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.
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