52 | ARTICLE
ICFF 2021
FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE SOMMO POETA! ” FROM A SILENT CLASSIC TO EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS, THERE HAVE BEEN INTERESTING EFFORTS TO CAPTURE THE DIVINE COMEDY ON FILM” You may never have read a single line of The Divine Comedy, the three-part epic poem published in 1320 by Dante Alighieri, but 700 years later its influence is felt everywhere and has produced a plethora of literary work, and inspired painters and sculptors and musicians for centuries. Although Dante’s influence in the literary and visual arts sphere is huge, equally significant is his determining role in the evolution of the visual media unique to our times, namely, cinema. From the silent era, with the 1911 movie L’Inferno directed by Bertolini, de Liguoro and Padovan, through to the era of sound and to film of the present day, as well as its impact on specific directors and actors in international cinema, we see the extent and staying power in the modern world of Dante’s Divine Comedy. There are surprisingly only a handful of actual adaptations of the Divine Comedy with respect to the time period it was written in. The monumental 1911 classic, L’Inferno, stands as the first. It also happens to be the first Italian feature film ever made. The footage is spectacular, and the primitive special effects still evoke the same shock and emotion they must
have done upon its Premiere. Most recently a unique cinematic journey was produced by heavy metal pioneer, and award winning producer responsible for the progressive rock band Goblin and the soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Maurizio Guarini, who created a compelling new soundtrack to this classic silent film of Dante’s Inferno. In 2017, Toronto’s very own director of the Italian Institute of Culture had the idea and asked Guarini to do a live soundtrack on the occasion of the International Seminar on Critical Approaches to Dante organized by the University of Toronto. The musician saw this incredible film from 1911 and took up the challenge. His first performance took place at Innis Town Hall (University of Toronto), and received a great audience response. Throughout the years most films, rather than adapt, only reference Alighieri’s work or re-imagine it in a contemporary setting. DeSica, Rossellini, and Fellini have all had a say. In Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Marcello Mastroianni is a celebrity journalist navigating Rome’s midnight bacchanalias and orgies (with the original Paparazzo constantly in tow) in search of life’s meaning. He personifies a sort of hybrid essence of Dante and Virgil leading us through each of his encounters through the absurdities of a modern hell. Unlike a true adaptation, modern and contemporary films, like La Dolce Vita, feature The Divine Comedy as a metaphor of man’s descent into his own private Hell, with or without Divine attainment. Two films from the same period, the 1975 Pasolini work Salò o Le 120 giornate di Sodoma, and Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now (1979), borrow intensely in spirit and in kind from the epic poem. Pasolini deals in extremes. His brush strokes are repulsive as he narrates this parable about the rise of Fas-
