Prokhorov, Alexander V

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W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Articles Arts and Sciences 1-2007 Revisioning Aleksandrov’s Circus: Seventy Years of the Great Family Alexander V. Prokhorov College of William & Mary, axprok@wm.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs  Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Slavic Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Prokhorov, Alexander V., Revisioning Aleksandrov’s Circus: Seventy Years of the Great Family (2007). The Russian Review, 66(1), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9434.2006.00426.x This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@wm.edu. REVISIONING ALEKSANDROV’S CIRCUSRevisioning Aleksandrov’s Circus:Seventy Years of the Great FamilyALEXANDER PROKHOROVThis introduction provides both a cultural context and a conceptual framework for thefollowing articles on Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Circus (Tsirk 1936) by Beth Holmgren andRimgaila Salys.  While delineating some basic background, the introduction willoccasionally confront several polemical questions related to the place of Stalinist film ininternational cinema as well as in the Stalinist myth-making industry.The authors chose for their discussion perhaps one of the most studied Soviet filmsand, through the prism of cultural studies approaches, amplified our sense of the Stalinistclassic while rescuing it from the more traditional Cold War readings.  Both articles focuson the issues of gender and body politics in Stalinist cinema.  They also wrest the discussionof Stalinist musical comedy from the familiar confines of comparison and contrast withHollywood musicals.  Instead, they contend that Aleksandrov profited from his knowledgeof and creative exchange with international modernist culture such as German popularcinema and Art Deco as the international style of architectural, industrial, and consumergoods’ design.Relying on cultural theory, Holmgren argues for the pivotal role of Aleksandrov’sfilm in Soviet culture.1  While Western musicals offered utopian solutions to domesticsocial ills, Circus inaugurated a Stalinist final solution to the social ills of capitalismwhile cunningly deflecting attention from the contradictions and issues of Stalinist society:Circus “offer[s] strictly Soviet-based solutions to the Western social inadequacies thatWestern entertainment abets or represses.”2  Holmgren investigates how the filmmakerexploits a tale of gender and racial emancipation to naturalize Soviet communal identity,including gender, ethnic, and racial hierarchies as an integral part of that identity.  Mostimportantly, Holmgren frames her analysis of gender and racial identity politics inAleksandrov’s picture within contemporary cultural theory, rather than the tired rhetoricof the Cold War.Dedicated to the memory of Sergei Dobrotvorskii1Richard Dyer, “Entertainment as Utopia,” in Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London, 1993),271–83; Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, 2002); Arthur Knight, Disintegrating theMusical: Black Performance and American Musical Film  (Durham, 2002).2See, in this issue of Russian Review, Beth Holmgren, “The Blue Angel and Blackface: Redeeming Entertainmentin Alexandrov’s Circus,” 22.The Russian Review 66 (January 2007): 1–4Copyright 2007 The Russian Review2 Alexander ProkhorovSalys employs Lucy Fischer’s feminist reading of Art Deco’s gender assumptions toexamine how Stalinist cultural producers, Aleksandrov in particular, incorporated ArtDeco techniques into the visual regime of High Stalinism.3  Post-Soviet cinema has paidample tribute to the stylistic sophistication and coherence of Stalinist culture and itsintertextual links with European modernism.  Ivan Dykhovichnyi’s Moscow Parade(Prorva; 1993) is perhaps most memorable example of this trend.  Few scholars, however,have focused on the place and function of international design styles in Stalinist culture.And nobody, to my knowledge, has attempted a gynocentric reading of the role of ArtDeco in Stalinist cinematic mise-en-scène.   In this respect, by contextualizingAleksandrov’s musical in the international artistic and architectural trends of 1930smodernity, Salys offers a pioneering perspective on the picture, one that perhaps explainswhy this propaganda film impressed international audiences at the 1937 Paris World’sFair.In his recent study of the legendary history of the October Revolution, Fred Corneycontends that myth shapes people’s understanding of past events, while “the narrative ...adds important dimensions to this conception of myth.  It conveys the notion of dynamismand process, of a story told in the telling, replete with the sense of drama, coherence andflow shared by all well-told tales.  Narrative form should not be dismissed as mereadornment but seen as a device that makes the story itself comprehensible.”4  Seventyyears after its release, Aleksandrov’s Circus continues to captivate domestic viewers andto attract scholars’ attention precisely because the director found a magic narrative formulafor the key myths of Stalinist culture: the positive hero, the “Great Family” of nations,and the ideological clash between Soviet “us” and capitalist “them” as a dominant principleof totalitarian culture.  In contrast to the fragmented, vaudeville-inspired aesthetics ofAleksandrov’s first musical, Jolly Fellows (Veselye rebiata 1934), his second pictureimparted a strong visual and narrative coherence not only to Stalinist but also to Russo-Soviet cultural mythology long after Stalin’s death.  Hence post-Soviet viewers still enjoythe totalitarian classic on their small screens.   Moreover, as David Branderberger arguesin his discussion of Stalinist culture’s influence on post-Soviet Russian national identity,Stalinist cinema, and Circus as one of its iconic texts, articulated a form of populism thatcontinues to resonate among Russians today.5  The recent revival of neo-Stalinist populismunder Putin’s regime provides ample evidence of the resilience of cultural assumptionsestablished by Stalinist culture, and cinema as its prime visual form.Critics often examine Aleksandrov’s Circus within the framework of Western genreand star systems—above all, the musical in its Hollywood or UFA incarnation, astransplanted to Soviet cinema.6  Soviet cultural administrators, however, were always3Lucy Fischer, Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco and the Female Form (New York, 2003).4Fred Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, 2004), 4.5David Branderberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern RussianNational Identity (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 240–48.6Moira Ratchford, “Circus of 1936: Ideology and Entertainment under the Big Top,” in Inside the Soviet FilmSatire: Laughter with a Lash, ed. Andrew Horton (New York, 1993), 83–93; Neia Zorkaia, “Tsirk i sverkaiushchiegeroini Liubovi Orlovoi,” in Krutitsia, vertitsia shar goluboi: Desiat' shedevrov sovetskogo kino (Moscow, 1998),109–30.Revisioning Aleksandrov’s Circus 3suspicious of commercial film genres because they implied capitalist profiteering as theprime goal of film production.  