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een boosted during his formative years by supportive family circumstances which emerge in
several interviews with him. For instance, Bertolucci's father Artilio appears as a caring
father and the person who introduced Bernardo to cinema, (Fieschi, 1968: 37) sharing with
him his passion and expertise. (Ungari, 1982: 11) He was the person who - through his
friendship with Pasolini - had given young Bernardo a foothold in the film-making world
since The Grim Reaper was aired at the Venice Film Festival. Coupling these positive
formative events with Bertolucci's affirmations that his childhood was so happy that he
prolonged it as long as possible, and that he had paid and suffered for it, (Maraini, 1973: 88)
it might be argued more plausibly that psychoanalysis helped him to deal with the aftermath
of repeated professional failure,(2) as well as with the issue of what kind of film-maker he
wanted to be. This need for personal re-assessment is clearly implied in the above quotation
about the need to understand himself better, to see inside himself, and it is no coincidence
that, towards the end of the same decade, he distanced himself from the Nouvelle Vague:
In the 60s, filmmaking focused on expressivity and on language; however at a certain point I
discovered that I needed to communicate, to privilege communication. In fact with Stratagem and
Conformist I started making films which had a wider circulation (Ungari, 1982: 230).
Within this sequence of events, if Tlie Confonnist represents the first proof of
Bertolucci's stylistic change, Tlie Spider's Stratagem occupies the position of Janus, the
Roman god whose two faces traditionally presided over the end of old events and beginning
of new ones. The film constitutes a final link with Bertolucci's earlier mode of film-making
and the beginning of his establishing of a cinematic 'third way' that might combine auteurist
art cinema with films that would facilitate a broader understanding of his work. On the
position occupied by Stratagem in his career, Bertolucci unequivocally said to Mark Cousins
in a BBC interview: 'Stratagem marked the end of an era, the end of a phase for me.'
(Cousins, 1999). Regarding the problematic father/son relationship in the film, this chapter
will trace a political configuration through what can be seen as another example of the
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