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Dante and Cinema Film across a Chasm Bart Testa Dante and cinema? The Commedia and cinema? The discussion has hardly begun—yet several film artists have already spoken first, and spoken of an abyssal chasm of time. What follows is a series of hazardous notes concerning three “artist’s films”: Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987); Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (1964); and Bruce Elder’s The Book of All the Dead (1978–1996).1 One hazard I must point out here is that these notes cannot begin to respond to the immense reserve of philological and interpretative scholarship on Dante. Another is that they refer to “artist’s films” (Brakhage’s coinage), a term without critical currency in cinema studies where such works are slotted as “avantgarde ” or “experimental” cinema. But that label draws a genre ghetto around films and the problem of defining this or that film genre is not at issue here. In any case, these films (which do not form “a cinema” because they remain three single films) do have a relation of radical Otherness to the movie industry. It is in this place of alterity that the chasm of time— the abyss of history between Dante and cinema—opens initially to view. Among the classic texts of the Western canon, the Commedia must seem the most remote to filmmaking. Is it not still hailed as the great epic (or anti-epic) of Catholic conversion, the return of the Lost Soul to God through pilgrimage? No medieval pilgrim-poet, it seems, could be further removed than Dante—in his forms and sensibility, in his compositional élan and cosmology, and (especially) in his aesthetic completeness and totalizing vision—from the modernity to which cinema belongs. I am not just referring to the fables promulgated by our media theorists. The fable of film technology, for one, tells us that a fragmented and phenomenalist visual culture, secularism, and the languages of instrumental reaPART V TRALUCERE  367 son determined the invention of cinema and all that flowed across our century’s screens thereafter. That fable is true and its truth militates against the very idea of Dante as plausible in cinema. Nonetheless, even if we could fantasize some reform that would free filmmaking from these technocultural determinations, there is an epochal abyss between the poet and film still older, deeper, and darker than the meaning of “modern media.” A chasm was cut out of European time when the Renaissance gave rise to the baroque, the age of Shakespeare (in his later plays) and Milton (in his two epics), and in the visual arts, the age of Bernini and Velasquez. In film, it halted even Sergei Eisenstein—the great self-primitivizing artist of classic film history—and held him forever in the baroque Mexico that formed his later imaginary in the 1930s, as we can vividly see in his masterful film of ancient Rus, Ivan the Terrible. Consider, too, the postwar European filmmakers who resist the magnetic modern literary realism of Dickens and Balzac, Verga and Zola—the tradition that gave us Hollywood and socialist realism, French poetic realism, and Italian neorealism alike. Recall that Bergman and Tarkovsky attempted to traverse the chasm. Their efforts resulted in the most vivid religious film works of the modern-baroque era: The Seventh Seal and Cries and Whispers, Andrei Rublev and Nostalghia. Extraordinary and beautiful films they are, but none of them suggests to us any prospect for Dante and cinema. Among post-war filmmakers there are a rare few, nonetheless, who slip beneath the bar of the baroque. Carl Theodore Dreyer and Robert Bresson spring to mind. Both are northern Europeans, dissenters in spirit, and strict modernists in style. The only other filmmaker of the post-war era for whom such candidacy is plausible, if only for his willing it so titanically , and because of his intense “linguistic” saturation, is Pier Paolo Pasolini. But the discussion of these filmmakers and Dante has hardly begun, and only with Pasolini is the name of Dante even brought up.2 Dante and cinema, then? The films drawing me to this question in these hazardous notes do not belong to the tiny catalogue just outlined. The Dante Quartet, Il deserto rosso, and The Book of All the Dead do not envision Dante crossing the abyss of time to us. They do not try to bridge time or to “reconstruct” the Dantean text in modern terms. Instead, they exacerbate their modernity by inviting comparison with the...

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