I primi due Inferno del cinema italiano

This essay aims focused on the first Italian films based on Dante’s Inferno: Inferno (F. Bertolini, A. Padovan e G. De Liguoro, Milano Films 1911) and Visioni dell’inferno (G. Berardi, A. Busnengo, Helios Film 1911). Both works are made for the 590th anniversary of the poet’s death and for the 50th anniversary of the unification of Italy: both carry with them events multiple meanings linked to the nascent film industry and its achievement on international markets. But here the two films are faced in a comparative analysis aimed at investigating their textual differences and similarities. The two films stage the first cantica of the Comedy starting from Gustave Doré’s visual encoding. The transnational model of the art film is more central in Inferno, indispensable for bringing the bourgeois audience closer to cinema, and secondary (but certainly not absent) the imprint of the fantastic-spectacular film; decisive in Visioni dell’inferno is the rhythmically compressed and sensational approach, able to guarantee a popular success. More than the general properties of the subject, the two films differ on a stylistic level. While Inferno shows a refined staging of the canticle without renouncing to exhibit tricks and special effects, Visioni dell’inferno Dante and Doré’s illustrations in the name of brevity, drawing a chaotic and sensual afterlife.