Jackie Raynal

Détruisez-vous : le fusil silencieux

Avril 1968 – 70’ – 35mm – Noir & Blanc – France

Réalisation : Serge Bard

avec Serge Bard, Caroline de Bendern, Juliet Berto, Thierry Garrel

“Tourné en avril, Détruisez-vous (et son sous titre implacable: Le Fusil silencieux) est donc de façon absolue un film de Mai, un film de Mai en son germe. (…) Détruisez-vous peut être regardé comme la prophétie de Mai 68, celle d’une révolution imminente, le film qui crie et qui signe la possibilité d’un surgissement. (…) Aidez-nous? Alors détruisez-vous. Une bonne fois pour toutes.”

^{Philippe Azoury}

DVD bientôt en vente / Soon on sale : re:voir video

“The phrase ‘Aidez-nous, detruisez-vous’ (‘Help us, destroy
yourselves’) was a rable-rousing graffito that marked the walls of University of Paris’s Nanterre campus in May 1968. It was in this place and at this volatile time in world politics that a generation of French artists and thinkers defined themselves around youth and workers’ movements (recently chronicled in such films as Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘The Dreamers’ and Philippe Garrel’s ‘Regular Lovers’). Among them were the Zanzibar filmmakers, who took the many street mottos and images of the ’68 protests and turned them into phantasmagoric film allegories, many of them shot in North and East African counties in somptuous 35 mm (a format rarely afforded to experimental cinema) and shown elusively to late-night audiences by Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française. Difficult to see for decades a selection of the the 13 or so films made under the Zanzibar header from 1968-70 have recently resurged throught the efforts of researchers such as Nicole Brenez, Sally Shafto, Christian Lebrat and Pip Chodorov with the Re:voir VHS and DVD collection.”

^{Gabe Klinger, University of Chicago}

“The Zanzibar films are like the x-rays of this now distant but still ever present historical moment.”

^{Sally Shafto in Les Films Zanzibar et les dandys de Mai 1968, aux Éditions Paris Expérimental, Collection Classiques de l’avant-garde n°13 (Paris, 2007)
En vente chez / Buy the book Editions Paris Expérimental}