History Lessons

(Geschichtsunterricht, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Italy/West Germany 1972, DCP, German w/subtitles)

Jean-Marie Straub + Danièle Huillet. Straub-Huillet’s History Lessons is based on Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished experimental novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar. A young man drives around through the streets of Rome in the early 1970s and interviews different characters whose lives were irretrievably changed by Julius Caesar’s affairs. He talks to a banker, a poet, a lawyer, and a peasant former soldier. Their fractured views of a man considered both a noble statesman and tyrannical dictator testify to the fragile and elusive nature of what we think is history set in stone, and offer illuminating insights on the political and economic affairs of both past and present.

Preceded by In omaggio all’arte italiana! (Jean-Marie Straub, Switzerland/Italy/US 2015, 10 min., DCP), the latest short film by Straub, which puts History Lessons in additional historical context.