Trop tot, trop tard

I've read Jonathan Rosenbaum's comments about this film and while I don't have the chops to dispute any of them, I'll just say I was not as enraptured as he was. Is it original? Sure, but beyond the basic thrust of the concept, I feel it doesn't sufficiently exploit cinema as a medium. Distribute a pamphlet instead. The Soviets made incredibly exciting, entertaining movies about revolution. Leave it to the French to make revolution so fucking BORING. A navel-gazing chore.

The juxtaposition of a voiceover mainly describing dismal social-historical facts with contemporary images of landscapes related to those facts does generate some affective-intellectual power, but everything seems a bit too stretched-out. Watching this forty years after it was made (and the day after Straub died), one suspects that the French villages have changed little (perhaps having become more deserted of villagers) and that Egyptian social life may have gone backwards. My 5000th rating.

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