Too Early / Too Late is a diptych shot in France and Egypt concerning the relation between history, class struggle and landscape.
As Huillet wrote, ‘This is not “fiction”, but what is called “documentary”, even if this way of documenting is, I believe, new (though it has precedents: for example, La Sortie de l’usine Lumière) – no “restrictive” narration, no actors. What is recounted: struggles, revolts, defeats, delays and anticipations, statistics; what is represented: history, topography, geography, geology, light, lights, wind and clouds, land (transformed and worked by men), traces – erased or still visible – and sky (lots of sky)’.
In the first part of the film, Huillet reads excerpts from a letter written by Friedrich Engels about the impoverishment of French peasants on the eve of the Revolution of 1789. In the second part, shot in the Egyptian landscape, the writer Bahgat Elnadi reads from his book on the history of anti-colonial resistance and class struggle in Egypt, which he co-authored with Adel Rifaat under the pseudonym of Mahmoud Hussein.
Europa 2005, 27 October is a ciné-tract, a pamphlet shot in video responding to the death of two young men – Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17 – electrocuted in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois when they were escaping from the police. Their deaths sparked three weeks of uprisings across France. In two camera pans repeated five times, the film documents the dead-end location of this atrocity, thus making evident the violence and iniquity of the authorities.
Joachim Gatti is a short video made in support of and solidarity with a young filmmaker and activist seriously injured by a police ‘flash-ball’ during a peaceful demonstration in Montreuil, Paris.
The screening will be introduced by Erika Balsom, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Kings College London
Too Early/Too Late, Dirs: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, France/Egypt, 1980/81, 16mm/DCP, colour, 100 mins., English version.
Europa 2005, 27 Octobre,
Europa 2005, 27 October, Dirs: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, France/Switzerland, 2006, MiniDV, colour, 10 mins. 30 secs., no dialogue.
Joachim Gatti, Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, France, 2009, HD, colour, 1 min. 30 secs., French with English subtitles.
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