March 12, 4 p.m.


​LA STRATEGIA DEL RAGNO

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
Italy, 1970, 100'
The screening is part of the Film-Thinking Series of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown, a series designed to enlarge our sense of the politics of cinema and collectively expand our understanding of film's capacity for thought. It will be followed by a round table discussion with Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Timothy Bewes, and Massimo Riva.

Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) is the son of an anti-fascist hero who was assassinated three decades earlier. When the dead man's former mistress (Alida Valli) calls him back to his father's hometown, Athos has a number of perplexing, surreal encounters with her and the men who were his father's allies long ago. As he tries to unravel the mystery of his father's murder, the son is forced to reckon with the nature of compromised ideals. Shot in Sabbioneta, Bertolucci’s free adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges’ fiction, The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, “arose from the need to face the ambiguity of history regarding the demystification of heroic father figures,” as Bertolucci himself said in an interview, at the time of the film’s release. In the process, Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro, the camera operator, discovered that just like in René Magritte’s painting, nights in the Po River valley are made “of light blue light...because we shot most of it in the brief interval of light between day and evening when a traditional operator would have said ‘stop’!” Thus, the film, Bertolucci continues, “was shot in a trance-like condition like a dream: it is the dream of a film, the true cinema of memory.”