Hannelore Hoger stars as Leni Peickert, an idealistic child of the big top who inherits a circus from her father (a trapeze artist who died in the ring) and decides to transform the old fashioned entertainment spectacle into modern, socially relevant performance art. Kluge structures this satirical fiction like a documentary, opening with a survey of Peickert's circus (and the performers who died performing or rehearsing their acts) and then following Leni's odyssey. He shoots it like a TV new cameraman, observing her business meetings, her creative brainstorming sessions and her obsessive purchasing of elephants and other exotic animals with a mobile handheld camera, as if peaking in on the unfolding story. That style has become part of the modern film language, thanks to decades of comic mock-documentaries and restless, scruffy American indies, but in 1967 it was part of the cinematic revolution inspired by the French New Wave, as is the abrupt editing and intercutting, the use of archival footage and the editorializing commentary. "A dialogue with the real experience of the audience demands a new filmic language and this language initially withdraws from the audience, because they are not used to it," explained Kluge in an interview.
While Leni Peickert is in many ways a stand-in for Kluge and his determination to remake the cinema, he's not above satirizing her idealistic but unfocused and confused efforts. "Leni Peickert realizes she can't unite art and free enterprise," drones the often droll narrator. "Only as a capitalist can one change things." Leni is big on the generalities and political intentions but short on form, content and practical execution, so she surrounds herself with visionaries who dream up outrageously elaborate set-pieces. The problem is, she's as shortsighted a capitalist as she is ineffectual an entrepreneur. She takes out loans to hire acts and equipment (and, of course, all those elephants), then applies for new loans to cover payments on the old. She goes bankrupt then starts all over again after inheriting a small fortune, this time adding a water park and trained dolphins to the politically-minded spectacle. Think Cirque du Soleil with a Brechtian spirit: part big top spectacle, part theatrical deconstruction, part performance art with socially conscious commentary. Needless to say, her dreams are bigger than her resources.
Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed does challenge audiences with its mix of documentary style and droll commentary to explore the tension between entertainment and social engagement, and between art and commerce. But Kluge is also dryly witty and visually inventive and his creative play with form and style keeps the narrative alive with surprises. Just like Leni, Kluge hasn't the resources to stage her dream circus but he manages to suggest the scope, the audacity and the absurdity of her visions through dialogue, sketches, miniatures and a few isolated elements of the big picture. And like Leni, Kluge has a thing for elephants, who appear as both majestic animals and bizarre aliens dropped into the landscape of sixties Germany. Hannelore Hoger brings an indomitable spirit to Leni and her ideals. She may fail to see her grand ideas realized, but Kluge admires her intentions and her resolution and together they bring that energy and idealism to the forefront of her character. Even in failure, she's hatching new plans to put her ideas into play, this time in a more modern arena: television. It can be a challenge to watch and it is decidedly an artifact of its time and culture, but that's also part of its charm. This is a film made a by a director who believes that movies matter and can, if not change the world, at least inspire viewers to look at it differently. Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice.
The Facets DVD appears to be mastered from a preserved archival print rather than a restoration but it is in good condition. The B&W footage (with a brief sequence in color) is generally clean (in contrast with the archival newsreel footage interspersed through the film, which shows its age and degradation) and the sound is clear, though there are some glaring typographical errors in the English subtitle track. The feature is accompanied by two short films by Kluge. The thirty-minute The Indomitable Leni Peickert, Kluge's 1970 follow-up to Artists, picks up Leni's story as she leaves TV to return to the circus. This time she's determined to give audiences what they want but before she knows it, her restless creative streak kicks in again. The print is watchable but more worn and scuffed than the relatively pristine feature. The Execution of an Elephant, a rumination of the cultural treatment of captive elephants that reaches back to the notorious Edison company short of the same name, is one of Kluge's late made-for-TV shorts, part documentary and part visual essay where the text becomes part of the expressive style, as much image as narrative information.
For more information about Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed, visit Facets Multimedia. To order Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed, go to TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
