In Wonderland

Alice falls downward. Wonderland is waiting for her, at the bottom of the infinite tunnel of her frustration and curiosity. As the girl reaches the bottom, she breaks through the ceiling of a room. When she recovers from the tumble, a point-of-view shot shows a chandelier oriented strangely upwards. A moment later, a close-up shows a strange expression on the girl's face; the shot enlarges to show her long blond hair dangling upwards, against the force of gravity. Suddenly, a quick rotating camera motion tilts the perceptual plane 180°. The spectator realizes then that the ceiling is actually the floor, and that the world into which Alice has plunged is organized according to a new, completely inverted orientation. This overturning, this ‘revolutionary’ camera movement in the opening scene of Alice in Wonderland's (Burton 2010), is something that goes beyond a mere change of the inner spatial organization of the fantastic world into which the character has dropped. This filmic ‘gesture’ tells us something about our own status as film spectators, and therefore about the nature of the film experience.

The most interesting, albeit almost undetectable, aspect of the scene is precisely that brief moment of time during which Alice remains attached to what at first seemed to be the room's floor and what is soon to to turn into its ceiling.