Kings Of The Sky

The U. Film Society (being a real Minneapolitan, they will NEVER be "The Bell" any more than Dayton's will ever stop being Dayton's or the Hungry Mind ever REALLY became Ruminator) is currently showing a two-week festival of documentaries about the many aspects of the circus. Now, almost everyone finds SOME aspect of the circus interesting, right? And what with side shows, high wire artists, magicians and more, there ought to be plenty to fascinate. Well, yes. But not in "Kings Of The Sky", the first of the series that I've gotten to see, last night.

This film tells the story of a high wire act in a circus touring the rural areas and small towns of China. You have the visual spectacle of the act itself, the look at a culture you rarely see in the movies, and the cultural differences between the circus performers and the people they're entertaining. All in all, prime ingredients for a great time. What went wrong?

For starters, the film uses some truly perplexing camera work... in far too many of the shots of the troupe performing their act, they're shown in such extreme close-up that you can't even see their entire bodies head to toe, much less get any sense of how dangerously far from the ground they're performing... and when one of them is injured in a fall, the camera totally fails to convey the shock of the moment because as far as you can tell from watching the film, she's only fallen a few feet.
Then there's the fact that sub-titles are used for only a fraction of the dialogue, so all the personal insights into the performers that we could be getting just go up in smoke. What do most of them feel about their work, what do they get out of it? We'll never know.

There's a very telling sequence in which the camera zips from one member of the troupe to another as they show their various scars and injuries and tell us where and how they got each of them that reminds you that this light amusement for the audience often comes at a high cost to the performers themselves. That could have had quite an impact if there had been a few more scenes like it, but no such luck.

"Kings Of The Sky" is a rare film of an unfortunate kind: one that takes a subject that only has to be presented straightforwardly with no elaboration in order to be exciting, and makes it into a bit of an endurance test, even at a short 75 minutes. Undoubtedly other films in this "Under The Bell Big Top" series must avoid the mistakes that this one has made, and I intended to find out by checking out at least one or two more. But anyone who's a big fan of the circus or merely curious about it can safely skip "Kings Of The Sky." It's not exactly The Greatest Show On Earth.