L’INFERNO (Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, Giuseppe de Liguoro, 1911)

Based on the first part, “L’inferno,” of La divina commedia, which Dante Alighieri wrote in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, L’inferno is credited as being the first feature-length film from Italy. It is visually beautiful, but fragmentary, incomplete; it provides little insight, for example, into the relationship between Dante, who journeys into the medieval Christian idea of Hell as a journalist might, and the ancient Roman poet Virgil, who is his guide. The film was directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro.
     The filmmakers heavily relied on Gustave Doré’s gorgeous nineteenth-century black-and-white illustrations. The filmmakers cannot match Doré’s gloomy grandeur, but obviously (since they use naked actors) they correct the artist’s misconceptions about human anatomy, and there is something magical about having motion added to these familiar scenes. Let me reiterate that this film is something to see.
     The use of long-shots helps keep the film from becoming a catalog of horrors, which the combination of abundant naked sinners and their eternal punishments might otherwise have effected. Although the names of actual persons are attached to these outcasts, we see in effect categories of misbehavior. No one, for instance, is a “hypocrite” and a hypocrite only, or a “flatterer” and a flatterer only. Each individual is a complex of vices and virtues. To make an individual representative of a particular vice is to employ poetic license. One may hope that God proceeds differently.
     There is a (clumsily handled) flashback-insert involving Count Ugolino, who tells his tale of woe to Virgil and Dante. The Count had quarreled with his friend the Archbishop, who therefore had him and his entire family imprisoned and starved. Now the Count perpetually gnaws at the Archbishop’s face. The Archbishop is being punished for killing innocents by withholding food; the Count, for being quarrelsome with a friend and disrespectful towards the Church that the Archbishop represented. But it’s a lame, murky episode. Some parts of this film are better and more compelling than others.
     The DVD has imposed a dreadful score by Tangerine Dream onto the material. No matter; low-level, it entirely vanishes when one turns down the sound all the way. One then experiences the silence of dreams, imagination, wonder. The silence of cinema.