Manhattan, 1983
Questions of camera distance in Too Soon, Too Late, like those in Playtime, are ultimately moral questions, as well as practical ones: how does one see what one needs to see without exploiting either the spectator or the person being filmed? (Many related questions of tact are broached by the landscape paintings of Patricia Patterson.) Serge Daney has some relevant things to say about this in his lovely newspaper review of the film for Liberation (20-21, February, 1982), entitled "Cinemeteorology", which I translated for the Straub-Huillet catalog:
... [In overpopulated Egypt], the fields are no longer empty, fellahs work there, one can no longer go anywhere and film anyone any which way. The terrain of performance again becomes the territory of others. The Straubs (whoever knows their films realizes that they're intransigent on this matter) accord much importance to the fact that a filmmaker should not disturb those whom he films. One therefore has to see the second part of Too Soon, Too Late as an odd performance, made up of approaches and retreats, where the filmmakers, less meteorologists than acupuncturists, search for the spot - the only spot, the right spot - where their camera can catch people without bothering them. Two dangers immediately present themselves: exotic tourism and the invisible camera. Too close, too far. In a lengthy "scene", the camera is planted in front of a factory gate and allows one to see Egyptian workers who pass, enter and leave. Too close for them not to see the camera, too far away for them to be tempted to go towards it. To find this point, this moral point, is at this moment the entire act of the Straubs. With perhaps the hope that the "extras" thus filmed, the camera and the fragile crew "hidden" right in the middle of a field or a vacant lot would only be an accident of the landscape, a gentle scarecrow, another mirage carried by the wind. These scruples are astonishing. They are not fashionable. To shoot a film, especially in the country, means generally to devastate everything, disrupt the lives of people while manufacturing country snapshots, local color, rancid back-to-nature museum pieces. Because the cinema belongs to the city and no one knows exactly what a "peasant cinema" would be, anchored in the lived experience, the space-time of peasants. It is necessary therefore to see the Straubs, city inhabitants, mainland navigators, as lost. It is necessary to see them in the middle of the field, moistened fingers raised to catch the wind and ears pricked up to hear what it's saying. So the most naked sensations serve as a compass. Everything else, ethics and aesthetics, content and form, derives from this.
To Daney's second paragraph, two personal footnotes should be added. Danièle Huillet, who sent me a copy of Daney's review, added one small caveat: "Jean-Marie is a 'Stadtkind' [city-child] but I grew up in the country, though born in Paris ..." And Sara Driver has suggested to me that Too Soon, Too Late may indeed be more Huillet's film than Straub's, reflecting her country background - just as En Rachâchant (1982), again according to Driver, may be more Straub's.
(e) As I suggested earlier in this book, Too Soon, Too Late inverts the usual relationship in a Straub-Huillet film between landscape and text - the landscape becoming the film's central text, the verbal text becoming the film's "setting". Practically speaking, this reduces the relative importance of the verbal texts in the films - although when I mentioned this notion to Straub, he countered that nevertheless the film could never have been made without those texts. And the documentary side of this - which is of course the major element apart from comedy separating Straub-Huillet's use of long shots from Tati's in Playtime - has specifically musical implications. The uncontrolled movements of people, animals and weather function on this terrain like improvisations that play against the "composed" framings and camera movements, somewhat in the manner of jazz. When I proposed this parallel to Straub, he replied that a principal reference point for him and Huillet while shooting the second part of Too Soon, Too Late was the late quartets of Beethoven - particularly the use of suspensions and slow tempos. The very slow pans, according to Dave Kehr, always move in the same direction as the wind, and it is largely the sense one has of the film's profound attentiveness to the material world that makes the film so singular a documentary - calling to mind the three living quotations cited by Straub before the screening of the film at the Collective for Living Cinema on April 30, 1983:
D. W. Griffith at the end of his life: "What modern movies lack is the wind in the trees."
Rosa Luxembourg: "The fate of insects is not less important than the revolution."
Cézanne, who painted Mont Saint-Victoire again and again: "Look at this mountain, once it was fire."
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/6/soon.html
... [In overpopulated Egypt], the fields are no longer empty, fellahs work there, one can no longer go anywhere and film anyone any which way. The terrain of performance again becomes the territory of others. The Straubs (whoever knows their films realizes that they're intransigent on this matter) accord much importance to the fact that a filmmaker should not disturb those whom he films. One therefore has to see the second part of Too Soon, Too Late as an odd performance, made up of approaches and retreats, where the filmmakers, less meteorologists than acupuncturists, search for the spot - the only spot, the right spot - where their camera can catch people without bothering them. Two dangers immediately present themselves: exotic tourism and the invisible camera. Too close, too far. In a lengthy "scene", the camera is planted in front of a factory gate and allows one to see Egyptian workers who pass, enter and leave. Too close for them not to see the camera, too far away for them to be tempted to go towards it. To find this point, this moral point, is at this moment the entire act of the Straubs. With perhaps the hope that the "extras" thus filmed, the camera and the fragile crew "hidden" right in the middle of a field or a vacant lot would only be an accident of the landscape, a gentle scarecrow, another mirage carried by the wind. These scruples are astonishing. They are not fashionable. To shoot a film, especially in the country, means generally to devastate everything, disrupt the lives of people while manufacturing country snapshots, local color, rancid back-to-nature museum pieces. Because the cinema belongs to the city and no one knows exactly what a "peasant cinema" would be, anchored in the lived experience, the space-time of peasants. It is necessary therefore to see the Straubs, city inhabitants, mainland navigators, as lost. It is necessary to see them in the middle of the field, moistened fingers raised to catch the wind and ears pricked up to hear what it's saying. So the most naked sensations serve as a compass. Everything else, ethics and aesthetics, content and form, derives from this.
To Daney's second paragraph, two personal footnotes should be added. Danièle Huillet, who sent me a copy of Daney's review, added one small caveat: "Jean-Marie is a 'Stadtkind' [city-child] but I grew up in the country, though born in Paris ..." And Sara Driver has suggested to me that Too Soon, Too Late may indeed be more Huillet's film than Straub's, reflecting her country background - just as En Rachâchant (1982), again according to Driver, may be more Straub's.
(e) As I suggested earlier in this book, Too Soon, Too Late inverts the usual relationship in a Straub-Huillet film between landscape and text - the landscape becoming the film's central text, the verbal text becoming the film's "setting". Practically speaking, this reduces the relative importance of the verbal texts in the films - although when I mentioned this notion to Straub, he countered that nevertheless the film could never have been made without those texts. And the documentary side of this - which is of course the major element apart from comedy separating Straub-Huillet's use of long shots from Tati's in Playtime - has specifically musical implications. The uncontrolled movements of people, animals and weather function on this terrain like improvisations that play against the "composed" framings and camera movements, somewhat in the manner of jazz. When I proposed this parallel to Straub, he replied that a principal reference point for him and Huillet while shooting the second part of Too Soon, Too Late was the late quartets of Beethoven - particularly the use of suspensions and slow tempos. The very slow pans, according to Dave Kehr, always move in the same direction as the wind, and it is largely the sense one has of the film's profound attentiveness to the material world that makes the film so singular a documentary - calling to mind the three living quotations cited by Straub before the screening of the film at the Collective for Living Cinema on April 30, 1983:
D. W. Griffith at the end of his life: "What modern movies lack is the wind in the trees."
Rosa Luxembourg: "The fate of insects is not less important than the revolution."
Cézanne, who painted Mont Saint-Victoire again and again: "Look at this mountain, once it was fire."
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/6/soon.html
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