Alice -cal Vista- -split Scenes- [portable] 〈INSTANT〉

The were condemned by regular porn patrons who complained of headaches. "I came to see a movie, not a shattered mirror," wrote one disgusted viewer in a fan letter preserved in the Cal Vista archive. Conversely, a tiny cohort of art students and film theory professors celebrated the film. They saw the split screen as the ultimate metaphor for the pornographic gaze: it is always fragmented, always looking from two places at once (participant and voyeur).

Distributed by , a studio known in the late 70s for pushing the envelope of narrative smut (they were behind the infamous SexWorld ), Alice is unique. It is a film that is less interested in the "money shots" and more interested in the descent . The protagonist, Alice, is not a wide-eyed child but a disaffected woman trapped in a gaudy, bourgeois nightmare. When she follows the "White Rabbit" (often portrayed as a sleazy, fast-talking porn producer or a literal man in a decaying costume), she falls not into a garden, but into a video feedback loop. Alice -Cal Vista- -Split Scenes-

Over a decade after its release, Cal Vista’s Alice occupies a nostalgic niche. While mainstream parody blockbusters of that era often leaned heavily on campy humor, McLean’s Alice chose a more somber, abstract, and heavily saturated visual design. The were condemned by regular porn patrons who