Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.
Presented at the 2015 Venice Biennale, this short film by Jean-Marie Straub is a fragment of the last reel of his film History Lessons, based on Bertolt Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar and dedicated to the memory and materiality of cinema.
In a protracted act of adaptation, Jean-Marie Straub retrieves and recontextualises this installation piece from the last reel of one of he and Danièle Huillet’s Italian films: History Lessons, itself a retelling of Brecht’s unfinished historical novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.