Circus (1936) is a romantic-farce-musical directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov (1903-1983) who started as an assistant director to Sergei Eisenstein before graduating into the ranks of the great Soviet musical directors. Lyubov Orlova, the wife of Aleksandrov (and incidentally Stalin's favorite movie star), stars as Marion Dixon, a circus performer who flees to the Soviet Union only to be plagued by her troubled past of committing "history's biggest crime" of sleeping with a colored man and conceiving a colored child. Dixon falls in love with a theater director but is blackmailed by a Western man who has knowledge of her illustrious affair.
While the arrival of sound brought a regression in the aesthetics of cinema, Circus manages to maintain the specificities of the medium offering spectacular visual sequences and technical perfection that makes the film seem rather Hitchockian. There are moments of Chaplinesque physical comedy (as well as a character physically resembling the Tramp (Chaplin's The Circus (1928) was made only six years earlier)) such as the man pulling the feather from the swan, using the feather as a pen, before putting it back into the swan. Aleksandrov stages the two protagonists falling in love in a spectacular shot as the camera pans down from Marion's face, to the couple holding hands in the reflection of the piano before rotating 180 degrees.
Stalinist cinema, also known as socialist realism, abandoned the formalism that had categorized the Soviet films of the 1920s, to instead focus on wholesome entertainment and strong characters and plot intended for the masses. The films were similar to Hollywood narratives but located on the opposite ideological spectrum as they consisted of a naive, but good-natured hero developing the communist consciousness. Like, Chapaev (1934), Circus embodies the synthesis of ideology and entertainment that the Soviet center-moderate critics sought to achieve. At the climax of the film, Marion is exposed in front of the circus audience with the blackmailer claiming her actions justify her "banish(ment) from civilized society." The film portrays the socialist Soviet Union as a place of acceptance and understanding, compared to the harsh reality of race relations in the United States and other Western nations. The last minutes of Circus drive the message home as masses of people march through the streets carrying flags and banners of Lenin and Stalin as Marion turns to her comrade proclaiming, "now I understand."
While the arrival of sound brought a regression in the aesthetics of cinema, Circus manages to maintain the specificities of the medium offering spectacular visual sequences and technical perfection that makes the film seem rather Hitchockian. There are moments of Chaplinesque physical comedy (as well as a character physically resembling the Tramp (Chaplin's The Circus (1928) was made only six years earlier)) such as the man pulling the feather from the swan, using the feather as a pen, before putting it back into the swan. Aleksandrov stages the two protagonists falling in love in a spectacular shot as the camera pans down from Marion's face, to the couple holding hands in the reflection of the piano before rotating 180 degrees.
Stalinist cinema, also known as socialist realism, abandoned the formalism that had categorized the Soviet films of the 1920s, to instead focus on wholesome entertainment and strong characters and plot intended for the masses. The films were similar to Hollywood narratives but located on the opposite ideological spectrum as they consisted of a naive, but good-natured hero developing the communist consciousness. Like, Chapaev (1934), Circus embodies the synthesis of ideology and entertainment that the Soviet center-moderate critics sought to achieve. At the climax of the film, Marion is exposed in front of the circus audience with the blackmailer claiming her actions justify her "banish(ment) from civilized society." The film portrays the socialist Soviet Union as a place of acceptance and understanding, compared to the harsh reality of race relations in the United States and other Western nations. The last minutes of Circus drive the message home as masses of people march through the streets carrying flags and banners of Lenin and Stalin as Marion turns to her comrade proclaiming, "now I understand."