Life is a Circus

This is quite an interesting documentary on the visionary Danish artist Robert Storm Petersen - aka “Storm P”. His career spanned silent movies, through theatre and cartoons as he made people laugh by exacerbating situations and those humorous traits are illustrated here using a suitably daft shoot-out scene from a silent movie before exploring some of his illustrations, and his comedic performances. His drawings are potently satirical poking fun at aspects of society, yes, but also at individual vanity and hypocrisy - and as he ages, we see a definite change in his attitude to his work and to his audience. This is a man who took the art of comment and fun very seriously and though there’s a paucity of available moving imagery here, it’s still a quirky ten minutes worth a gander if you are at all interested in the history of what we might call socially charged “light entertainment”.