Flying and Smoking
9
advertisements, pleasurable risk-taking in the circus becomes clearly associated
with consuming cigarettes. Penny Tinkler identifies how the “feminization of
smoking” was largely “a visual phenomenon” and one replayed through
representation (2006: 2). If athletic circus performers could make smoking seem
alluring, as both physically daring and socially adventurous, these
advertisements reiterate how the act of smoking signals female emancipation
and potentially also sexual availability (Tinkler 2006). They co-opt images of
health and glamour—the body’s social surface.
An association of the bodily activity of smoking with the physical action of
the circus produces further significance. As argued elsewhere, flying trapeze
performers in kinesthetic motion can provoke visceral responses in circus
spectators as they watch the performers doing mid-air leaps and jumps (Tait
2005: 141-151). Simone Dennis (2006) argues that the action of smoking is a
bodily experienced phenomenon that advertising appropriates, so that these
Camel cigarette advertisements can be said to surreptitiously align the bodily
experience of smoking with the felt bodily thrills of viewing circus. This
conceptual framing is discussed later in the article and implicates the lived body
in relation to the seen movement of other bodies, through bodily engagement
with and in the world (Merleau-Ponty 1996). The article’s larger point is that
responses to popular entertainment are not only about the targeted appeal of
associated words and images but also the conjunction of these with bodily
sensations. These three Camel advertisements evoke a sensory body
phenomenology of overlapping responses to flying and smoking.
Visible Traces
Recent cultural analysis of the circus has identified how promotional
advertising was an integral part of the institution of the circus and its business
and providing a precedent for entertainment industry marketing such as that of
cinema (Stoddart 2000: 56; Davis 2002: 42-6). But in turn, advertisers benefited
from the social spaces created by the mass audiences for the circus and its
widely disseminated programs and magazines. Of special interest to an analysis
of the circus is how the three Camel advertisements depict circus performance
and offer unusually detailed information about an act that captures the
performance history of a specific performer with, importantly, guidance about
how spectators might respond. These are not simply functioning one-way in
marketing cigarettes to consumers but they also promote the performance to
spectators.
Aerial performance is a particularly ephemeral art form and the verification
of its achievements claimed in circus annals, including knowledge about the
repertoire of a record-breaking act, is dependent on traces retrieved from print
archives inclusive of performance trade advertisements. Therefore these Camel
advertisements are useful historical sources. Print sources can be supplemented
with the cinematic record after the 1920s, and usefully with films in which
aerialists did the physical stunt work—both Concello and Fox perform aerial
action in Cecil B. de Mille’s film, The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). An aerial