The spider's strategy

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Movie
German title The spider's strategy
Original title La strategia del ragno
Country of production Italy
original language Italian
Publishing year 1970
length 110 minutes
Rod
Director Bernardo Bertolucci
script Bernardo Bertolucci
Eduardo de Gregorio
Marilù Parolini based
on a story by Jorge Luis Borges
production Giovanni Bertolucci
music Pieces from Giuseppe Verdi's operas Rigoletto and Attila as well as from the Chamber Symphony No. 2, op. 32 by Arnold Schönberg
camera Vittorio Storaro
cut Roberto Perpignani
occupation

The strategy of the spider ( La strategia del ragno ) is the fourth full-length feature film by the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci and was shown on Italian television in 1970. The film tells how a young man comes to the small town of his father, an anti-fascist hero who was murdered before he was born, and gets to the bottom of his myth. The subjects of memory and historiography are treated individually and collectively with unusual images.

action

The young Athos Magnani comes one summer to Tara in Emilia , where his father, Athos Magnani of the same name, lived and was killed in 1936, before the birth of the young Athos. The killer has never been identified; in Tara there are some monuments and plaques in honor of the anti-fascist hero. Athos the son begins to search for the truth. Draifa, who was his father's lover at the time, invited him. The three older gentlemen Costa, the salami manufacturer Gaibazzi and the cinema owner Rasori, who were his father's campaigners at the time, give him more insights into the past.

Draifa suspects the murderer of Athos senior to be among the local fascists. Athos Magnani senior was killed during a performance of the opera Rigoletto . A few days earlier, a fortune teller had foreseen his death - as with Macbeth , Athos junior remarks - and had an unread letter with her - like Julius Caesar , Athos junior observes . Draifa then says he must be educated. In his further research, he discovers that his father and Costa, Gaibazzi and Rasori were planning an attack on the Duce on the occasion of a planned visit by Mussolini to Tara, which was betrayed; the police found the bomb. Athos junior now focuses on who the traitor was. Finally, the three fighters confess to having killed Athos senior. For Athos senior confessed to them that he was the traitor himself; his motive for this remains in the dark. In order not to harm the movement through this circumstance, but even to benefit it, he suggested that they accompany the murder of him with a well thought-out staging and blame the fascists. After his father's disenchantment, Athos junior is faced with the question of whether he should make the truth public and take away the heroes from the local people or keep the secret for himself. In his speech on the occasion of the inauguration of a new monument for his father, he decides to keep the myth. When he is about to leave Tara at the end, the loudspeaker reports a train delay, followed by the announcement of an even longer delay. Finally, the camera follows the tracks that are increasingly overgrown with weeds.

Literary template, quotes and visual borrowings

Bertolucci refers in the strategy of the spider to numerous works of literature, music and painting. The starting point for Bertolucci's script was a short story by Jorge Luis Borges , the subject of the traitor and the hero . This is located in Ireland in the 19th century; the murdered hero is a freedom fighter against the rule of the English. It also contains elements of the Macbeth death prophecy and the unread letter from Julius Caesar.

The name of Draifa, as the character himself explains to Athos, comes from the fact that her father was an admirer of Dreyfus . A child recites verses by the poet Giovanni Pascoli . The name of the place, Tara, corresponds to that of the cotton plantation in the novel Gone with the Wind ; But fare la tara also means in Italian not to take everything at face value, and tara stands for mistakes or infirmities .

Bertolucci used Giuseppe Verdi's music less because of its political significance in the Risorgimento , but because Verdi comes from the region and his music also has a mythical dimension that goes well with the mythical figure of Athos senior.

The visual borrowings are also numerous in the strategy . The opening credits already show paintings by Antonio Ligabue , for whom the landscapes of the Po Valley often served as a subject; his lion motif also appears briefly in the plot. The painting L'empire des lumières by René Magritte is quoted with the train station at night, its little lantern and the warm light . The station is more domestically inviting than a transit point, which illustrates Athos' difficulty in getting out of Tara. Like Magritte, many other scenes also have a blue tint because they were shot in the light between afternoon and evening. The town itself is a geometric labyrinth, the streets of which, with their side arches and their emptiness, are reminiscent of the paintings by Giorgio de Chirico .

Using the visual quotations, Bertolucci creates a world in which images refer to other images, but not to real events.

shape

The scenes from the 1930s are not flashbacks in the strict sense, but representations of the past by the present protagonists; therefore Bertolucci did not use younger actors either, but let the same old faces play themselves thirty years ago. Athos junior can usually only be distinguished from Athos senior by the red scarf.

