THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM

In the climate of hallucination, of calm and measured madness that immediately surrounds him and is the tone (“Magrittean”, to borrow an adjective suggested by the director himself) of the entire story, he slowly discovers that actually the hero was a traitor. Was he traitor due to cowardice or “strategy” so as to sacrfice himself as a martyr of freedom?

Rigging the traitor’s assassination by his friends so that it looked like a crime by their adversaries was actually the victim’s idea. Once his son finds out the truth, he understands that he can only use it for himself. The gravestones must stay where they are. Around this theme based on a short story by Borges, Bertolucci builds an enchanting film with the slightly soured tenderness of its images and the precision of its bizarre or tender details. I would say say that it is this tenderness, this clear-eyed, affectionate yet chilling rediscovery, as if marred by the breath of death, of a landscape an a people that is the crucial aspect of The Spider’s Stratagem, creating and illustrating its subtle and constant poetic tension. It is as if the mystification of the image of the father, who the main character pursues, in the hands of the director, is turned into a poignant tribute to the image of his own childhood, his native places and his filial devotion.

After the contrasting, chaotic style filled with references and fashionable digressions of Partner, Bertolucci created a spotless, luminous film, in which he reclaims the expressive jouissance seen in Before the Revolution. In this movie, however, the director is not just an admirable painter of small-town Italy. He moves like a master on the thin line between the real and the imaginary, in a game that fascinates many contemporary filmmakers, from André Delvaux to Ruy Guerra. What brings to mind here the author of One Night… A Train is not just Bertolucci’s citation of Magritte, but also his depiction of crystal-clear nights, and his search for the fantastic element in the day-to-day. Perfectly natural rustic scenes set the ground for a journey into memory, into an anguishing encounter with the past. Athos runs through the streets of Tara, whose inhabitants remain motionless at the crossroads, and finally comes to a place where the Rigoletto is heard again. Caught in the trap of truth, he refuses to divulge it and returns to the station to catch the train that had taken him there. At the station, he stares at the train tracks now covered in weeds. Bertolucci is a poet who forces on us great acts of boldness: the roles of the father’s comrades, for example, are played by the same actors, without make-up, in the scenes relating to both the present and the past, and we accept such strangeness as a supplement of realism. Bertolucci, it seems, recovered his exhilaration at making movies and shares it with us, until we suddenly find ourselves, stunned, on the threshold of the unknown.

The story Bertolucci was inspired by is a very short story by Borges, [that] takes place in the past “in an oppressed and tough country” that the writer indicates as Ireland. A conspirator was assasinated in mysterious circumstances, and the crime has not yet been solved. Many years later, a descendant of his investigates this crime to find out the truth, and, little by little, he comes across disturbing clues of a “pre-established harmony”. Some narrative and scenographic choices bring to life Borges’s theme of “pre-established harmony”. There are basically three: [1] Tara, in reality Sabbioneta, a magical city with harmonious architecture built in the 16th century by a Gonzaga of Mantua, whose Renaissance layout has remained intact and, with its parallel lines, squares and large spaces, is the setting of Athos the son’s journey back through time. [2] The melodrama, Verdi’s Rigoletto, whose music punctuates the whole pre-finale and the mystery’s solution. Also a drama of betrayal and disguise, it echoes and harmonizes with the drama of the traitor wearing the mask of a hero. [3] Last, the staged performance: the original one behind the mystery of Athos Magnani’s assassination; and the new one planned for Athos the son. The original tableau, which borrows from the great dramas of history and literature, is “parodied” in the sort of clumsy “family spectacle” staged by Draifa and the three friends (who are joined by the local fascist).

Yet it was The Spider’s Stratagem(1970) rather than The Conformist (made just afterward and released the same year) that renewed my faith in his talent. Both movies, like Before the Revolution and Partner, were the flamboyant expressions of a guilt-ridden leftist, a spoiled rich kid with a baroque imagination and a social conscience that yielded dark and decadent ideas about privilege and guiltless fancies about sex. Where they differed for me was in the degree to which The Conformist succumbed to fashionable embroidery, a stylishness that took the place of style.

