Lezioni di storia

I just watched "History Lessons" today in my Film Class. I was quite excited, my expectations were high and I was ready. It started off ok, but just got worse and worse over the 90 minutes which seemed like 4 or 5 hours. I understand it's a very Brechtian idea from a couple of radical directors, but 30 minutes of this film is a guy driving around Rome. Another 30 minutes is two men sitting in silence. One minute of it is a water fountain. And the remaining 29 minutes is two German actors talking about Julius Caesar, but only about half of what the actors said was translated to the subtitles.

Although I do believe this film accomplished what it set out to do; to make absolutely no sense and to be totally unenjoyable.

As usual the Straubs take as their starting point a literary text,this time Brecht's novel "The Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar" which they use to deconstruct the harsh reality of Roman history.The dialogue is spoken in lengthy monologues by a peasant,a writer,a banker and a lawyer speaking directly to the camera.These dialogues are interspersed with three very long tracking shots of a car driven by a young man through the streets of modern Rome,a device which anticipates Kiarostami's "Ten" by thirty years.These modern scenes set up the dialectic between past and present,between the economic and civil corruption of ancient Rome with the decadence of its modern counterpart.While the ancient buildings have decayed,the same political and economic dilemmas which Brecht's characters describe still thrive amidst the new vistas of Rome's gleaming office blocks and skyscrapers.

Far from being drivel, as another commentator has suggested, History Lessons is one of Straub and Huillet's richest and most rewarding films. A young man from the present interviews a series of ancient Romans about the rise of Julius Caesar (the text is adapted from an unfinished novel by Brecht): what emerges is a brilliant (and funny) demythologization, an analysis of power whose contemporary relevance is underscored both by the young man's obvious modernity and by his 3 long drives through modern Rome. Straub and Huillet refuse to cover over the myriad contradictions in their project (the anachronisms, artifice vs. documentary, etc.); instead they heighten these into a rich and challenging dialectic which demands of the viewer intense critical engagement and the patience to learn new ways of looking and thinking.