History Lessons

History Lessons (1972) is an adaptation of an unfinished novel by Bertolt Brecht, a book called The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.  The film is challenging and, probably, better than it looks when you are watching it.  Straub and Huillet's approach to Brecht's didactic text is equally didactic and, perhaps, may be accused of being "uncinematic" -- I think a better word for the film is that it employs a minimalist style so as better to emphasize the parameters controlling the picture and any deviations from those parameters.  David Bordwell, as far as I know, coined the term "parametric" to describe a certain kind of abstract style deployed by some directors, most notably Bresson and Ozu.  A film built according to a "parametric" mise-en-scene establishes certain abstract norms, that is, specific regularly repeated images or types of images, a pattern in the editing that may be non-narrative, and an approach to the material that shapes the plot (or film's argument) to stylistic parameters as opposed to the contrary approach in which the style supports and enhances the narrative by emphasis or dramatization.  Parametric films, often, give the impression of being austere and intentionally unexpressive -- History Lessons is an excellent example of a movie designed according to abstract parameters.  Film critics have counted 49 shots in the movie which is about ninety minutes long.  A third of the film consists of imagery shot from the back seat of a small car navigating the claustrophobically narrow and busy streets of Rome. A young man drives the car in "real time", shifting gears, eluding collisions with oncoming cars, sometimes trapped in traffic jams, on other occasions having to back up to yield to oncoming vehicles confronting him in the tight alley-like lanes.  These shots are lengthy and without edits -- as long as ten minutes.  Between the traffic scenes, we see actors dressed in vaguely antique costume, modified Roman togas -- these actors speak, in some cases, in lengthy monologues or, in other cases, respond to the questions of the interlocutor.  (The interlocutor turns out to be the young man in the car -- he is posited as a kind of journalist or investigator seeking information about Caesar.)   Images of water -- a rushing mountain stream, a fountain, a turbulent bay on a rock-girt coast punctuate the film and serve, in two instances, as establishing shots.  The film ends with a lengthy immobile shot of an ornamental fountain in Rome disgorging a stream of clear water from the mouth of a bas relief face, a sort of staring Gorgon spitting water into a basin.

The monologues describe Julius Caesar's activities in terms of economics.  The four characters provide elaborately detailed information about Caesar's investments, the structure of the Roman economy particularly with regard to the interplay between the ruling classes and the proletariat and the role that war plays in furthering economic interests.  (These speeches are lengthy and complex and the subtitles provide translation for only about half of what is spoken -- my German isn't quick enough to reliably translate the parts of the monologues or dialogue not put into English in the subtitles.  However, as far as I can tell, the most characteristically Brechtian aspects of the monologues -- that is, acerbic asides, parenthetical remarks, additional footnote-type detail -- is not put into subtitles, that is, left untranslated.  In effect, the subtitles provide only a bare outline of what is being said.  In the monologues, filmed generally from a high close angle in lengthy three or four minute shots, the characters discuss the relationship between the price of grain, the growth of the great estates, the repression of the peasant class, and the expansion of slave trading.  Caesar's adventures in Spain are not depicted in a martial light but instead described as efforts to compel a primitive mountain-dwelling tribal people to labor in silver and copper mines.  Various battles with pirates at sea, many of them involving "the great Pompey," are revealed to be the military epiphenomena to a vigorous competition between slave-trading businesses -- the Romans want to monopolize the slave trade in Asia Minor but are confronted by aggressive and entrepreneurial pirates competing for the same commodities and markets.  Characteristically, history presents this conflict as a struggle between law-abiding Roman merchants and lawless pirates -- in fact, both sides to the conflict are merely businessmen trying to outflank their opponents in a lucrative mercantile endeavor.  The crucial difference between this situation and modern business competition is that the victors get to literally crucify their adversaries.  The influx of huge numbers of slaves into the agrarian economy destroys the livelihood of the peasants (their farms can't compete with the huge estates operated with efficient slave labor).  The peasants swarm into the "City" as Rome is called in the film and form an underclass that "democrats" like Caesar manipulate.  And so it goes -- the level of legal and economic commentary is very sophisticated and hard to follow:  it's like a graduate level lecture on the Marxist implications of Roman commerce and war.  The most loquacious of the commentators is a well-groomed middle-aged Roman who seems to know everything there is to know about Julius Caesar's (he calls him "C") business dealings.  At first, we hypothesize that this actor is playing Caesar himself.  Only at the end of the film is it revealed that this fellow is Caesar's banker.  The film ends establishing the close relationship between Caesar's enterprises and the bank -- "thus," the banker says, "as Caesar prospered, our little bank was little no more."  In the final ten minutes of the movie, the young man from the car scenes, the interlocutor, sits with his hands folded on his lap with his arms not inserted into his jacket:  this creates a curious image of impotence -- the man's arms don't seem to be quite properly connected to his body.  The banker's monologue also results in the most surprising and, even, viscerally shocking cut in the film:  the banker, after his first monologue, sits bemused, motionless, without speaking; the camera lingers on him for a long period of time, creating an oddly uncanny ambience, and, then, suddenly without warning, the image cuts to a close-up of water tumbling in rapids down a hillside, a torrent of water with its sound loudly amplified on the soundtrack.  On a small screen, this effect was startling -- in a movie theater, I presume the cut would cause the audience to jump out of its collective skin. 

History Lessons is tedious, albeit in learned, scholarly sort of way.  The film does focus your attention -- minor aspects of the imagery, the way someone sits or speaks, the color of the rhododendrons in the garden where the banker is speaking, a row of vases on a parapet, or, in one scene, the young man picking a fallen leave off his jacket and, then, flicking it away, all have substantial impact.  The movie schools you in a certain kind of precise, concentrated looking.  The traffic scenes are nightmarish -- the impression that they provide is of continuous progress in the face of innumerable obstructions:  the driver weaves between pedestrians and oncoming cars in tiny, narrow alleys, many of them congested with parked cars.  It's a sort of ballet involving a continuous threat of collision.  I presume that these images are intended as a metaphor for the labyrinthine course of economic history -- its stops and starts and obstructions.  In this film, things flow -- people speak in long monologues, a stream surges through an idyllic valley, the sea crashes against rocks, money and commodities change hands,  currency is valued and devalued, a stone mouth vomits water into a fountain.