A Few Facts and Gems from the Earliest Days of Cinema
Produced and directed by Cecil Hepworth, it is the very first cinema adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The film runs eight minutes and is held at the National Archives of the British Film Institute. It is damaged, looks blistered, but, my, is it worthy of still being screened. The link is here. Do take the time to watch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeIXfdogJbA
We can walk into a bookshop and pick up a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland without any difficulty at all. We can follow the development of authors, their influence on others, their influence on children’s literature, adult or fantasy literature … But to discover the birth of cinema, to have access to the material of those century-and-more bygone days is not so easy. Of course, there are some excellent books on the subject but that is not the same as access to the material. I have been searching the internet to see whether anywhere in the world there is a festival that celebrates the birth of cinema, and I cannot find one. Do any of you know of one?