Art Deco Aesthetics in Grigorii Aleksandrov's The Circus

Employing Lucy Fischer's feminist reading of Art Deco's gender assumptions, Salys examines how Stalinist cultural producers, Grigorii Aleksandrov in particular, incorporated Art Deco techniques into the visual regime of High Stalinism. By contextualizing Aleksandrov's The Circus in the international artistic and architectural trends of 1930s modernity, she offers her perspective on the picture, one that explains why this propaganda film impressed international audiences at the 1937 Paris World's Fair.