About the Film
Originally, The Spider’s Stratagem was intended to be a television work, but its subject— adapted from the short story Theme of the Traitor and the Hero by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges—soon revealed itself as a cinematic asset. Hence, the project became one of the first films by Bernardo Bertolucci, who was then 28 years old, and freshly out of the struggles of Europe’s revolutionary youth.
Bertolucci moved the original setting from Ireland to the Italian region of Emilia, and made his protagonist, Athos Magnani, a communist militant who returns to the city to recapture the struggles of his father and his communist comrades. The young man’s goal is to explore the mysteries in the story of his father and his companions. The ambiguity of the story implies that betrayal ensued, exposing his father and the rest of the comrades.
After researching and questioning the past, Magnani reaches the conclusion he had feared in the first place.
In this film, Bertolucci knew—even if the original narrative became more obscure, and he pushed his condemnation of the past to the limit—how to work on an inversion of values in a unique cinematic language, which would be further established in his following film, The Conformist (1970), based on the novel by Alberto Moravia. Because of this, it is always a good idea to watch these two films successively. Through his following films, Bertolucci exhibited a peculiarly intimate phase with Last Tango in Paris (1972), and an indulgence in the vastness of modern Italian history with the great Novecento (1976). However, in The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist, it seems as though he was still settling a score with himself and the recent past. Here lies the importance of these two films, especially The Spider's Stratagem, which was, back then, the first European feature film to pay homage to Borges’ literature. It has since become one of the icons of global creativity.
Ibrahim Al Aris
