The Icelandic actor and director Benedikt Erlingsson has followed his fascinating drama Of Horses and Men by curating this weird documentary clip-montage. It’s a surreal tapestry of home-movie and newsreel fragments about the secret life of circus folk and itinerant fairground entertainers in various European countries from the 20s to the 60s, accompanied by the woozily ambient music of Georg Holm and Orri Páll Dýrason from Sigur Rós.
There are longueurs, yet often also strangely fascinating sequences, like parts of a druggie fantasy. Clowns, comics, trapeze artists, lions, tigers, elephants, giants gambol across the screen. Sometimes the footage will switch from ancient monochrome to relatively recent colour material, but the activities seem ageless. It has the feel of a remembered dream. Circus themes on film usually provoke mentions of Fellini, Browning or Jodorowsky, and yet none of these allusions is quite right.
The Show of Shows is neither celebratory or derogatory in the right way. Just unreal. Perhaps it’s more a found-footage experimental piece than a documentary.
