“What Is Newest in What Is Oldest”: Cinema, Communism, and the Global Peasantry in the Long 1970s

This article examines the aesthetic and political significance of the peasantry for the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ogawa Pro, and Jean-MarieStraub and Danièle Huillet. Situating their filmmaking in the context of the collapse of a programmatic vision of communism predicated on the development of the productive forces and growth of the industrial proletariat, the author demonstrates how the anachronism of the peasantry formedthe basis for an alternative cinematic vision of communist life. Building toward an extended reading of Straub-Huillets Too Early/Too Late (1981), the article ultimately seeks to illuminate a comment referenced by Straub: that it “isn’ta Marxist film, but a communist one.”