The Circus with a Broken Heart – a documentary record of entropic decay
Author of the article discusses in details the documentary film directed by Marek Tomasz Pawłowski The Circus with a Broken Heart (2009), in the context of the condition of Polish contemporary circus after 1989. This documentary film presents a picture of a modern circus, infected with entropy, decline and chaos. These forces destroy all constitutive elements of a circus: artists, arena, technical background, and the audience as well. Through presentation of specific people, events and phenomena the director creates the image of slow decline of a small circus “Bojaro”. Based on this picture, the author of the article draws conclusions about the causes of the crisis of Polish circus, and tries to analyze the image of the Polish province under capitalism. Reffering to the artistic values of the documentary, the author indicates its main assets, namely the use of metaphors and complex aesthetic figures, and the well organized dramatic structure. The analysis emphasis the figure of clown, which despite a documentary nature of the movie, goes beyond the reality and becomes the main metaphor of this film. According to the author’s the ethnographic fi lm category is useful to discover a hidden meaning of this documentary film.

The Circus with a Broken Heart – a documentary record of entropic decay
Author of the article discusses in details the documentary film directed by Marek Tomasz Pawłowski The Circus with a Broken Heart (2009), in the context of the condition of Polish contemporary circus after 1989. This documentary film presents a picture of a modern circus, infected with entropy, decline and chaos. These forces destroy all constitutive elements of a circus: artists, arena, technical background, and the audience as well. Through presentation of specific people, events and phenomena the director creates the image of slow decline of a small circus “Bojaro”. Based on this picture, the author of the article draws conclusions about the causes of the crisis of Polish circus, and tries to analyze the image of the Polish province under capitalism. Reffering to the artistic values of the documentary, the author indicates its main assets, namely the use of metaphors and complex aesthetic figures, and the well organized dramatic structure. The analysis emphasis the figure of clown, which despite a documentary nature of the movie, goes beyond the reality and becomes the main metaphor of this film. According to the author’s the ethnographic fi lm category is useful to discover a hidden meaning of this documentary film.