Search - Angry Brigade: the Spectacularrise & Fall of Britain's First Urban Guerilla Group on DVD

Unbelievable footage of a past revolutionary movement

Harriet Vane | Los Angeles, CA USA | 12/09/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Angry Brigade is a fantastic historical documentary, a 1973 BBC program looking at the anarchist group behind a series of bombings and attacks against private property and political targets in the early 70's. It is introduced by Stuart Christie, who was himself put on trial as a member of the Angry Brigade and acquitted, after spending years in a Spanish prison for his role in a plot to blow up Franco.

It remains the best and most in depth look at this group and this period. While I would love to see a new documentary done with some of the benefits of historical distance and perspective, nothing really could replace the immediacy and power of the news footage and interviews shown here. What I find most remarkable is that it is undoubtedly an effort to present unbiased information by a media organization that was certainly not in sympathy with anarchist bombers, yet you cannot help but come away with sympathy yourself. Perhaps it was just the spirit of the times. As someone born after these events happened, I still find it hard to understand the 60's and the 70's...intellectually it is not so difficult, but to really get a feeling for a period when so many believed that revolution was entirely possible and incredibly imminent requires watching films like this. It was extraordinary to see the footage from the radical movements in France and Germany, and the BBC actually got an interview with Spanish anarchist Alberola, once considered one of the most dangerous men in Europe.

You can see how far they had come only a few years later just through dealing with a stepped up IRA campaign in the dvd's inclusion of another BBC program on the trial of "Persons Unknown." An early example of the strategy of the preemptive strike, 6 men and women were tried along with persons unknown, for planning to set off bombs in places unknown...it's a great look at the prisoner's support group Black Flag, and the changing face of Britain's police and court system. Especially watching it after the main feature.

It is altogether a fascinating look at a time when so many were willing to fight that another world might be possible, how they fought, and how the government fought back...
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