|
By Jessi Klein Like The Conformist, The Spider's Stratagem explores the connection between identity politics and fascist politics. In this film, however, we view the story primarily through the eyes of Athos Magnani Jr, whose deceased father is memorialized by a small town as an anti-fascist hero. Although Magnani Jr's search for the truth about his father's assassination is the manifest content of The Spider's Stratagem, Bertolucci constructs an equally important subtext in the film. That is, through his use of mise-en-scene, elliptical editing, and casting, Bertolucci addresses the relationship between the cinema and the spectator in a profoundly reflective manner. The story begins with Athos Magnani Jr returning to Tara, the town of his birth. From the moment he first emerges from the train, we have the sense that he is not in another geographical space so much as he is in another psychological space. Bertolucci's camera work consistently creates an oneiric, surreal atmosphere, zooming in, for example, on the back of Magnani Jr's head. In his study, Bertolucci's Dream Loom, Jefferson Kline astutely points out the influence of the surrealist painter Magritte on the look of the film; Bertolucci himself explicitly acknowledges that, "...I bought a book on Magritte and studied it at length with Vittorio [Storaro, his cinematographer]...Magritte was the inspiration for the lighting in Spider's Stratagem. " Athos has returned to Tara at the request of his late father's mistress, Draifa, who reveals to him that his father's murderer was never found and implores him to make that his mission. As the film progresses, we come to perceive Draifa as a "widow spider," in whose web Athos is slowly becoming entangled. The further Athos plunges into his father's life, the more their identities become intertwined, until the boundaries between Senior and Junior are practically indistinguishable. Bertolucci makes this slippage in identity explicit by using the same actor for the role of both father and son. Furthermore, there is a scene midway through the film in which Magnani Jr is being chased through the forest by his father's friends, just as his father was decades ago (Bertolucci also uses the same actors to portray the friends as they were in the thirties and as they are in the present). Using quick parallel editing, Bertolucci cuts back and forth between the father running and the son running so that they seem to physically become one person. Ultimately, Magnani Jr discovers that his father's death was in fact staged; having betrayed his comrades' plot to assassinate Mussolini to the fascists, Magnani Sr decided to redeem himself by becoming an anti-fascist symbol for the people, a symbol of hope. The "staged" aspect of his death is underlined by the fact that his assassination occurs in an opera house.
In this way, Bertolucci links the idea of cinema with that of
historical memory. Memory, like cinema, is a social construct;
although cinema can temporarily destabilize the viewer's identity,
Bertolucci seems to be reminding us that maintaining one's
identity is essential to the ability to view critically.
|