Stockholm Film Festival

The Inferno is the first part of Dante's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. It tells the story of Dante's descent into Hell and of the Lost Souls he encounters there. Inspired by Phillip's translation of Dante's Inferno, which he illustrated with one hundred and thirty-nine of his own images, Peter Greenaway persuaded Philips to collaborate on a video equivalent of his work, using all the resources currently available to both feature film and video production. For each of the thirty-four cantos of the Inferno Greenaway and Phillips are creating what could be described as a thinking person's pop video to conjure up a contemporary vision of Dante's Hell. The programmes achieve a unique contemporary relevance as well as exploring Dante's text. The first eight cantos are available today and the project will continue over the next three years.

Comment
Peter Greenaway's and Tom Phillip's video adaptation of Dante's Inferno, A TV Dante, has the high-pitched tempo of the rock video. Picture is piled upon picture - texts, symbols and non-figurative elements are inserted, creating multi-layered expansive pictures with varying pulses and speeds. But this is neither a pop video for intellectuals nor video art in the accepted sense. Instead it is an effort to expand the boundaries of the medium into completely new senses.

Tom Phillips' illustrated translation of Dante's Divine Comedy inspired Greenaway with this highly unusual production. It is not an attempt to dramatise Dante's text by introducing elements of dialogue and interraction; Greenaway ha retained Phillip's beautiful translation intact. Instead the tension develops through the interaction of the text, picture and commentary. About 15 ''authorities'' in various fields are inserted, offering a continous explication. These are the first eight cantos of a total of 34 sections planned.
Dante the pilgrim (Bob Peck) and Virgil his guide (John Gielgud) make their way down to the subterranean geometry of sin and divine punishment. They travel downwards, through circles of increasing cruelty. Tom Phillips explains: ''Lucifer fell from heaven, creating a gigantic shaft in the earth, a conical hole which became Hell, divided into nine layers, nince circular storeys.'' Nine levels of sin - nine levels of perpetual suffering.
The multiply-exposed flow of pictures short-circuits all claims to realism: we progress through a wholly artificially cosmos of signs - levels of fiction in which the condemned body and the theological symbol marking its place in the hierarchy of sin are both part of the same chaotic process. This is a phantasmagoria without any uniformly illusory pictorial space, a kind of visual sampling, video sequences, photographic fragments, computer graphics, theological and cosmological symbolism, the specific commands and cursors of the computer and video technology flutter past.

At the same time there is a strict order in this sensuous flow, and thus TV Dante relates to a type of problem occuring in practically all of Greenaway's films: a radicalised tension between form and chaos. This contradiction has been various articulated in his films. In The Draughtsman's Contract as the collapse of the rationally recording gaze confronted by that which cannot be caputed in the representation of frontal perspective - the enigmatic (and therefore deadly dangerous) which alludes geometry.
In A Zed and Two Noughts the tension between the orderliness of scientific observation and the processes of organic substances: disintegration, decay. The dream of a crystalline geometry is contrasted with the amorphous degeneration of biology.

In A TV Dante, the antithesis between form and flow is very palable - on the one hand, the hierarchy of medieval cosmology, and on the other the uncontrollable flow of images. But it is not only the order of the infernal circles and the narrative sequence of the cantos which imparts structure to the chaos of images. Greenaways systematically numbers every picture inserted, thus transforming the flow of images into a numerological delirium, an abstract hurricane of characters, digits and symbols. The pictures flutter past for a second but are washed away by the next deluge - drowning by numbers.

DB

Medverkande

Bob Peck, sir John Gielgud, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer

Producent

Denis Wigman, Rees Kasander

Manus

Tom Philips

Talat språk

English

 

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