Word: spidered
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...SPIDER'S STRATAGEM...
...Italian television, this mesmeric film is only now being released in America, in the wake of the wide acclaim for Bertolucci's The Conformist and in anticipation of the brouhaha over Last Tango in Paris (TIME cover, Jan. 22). Perhaps Tango may not SO much sweep up The Spider's Stratagem in its wake as swamp it. The Spider's Stratagem boasts no superstars in the cast, no odor of brimstone and no heavy hype. It should not need them. Less exotic than The Conformist or Tango, certainly more subtle and contained. The Spider's Strata...
Like such otherwise di verse works as Godard's Contempt and Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, The Spider's Stratagem concerns the workings of myth, the complicity of fancy and legend in history. The screenplay is an extrapolation from a short fiction by Jorge Borges, Theme of the Traitor and Hero, in which a historical researcher, investigating the death of his great-grandfather, a political martyr, discovers that the man actually traduced his confederates...
...Bertolucci's lush, visual style, a kind of free-flowing flamboyance that seems to be a celebration of the act of filmmaking. There were references to movies, countless movies, everything from early Godard to Red River. Bertolucci continues this tradition of paying homage to his mentors: In The Spider's Stratagem, made in 1969, the camera lingers briefly over a poster for Robert Aldrich's Wagnerian western The Last Sunset; in Tango there is a scene aboard a barge, between Maria Schneider and Jean-Pierre Leaud, that is meant to evoke Jean Vigo's classic...
...inborn sense of beat, or rhythm," says the superb cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci's collaborator since The Spider's Stratagem. Storaro douses Bertolucci's films in ravishing light-working, as many cinematographers do, from ideas in painting. He and Bertolucci drew their inspiration for Tango not only from Francis Bacon but also from Vermeer...