LRB Screen returns from its summer break to continue its year-long exploration of the art of literary adaptation in partnership with MUBI.

Alice (1988), the first feature by the great Czech stop-motion artist and animator Jan Švankmajer, who turns 90 this month, has perhaps come closest of all Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland adaptations in successfully translating Lewis Carroll’s singular vision for the screen. Fusing animation and live-action, with Alice as protagonist and narrator, it is at once a faithful adaptation and a characteristically idiosyncratic take by a veteran Surrealist, who saw the original narrative less as a fairy tale and more like a kind of amoral dream. Responding to the film, and especially its psychoanalytic depths, will be the author, film-maker and professor of literature and psychoanalysis, Devorah Baum.

*Czech with English Subtitles*

Join historian Fara Dabhoiwala for the story behind one of the V&A’s most fascinating portraits, in association with the LRB.

In 1928, the V&A acquired a previously unknown portrait. It shows the Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams (c. 1690-1762), dressed in a wig, surrounded by books and scientific instruments. In all of the previous history of Western art, there is no other image like this: a man who had been born into slavery, shown as a gentleman and scholar. The museum presumed it was a satire – but who had made it, when, where, and why, has remained a puzzle ever since. 
 
Join Fara Dabhoiwala as he reveals the astonishing story of the painting’s true meaning, its connections to the greatest scientists of the Enlightenment – and Francis Williams’s extraordinary message to posterity.

Livestream tickets are available here. (For in-person tickets, tap the button below.)

Parker’s monumental two-volume anthology Some Men in London uncovers the rich reality of life for gay men in London, from the end of the Second World War to decriminalization in 1967. Bringing together contemporary newspaper reports, letters, diaries, psychological textbooks, novels, films, plays and police records, and covering a wide range of viewpoints, the books explore what life was actually like for gay men in this period. Volume II, published on 26 September, takes us through the not-so-Swinging Sixties, on the road to partial decriminalisation – and includes an exploration of the production and release of Victim, a landmark of queer cinema starring Dirk Bogarde.

Hiding in plain sight, the gay community of 1960s London call Soho their home. This cloistered community lives in fear of persecution and under the shadow of blackmail. Enter Melville Farr (Bogarde): a successful barrister – and a married man – who is drawn into a murder enquiry involving a former acquaintance. As Farr finds himself increasingly implicated in the case, he becomes determined to catch those responsible and refuses to meekly accept his peers' pact of silence and role as victim.

The post-screening Q&A will be hosted by the author and LRB contributor Mendez, whose debut novel, Rainbow Milk, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize.