Intellect

Cryptonym (the distributed presses blog at the University of Chicago Press) has invited noted Russian film scholar Rimgaila Salys, author of The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov to introduce us to some of the fun and provocative films that were among the most popular works of Russian cinema in the 1930s and 40s. For today's installment, Salys looks at Circus, an eccentric work from 1936.

For Aleksandrov, the transition from the pomp, pageantry, and pathos of the Hollywood musical to the Stalinist grand style and spectacle was a natural one. The successful musical – and especially the folk musical – expresses the ritual values of a society that coincide with the ideological values of the producer, in this case the Soviet State, so that Stalinist myths and their visual elaborations enter Circus naturally as a function of the genre. Aleksandrov's musical was perhaps the first Soviet film to give full and direct expression to the core myths of high Stalinism. Like many Socialist Realist heroes, Marion Dixon undergoes a painful rite of passage as part of her path to consciousness and incorporation into Soviet society. Her arrival in the Soviet Union may be seen as separation; learning about Soviet society in Moscow under Martynov's tutelage expresses the transition. Dixon suffers initiation, regression into chaos, and symbolic death via Kneishitz's public revelations regarding her illicit past. At one point he tells Dixon, "This city has driven you mad!" Madness is not excluded from the death-experience of the initiate. Traumatized by the public exposure of her past, Dixon runs away from the circus arena and literally faints from shame and horror. By forming a proper family with Martynov, she transforms her formerly illicit and dark sexuality into a healthy, wholesome femininity, figured by the white sweater and skirt of the fizkul’turnitsa. She is resurrected into the great Soviet family in the Red Square finale of the film. Her sexual "spontaneity" is first stabilized and made passive within the family unit and then transformed into consciousness and subsumed to the state patriarchy during the second finale.

The success of the show "Flight to the Stratosphere" (the Soviet cannon is mounted on a car – much more modern) parallels the now successful love of the couple, whose cultural values – domestic and foreign, capitalist and communist – have been reconciled. The sexual transcendence of flight is now melded with national transcendence, just as Martynov's cupid wings have been replaced by the wings of Icarus. Dixon and Martynov make their entrance as equals, dressed in unisex aviators' jumpsuits, capes and Flash Gordon helmets, and descend the grand staircase to the rhythm of "Song of the Motherland." Symbols of Soviet air power abound, from propellers on the showgirls' tank tops to their imitation of whirring blades in front of a triangular bank of propellers to the stratospheric rocket itself. The glorification of military might is paradigmatic for the folk musical, as in Busby Berkeley's synchronized marching and flag waving in Footlight Parade (1933) and the battleship number of Born to Dance (1936). In the Soviet instance, feats of aviation, such as the rescue of the Cheliuskin crew, also signify communication and unity between the center and the marginal areas of the Motherland. – Rimgaila Salys