Rating: ★★★★

Dante Aligheri (?1265-1321), usually just shortened to Dante, was a poet born in Florence who is recognised as one of the greatest of all Italian literary figures. Dante came from a wealthy family and studied philosophy, before becoming an apothecary and poet. He was very much involved in the pro- and anti-papal politics of the day. Unfortunately he chose the wrong side, the upshot of which was that Dante was forced to leave Florence and go into exile in 1302, spending the rest of his life in various parts of Italy.

It was during his time in exile that Dante produced The Divine Comedy, the work with which he will always be remembered. Dante began writing around 1308 and completed the manuscript in 1321, just before his death. The poem was first published as The Comedy of Dante Aligheri (1472). The work concerns Dante’s being taken on a journey through the afterlife and consists of three parts – Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradisio (Paradise or Heaven). Judging by the number of film adaptations at least (see below for listing), the only one of these remembered today is Inferno in which Dante creates a vivid visions of the Nine Circles of Hell where the damned suffer punishments befitting their sins in life.

This Italian-made adaptation has the distinction of being the first feature-length film, running to 71 minutes in length. (It also has the distinction of being the first feature film to show full-frontal nudes). The version seen here was a 4k restored dvd version, released in 2022 with soundtrack that was performed live by Mike Kiker at the Ruba Club in Philadelphia in 2016.

Of all the film versions of Dante’s Inferno (see below for the others), this is the most faithful. The others take the general idea of the Inferno and usually add a framework about someone reading the text, or else modernise the story. This stays with what Dante wrote down in close detail. No other version, for instance, covers the encounter with Francesca da Rimini and her affair with Paolo Malatesta and their bonding over the story of Lancelot du Lac, an incident that would have been fairly recent history for Dante but which is all but forgotten by history at large. To this extent, the film is rooted very much in a Catholic outlook of the world.

Despite being lumbered by a technical crudity at times, Dante’s Inferno comes with some magnificently ambitious visions – of nude bodies swimming through the air like shoals of fish; a boat rowing across a lake surrounded by bodies waist-deep in the water reaching up to plead; demons whipping lines of suffering souls; rivers of pitch where demons fly above and torture the damned trapped in the midst with pitchforks.

Sometimes the film is let down by the effects, such as a very scrawny-looking Cerberus. Nor does the Forest of Suicides quite work, which just looks like some costumed figures have been suspended in the branches of trees. The descent between levels on the back of a griffin is let down by the effects but has great conceptual ambition nevertheless.

There are some limitations to this. One of these is that the film was shot during the early days of Silent Cinema – where every scene was a master shot that took place with the camera sitting like a member of the audience watching a play and the only cuts that occurred were when the scene ended. This would change not long after this with the invention of cutting within a scene and closeups, but each scene here remains just a single camera set-up.

Dante’s Inferno has been filmed several other times with the silent American Dante’s Inferno (1924); Dante’s Inferno (1935) with Spencer Tracy as a similarly haunted carnival barker; Peter Greenaway’s A TV Dante (1989), which contrasted readings of the poem with superimposed visual imagery; the modernised cardboard cutout puppet film Dante’s Inferno (2007); and the animated Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010).

Trailer here