Artistes at the Top of the Big Top: Disorientated

Kluge's second feature is a brilliant marriage of abstract ideas and concrete images. The daughter of a trapeze artist dreams of revolutionising the circus, but comes up against reality in all its forms: the Moscow cultural chief, the capitalists who have the power but not the will to change, and her elephants - who after all remain circus elephants. Part political essay on utopia and how to achieve it, part fiction, part a 'mondo bizarro' of circus life, it's a real rarity. And, of course, it's part of the film's task to deal with such disorientating impossibilities. The circus performers - a man wrestling with a crocodile, the lion tamer, the elephants standing on their hands - would surely agree. DMacp.