Opening upon one of the most memorable shots ever filmed (and prefiguring a similar circular sweep that begins L’Itinéraire de Jean Bricard shown last season), Straub-Huillet’s rarely screened Trop tôt, trop tard is an essay on the often tentative, yet urgent conditions of revolution. Shot in France and Egypt, the film employs a diptych structure as it attempts to (quite literally) catch the wind of past revolutions, using the writings of Friedrich Engels and Mahmoud Hussein. Shooting first in the busy roundabout of Paris’s storied Place de la Bastille, then in the outlying countryside where the seeds of revolution were once sewn, Straub and Huillet describes how the French peasants revolted “too early” and succeeded “too late.” Alongside landscapes shot near the Nile and its delta, an Arab intellectual relates the history of the peasant resistance during the occupation by the English, who similarly employed bad timing. Much has been written about the film’s ebb and flow structure, especially by Serge Daney, French critic and official card-carrying member of the I.S. (“Internationale Straubienne”), who observed its musical and “meteorological play not seen since the silent era. Trop tôt, trop tard is, to my knowledge, one of the rare films, since Sjöström, to have filmed the wind” (anticipating of course Ivens’s Une Histoire de vent screening on March 8). “The cinema of Straub-Huillet is first and foremost an art of perception, a new way of looking at appearances and, via them, at the mechanisms of the society in which we live” (Louis Marcorelles, The Guardian). “The bottom line is no one seriously interested in film as filmmaking should miss this show” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice).

Rated PG