b02
BETTY FALKENB ERG
gives is Kluge's new film itself. For all their use of avant-garde tech–
niques, for all their forward-looking social concepts, the cinema of social
reality had been barking up a dead tree. A Shaw or an Ibsen can hardly
expect, today, to be hailed as a new prophet just because he's changed
his medium. The message remains the same and it's a tired message for
all its noble intent.
Kluge's title proclaims the break.
Artists in the Circus Dome:
Bewildered'
is a precise description of the artist's situation and state of
mind in the sixties; the film, itself, an extended metaphor exploring
mind's terrain. Anxiety is taken out of its cement cast and made fluid .
As in
Abschied von Gestern,
there is a loose story, this time about a
trapeze artist who decides to start her own circus. Not just another
circus like all the rest, but a "reform" circus, one that would "en–
gage" the audience rather than entertain. Leni Peickert's ideas are
not always practical or feasible. In fact, they are often totally ab–
surd. For one thing she wants to confront the audience with really
wild animals. From someone who has read his Lorenz she must
be told , "Animals are wild only in the jungle." But in order to
rea lize her plan at all, she finds she must have capital. Indeed, she
becomes a "capitalist," and makes most of the necessary adjustments
to the system, compromising many of her original aims. Still the circus
fails. Leni is arrested for tax evasion and forced to give up the animals.
With them go her hopes of reforming the circus.
If
you want to change
the world, then by little steps. Big steps will make a fool of you and get
you nowhere. Besides, circus is an anachronism; today's circus is TV.
And so, just as she read up on circus history, now she does her home–
work on the "cool" medium, takes a job at a TV station and starts work–
ing her way up the departmental ladder. The movie ends on a vague
hope: maybe some day the two things will grow together - the artist's
love for his art and the technics of TV.
Kluge's plot is sheer parable. But not parablc in the Biblical sense,
with a moral tucked away in the hem.
If
the movie is a book with seven
seals, then an open-ended apocalpyse. Nor is there anything esoteric
about the symbols he uses; they are all fearfully present in the things
around us. Fantasy is employed not to distract us from our terrors but
to confront us with them on a deeper, unconscious level. Every image
can awaken countless associations, different for each viewer, according
to his history.
There are themes. But no themes of social utility, and no solutions,
I. Shown in America as
A rtists Under the
Big
Top: P erplexed.
