Abstract
As is the case of many of Bernardo Bertolucci's films of the 1960s and 1970s, La strategia del ragno (1970) has elicited a number of readings from the framework of auteur-theory at the expense of a meaning-production generated in the larger social and political context where texts and spectators meet. Without denying Bertolucci's modernistic auteurial signature nor downplaying the Freudian concerns that run throughout La strategia, this essay accounts for the relationship between the film's formal and thematic structures and the wider socio-political, and historical context of Italian Fascism of the 1930s, the time of the film's diegesis, and its resurgence in the 1960s, the time of the film's production. When viewed at the intersection of historically situated and embodied subjects, the enunciating structures La strategia stage question the alliance with the anti-fascist Resistance that was cultivated by post-war Italian political institutions while revealing a cultural preoccupation with the re-emergence of the castrating authority of Italy's right-wing politics that was occurring at the time the film was being produced: the early years of a very dark period of Italian history that would later be known as the epoch of “la strategia della tensione” [strategy of tension].
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.