Friday, June 14, 2013

The Spider's Stratagem (1970)

The Spider's Stratagem (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
Movement through time and space.
Tiny movements, barely discernible.  
The decisions made in a moment.  The people who made them.  The reasons don't matter.

The son of a hero comes home.  He mirrors his father.  
The same name, the same look.
Athos Magnani.
There is his old mistress.
There is the memorial.  
There are his old friends.
There are the memories.
There are the lies. 

Where does one end and the other being?
The son walks in all the same corridors, fields and roads.
He may be looking for closure.  Closure is an abstraction.
Railways eventually covered over by grass.  Single, sharp parallel lines eventually broken by the convergence of thousand askew lines, all for their own purposes.

Bertolucci builds slowly, allowing these movements to linger.
Clarity is not his end goal. 
Literary allusions.
Fascism and anti-fascism (of course). 
Reality and illusion.
Sometimes, the invisible men.

There is the oppressive realization that truth is good for some but the masses need the illusion, they crave it.  The symbolic pointing to something great outside themselves.
The corporate imagination.

film journal entry: 06.14.2013

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