Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed

The film is a post-modern mix of various narrative and formal techniques, broken down into a myriad of individual building blocks that can stand and function on their own. However (and this is the main advantage of the entire film), they can work together as part of a truly singular film, with the story of Leni Peickert as its backbone. The best thing about the film is precisely its seemingly fragmented form of "building blocks" - the individual blocks: a) are made up of various artistic and non-artistic media (fragments from literary works, reproductions of paintings, metafictional techniques, and archival and documentary shots); b) have variable length and role in the overall structure (from short meditations, for example, on freedom and the end of Nazism expressed by elephants (!), to longer micro-stories of characters seemingly unrelated to the plot, but indirectly playing an important role, such as the profile of moral inspector Korti, who is a symbol of the final subjugation of Leni Peickert's "utopianism," but we are told many irrelevant things about him). There are endless examples, but it is important that these blocks trigger a free chain of associations and possibilities in the viewer to create different and new meanings and forms, always connected by the main narrative thread, which makes the film very audience-friendly. There is also more technical and formal playfulness, overall perspective, references to other films, the strong influence of Godard's work (such as the intertitles), and a story that, in a positive sense, reflects the time period of its creation - the rejection of the West and the East, the 19th century, Nazism, and the present as places that not only deprive us of illusions but also of utopia in its positive sense of a desire to change an unjust present. (09.11.2014)