First long lenght product of the collective effort of the Groupe Zanzibar, a collective of avant-garde filmmakers, college dropouts and political activists dating from the French termoil of the 60's. Funded by Sylvina Boissonnas, a wealthy feminist activist, many highly experimental directors such as Philippe Garrel, Jackie Raynal or today's pick, Serge Bard, had the opportunity to present many projects addressing topics burning with the zeitgeist of the times, with themes ranging from religion to political revolution, postmodernity or existentialism. The group also benefited from the glamour of many attractive young talents (from Caroline de Bendern, starring here, to Tina Aumont or Nico herself), to the point of being referred as ''The Dandies of May 1968''. While they put faces on films and visual projects (in a cross aesthetic between the political Nouvelle Vague and the cynical, psychedelic décadence of The Velvet Underground), many others collaborated from the shadows, until the formal dissolution of the artistic collective in 1973. With an absolute creative freedom (more than in Warhol's factory), a sufficient budget and upholding the flag of revolutionary cinema, Groupe Zanzibar produced minimalistic films prone to philosophical reflection and situationist rethoric; Patrick Deval's 1969 film Acéphale, portraying quotes from Bataille's body of work, could serve as an
example of radical cinematography, which was not sanctioned by the Centre National de la Cinematographie, the supreme authority issuing and labeling almost the entire French filmmaking industry. After they dissolved and the epoque came to an end, the so-called Zanzibar Films are testimony to a radical time gone by.
Now, Détruisez-vous (Destroy Yourselves) was directed by Serge Bard, an enigmatic college dropout from Paris Nanterre University who at some point and after three films, traveled to Algeria, converted to Islam -renaming himself to Abdullah Siradj- and abandoned filmmaking altogether, moving to Mecca. This could be considered bizarre, if not taking into account the rich relationship between young French political activism and Africa as a whole, land ravaged by colonialism and its people subjected to discrimination in the streets of Paris. Also, Groupe Zanzibar itself funded overseas travels to the Magreb, resulting in video memoirs such as Frédéric Pardo's Home Movie. Before all that happened, Serge's films are the only clue as to what were his thoughts about revolution.
Stylistically powerful, Détruisez-vous portrays Caroline de Bendern (who became famous by virtue of her iconic photograph holding a flag as the 68's Marianne) as a politically invested student, who permanently struggles to remember and quote lectures and conversations of fellow radical thinkers, whether teachers or friends; as the film goes on, in almost anti-chronological order often interrupted by shocking intermissions courtesy of the camera work or a distinctive and unnerving noise, it becomes short of an existentialist deconstruction of the motives or possibilities of revolution, including a psychoanalysis of shorts in conversation with a disencarnated voice. Caroline, who later would become a director of her own (also in fascination with Africa, as her 1971 'A l'intention de Mademoiselle Issoufou a Bilma' and her 1970's records of African music 'Moshi Too', along with Barney Wilen truly indicate), peaked here as an actress, and her expressivity and voice really enhanced an otherwise really abstract and almost plotless film essay. Filmed in dark, stern and austere sets, Serge Bard unfolds both a critique and an affirmation and, as Nietzsche, he seems to denounce nihilism the only possible way -from its belly. For the characters deconstruct the more prevalent affirmations of the young French activists: the idea that most people would seek change in their lifetimes, that intellectualism and discourse are the most fundamental values of revolution, that change of institutions would not demand blood. As in Godard's La Chinoise (and the fact that Juliet Berto is also casted here is telling), here lies the idea that only a change so radical that rejects discourse (the terrorism of the moral minority) would be effective; even if also meaningless in the great scheme of things.
Another connection between Détruisez-vous and La Chinoise lies in a reflection on the impossibility of human communication, and the primacy of social and psychological relationships in the political discourse; while in La Chinoise such an aspect comes to shine as a parody of Maoism's encourage of self-criticism and the background and functions of the characters within their cell, Bard's analysis is shaped in Sartre and Freud's terms. In short, where Godard's approach to orthodoxy is, as widely known, satirical, subtle and even funny, Bard's is absolutely serious, frontal and definitive. There's little humor in Détruisez-vous if not by an imaginary program of the next French Revolution in Breton's style; its iteration of political speech seems to urge a going up beyond words and justification, into the pure action of will, the sartrean concept of chance. Nothing should be respected, aside from that deliberately chosen to be so. And so many obstacles lie between personal discomfort and action in society: the crippling lack of personal discourse aside from that of others (portrayed in Caroline's permanent borrowing), the lack of will characteristic of too much knowing (the teacher's position); the constant and necessary omission of the never-ending 'what for?'.
Many other elements seems to surround Caroline's character, in a confuse background; from a peyote trip in the United States and the fight in the ghettoes to various encounters with characters male and female of different ages, without further explanation. Many of them are significant not as much due to the conversation as to the emotional weight behind them: when she confesses her hatred for people to a roomate, when she -symbolically- has sex with an older man, when she speaks of how unimportant almost everything seems. These elements blend with the questioning voice, reminding her of the body behind all words and identifications ''you are a body, yet you act as if you didn't had one''. If I had to answer whether if Détruisez-vous is a political film or an antipolitical one, I'd answer neither one: it's a deconstruction of revolutionary politics, and, as ought to be known, a deconstruction is not a destruction but rather a desarticulation, a dismembering which seeks to explicite internal tensions, relationships and motions. Its weaknesses, its strenghts. As it constitutes an active process, it still constitutes a political document nevertheless. As the film states at some point, a burned-out American who unleases shots into the crowd instantly turns his personal affairs and unhappiness into politics.
Bard urges to speak even if speech is imperfect and equivocous: 'If we don't speak we are already dead, and governed by the dead'. And he reminds us that 'to really love someone means you must demand them to become a complete revolutionary: they must carry out fully all that they begin, whatever it is''.
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