Borges Film – Spider’s Stratagem
- At September 21, 2019
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
0
La strategia del ragno
The Spider’s Stratagem
1970, Italian, 100 minutes
1. New Yorker Films, 1996; VHS
2. Japanese “K-Repair” Edition, DVD/ Blu-ray
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.
Screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci, Eduardo de Gregorio & Marilù Parolini after a story by Jorge Luis Borges.
Cinematography by Franco Di Giacomo and Vittorio Storaro.
Music by Arnold Schönberg, Guiseppe Verdi.
Produced by Giovanni Bertolucci.
Cast
Giulio Brogi — Athos Magnani, father and son
Alida Valli — Draifa
Pippo Pampanini — Gaibazzi
Franco Giovanili — Rasori
Tino Scotti — Costa
Originally produced for Italian television, Bertolucci’s La strategia del ragno is a marvelously clever adaptation of Borges’ short story “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” published in 1944 in Sur and collected in Ficciones.
Synopsis
Athos Magnani arrives at the sleepy Italian town of Tara, where years ago, his father—also named Athos Magnani—was assassinated by Fascists while attending a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto. In the intervening years, the elder Magnani has become a hero to this town filled with “old madmen.” Drawn deeper into the town’s politics and history by Draifa, his father’s mistress; and Gaibazzi, Rasori, and Costa, his father’s old compatriots, the young Athos is soon entangled in a web of manipulation and deceit. Something is not what it seems, and it could cost him his life—or his sanity.
Review
In a 1936 review of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-nine Steps, Borges wrote: “from an absolutely dull adventure story—The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan—Hitchcock has made a good film. He has invented episodes, inserted wit and mischief where the original contained only heroism. He has thrown in delightfully unsentimental erotic relief, and a thoroughly charming [new] character…”
Based on these comments, I can only assume Borges would have been delighted with Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” (I am unaware if Borges was familiar with it; and I cannot find mention of the film in any contemporary interviews.) Though Borges’ story is by no means “dull,” it is nevertheless merely a sketch; an idea offered to writers and requiring “details, rectifications, tinkering.”
Intended to be set in “an oppressed yet stubborn country,” Borges discards several locales before settling on Ireland. Inventing a great Fenian hero named Fergus Kilpatrick, he envisions a researcher writing a book on Kilpatrick a century after his assassination in a theater. Eventually the researcher becomes disturbed by certain details of the plot—elements which seem contrived, contradictory, or even borrowed from literature. Conducting a thorough investigation, the researcher discovers that Kilpatrick had actually betrayed his group of co-conspirators! After privately confessing his crime and signing his own death warrant, Kilpatrick and his cabal decide that he should die a martyr, thus redeeming his traitorous act and furnishing Ireland with a shining example of heroism. Cribbing ideas from Shakespeare, with the whole town acting as a theater, Kilpatrick sacrifices himself on the stage of history and is reborn as myth. Realizing that the truth would only destroy this powerful illusion, the researcher decides to remain silent, publishing a book that glorifies Kilpatrick—all the while wondering if he, too, is playing a predestined role.
Bernardo Bertolucci correctly honors the spirit of Borges’ story more than its details, and does so brilliantly, with a wonderful cast, music by Verdi, and gorgeous cinematography inspired by the paintings of René Magritte. Relocated from Ireland to postwar Italy, a sly nod to the original is granted by naming the town “Tara,” the mythical seat of Irish kings. Bertolucci changes more than the setting, and La strategia del ragno expands Borges’ critique of history to include a psychological exploration of identity. The protagonist is no longer an impartial researcher, but the hero’s only son. More than that, the young Magnani is virtually a reincarnation of his father—identical to his father in appearance, at the same age of his father’s death, and bearing the same legendary name.
The son as reluctant doppelgänger gives a Freudian twist to the story, inserting the young Magnani directly into the town’s drama and forcing him to confront an identity crisis of Oedipal proportions. Tara is filled with the “old and the mad,” and from the moment of his arrival, Magnani becomes the focus of the town’s anxious projections. Everyone wants something from him. The manipulative Draifa sees her lover resurrected; his father’s comrades desire understanding, and possibly some form of secret absolution; his father’s enemies want him expelled or even destroyed.
