This film is so experimental, it doesn't even have a damn POSTER!
Too Early, Too Late
1981
Director: Daniele Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub
Starring: Countryside vistas and the essays of Marxist writers. No, I’m serious.
Y’know, as pretentious and posturing as I know I can sometimes get about film, I really really do not enjoy avant garde cinema. I just don’t get it. Dammit, I like it when my film tells me a story. And even if there’s a little bit of story mixed in with some experimentation, yeah, I like that too (Last Year at Marienbad, I’m looking at you). But just plain experimental? No plot, no actors? Oooh, then we have a problem.
Too Early, Too Late is exactly that type of a film. The entire film – the ENTIRE film – is very long shots of various countryscapes throughout the world. The narration over these long pastoral shots is readings from famous Marxist essays read in the most possible flat voices you have ever heard in your entire life. The first part of the film is a reading of a letter by Friedrich Engels listing stats of numbers of impoverished people in the French countryside, read over shots of the French countryside. The second part of the film is a similar structure, but now in Egypt, reading an essay by Mahmoud Hussein, describing how the Egyptian people should cast off their European rule to be independent.
