Dante's Inferno

Guided by Virgil, Dante passes through the nine circles of hell. The film stages the first part of the Divine Comedy from end to end: limbo, the wind of the lustful, the frozen lake, and Lucifer at the bottom. It is Italian, credited to Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro. It took years to shoot. Its place in history is large. In 1911 cinema still meant shows of a few minutes; this runs over an hour and is generally accepted as the first Italian feature. It is among the films that proved the feature length format was commercially possible. The source of the visual design is plain: Gustave Doré's engravings for the Divine Comedy. The scenes are built directly from those drawings and some frames are exact copies. It is a characteristic example of the period when cinema had not yet built a visual language of its own and was borrowing from painting. The effects are ambitious for the moment: double exposure, miniatures, and crowd scenes staged with nude performers. The nudity was censored in several countries. It has been reissued over the years with different scores and performed live by modern groups. Who it is for: viewers curious about early film history and the roots of literary adaptation. Who it is not for: there is no narrative and no character. It proceeds as a series of tableaux and is hard to follow without knowing the text.