“Like a three-ring circus”

This chapter tackles the relation between circus and the avant-garde through the overarching issue of attractions and distractions. Sergei Eisenstein’s 1923-production of Ostrovsky’s Enough Simplicity for Every Wiseman broke the nineteenth-century text into “attractions” derived from circus acts. Eisenstein’s theory of “the montage of attractions” approached the spectator as raw psychic and physiological material to be assaulted by discontinuous attraction rather than absorbed by a coherent plot and setting. Barnum’s late nineteenth-century three-ring circus, with its multiple points of attention, had already envisioned a modern spectator whose attention was fragmented and easily distracted and needed to be overwhelmed. Jonathan Crary’s view of modernity as a battle between attention and distraction is examined in relation to Manet’s 1882 painting Bar at the Folies Bergère in which the enigmatic expression of the main figure, a barmaid, is juxtaposed with a miniscule figure of a trapeze artist. The modern entertainment environment is a push-pull between boredom and excitement, open to both popular and avant-garde appropriation.