I kept thinking of Hypernormalisation and the way that the shaping of history by the powers that be is now able to happen in essentially real time. Here, Bertolucci presents that prescient vision in miniature by giving us a place where those in power are also the ordinary citizens, and the only person who sees through the artifice has no one to expose it to, no tools to enact change because all those tools and all those potential witnesses exist in the same horrible framework. Looking for some great streaming picks? The Andromeda encounters the Arkology, a society that they believe is the closest to perfection humanity will ever achieve. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. At the station, he stares at the train tracks now covered in weeds. If you want to know more or withdraw your consent to all or some of the cookies, please refer to the cookie policy. All Tara will become one big theater. The story of Italy, from the 80s to nowadays, told through the life of four friends, Giulio, Gemma, Paolo e Riccardo; during 40 years of loves, aspirations, success and failures. The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth century Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides. Use the HTML below. Do you love all types of movies? Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. Watch The Spider's Stratagem-1970 online free with subtitles. But as the trip drags on, their attempt at recovering what they once had seems futile. Only the slightly flat acting, which feels a bit phony and distancing, keep this from seeming more like a full-on masterpiece. He is just watching the arrival of the last ferry at night from his control room on top of a high iron tr... A young man living in a cold southern village in South America, decides to start a trip looking for his father. Was he traitor due to cowardice or “strategy” so as to sacrfice himself as a martyr of freedom? Giulio Brogi Alida Valli Pippo Campanini Franco Giovanelli Tino Scotti Allen Midgette, Bernardo Bertolucci Jorge Luis Borges Eduardo de Gregorio Marilù Parolini, 100 mins   This list is the Letterboxd version of The Oxford History of World Cinema. With its bold camera movement and blocking, sly comic/Kafkaesque tone, and drop dead gorgeous shots I expect this could have been an all-timer for me had I seen it half a lifetime ago; hard to fall quite as in love with it now that I've seen so much, but still made it to deep like. 38; Giuseppe Blanc’s Giovinezza; Mina and Martelli’s Come un fior (aka Il conformista), (Monophonic, live recording) Giorgio Pelloni, Giulio Brogi (Athos Magnani son and father), Alida Valli (Draifa), Pippo Campanini (Gaibazzi), Franco Giovanelli (Rasori), Tino Scotti (Costa), Allen Midgette (sailor), Claudio Cerioli (boy at the bar), Chiara Regina (girl at Draifa’s house), Attilio Viti (animal tamer), Giuseppe Bertolucci (lion head carrier) and the musicians of the Concerto Cantoni di Colorno, Giovanni Bertolucci for Red Film / RAI-tv; production manager Aldo U. Passalacqua, Sabbioneta, Pomponesco, Villa Longari Ponzone (Rivarolo del Re); July-August 1969, RaiUno, October 25th 1970 (repeated once on November 1st), The very first experience with psychoanalysis marked the transition from the chaos of Partner to the unexpected structural harmony of The Spider’s Strategem. The Spider’s Stratagem… A film from 1969. 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). It’s a very special, distinct blue that all cameramen dreaded at the time. The crew intercepts a smuggler's stash of mysterious living armor on its way to a war-torn galaxy. As the son untangles the web of lies this story is constructed from, he finds himself ensnared in the same web. 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. Even though Athos never knew his father – who died before he was born – they share the same name and have a remarkable resemblance. The Spider’s Stratagem was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci from Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, by the great Argentinian short story novelist and poet, Jorge Luis Borges.It’s surprising there have not been other notable adaptations of Borges’ works. Check out some of the IMDb editors' favorites movies and shows to round out your Watchlist. A young man is called to his hometown by the former mistress of his long-dead father to investigate the death of his father, a hero of the anti-Fascist resistance who was murdered by unknown assassins while plotting against Mussolini. A hero, yes! Athos Magnani, a young researcher, returns to Tara, where his father was killed before his birth, at the request of Draifa. But the Magog are close, and Dylan and the crew must convince the utopia that peace is not the answer. The plot concerns a young man named Athos Magnani who visits a small village in Italy where his father was reputedly an "anti-fascist freedom fighter" in 1936, but from the flash backs, he was a pompous jerk who really didn't do much anti-fascist work. As a consequence, it's not precisely about an investigation for a killer, but willingly more an examination into the kind of people the…, Both the last of the more distinctly abstract Bertolucci pictures (until oddly, Stealing Beauty) and the transition point to many ideas that will define Bertolucci's most notable period, The Spider's Stratagem is a mini-masterpiece of a film, a labyrinthine structural flex in the guise of a mystery drama, where the more we learn, the less we actually know. Giulio Brogi, Alida Valli, Pippo Campanini, Franco Giovanelli, Tino Scotti, Bernardo Bertolucci, Eduardo de Gregorio, Jorge Luis Borges, Marilù Parolini, Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2013. The rural hamlet has De Chirico’s mysterious slanting light, the young visitor (Giulio Brogli) goes one way and the slowly panning camera goes another until they meet at the town square before the effigy honoring the lad’s father. We were up on a tower in a bright sunlight, and all I had was one Sun Gun to light the actors. Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2013. Suddenly coming back with your "better knowledge" as the one who knows because they move is questioned. 300 years later, rescued from a black hole by a salvage ship called the Eureka Maru, Dylan realises his entire world is in ruins. A Bertolucci film about historical memory poisoning the present, and the echoes of Italian Fascism on future generations, but I repeat myself. The book celebrates and chronicles over one…. [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. It’s surprising there have not been other notable adaptations of Borges’ works. Film data from TMDb. It will be the legendary death of a hero: a great theatrical performance. I thought that no matter what I did, the scene would look terrible. The Spider's Stratagem (Italian: Strategia del Ragno) is a political film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Five short stories with contemporary settings. ::Francesco Camarda... Made during confinement, In My Room plunges us into the poignant story of a woman at the twilight of her life, through recordings of the director's deceased grandmother. Instead of having a welcoming experience, everyone's pretty hostile and dirty secrets start to be unraveled. Wow, so long ago! Hence the confusion of the town’s inhabitants, who continue to celebrate the legacy of their local anti-fascist hero. He knows how to compose beautiful images, he knows how to use music effectively, he knows how to cast the people that will more likely create what he intends in his characters, and most importantly, he knows how to make complicated narratives at a moral level. Report this film. As Athos proceeds with his investigation, including conflicting testimony of the deceased’s friends and enemies, it becomes clear that the official version is hiding something… Until he finds out that it was not a “fascist bullet” that took his father, but his father’s fellow conspirators, convinced by him to stage his execution – for an alleged betrayal – as an act by fascists in order to anchor the entire population’s hatred of the fascist regime…. I shoot it and re-shoot it continuously on the set of my memory. Athos senior – Listen. Athos Magnani, a young researcher, returns to Tara, where his father was killed before his birth, at the request of his mistress, Draifa. The Spider's Stratagem becomes about the image's fallacies and propensity towards myth-making - it's not for nothing…, To illuminate paternal heroism is to debunk it, that’s the Freudian thesis, "il classico mistero." A very overlooked film but one that ranks as highly as other films in Bertolucci's catalogue. A conspirator was assasinated in mysterious circumstances, and the crime has not yet been solved. 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! 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. even if the film can feel like it offers frustratingly little to latch onto in terms of conventional plot and character, storaro's restless, roving camera is the star of the show here, endlessly gliding between gloriously isolating compositions, (shout out to the restoration team behind this immaculate print- shit was sharp as a tack with brilliant colours). [F.G.]. One of them is the killer. kept coming back to martel's zama (2018) as a point of comparison, with both male leads haplessly floundering about within a lush, deeply irrational landscape ravaged by brutal nationalist rule. More details at Forty years ago. Was this review helpful to you? She sails for Italy, takes a job at a small bookstore in Rome, and meets Don, who has just broken up wi... Four struggling actors retreat to a cabin in Big Bear, California in order to write a screenplay that will make them all stars. This set-up, where the veil is merely pulled over more once we get closer to the truth, becomes the central crux of the films thematic basis itself - as we get closer to truth, the illusory nature of the image reinstates itself more and more. The Spider's Stratagem. Understand? And once you've left them, the more distant and alien they actually become. Rigging the traitor’s assassination by his friends so that it looked like a crime by their adversaries was actually the victim’s idea. (1970). He too though becomes a prisoner of his father’s web, when he looks at the train tracks and realizes that trains stopped coming to Tara some time ago. The Spider's Stratagem is another example of Bertolucci's masterful craf where he forces the audience to evaluate the way we view myths, most importantly, the myth that our parents aren't gods and may actually be people just like us. It seems like yesterday. 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. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. [Laughter]. An introverted teenager tells his parents he is going on a ski trip, but instead spends his time alone in a basement.