Artists under the Big Top...was improvised without any preconceived script during a time of considerable political turmoil in Germany; its narrative is disconcertingly elusive and few of the conventional rules of cinematic construction are observed. But these "amateurish" features are deliberate strategies designed to articulate the film's unusual subject: an allegory of the perplexing situation artists, especially filmmakers, face in the era of late capitalism. Like the young German filmmakers, the heroine, Leni Peickert, wishes to "reform" her art, the circus, to make it portray its subjects more authentically and abandon its celebration of man's omnipotence. Despite an "inheritance" from a "socialist research institute in Frankfurt" and some rather sinister pointers from a marketing specialist, she fails and ends up studying television techniques (a career trajectory remarkably similar to Kluge's own). The circus' series of self-contained acts becomes a model for Artists' structure... The variety-show format becomes the basis for a counter-spectacle that stretches the spectator's imagination and creative reasoning powers to their limits. Stuart Liebman