Notes on... History Lessons (1972)

If the notoriously bewildering filmmaking tandem of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet had a patron saint, it would undoubtedly be Bertolt Brecht. Like the pair, the German playwright's career was informed by staunch Marxist beliefs and a devotion to the avant-garde as a means for social change. He also introduced to the dramatic vernacular the "estrangement effect," a term so befitting the filmmaking style of Straub-Huillet that it could title a monograph on their collected works. According to this principle, rather than striving for an empathetic viewer-subject relationship, dramatists should actively work to subvert narrative norms that lull audiences into complacency. To increase the likeliness that they will intelligently consider what they're witnessing, viewers must routinely be shocked, jostled, and knocked off balance. This concept can be said to underpin all of the Straub-Huillet films, most of all 'History Lessons,' their adaptation of Brecht's only novel, The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.

Like an even sparer reduction of Rosselini's 'Socrates,' this unconventional biopic recounts the life of the founder of the Roman Empire through long scenes of unembellished dialogue. In a series of blatantly staged tableaux, an unnamed man in modern dress interviews costumed historical figures who knew or encountered Caesar. Photographed rigidly against bucolic backdrops, the blank faced actors pose like mannequins and recite their dialogue in harsh-sounding German. As if the staginess of these scenes wasn't perplexing enough, they're intercut with long, static, in-car shots of the modern interlocutor driving around present-day Rome, seemingly without destination or urgency. Viewers familiar with Brecht's epic theatre (or the Straub-Hulliet oeuvre) may know what to make of it all, but most will be left scratching their heads, or worse, nodding off from the lack of action. Indeed, estrangement is in full effect.

Still, through these awkward retellings of key episodes, the filmmakers do succeed in conceiving of a more concrete, modern Julius Caesar. Neither magisterial statesman nor imposing military commander, their version is something much more novel, a proto-capitalist in an imperial age. He did not enslave and execute out of ruthlessness, but to gain economic advantage, and through instinct and opportunism built the most powerful empire of his day. The anachronistic modern figure on his trail functions as a link to our present-day world. When juxtaposed with the dialogue scenes, his excursions through the streets of Rome are imbued with a fresh significance: choked with cars, commerce and milling crowds, the city is transformed into a monument to Caesar's machinations. Such are the suggestive powers of Straub and Hulliet. Much more than a demythologization (or didactic exercise as the title suggests), this unorthodox work compels us to consider what really spurs a man to seize power, and strongly implies that the world we inhabit today is still shaped by men of that ilk. By not showing the audience what it expects to see, they evoke the very notion they wish to impart, and without a single ideological statement, they politicize the viewer. It's more than a neat trick; it's the result of a finely tuned method that the pair, like seasoned dramaturges, employed year after year, film after film.