Young circus artist Leni Peickert has ambitions- to create the most unique and advanced circus for the future. Setting up to create a circus that features completely authentic animals, challenging the artists involved, Leni runs into many difficulties as she works with marketers, finance types, and other artists. Alexander Kluge's Artists Under the Big Top: Perplex is not a very accessible film for average audiences. Dripping of intellectual conversations, Kluge's film uses heavy editing to create a powerful yet complex portrait of arts place in society. Being a german filmmaker, Kluge seems to be most notablly wresting with his own decisions, trying to pinpoint the role of art after such a castrophe as World War II. Artists Under The Big Top: Perplexed wrestles with the relationship of Art and Free Enterprise, capturing the restraints of society and art itself. The circus merely represents any form of artistic expression, with Leni Peickert and her team even discussing in the film the notion of whether art can exist after Auschwitz. This is not a film interested in bashing the commercial side of art but instead merely surveying the various ways they can and should coexist. Kluge's film touches on so many interesting antedotes when it comes to artistic expression but my favorite would be how the film subtelty depicts the give-and-take of individual creativity when involved in a co-dependent art project. What stands out the most over all else is the passion Kluge shows for the importance of art, arguing the monumental importance of the ability to create. Kluge's Artists Under The Big Top: Perplexed is complex and confusing experience, but the film's deep routed message appears to be a rally cry for art in the face of trauma, with art being a tool for change.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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