It was the relatively big budget The Conformist, an adaptation of an Alberto Moravia novel, that made Bertolucci’s name in the world market and so influenced American movies that Coppola’s Godfather trilogy would have been inconceivable without it. But it was the more ponderous and adventurous The Spider’s Stratagem — a TV commission adapted from a Jorge Luis Borges story, “Theme of the Traitor and Hero” — that showed Bertolucci truly grappling with his material and not merely with his markets. His mise en scène may have overwhelmed his content, marking him as a mannerist, but there was nothing glib about that content, and the mise en scène was more than just decorative. But both elements were too European to capture the American market — unlike the glossier The Conformist, so decorous it suggested one of Marshall Field’s window displays.

The Spider’s Strategem is not, as you’ve probably gathered, a mass-audience movie. It will have most appeal to people sensitive to Bertolucci’s audacious use of camera movements and colors; Pauline Kael said a long time ago that, of all directors influenced by Godard, Bertolucci has been the only one to extend Godard’s way of looking, instead of just copying. The Spider’s Strategem documents that, and is better to look at than analyze.

At least half of the film is blue like some of Magritte’s paintings because I shot a lot during the brief interlude of light between day and evening. It’s a color you get only for a few minutes after the sun has set in summer, if you film without using filters. It’s a very special, distinct blue that all cameramen dreaded at the time. We started shooting when a normal cameraman would have said “enough”.

The Spider’s Stratagem…

A film from 1969.

Forty years ago.

Wow, so long ago! It seems like yesterday.

What a great ambience there was, buzzing with the enthusiasm and professional expertise of people who believed in what they were doing and felt useful.

What lights, what atmosphere, and the evenings spent talking and talking in the little restaurant in Sabbioneta.

What characters, what individuals: the legendary Alida Valli (Draifa), the grotesque and tragic Tino Scotti (Costa), Pippo Campanini (Gaibazzi), the witty culatello artist, the thirty-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci who was full of energy and imagination, the even younger Vittorio Storaro who was ready even then for brilliant undertakings.

What an atmosphere!

I admit to being caught in that spider’s web spun with threads of poetry, love, passion and dedication creating hope for a less boorish world.

Nostalgia? And how!

I love this film.

I shoot it and re-shoot it continuously on the set of my memory

One day when we were doing the Spider’s Stratagem, we were filming a sequence in which the main character discovers that his dead father, who has been deified in a small Italian town as an anti-Fascist hero, actually betrayed his friends by telling the police about their plot to kill Mussolini. In a flashback, we see his father’s anti-Fascist friends take him to a tower overlooking the city, where they plan to kill him. But in a final attempt to redeem himself, he tells them that they should instead stage his murder in public, in a way that will make it seem as if he was really killed by the Fascists; this will immortalize him as a hero, and ensure that the people of the town will continue to oppose Fascism.

When we arrived at the location in Sabbioneta to shoot the sequence, I found myself lost technically. We were up on a tower in a bright sunlight, and all I had was one Sun Gun to light the actors. I thought that no matter what I did, the scene would look terrible. So I asked myself, “Why should we see this man? He’s becoming a symbol, so why don’t we transform him into a silhouette?” Of course, let me be honest here: part of the reason I tried to convince Bernardo to shoot the scene that way was because I had no light! [Laughter]. I told him we could shoot the first part of the scene normally, lighting the actors with the Sun Gun; then, when our protagonist walked toward the sunlit view of the town, we would turn off the light and transform him into a silhouette, in a way that would make our intention for the scene perfectly clear. By shooting the scene that way, I was able to symbolically represent the unconscious of the protagonist, and at the same time visually represent the way Bertolucci is telling the story – from the unconscious side.