1īertolucci grasps in his film what is in Borges’ work a continuous investigation of the essence of time, history, and being. The film is otherwise considered Borges’ “best-received high-cultural translation to the screen” (Williamson 92), while Kolker characterizes it “intellectually the most complex of his films, politically the most intriguing” (68). Kolker explains that, in comparison to Bertolucci’s other literary sources, the “relationship between the Borges fiction and The Spider’s Stratagem operates in an entirely different manner” in the sense that, in this case, Bertolucci does not use the “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” as simple “stimuli” for characters and events on the contrary, he “uses the concepts that Borges’ narrative suggest” thus ending up with a work of intricate intertextual nature (109). However, there is something particularly intriguing in the way Bertolucci understands Borges’ philosophical backdrop in The Spider’s Stratagem. The conformist also was an adaptation, of Alberto Moravia’s titular novel, whereas before that, Bertolucci had appropriated elements from Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, in his films Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964) and Partner (1968), correspondingly. He was, after all, the son of the noted Italian poet and writer, Attilio Bertolucci, and he himself had already published, in 1962, a prize-winning book of poetry entitled In cerca del mistero (In search of mystery) (Tonetti 8). This was the year Bertolucci finally managed to overcome Jean-Luc Godard’s heavy influence and introduced a personal cinematic style, a political cinema of the operatic nature, which, in the years that followed, served his artistic and ideological endeavors in a distinct and identifiable way.īased on Jorge Luis Borges’ short novel “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” (Tema del traidor y del héroe), The Spider’s Stratagem simultaneously confirmed Bertolucci’s loving relationship with literature. In 1970 Bernardo Bertolucci presented The Spider’s Stratagem (Strategia del ragno), along with The Conformist (Il conformista) and thus entered a decisive era in his cinematic career that was marked by those two renowned, complex, and sophisticated films. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins” To be not a man, but the projection of another man’s dream-what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo! How to Construct a Labyrinth: Bertolucci, Borges, and Magritte in The Spider’s Stratagem (1970) × Current About Archive Submit Editorial Board Salisbury University
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