It ended up being a pretty special experience. Most dominantly, the movie was a poetry recital, where the heads (nothing else was showing) of two actors portraying Dante and Vergil recited the lines these two characters utter in the poem. Or, this wasn’t what was most dominant; it was merely what most of the movie consisted of. The most dominant element was the montages.
Because in between shots of the talking heads of Dante and Vergil, the movie makers had edited in a variety of clips. Most of them were obviously made for this movie, as they consisted of naked people — primarily old ones, appropriately enough — who walked around in circles, ran around in random mobs; rolled on the ground in simulated mud while fighting; and generally acted as if they were in Hell. Overlaying this was a soundtrack alternating between screams, depressive Baroque music, air strike sirens, and other forms of noise, and in between this again, clips from concentration camps, the battlefields of WWI, Dresden after the firestorms, and other bleak locations had been cut in, creating the overall impression of absolute horror.
Often I would find myself hypontised by the images, completely ignoring the poetry recital, but it was obvious that the film makers had planned for just such effects, because they would regularly implement one of the niftiest devices of Brechtian drama: the alienation effect. In practice in A TV Dante the alienation was accomplished by letting the spell of fiction be broken by constantly pausing the action to allow an academic expert comment on something that had just been said. It started out with Sir David Attenborough popping in to comment on the significance of the leopard, the lion and the she-wolf Dante encounters early on (they’re representations of three levels of sin, by the way), and continued with giving classicists, theologians, literary scholars, historians, astronomers, philosophers and naturalists a say — helping the audience to both catch Dante’s references (he did after all write for an audience who’d know ancient literature better than the backs of their hands) and avoid being sucked in (which was needed; one of the departement professors had brought the movie home the preceeding evening, to enjoy it in the comfort of her own home, and she ended up having nightmares about the movie).
All in all, this was a rather interesting movie. It highlighted the potential of the medium — what can be done with film if only one tries –, it gave a short taste of what the avant garde is up to, and it presented at least me with a quick introduction to The Inferno. I was a bit miffed that they only got to the fourth level of Hell, or thereabouts, as I’d been looking forward to seeing Judas and Brutus frozen in the mouth of the Devil at the ninth level, but it was still fun. Or, rather, it wasn’t much fun; but it was one of the most fascinating movie experiences I’ve had in a while.
8.0/10.
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