Cinema Travelogue

A recent surge in interest in the texts of Serge Daney has led me to Too Early / Too Late, subsequently leading me to watch a film from the filmmaking couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet for the first time. My previous assumption of the challenging nature of their cinema gradually dissolves, one landscape after another of rural France in the first part and Egypt in the second.

The film is a diptych juxtaposing the narrations that tell the histories of revolting peasants from both countries, with an actively present landscape captured in a way, in the words of Daney:

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 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.

Serge Daney, “Cinemeteorology”

The idea of “being lost” as described by Daney here can be attributed to the camera panning in most of the takes. It emerges and focuses on a landscape, whether from a black screen or an abrupt cut from the previous, and then circles around the field as if it’s searching for something. Interestingly, the first shot of the film, set in a bustling city, is from the position of a moving vehicle that is circling around the centre of a plaza without any purpose. These two variations of seeing, one standing in one position while curiously looking, the other constantly moving but everything it sees as already been seen repeatedly, are the process of city folks escaping for a bucolic excursion. But the fact that whether it’s in rural France or Egypt, even when the shot decides to land on a spot and fixate on it, what is in front of it is just as foreign as what was initiated, is an acknowledgement of the Straubs’ positions as strangers to the land and its people. There is an unsettling feeling percolating beneath this scenery and the picturesque sky, that nothing can really be found. Similarly, the narration speaks of populations of the pauperized in France, or the failures and shortcomings of the revolutionaries in Egypt in a dispassionate way, which imposes a historic distance onto its images. The film’s ontological foundation is the understanding of a traveller’s limit, whether through places or time. It is this limit that gives the act of seeing a purpose.

Of course you’re not obligated to believe in what you see – it can even be dangerous – but you’re not obligated to hold on to cinema either. There has to be some risk and some virtue, that is, some value, in the act of showing something to someone who is capable of seeing it. Learning how to “read” the visual and “decode” messages would be useless if there wasn’t still the minimal, but deep-seated conviction that seeing is superior to not seeing, and that what isn’t seen “in time” will never really be seen. Cinema is an art of the present. If nostalgia doesn’t suit it, it’s because melancholy is its instantaneous double.

Serge Daney, “The Tracking Shot in Kapo”

I’ve never lived through or seen anything regarding the revolutionary history of either country; I don’t recognize any places or anyone in this film, but I recognize the wind, through its gentle stroking of trees, the undulation of crashing waves; I recognize the symphony of insects scoring every landscape as the camera pans across them. During the long take atop a cow, the scene was so entrancing that I felt as if I were there. But the montage of archival footage brutally reminded me that I wasn’t, and I could never truly understand. This type of dialecticism is something I would like to seek more of in cinema, between humanistic beauty and the understanding of an invisible boundary that negotiates the relationship of history and art.