round the
world, by this time!”
“You flatter me—flatten, I mean,”
said the Tortoise; “for you are a heavy weight, and no
mistake! Well now, would you like to hear of a race-course, that
most people fancy they can get to the end of in two or three steps,
while it really consists of an infinite number of distances,
each one longer than the previous one?”
“Very much indeed!” said the Grecian warrior, as
he drew from his helmet (few Grecian warriors possessed
pockets in those days) an enormous note-book and a pencil.
“Proceed! And speak slowly, please! Shorthand isn’t
invented yet!”
“That beautiful First Proposition of Euclid!” the
Tortoise murmured dreamily.
“You admire Euclid?”
“Passionately! So far, at least, as one
can admire a treatise that won’t be published for some
centuries to come!”
“Well, now, let’s take a little bit of the
argument in that First Proposition—just two steps, and the
conclusion drawn from them. Kindly enter them in your note-book.
And in order to refer to them conveniently, let’s call them A,
B, and Z:—
(A) Things that are equal to the same are
equal to each other.
(B) The two sides of this Triangle are
things that are equal to the same.
(Z) The two sides of this Triangle are
equal to each other.
Readers of Euclid will grant, I suppose, that
Z follows logically from A and B, so that any
one who accepts A and B as true, must accept
Z as true?”
“Undoubtedly! The youngest child in a High
School—as soon as High Schools are invented, which will not be till
some two thousand years later—will grant that.”
“And if some reader had not yet accepted
A and B as true, he might still accept the
sequence as a valid one, I suppose?”
“No doubt such a reader might exist. He might say
‘I accept as true the Hypothetical Proposition that, if A
and B be true, Z must be true; but, I don’t
accept A and B as true.’ Such a reader would do
wisely in abandoning Euclid, and taking to football.”
“And might there not also be some reader
who would say ‘I accept A and B as true, but I
don’t accept the Hypothetical’?”
“Certainly there might. He, also, had
better take to football.”
“And neither of these readers,” the
Tortoise continued, “is as yet under any logical necessity
to accept Z as true?”
“Quite so,” Achilles assented.
“Well, now, I want you to consider me as a
reader of the second kind, and to force me, logically, to
accept Z as true.”
“A tortoise playing football would be—” Achilles
was beginning.
“—an anomaly, of course,” the Tortoise hastily
interrupted. “Don’t wander from the point. Let’s have Z
first, and football afterwards!”
“I’m to force you to accept Z, am I?”
Achilles said musingly. “And your present position is that you
accept A and B, but you don’t accept the
Hypothetical—”
“Let’s call it C,” said the
Tortoise.
“—but you don’t accept
(C ) If A and B are true,
Z must be true.”
“That is my present position,” said the
Tortoise.
“Then I must ask you to accept C.”
“I’ll do so,” said the Tortoise, “as soon as
you’ve entered it in that note-book of yours. What else have you
got in it?”
“Only a few memoranda,” said Achilles, nervously
fluttering the leaves: “a few memoranda of—of the battles in which
I have distinguished myself!”
“Plenty of blank leaves, I see!” the Tortoise
cheerily remarked. “We shall need them all !” (Achilles
shuddered.) “Now write as I dictate:—
(A) Things that are equal to the same are
equal to each other.
(B ) The two sides of this Triangle are
things that are equal to the same.
(C ) If A and B are true,
Z must be true.
(Z ) The two sides of this Triangle are
equal to each other.”
“You should call it D, not Z,” said
Achilles. “It comes next to the other three. If you accept
A and B and C, you must accept
Z.”
“And why must I?”
“Because it follows logically from them.
If A and B and C are true, Z must be
true. You don’t dispute that, I imagine?”
“If A and B and C are true,
Z must be true,” the Tortoise thoughtfully repeated. “That’s
another Hypothetical, isn’t it? And, if I failed to see its
truth, I might accept A and B and C, and
still not accept Z, mightn’t I?”
“You might,” the candid hero admitted; “though
such obtuseness would certainly be phenomenal. Still, the event is
possible. So I must ask you to grant one more
Hypothetical.”
“Very good. I’m quite willing to grant it, as
soon as you’ve written it down. We will call it
(D) If A and B and C
are true, Z must be true.
“Have you entered that in your note-book?”
“I have!” Achilles joyfully exclaimed, as
he ran the pencil into its sheath. “And at last we’ve got to the
end of this ideal race-course! Now that you accept A and
B and C and D, of course you accept Z
.”
“Do I?” said the Tortoise innocently. “Let’s make
that quite clear. I accept A and B and C and
D. Suppose I still refused to accept Z
?”
“Then Logic would force you to do it!”
Achilles triumphantly replied. “Logic would tell you, ‘You can’t
help yourself. Now that you’ve accepted A and B and
C and D, you must accept Z !’ So you’ve
no choice, you see.”
“Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is
worth writing down,” said the Tortoise. “So enter it in your
book, please. We will call it
(E ) If A and B and C
and D are true, Z must be true.
Until I’ve granted that, of course I
needn’t grant Z . So it’s quite a necessary step, you
see?”
“I see,” said Achilles; and there was a touch of
sadness in his tone.
Here the narrator, having pressing business at
the Bank, was obliged to leave the happy pair, and did not again
pass the spot until some months afterwards. When he did so,
Achilles was still seated on the back of the much-enduring
Tortoise, and was writing in his note-book, which appeared to be
nearly full. The Tortoise was saying, “Have you got that last step
written down? Unless I’ve lost count, that makes a thousand and
one. There are several millions more to come. And would you
mind, as a personal favour, considering what a lot of instruction
this colloquy of ours will provide for the Logicians of the
Nineteenth Century—would you mind adopting a pun that my
cousin the Mock-Turtle will then make, and allowing yourself to be
re-named Taught-Us ?”
“As you please!” replied the weary warrior, in
the hollow tones of despair, as he buried his face in his hands.
“Provided that you, for your part, will adopt a pun
the Mock Turtle never made, and allow yourself to be re-named A
Kill-Ease! ”
This dialogue, restoring the beloved Tortoise
and the Mock Turtle, has inspired mathematicians for generations,
among them Douglas R. Hofstadter. In his book Gödel, Escher,
Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), he intersperses among his
chapters further colloquies between the Tortoise and Achilles. In
this way, Hofstadter introduces complex geometrical puzzles through
the allegorical Carrollian heroes. Gödel, Escher, Bach
received a Pulitzer Prize in 1980.