While on the surface Circus looks and sounds like acommercial genre product, I would argue that Aleksandrov’s film belongs to a differentcategory of cultural text—namely, a propaganda film designed to frame a political eventof major mythological significance, with music carrying much of the “message” andsimultaneously rendering that message palatable.  Made to celebrate the adoption of theStalinist Constitution (1936)—the midpoint landmark from the October Revolution tothe communist end of history—Circus was designed to bring visual coherence and narrativestability/legitimacy to the myth of the Soviet Union as a society living according to therule of socialist law.  In its focus on the grand teleology of creating the socialist family ofnations, Circus resembles historical-revolutionary films produced for the anniversary ofthe October Revolution: they, too, visualized the current version of the foundation tale.Aleksandrov had learned from his work with Sergei Eisenstein on the production of October(1927), an anniversary film that arguably placed the Bolshevik party at the center of thestory of the October Revolution.  Politically, the legacy of Soviet montage cinema andcollaboration with Eisenstein were appreciably more important for Aleksandrov than theexperience he acquired in Hollywood.  As Holmgren’s article demonstrates, through acareful juxtaposition of attractions and symbols appropriated from Western films,Aleksandrov’s Circus offers a biting critique of Western racism and gender andclass exploitation while promoting the Soviet community as presumably immune to suchsocial ills.Among Aleksandrov’s appropriations is the image, developed in Western cinemaand avant-garde art, of the circus as a metaphor for the modern world.  Out of numerousfilm narratives set against the backdrop of the big top, the 1928 film by Charles Chaplin,Aleksandrov’s friend, provided one of the major inspirations.  Like Chaplin, Aleksandrovmixes comedy with melodrama.  However, if Chaplin comments on Western modernityvia a narrative constantly balancing slapstick and melodrama, and favors melodramaticclosure, Aleksandrov creates a diegesis that cleverly assigns the two genres to diametricallyopposed ways of sociopolitical life: melodrama belongs to the prejudice-ridden capitalist“other,” while comedy triumphs in the protagonist’s redemption and introduction intothe Soviet way of life.  Whereas the synchronic formula of Chaplin’s Circus is “comedy”interfused with “melodrama,” Aleksandrov’s Circus opts for a diachronic model, whereby“comedy” defeats and displaces “melodrama” in the course of the ideological war.An introduction to a cluster of articles devoted to Aleksandrov’s Circus would beincomplete without a few remarks about musicals’ self-reflectivity.  In her commentaryon the Hollywood musical, Jane Feuer notes that film critics usually discuss self-reflectivitywhen analyzing avant-garde cinema.  Yet self-reflectivity, she argues, is also a conventionof such commercial genres as the musical:Self-reflectivity as a critical category has been associated with films, such asthose of Godard, which call attention to the codes constituting their ownsignifying practices.  The term has been applied to aesthetically or politicallyradical films that react against so-called classical narrative cinema byinterrogating their own narrativity.  Thus we tend to associate reflexivity with4 Alexander Prokhorovthe notion of deconstruction within filmmaking practice.  The MGM musical,however, uses reflexivity to perpetuate rather than to deconstruct the codes ofthe genre.  Self-reflective musicals are conservative texts in every sense.7Aleksandrov appropriates the musical’s self-referentiality to comment on the changingideological regime of the Soviet film industry.  Circus tells the story of the transition froman entertainment industry based on relative openness and collaboration with the Western,primarily German, entertainment industry, to the closed, self-reliant entertainment economythat caught up with and surpassed Western entertainment.  Having won the ideologicalwar and technological race with the West, Aleksandrov’s victorious Soviet entertainerstake as booty Westerners’ women and children: both the American protagonist and herblack child choose to stay in “Our Motherland” with the Soviet white man.  As Lahusendemonstrates in his discussion of early Soviet talkies, the transition to sound in Sovietcinema coincided with the increasing political isolationism of Stalinist Russia and therevamping of the film industry along the lines of reliance on domestic film production,without using revenues from Western imports.8  In Circus, Aleksandrov perpetuatedStalinist ideological codes by means of the backstage musical’s self-reflective conventions.By giving gender and body-politics readings of Aleksandrov’s classic, Holmgrenand Salys uncover the contradictions and instabilities of the myth of Soviet gender equality.Their refreshing exploration of identity politics in Aleksandrov’s film sheds light on thedifferences between Western and Soviet modernity and addresses the central question ofthe film’s continuing cultural relevance at its seventieth anniversary.August 20067Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” in Film Genre Reader, II, ed. BarryKeith Grant (Austin, 2003), 454.8About the industrial and ideological role of comedy in Soviet cinema’s transition from silent to synchronizedsound film production see Thomas Lahusen, “From Laughter ‘Out of Sync’ to Post-Synchronized Comedy, or, Howthe Stalinist Film Musical Caught Up with Hollywood and Overtook It,” in Socialist Cultures East and West: APost-Cold War Reassessment, ed. Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker (Westport, CT, 2002), 31–42.

Revisioning Aleksandrov’s Circus: Seventy Years of the Great Family

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Revisioning Aleksandrov’s Circus: Seventy Years of the Great Family

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