Too Early/Too Late shows certain aspects of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s work at their most radical. But what does the film show precisely? What exactly do we see, when watching those “panoramas” of the French and Egyptian cities and countryside around 1980? What we hear may give us clues: something about history is at stake here. So the question could be: when we are looking at a landscape, what do we see of its history?

Other artists have worked on this matter. Some of them have also shared with the Straubs other problems and principles: the “Objectivist” poets, a group formed in the USA around 1930, featuring Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams. They wanted a highly innovative poetry that could also be politically radical, a poetry that would engage at the same time vision (they were influenced by Ezra Pound’s Imagism), and history. They proposed solutions that have to do with the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, and with us.

KEIN TV / www.ofapeoplewhoaremissing.net
English / 00:39:12.680 / 212 MB / Ogg Theora/Vorbis - 512x384/Stereo

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