Tara is a strange and terrible town, and Bertolucci draws its wounded inhabitants around the young Magnani in increasingly claustrophobic spirals, as if enough pressure will slough away his false skin and reveal Magnani for what he truly is. Surreal camera shots create a restless and edgy atmosphere, a visual depiction of his irritated confusion and deepening paranoia. Characters are frequently seen doing inscrutable things just off-camera, with only their reactions coming into focus. A conversation in a salami shed is assembled in hypnotic waves; another conversation takes place through the window of a moving car. Long shots into the town are contrasted by the flat barriers of surrounding fields, giving the impression that the town is infinitely bordered; like the rim of a wheel, all possible pathways are spokes leading back to the center.
The flashback sequences are particularly ingenious. Relating the story of the elder Magnani, Bertolucci creates an undercurrent of nightmare through his casting decisions. Naturally, the same actor who plays the young Athos Magnani also portrays his father. However, Bertolucci uses the same actors to play the townsfolk as well, with no attempt to make them appear thirty years younger! This visual paradox suggests a conflation of timelines, the present colonizing an increasingly unreliable past. As the film continues, visual slippages begin to align the two Magnanis, the monstrous needs of the townsfolk dissolving time and bringing the two images into a single focus. That this means the annihilation of the younger Athos Magnani is of no concern to anyone but himself.
As the town pushes Magnani towards his fate, Bertolucci relocates the climax from Borges’ Irish theater to an Italian opera house. Rigoletto is playing, just as it was the night of his father’s assassination. As Verdi’s lurid tale of intrigue unfolds in the background, Magnani finally learns the truth; but whether he can free himself from the terrible destiny of his name is left ambiguous. The movie’s closing scene certainly suggests that escape is impossible; and Magnani’s chilling revelation that Tara may be nothing more than a ghost town—or just another stage—evokes Rigoletto’s final anguished cry, “La maledizione!”
Notes
The Argentine writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky writes about La strategia del ragno in his 1980 book, Borges In/And/On Film:
Perhaps no other literary text has offered itself so provisionally to its eventual adapters as “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” which is the point of departure for Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem: “I have imagined the plot for a story that I may write someday and that somehow already justifies my idle afternoons. The details, emendation, adjustments are missing, and there are portions of the story as yet unrevealed to me. This is how I see it today, January 3, 1944.” Borges even went on to invite diverse translations of the story: “The action takes place in an oppressed, dogged country: Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice, some South American or Balkan state . . . Let’s say (for narrative convenience) Ireland; let’s say 1824.”
Bertolucci and his script writers—an Argentine and an Italian—said Italy, said the 1930s; but Stratagem fits into no historical genre. The film is neither a cast-of-thousands spectacular nor a contemporary interpretation of past times and events; rather, it is, more than anything else, a film about the continuity of past and present, about their connection and interaction. In Borges’s story, the central character Ryan is the grandson of one Kirkpatrick, a martyr of the Irish rebellion, while in Bertolucci’s film, the main character, Athos Magnani, is the son of Athos Magnani, a hero of the anti-Fascist resistance. As in The Conformist, which he made immediately after Stratagem, Bertolucci does not see Fascism as a historic development that is over and done with but as a system of attitudes and behavior in which ideology grows stronger in inverse proportion to its explicit manifestation. In The Conformist, the family’s lunch or the vast governmental architecture are Fascism; in Stratagem, the movements with which the elder Athos dances to “Giovinezza” before the townspeople are defiant opposition.
The elder Athos Magnani was a coward trapped within a romantic conception of political action, at once heroic and ingenuous. (Better than any scene in the film, the name of his lover, the daughter of a bitter Dreyfusard, illustrates this concept: her father has baptized her Draifa.) For such partisans, the only popular cultural tradition that can match the staging of a Shakespearian play in Borges’s story is a Verdi opera, whose historic Risorgimento atmosphere is as appropriate to their militancy as to their countryside. (The film was shot in the Po Valley, between Mantua, the setting of Rigoletto, and Parma, Bertolucci’s native city; to be more exact, in Sabbioneta, a model of Renaissance city planning whose almost abstract mass and geometric perspectives nowadays evoke de Chirico.) Thus the staging of Julius Caesar is replaced by a production of Rigoletto; and, consequently, the “Ides of March” motif is lost, but the theme of the son murdering his father is gained. For the adapter’s concept of the plot, this theme is much more important than the classical allusion.