Interpretations

“ If you now ask yourself the question that we have unfortunately practiced, what the author was trying to say, you are making a strategic error. Because the attempts at explication are - at least during the film - at the expense of fun. “However, different authors have tried to interpret the film. Athos junior wandered through Tara as if between scenes; the feeling arises “ that a harmless stage has been set up for the son as a counterpart to the tragic stage that the father had set up for himself. “Historical time is replaced by mythical time, where characters and events repeat and duplicate, where political acts not only copy earlier acts, even literature; it is a variant of the doppelganger motif that is common in Bertolucci's works. Heroism and betrayal, historical facts and myths are therefore indistinguishable, history is inaccessible for establishing the truth.

Four months before the shooting in the summer of 1969, Bertolucci had started a psychoanalysis, during which he worked out approaches for the spider's strategy , sometimes without even knowing it himself . According to Bertolucci, Tara stands for the subconscious. Athos junior enters a realm of death - it is cut off from the rest of the world, almost only old people live there, you can hear opera on the street - and once you have entered it, it is difficult to get away. “ Life does not live in Tara, it only carries out the signs that the determinism of the script sets. "

The film title is not explained from the plot itself. Female spiders show the behavior of eating the weakened male after mating. The strategy of the male ( ragno is male) is to withdraw when excited, to collect the semen after masturbation and to fertilize the female with it after a break. In the action, Athos junior eludes Draifa's clumsy attempts to keep him on her estate. However, he cannot escape the entanglements of the historical. But interpretations of the narrative strategy towards the audience of the film are also possible.

Bertolucci himself offered a concrete political reading of the father-son conflict when he compared the relationship between Athos junior and senior with that between the leaders of the Italian Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer and Palmiro Togliatti , when he was the first to become aware of the latter 's Stalinism .

Production and recording by the audience

The Spider's strategy was a co-production with the Italian television company RAI , which accepted its first version of the screenplay unchanged and did not interfere with the production - for Bertolucci the best producer who granted full freedom. Since no theatrical release was planned in Italy, the film was shot in 4: 3 format. The film was shown twice on television within five days in October 1970 and is said to have reached 20 million viewers.

  • 1001 films - The best films of all time : “ Few films cause such a wonderful aesthetic confusion: If you watch them without the expectation of getting questions answered, you will be richly rewarded. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ on the name Tara see: Witte, Karsten: Der late Mannerist. in: Bernardo Bertolucci. Film 24 series, Hanser Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-446-13164-7 , p. 27
  2. ↑ Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation with Sight & Sound, autumn 1972 edition
  3. ↑ Ungari, Enzo and Ranvaud, D .: Bertolucci par Bertolucci, Calmann-Lévy, 1987, ISBN 2-7021-1305-2 , p. 219
  4. ^ Kuhlbrodt, Dietrich: Bernardo Bertolucci. Film 24 series, Hanser Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-446-13164-7 , p. 136
  5. ^ Tonetti, Claretta Micheletti: Bernardo Bertolucci. The cinema of ambiguity. Twayne Publishers, New York 1995, ISBN 0-8057-9313-5 , p. 80
  6. Jump up ↑ Loshitzky, Yosefa: The radical faces of Godard and Bertolucci. Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1995, ISBN 0-8143-2446-0 , p. 58
  7. ↑ a b c Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation with Filmcritica, October 1970 (No. 209), Rome.
  8. ↑ Kuhlbrodt 1982, p. 137
  9. ↑ Kuhlbrodt 1982, p. 134
  10. ↑ Tonetti 1995, p. 80
  11. ↑ Loshitzky 1995, pp. 56-57
  12. ↑ Bernardo Bertolucci in Gili, Jean: Le cinéma italien, Union Générales d'Editions, Paris 1978, ISBN 2-264-00955-1 , p. 57
  13. ↑ Witte 1982, p. 32
  14. ↑ Kuhlbrodt 1982, p. 142
  15. ↑ Tonetti 1995, p. 84
  16. ↑ Witte 1982, p. 24
  17. ↑ Tonetti 1995, p. 90
  18. ↑ Kuhlbrodt 1982, p. 129
  19. ↑ according to Bernardo Bertolucci's statement in Cineaste Magazine, Winter 1972-73, New York
  20. ↑ 1001 Films - The Best Films of All Time, Edition Olms, Zurich 2004, p. 526

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