LobotomousMonk

...grabby title, right? I wasn't sure what to expect with Avenging Angel, but I was pleasantly surprised. The drama was cartoonish, but like most cartoons it was a fun romp. The setting is the bright lights of the big city, Los Angeles, where an ambitious law student reviews her previous life as a street prostitute. She comes to the aid of her old friends when they are being attacked by two-bit mobsters. Betsy Russell is the titular character and has a dynamic, cutesy-poo presence on-screen. Support characters are sweet and the villains are overblown but effectively so. Exotic Karin Mani looks fantastic in her shower scene for a lead-up to one of the more dramatic and shocking moments in the film. Additionally, there is a ridiculous climax at the Bradbury Building involving a baby in peril. However, alls well that ends well.

I found this movie on Telegram, streaming free in HD which was lucky for me... and you. It seems that there is a scammer company seeking to copyright flag educational documentaries using footage from Avenging Angel. The company is DivoSports and their charlatan scam artist rep, Arvind C. (see Divo at LinkedIn). Divo is violating the fair use clause of the Copyright Act as well as claiming rights on media they don't own. YouTube is accepting the claims because their entire flagging system is automated and even when you appeal the flagging, nothing reaches a real person at YouTube for review. Is it an attempt at extortion. This is unclear at present but regular honest people have been putting in complaints about Divo since 2017 and to no avail.

What a sad state of affairs for the media industry. No wonder then that some will upload the entire video for free when this kind of thing happens. Where is YT on this??! You really shouldn't block the distribution of educational content, Divo. It seems the Telegram uploader has become vigilant in making that point, not only by having Avenging Angel available on dozens of social media apps, but also with the posting of image galleries of screenshots from the movie. It seems that there was an Angel out there seeking Vengeance. I LOVE poetic justice! Nice job whoever you are.

Bard's film tight-rope walks the authenticity of Vigoesque documented views with the ideological transcendental identification effects of an interrogative process. In that regard, Destroy Yourself might remind some of Wajda's Man of Marble/Man of Iron set, where personal history and collective reflection of a historical moment become intertwined. This intertwining is exposed and foregrounded through the alternation of scenes in sepia tones and black/white while drawn-out blank frames rupture the possibility of integrating the considerations of personal and collective into a clear unity. Perhaps there is a Brechtian challenge behind the film? The spectator must remedy the disparate views into a coherent whole in order to appreciate the immediacy of the individual to the collective historical moment. The kinesthetic flicker sequence is an overt cue to that effect... foregrounding the rupture of auditory and visual with the physical compulsion to listen but also close one's eyes. It serves as an alarm to rouse the spectator into opening one's eyes and to see what is being said. To witness action is to participate in the event. In some ways, Godard's La Chinoise operates on similar principles. Godard plays on the congruence of witness-participant relationships as opposed to a more threatening dialectic rupture Bard is in effect warning against in that relationship. The film hails the unbound quality of freedom and that acts of freedom naturally interpellate all of humanity as the human condition is to be free and to imagine freedom (like the girl's questioning of the freedom of the wall/behind the wall). The film has a kind of staggered procession, unlike Zilnik's Early Works which is continuously infused with a kinetic bond between character and milieu. The female protagonist (de Bendern) claims fear directly after stating that a revolution must be complete. The staggered pace may be seen to reflect the immense anxiety surrounding the Student Demonstration of 1968. The labored pace may authentically reflect the emotional suspension of the moment, however, it compromises the kind of energy and fervor needed to activate fence-sitters and the politically apathetic. Destroy Yourself seems more like the dear-diary confession of a frustrated activist sooner than a documentary-type manifesto of an active revolutionary. The film suffers from being a text which is about nothing in particular and everything in general... and thus has its emotional core in the collective memories of its cast, crew and director sooner than in that of those who lived through the historical moment or study it afterwards. I would find it arrogant to identify with a film that clearly has the precept of invitation but not the will to provide a return address for the RSVP. I still feel that the truest expression of emotion and invitation toward sincere sharing of the historical moment can be found in Med Hondo's Soleil O. Destroy Yourself may lack in revolutionary praxis but remains a text rife with demonstrations of dialectics through the medium. The theories of Brecht, Lacan, Eisenstein, Althusser, Marx and the Frankfurt School could all be evoked to explain the dynamics at play within this film. Although the film is not entertaining, it is intellectually-engaged.

Le Caporal opens with a montage of WWII documentary footage. "Honor and glory to the survivors" provides a nice interplay between themes in Grande Illusion and more personal philosophies regarding the condition of the human race (Renoir's 'humanism'). The drama moves at a relatively slow pace and the performances are full of affect. More documentary footage has a voice-over narration in French but from the perspective of the Nazis. There is an element of self-reflexivity to the film not just through the use of documentary footage and a more psychologically-based stylistic system but also infused into the themes of coercion and resistance. Le Caporal is more concerned with individualism than Grande Illusion which focused on group dynamics. This is underscored by the obsessive compulsive worry that one character shows for the safety of his cows, regardless of what is happening in the moment. The story does not track the multiple characters but instead folds their offscreen progress in with the corporal at regular intervals. He becomes a transient in their lives (hence elusive). There is a disconnect in this regard and a repetition to the structure of the narrative that underscores this disconnect. The graceful allusions in Regle with Schumacher are replaced by purely cynical portrayals of Germans (the drunken warmonger states "I'm probably a better German than you all"). Scorsese commented that Le Caporal Epingle is "in a different emotional key than La Grande Illusion".