To Bertolucci, the film resembles psychoanalytic therapy. He explains that in the original story “the cyclic echoing of events, which is very Borgesian, didn’t attract my attention. The theme of the film really is a kind of trip to the kingdom of the dead. The investigation conducted by the young man is like a trip through atavistic memory, through the pre-conscious” (“Conversation with Bertolucci,” Filmcritica 209, Rome, September 1970). As a result, the political and ideological continuity of past and present assumes a new dimension. Bertolucci makes the same actor play both father and son, places these characters in similar situations, and renders Draifa’s reactions ambiguous. (Does she take the son for the father at one point? Does the resemblance between the father and son awaken her old love? Did the tender scene with the fainting son perhaps take place in the past with the father?) Furthermore, with very brief shots of running legs and others of agitated bodies and heads that successively identify father and son, Bertolucci composes an alternating montage for the escape of each, thirty years apart, through the same forest. Draifa’s role is the most eloquent element in this series: Circe or Medusa, she has summoned the son, and through her the “kingdom of the dead” works its most palpable spell. Her confusion of generations—as trivial as a symptom of old age—sets forth the film’s central subject: the defeat of Athos.
Stratagem displays a very special cross-section of ideological, esthetic, as well as psychoanalytic planes, and the cutting occurs in the most unpredictable way, obliquely revealing the levels’ extension and discovering their unusual outlines and volumes. The son desecrates the father’s tomb, but his rage is no liberation, no total profanation, because he acts it out before learning the truth. Precisely at the moment when he discovers that truth, he is trapped in the same lie sanctioned by the whole society. This unraveling of the plot lends the film a certain ideological pathos since, in order to conceive of history as the story of what really happened, it is necessary to reject myth, even though mythology may better inform history than some insignificant speck of documented truth. Unlike the John Ford of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which the lawman accepts the supremacy of the brave man and allows myth to occupy the stage of history, Bertolucci works in a context where a similar paradox would be unacceptable. To the degree that Stratagem presumes a meditation on the persistence of Fascism (“Fascism will continue; Fascism is already inside the people”) as well as on the contemporary history of Italy, the retort from Brecht’s Galileo, which Bertolucci quoted during the filming, is apt: “Pity the country that needs heroes.” (In the play, Galileo posed that aphorism against Andrea Sarti’s earlier one: “Pity the country with no heroes.” Deferring to the Inquisition, Galileo has recanted, and he knows that his “betrayal” will be more useful than the integrity of a naive idealist who is impatient to sacrifice his life for his ideas.)
Moreover, Bertolucci was wise enough to admit in the previously cited interview: “Of course I say all this now, and I did think about it before starting to shoot, but that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. I mean, psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis, and films are films . . . and I’m not at all interested in making psychoanalytic films.” The truth is that this trip to the “kingdom of the dead” uncovers two parental images: one of the father, the hero/traitor/hero, and one of the “mother,” an attractive, dangerous figure who is the instrument of that second intrigue which is the disclosure and acceptance of the first. Instead of freeing him, the knowledge that the traveller achieves destroys him. In Borges’s story, Ryan takes positive satisfaction in accepting his predecessor’s scheme, in submitting to the design already sketched by history; in Bertolucci’s film, that resolution implies defeat.
Various foreshadowings in the film predict this defeat: the camera focuses in on the father’s statue so that its bulk shrouds the son; Draifa dresses the young man in his father’s clothes; the presentation of Rigoletto, the mise-en-scène of the ostensible conspiracy in the present and the real conspiracy in the past, governs, from ubiquitous loudspeakers, the son’s impossible escape. As in classic tragedy as well as in psychoanalytic investigation, the film presents an unhurried yet inevitable linking of clues and revelations. For example, the train is delayed, first for forty minutes, then for two hours. A skeptical station master observes that sometimes the train forgets to pass through all. A travelling shot, the last shot in the film, gradually reveals the grass, growing progressively higher between the railroad tracks.
This confrontation takes place in a transfigured setting. Behind the opening credits, a naive painting, The Flight of the Lion in the Forest of Poplars by Ligabue, establishes a tone, both for the cornfields drenched in sun and the too luxuriant vegetation invading Draifa’s garden. Even the architecture of Sabbioneta evokes not only de Chirico but also Delvaux and finally Magritte in night scenes filmed without compensation so that the existing electric lights bring out violently orange areas under an intensely blue sky—a contrast between “natural” and “artificial” illumination that Vittorio Storaro repeated in The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris. No scrap of “nature” in the film escapes underscoring or absorption by this calligraphy, even when it is not a matter of erudite pictorial references but only an incidental touch of color, such as what a red handkerchief lends to a landscape or a bunch of flowers and some slices of watermelon give to a white tablecloth.
