/ THE ANGEL'S GAZE /
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Curcio Malaparte spoke about angels in his book Kaputt. When he walked through the Warsaw ghetto escorted by a member of the SS, he could appreciate how the Aryan's athletic bearing, his handsome face, his clear, haughty gaze contrasted with the dark mass of starving and dying Jews who parted in his wake. “I felt as if I were walking beside the angel of Israel,” he wrote.
A drone flies over a neighborhood destroyed by bombs. The precision of the machine makes it possible to appreciate the magnitude of the devastation. The missiles have brought down dozens of buildings. The skeletons of twisted iron form impossible geometries. Silence and stillness envelop the scene filmed under a peaceful sky. The neighborhood is now a huge mass grave. But the drone, with its long tracking shot, turns it into something else and gives the images a strange tone. The soundtrack that the director has introduced to emphasize the drama of the moment ends up subsuming the documentary sequence to the codes of theatricalization. The unique agility of the drone, its harmonious weightlessness, is that of an angel observing the destruction and suffering from its celestial impunity.
Perhaps for this reason, to avoid any hint of falsifying mysticism, Otto Dix faced the effects of the bombing at ground level. His engraving follows another engraving by Goya point by point. In both works, the victims crumble in the rubble. They fall downward and it is from below that both painters force us to look at them. The aerial vision of the victorious angel has no place here. The glory of the exterminator is based on the ignominy of the defeated. The denunciation of horror can only be made from hell.Source:
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