The Golden Age of Circus - Storyville - BBC 4 - Best Programme This Year imo

Recorded this on Sky Box and just watched it.  Wasn't expecting anything as mesmeric and captivating as this.  There is no narration, just superb atmospheric music throughout
apparently by some of Sigur Ros.  Clips of 'circus' acts from early 1900's to 1980s. 

It is on iPlayer

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06yghfw/storyville-20152016-12-the-golden-age-of-circus-the-show-of-shows#group=p03gr5wn

and Youtube.

Apart from the way that animals were treated, a couple of disturbing images will stick with me.  Knives being thrown at a toddler and a man throwing a baby from one hand to another
while stood on top of a beam on top of a building.

There is about 10 minutes of dancing at the beginning, it may not be your thing but stay with it, even that seems to work.

It restored a bit of faith in television.

A review of the film from the Guardian…..they liked it too!

An old clown dabs on his white pan stick, pushing the pale paste into the creases above his eyes. A girl in a neat, cream dress, who looks as if she’s waiting for a bus, perfunctorily swallows a sword and retrieves it again from her gullet without flinching. Excited children in Sunday coats queue for tickets next to a red wooden caravan, their mother opening a coin purse, unsure of whom to pay.

In his absorbing tone poem, Storyville: The Golden Age of Circus – The Show of Shows (BBC4) director Benedikt Erlingsson plunders the international archives to piece together this dreamy vision of bygone showpeople and their audiences. The footage, taken from the 19th and 20th centuries, is underpinned by the gloriously lofty sounds of Sigur Rós (well, some of them) and an Icelandic choir, performing a score written specially for the film.

At the end of a cold, gloomy week, this is as welcome as being wrapped in a blanket and handed a hot chocolate. Again, BBC4 offers a genuine alternative to the noise and static of other channels, scheduling more than an hour of wordless spectacle, the often jarring narration of modern documentaries replaced here by the sad piano and urging strings of a band perfectly suited to providing film soundtracks. Anyone who has seen the band’s film Heima, where they return to Iceland to play their music to small, local crowds, will know the gut-tugging power of their instrumental tunes, in particular when paired with beautiful pictures.

Erlingsson’s exhaustive research and careful editing, accompanied by the plaintive orchestrations beneath, are quite bewitching. This film grabs you like Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman, taking your hand and flying you over snowy fields to a land of big tops, vivid colour, whirling dancers and fiery daredevils.

Stampedes of laughing children, some waving caps above their heads, others in aprons and pigtails, hurry to find their seats in the bleachers as a more rhythmic section begins. Dancing girls and boys open the show with their wild, alien movements, quite out of keeping with the self-contained folk watching them. One couple dressed in rags dance tipsily, cheek to cheek and bent low as they twirl and stagger. A spinning woman with long plaits revolves as her heavy skirts fly outward, revealing sturdy bloomers. A cheekier, more modern pair jiggle and kick in sequin basques.

There is something powerful about old footage set to modern music. Like that oft-repeated internet meme in which Fred and Ginger or Laurel and Hardy seem to dance to hip-hop. It bridges past and present in an instant, somehow making the long-dead figures seem alive again. And with it comes the sadness that these suddenly vital people aren’t here any more.

The dancers are replaced by daredevils, escapologists and human cannonballs. And the music segues appropriately as the jumpers jump, the cannons fire and the motorbike stunt riders launch themselves at flaming obstacles while the escapologist whips round and round, inverted and tearing at the ropes that pin his elbows to his sides.

To pensive piano, the beauty contestants line up, showing leg, looking lightly embarrassed. This section is obviously about objectification, as old-fashioned strip tease (two words) gives way to full nudity. You get a strong sense that the circuses and sideshows gave the socially constrained permission to peak, to release suppressed urges. You can almost hear the steam shooting out of their ears.

The section dealing with performing animals is fairly miserable, as one caged, pacing creature after another does its keeper’s bidding. So many sad eyes – Kay Burley would have a field day. In particular, the rodeo clown/bull-fighting segment is violent, unpleasant and full of suffering, both human and animal. Towards the end of the lengthy section about elephants, several of them are dressed up in giant plaid shirts and jeans with huge guitars hung round their necks and encouraged to stamp on their podiums as though performing their latest chart hit. The absurdity of it is almost funny.

Finally, eerie quiet accompanies the clowns: even when smiling and waving, they are the most sinister aspect of circus entertainment. Two clowns with seemingly rubber bodies, perform a fast routine with a chair, both trying to steal it from the other. The skill is incredible. Buckets of water and custard pies fly this way and that, then the most upsetting thing of all: the off-duty clowns, still in makeup but holding a beer.

The music only falls silent in the last 10 minutes, so that we can hear the vaudevillian comedians “hey” and “wacka” their way through routines that have the audience rocking back in their seats. It ends on smiling faces, chins lifted to the ceiling, watching a body precarious in the air above. It’s beautiful.