This treatment works like a varnish, both preserving and distancing the action under a glaze that defines it all with a certain emblematic, atemporal quality. Thus Bertolucci establishes a tension with the elements of local color, even of naturalism, that he introduces into the film. This local color—wrinkled faces of the villagers, a boy reciting Pascoli, people drinking wine outdoors—can undergo a sudden allegorical transformation: the women wearing black, crowding into motionless wagons in the night, absorbed in listening to Verdi’s music broadcast over the loudspeakers proclaiming to the young Athos the omens that announced the death of his father.
This technique may be compared to the one Bertolucci employed in his first film, La commare secca (The Grim Reaper, 1962). There, the remnants of neo-realism on which the plot turns appear in quotation marks, like cultural documentation. For example, the hysterical outburst of a girl in a kitchen, suddenly filled with neighbors who have come to calm her, is a bit of melodrama included as information, since the different accents and dialects define the many episodic characters. In Stratagem the sweeping, majestic movements of the camera bestow an operatic emphasis on scenes whose action is not, in itself, grand. One sequence that illustrates this treatment occurs when Athos the son visits the manufacturer of culatelle, one of the men who conspired with the elder Athos. Like alternating stanzas, their conversation interweaves thoughts about the art of curing hams and the necessity of fighting against Fascism, along with quotations from Ernani and A Masked Ball—all between rhythmic fade-ins and fade-outs that take on the quality of caesurae.
Another aspect that Bertolucci develops in a minor way is the notion of film as collective memory, an idea that the director, like many of his contemporaries, enjoys illustrating. For example, the white figure of the sailor, who arrives in town on the same train as the son and reappears in the last sequence, is a ghost of the protagonist from La commare secca, played by the same Allen Midgette, while the name Bertolucci chooses for the locale is Tara, which does not sound foreign to the region but, of course, comes from the classic Gone with the Wind.
The concept of universal history as a story or metaphor written by diverse characters who, in turn, are written by it, a concept that Borges derived from the Scholastics through Bacon, is here associated with an unexpected echo. In the eulogy that he is obliged to give in honor of his father, young Athos says: “One man is equal to all men, is as good as all men, and all men are equal to him.” According to Bertolucci (interviewed in Sight and Sound, Spring 1971) this quotation comes from Sartre, but in the context of the film it seems to be lifted out of El hacedor (Dreamtigers). Young Athos, prisoner and leader of the plot he has discovered, remains paralyzed: “Whoever has glimpsed the universe, whoever has glimpsed the passionate designs of the universe, can no longer think about only one man, about his trivial joys and miseries, even if he is that man himself. He has been that man, and now he does not matter anymore.” (“The God’s Script,” The Aleph).
—Edgardo Cozarinsky
Additional Information
Additional InformationLa strategia del ragno
You can watch the entire film on YouTube. [Italian]
The Spider’s Stratagem
This version on Vimeo has English subtitles. [Italian w/ English subtitles]
Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia hosts a brief page on La strategia del ragno.
IMDB Page
The Internet Movie Database features a profile of La strategia del ragno.
Rotten Tomatoes
La strategia del ragno scores quite highly, for those who care about this sort of thing.
Only the Cinema Review
This review from the “Only the Cinema” blog examines the film as a work of anti-fascist cinema, but expresses some mystification at Bertolucci’s surreal direction, and seems unaware of the film’s source material: “It often feels like a loose, half-formed story has been folded around an essay, and the result is that the film is constantly slipping back and forth from languid to simply boring.”
Bernardo Bertolucci’s La strategia del ragno: Historicizing Oedipus at the Dawn of Italy’s ‘Strategia Della Tensione’
A 2006 paper by Norma Bouchard, “this essay accounts for the relationship between the film’s formal and thematic structures and the wider socio-political, and historical context of Italian Fascism of the 1930s, the time of the film’s diegesis, and its resurgence in the 1960s, the time of the film’s production.”
Myths of the Resistance and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno
A 2013 paper by Dominic Gavin that examines the film “in the context of debates over the antifascist paradigm in 1970s Italy.”
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 25 August 2024
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