The Web of Spectacle

Abstract

Bernardo Bertolucci’s La strategia del ragno (1970) is indeed a stratagem, ensnaring us within a busy web of ambiguous seductions. The film takes us to a small, historic Renaissance city in northern Italy, stunning our senses with its beauty; this intense aesthetic pleasure is, characteristically, a snare that Bertolucci gradually tightens until we, the spectators, are struggling uncomfortably in a trap woven from what we can only recognize as the silken strands of our own scopophilic satisfaction. The beautiful town of Tara is the setting for an encounter between the “past”—the fascist Italy of 1936—and the “present”—Italy in 1968—in which familiar epistemological categories lie in ruins. “Tara” as a name is highly overdetermined, itself a complex web, meshing multiple strands of cultural, political, historical, and artistic references. Its perfectly preserved historic cityscape, in which physical destruction is glimpsed only briefly, presents, like the overtly visible ruins of Rossellini’s Paisa, an insistent question: how does postwar Italy rebuild, relive, renarrate, and recinematize the Italy of Mussolini? Rather than the rubble we see in Rossellini’s film and in Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Deutschland bleiche Mutter, or the traces of a vaporized city in Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour, Bertolucci gives us a historiography of perfect preservation, a surreal suspension of destruction, an unchanging physical environment in which the monumentalization of a certain vision of “the past” masks a crisis of epistemology and subjectivity just as acute as the one realized in the other directors’ ruined streets.