Ivana Miloš, History Lessons Bloom (2022), monotype and nature print with hydrangeas on paper, 33 x 24 cm.
THE BEAUTY OF NASCENT REVOLUTION
The wind blowing here will break their chains
—Robert Desnos, Night of Loveless Nights
A couple of years ago I almost visited the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati near Rome. One of those unfortunate impulses sparked by unexpected pleasures had left me wanting for more after visiting the impressive Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli. To get there, I jumped on an old bus which took me to the 16th century countryside residence of the once powerful Aldobrandini family, who still own the villa and have only recently opened it to the public. It was quite common for rich citizens and especially clergymen to escape from the summer heat of Rome and build their decadent dream gardens in love with antiquity. Sitting on the bus, I noted down a recurring thought that had occupied my mind all day long: Those who plant flowers are the same people who write history. It’s a dull thought, no doubt about it, but we can’t always tell when we scribble enthusiastically.
Back then, I didn’t know that I was not only trying to visit a famous villa with a stunning baroque garden famous for its water theater (Teatro Dell’Acqua), but also one of the shooting locations for Danièle Huillet’s and Jean-Marie Straub’s History Lessons (1972). I’ve never quite understood the excitement cinephiles share for film locations. As much as cinema can open my eyes to seeing certain things in the world that I might have missed otherwise, I also have a feeling it casts a veil over everything it occupies, transforming it to the point of deformation. “There was the legend, which obscured everything,” writes Bertolt Brecht in The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar, which the Straubs (as they are sometimes called by those who like to pretend that they just live[d] around the corner) adapted in their very own way in History Lessons. On that day in Frascati, to my utter dissatisfaction, the gate was closed. There was no sign or explanation and, with the exception of a silent Japanese man who seemed to be willing to climb over the fence, there was nobody I could talk to. Frustrated like the narrator of Brecht’s appropriately unfinished novel, who tries to write a biography about Caesar some twenty years after the emperor was murdered and gets many different accounts about his subject, obscuring his image even further, I returned to the hot city.
So I had to get back to the film to discover the garden (my only alternative would have been BBC’s Monty Don's Italian Gardens series which, as you can imagine, is as far as one can get from images shot by Renato Berta and Emilio Bestetti). In the garden, the Young Man (Benedikt Zulauf) listens to the Banker (Gottfried Bold), named Mummlius Spicer in the novel, a real Brechtian name. The Straubs go right to the core of Brecht’s politics by having the time of the shooting (early ‘70s) collide with that of figures from Caesar’s time, who inhabit Italy like ghosts of a past never finished. The Banker is the first and the last of these ghosts the Young Man talks to. Brecht writes about him: “My impression was that he ran his estate, which was not actually so large, less for profit than for his own amusement. At the same time, the thought that he was not showing a good return for his capital would have been unbearable.” And when he describes him reading a letter: “Financiers read documents more thoroughly than lovers of literature.”
It’s quite interesting that the Straubs set the action (it’s edited like an action movie, make no mistake) in the garden. Except for a walk (which is also in the novel), Brecht sets their exchange inside the villa, mostly in a library full of books. The books in Brecht’s writing become the white and purple hydrangeas in the Straubs’ filming. Both display supremacy and so-called taste. As film scholar Gilberto Perez wrote: “There are flowers all around in the garden, flowers that represent the seduction of beauty, the beauty that wealth and power will afford us.” Needless to say, the filmmakers are not interested in the Villa Aldobrandini, although its baroque style functions as a quite similar display of power. However, the way Bold sits on his bench, dressed in the very same colors as the impressive flowerheads blooming from early spring all the way into fall, says everything we need to know.
Hydrangeas are the most arrogant flowers of all. It’s no coincidence that the Victorians related the plant to vanity. Their beauty is of a kind that doesn’t hold back anything. They are a bit too much, like a day where we think we need that extra spray of perfume. Hydrangea translates into water vessel from Greek, which is quite fitting as the Aldobrandin is operated their own aqueduct system, ignoring the needs of thousands of people to be able to enjoy their garden. The flower is endemic to the central Pacific coast on the Japanese island of Honshu where the plant is known as Temari-bana. Today it grows almost everywhere. There are over 75 species and 600 named cultivars.
In the first shots of this man in his garden we get only small glimpses of the hortensias (as they are also called by those who grow them just around the corner) until the very last shot of this first encounter, when the banker suddenly falls into an empty silence staring into the distance. It’s all perfect and symmetrical, however, the shot is not. It cuts off the listener and half of the bench and the arm of the banker reaches outside the frame. He leans his head to the side, opening up the view onto the lush hydrangea bushes, leaning their respective flower heads even further to the side. The ground is covered with brown leaves. Do none of his slaves sweep through before he receives visitors? How outrageous! But that bothers neither the banker nor the Straubs nor Brecht. Nevertheless, the silence and the sudden gaze into the garden reveal to us a world that is not obscured by legend. It’s just there, like Cézanne’s apples that Straub evoked in a short essay about the cinema of Peter Nestler and realism. It’s about just filming what the world reveals to us.
The Straubs never made an intellectual or abstract film. They just film what’s there, and that there is a lot is something we are no longer used to seeing in cinema. There is the Banker but also the actor playing the Banker. There is Caesar but there is also Brecht. There is cinema but there is also the text. There is history but also the present. There is beauty but also a growing anger. There is wealth but also the reasons for it. There are beautifully planted hydrangeas but there are also leaves on the ground. These are also some of the colliding perspectives Brecht’s narrator encounters. Different perspectives obscure history which is usually only told, and thus simplified, by those in power. Suddenly my note, “Those who plant flowers are the same people who write history,” does not seem as stupid anymore.
At the end of the film, the presence of those hydrangeas shaking rather wildly in the wind becomes even more apparent due to the wider shots employed by the filmmakers. It seems as if the world (also present throughout the film in the streets of Rome, a river in the Alps, or the sky) finally enters those narrations of the Banker. Cinema, the film seems to say, is not there to stop the world from entering, it’s there to invite it. It complicates things and that’s what history should do, too. History Lessons is among many things a cinematographic line of argument pointing towards the same impotence as Brecht’s novel fragment: We can’t have a full image, there is not one History, there are only histories. Like myself in Frascati, we are constantly standing in front of closed gates. Some of us, like the Japanese man whom I lost sight of pretty quickly, try to enter nevertheless. Those are the curious, the rebels whom the bankers try to keep out. But some of us might steal a few seeds from those closed gardens and maybe one day we will be the ones who plant flowers.
It rarely happens that a writer has already written about the flowers in a film, but in the case of History Lessons Gilberto Perez has thought a great deal about the role of those hortensias and the wind. While he first attempts to connect them to the growing anger in the Young Man, he eventually concludes: “But the flowers are beautiful in a way that does not belong to the ruling class alone. As the camera lingers on their beautiful agitation, they seem themselves to partake of the winds of change, and they come to represent the beauty of nascent revolution.”
For the revolution: Climb into the gardens of the rich. Search for hydrangeas (also works with other flowers!). Wait until a hydrangea’s blossom begins to fade. As soon as the flower dies, put a paper bag over it. Cut the stem, then take the flower to your own home and let the flower head dry in the bag. After a few days, shake the bag to get the seeds out of the flower. Carefully take out the seeds.
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.