Dante, Cinema and Television (review)

In his encounter with his ancestor Cacciaguida, Dante imagines that for many the retelling of what he has learned in his journey must have "sapor di forte agrume," and adds: "e s'io al vero son timido amico, / temo di perder viver tra coloro / che questo tempo chiameranno antico" (Par. 17.117–20). As we ponder these words, considering the many ways in which the modern world continues to recognize Dante's authenticity as poet, indeed as a living presence among us who call his time "antico," especially for his deep concern with telling the truth as he experienced it, and therefore with the ethics of poetry, we must also consider that this living presence has been and may continue to be realized only in virtue of the authenticity of his readers' response. Amilcare Iannucci's anthology of essays by various authors, Dante, Cinema and Television, which includes his own "Dante and Hollywood," is a significant, timely measure of this response as it shows how Dante's profound influence on the literary world, and on the visual arts and music, has also "spread decisively into the non-literary or para-literary world of the visual media unique to the twentieth century, namely cinema and television" (ix). Such response can best be described as a dialogue. "Just as Dante," notes Iannucci, "created his world out of dialogue with all of the voices which preceded him, so Dante continues to engage in dialogue with the whole of human culture, seen as a complex aggregate of alterity and outsidedness. As such, Dante's work possesses incredible potential to generate new meanings" (4).

In his overview of Dante's influence on Hollywood, Iannucci sheds light on vital aspects of this dialogue and, correspondingly, the "new meanings" it generates, as he traces the influence of the Divine Comedy on film, beginning with silent films—the first, and earliest, is Francesca da Rimini (1907), produced by the New York Vitagraph Company (and hence a product of what Iannucci calls "Hollywood East")—down to the sound period, from Harry Lachman's Dante's Inferno (1935) to Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate (1997) and Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1998). Iannucci's discussion is especially insightful in showing how directors who "enter Dante's world to retrieve a single detail, scene or idea, often become ensnared in a web of interrelated references," and "as a result, they wind up appropriating from Dante much more than they had probably originally intended" (18).

The other essays in Iannucci's collection represent a variety of approaches. Applying a philological/historical method, in "Early Cinema, Dante's Inferno of 1911, and the Origins of Italian Film Culture," John P. Welle argues that Milano's film Dante's Inferno "is perhaps best understood as a bridge between the early cinema of attractions and a cinema in transition toward classical film narration," and that "the film's participation in a broader set of dynamics involving the interaction of film and literature [. . .] has helped to establish the parameters of Italian film culture" (23). Particularly notable are Welle's observations about the importance of Dante's Inferno, not only for its stylistic and technical characteristics (which appear to be shaped within "an iconographical framework made popular by Gustave Doré" [40]), but also for its contribution to the development of Italian national culture and civil consciousness. Welle buttresses this assessment by citing, among others, these remarks from Angelo Aliverti's review of the film Dante's Inferno (quoted in Lux, 2 April 1911): "È appunto in questa diffusione insperata delle opere artistiche e letterarie, in questo ravvicinamento dei capolavori della stirpe con l'anima popolare, che bisogna riconoscere e presentire un fattore potente della cultura e della civiltà di domani" (40). In reading these observations, one cannot help but note—and this is one small flaw in an otherwise very sound essay—that Welle might have been reasonably expected to offer some comment, however brief, on the inflated rhetoric of the phrase in question ("i capolavori della stirpe...