Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
Hannelore Hoger | ... | Leni Peickert | |
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Sigi Graue | ... | Manfred Peickert (as Siegfried Graue) |
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Alfred Edel | ... | Dr. Busch |
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Bernd Höltz | ... | Herr von Lueptow |
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Eva Oertel | ... | Gitti Bornemann |
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Kurt Jürgens | ... | Mackensen, Dompteur |
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Gilbert Houcke | ... | Houke, Dompteur |
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Wanda Bronska-Pampuch | ... | Frau Saizewa |
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Herr Jobst | ... | Impressario |
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Hans-Ludger Schneider | ... | Assessor Korti |
Klaus Schwarzkopf | ... | Gerloff, Philologe | |
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Nils von der Heyde | ... | Arbogast, Pressechef |
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Marie Luise Dutoit | ... | Schweiter Aristin |
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Peter Staimmer | ... | Perry Woodcock |
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Theodor Hoffa | ... | Monokelträger |
"Neues Kino movie" about life in the circus dome narrated in Brechtian spirit; deceptively illusionist grip is broken violently by aloofness, sweeping subjective tracking shots interrupted by a flat snapshot of an old stick, calm color sequence stops up a moving black and white scene and interviewed people in close-up becomes suddenly silent. Kluge has also taken a different motto from Brecht to heart, namely, that the artist's task is to maintain: despite its ambiguity "Circus performers" in a somewhat simplified format, could have been a film for children. Written by Ulf Kjell Gür
This is the kind of German 1968 cinema I never really got into and never will - and this is also the kind of movie that has killed the German cinema and any kind of entertainment on German movie screens until a new wave of film makers emerged in the late eighties.
"Autorenfilmer" Alexander Kluge, part of the "intellectual" 1968 bunch of West German movie makers, tells no story but just a simple frame plot about a young woman (played by Hannelore Hoger of later "Bella Block" TV fame) who starts a new kind of politically correct circus attraction in the late sixties with the artists and animals showing the cruel sides of war and the Third Reich, but the idea fails as the artists and the audience cannot follow her visions.
It's filmed partially in b/w and consists mainly of documentary-like scenes, interviews, improvisations, artist exercises and useless repetitions and loops of people falling into the dirt, dancing without any reasons or repeating stupid sentences. A completely boredom of 115 minutes!
Maybe this was considered as "avantgarde" in 1968, but I cannot really imagine that even then anybody had fun watching this except with a gun held at his head. An unnecessary and completely uninteresting movie that made the punk movement of the late seventies more than necessary!