Circus (Tsirk)
Directed by: Grigori Aleksandrov
USSR | 1936 | Fiction | 88 mins | Russian w/English subtitles

This event is part of Global Roots Film Festival: Why Sing, Why Dance?

In May 1930, the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein and his lifelong collaborator Grigori Aleksandrov (they co-directed and wrote Ten Days That Shook The World, and General Strike), arrived in the US at the invitation of Paramount Pictures. They were interested in the new phenomenon of Sound Pictures which were sweeping the country - but their first experiences were not good ones. For at this time sound cinema was a sickly child that could just about talk but could barely move. To save bored audiences from endless talk required imaginative directors who knew how music could drive plot, character and momentum. Aleksandrov was much taken by what he saw on-screen: the studio’s musicals by Ernst Lubitsch and Russian emigré Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight) and, soon after, the ones at Warners choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Lyubov Orlova, Aleksandrov's wife, stars in this, as well as most of Aleksandrov's other films.

On his trip to the U.S. something, though, must have disturbed Aleksandrov: white American hatred of American blacks. Circus opens in the American south. Marion Dixon (Orlova), a white celebrity who has just given birth to a black child, races with her bundled infant, catching a train in the nick of time, townsfolk at her heels. It is not stated, but perhaps implied, that the father was lynched. In the final scenes in Russia, when a racist man tries to attack the child, the seated crowd, protectively, keeps handing the child upward and over, with one audience member after another singing to the child in Russian, in languages of the various Soviet republics. Like all Soviet children the responsibility of the nation, amidst such radiant celebration he embodies the nation’s future and hope.