Word: tangoing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Made in 1969 for Italian television, this mesmeric film is only now being released in America, in the wake of the wide acclaim for Bertolucci's The Conformist and in anticipation of the brouhaha over Last Tango in Paris (TIME cover, Jan. 22). Perhaps Tango may not SO much sweep up The Spider's Stratagem in its wake as swamp it. The Spider's Stratagem boasts no superstars in the cast, no odor of brimstone and no heavy hype. It should not need them. Less exotic than The Conformist or Tango, certainly more subtle and contained...
...references to movies, countless movies, everything from early Godard to Red River. Bertolucci continues this tradition of paying homage to his mentors: In The Spider's Stratagem, made in 1969, the camera lingers briefly over a poster for Robert Aldrich's Wagnerian western The Last Sunset; in Tango there is a scene aboard a barge, between Maria Schneider and Jean-Pierre Leaud, that is meant to evoke Jean Vigo's classic L'Atalante...
...aunt, with whom he is having an affair-has turned up, with appropriate variations, in every subsequent Bertolucci film. One of The Conformist's most elaborate set pieces was the late-night Paris café, where all the customers got up to dance, spontaneously crowding the floor; Tango's lingering and desperate ballroom interlude gives the film its title. Bertolucci is smitten by dancing the way Hitchcock is obsessed by staircases. Each motif gives the director occasion to employ the best elements of his visual style in full flourish. Bertolucci's dancers are not only orchestrated...
...inborn sense of beat, or rhythm," says the superb cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci's collaborator since The Spider's Stratagem. Storaro douses Bertolucci's films in ravishing light-working, as many cinematographers do, from ideas in painting. He and Bertolucci drew their inspiration for Tango not only from Francis Bacon but also from Vermeer...
...technique he adopted with his actors in The Conformist and especially in Tango is based on an informal method of psychological investigation. To create a climate conducive to such probing, Bertolucci says, he "mixes the Hollywood studio with the techniques of cinema verite. This permits the best possible conditions for improvisation, and gives the public a continuous sense of risk and danger." It also means, as Bertolucci admits, that "it would be proper to put my analyst in the main titles, because he is the first person to whom I confess the ideas of my films...