A Film Canon

The first feature-length Italian film, this extraordinary adaptation subordinates the Inferno's discursive imperative to its visionary delivery, as if to both evoke Dante's continual inability to believe his eyes, and identify it with that of the incredulous film spectator. To this end, the directors delineate a series of astonishing tableaux, heavily inspired by Gustave Dore's illustrations, themselves already gesturing towards the limits of visuality. These are replete with spectacular on-location shooting; a plethora of naked, writhing bodies; an impressive use of superimposition and freeze-frames; and, above all, a general, hypnotic slowness, imbuing everything with the meandering, aimless motion of the smoke, steam and fog that pervade virtually every scene, and render the relatively grainy print less conspciuous. Appropriately, the one extensive departure from this trajectory is the account of Peter of Vigna's blinding, while virtually every intertitle relays some variation on "Dante sees..." From this perspective, the Tangerine Dream score is, with the exception of a few clumsy vocals, a beautiful move, insofar as ambient electronica's peculiar ability to both intensify spatial cognition, and render it wondrous, or at least uncanny, encapsulates the directors' original gesture of diverting a historically distant work through contemporary technology.