Archive for June 2021

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[Commlist] cfp: Shadowed screens. Dante's Inferno in cinema and audio-visual media

Mon Jun 21 20:27:27 GMT 2021



SHADOWED SCREENS. DANTE'S INFERNO IN CINEMA AND AUDIO-VISUAL MEDIA

International Conference

Organized by Silvio Alovisio, Giulia Carluccio, Stella Dagna

Turin, December 16-18 2021

From the dawn of the 1900s to present day, the first Canto of Dante’s Comedy has been the subject of countless images and stories of film and audiovisual productions. Coherent to the vast and multiform iconographic tradition which has accompanied the diffusion of Dante’s work, for modern media cultures the Inferno represents not only a challenge to the limits of what can be represented (what first comes to mind is Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975, or Federico Fellini’s painful renouncement of his Dante project), but also a powerful creative space for western imagination to experiment, often during technological and aesthetic turning points, new expressive possibilities (L’inferno by F. Bertolini, A. Padovan and G. De Liguoro,1911; A TV Dante by P. Greenaway-T. Phillips, 1990 and R. Ruiz, 1991; What Dreams May Come by V. Ward, 1998). The re-elaboration of Dante’s Inferno by the media seems to be a point of convergence where, through the re-elaboration of a centuries-old artistic and staging tradition, new hybridizations between attractional function and narrative function are experimented. At the same time, Dante’s poetry has proven to be an endless reserve of visionary images, recurring topos, poetic tropes, situations, characters and citations to re-situate, re-enacting, reinterpret (even through parody) in productive contexts or heterogeneous genres and with the most diverse choices of mise- en-scène.

While the Inferno produced by Milano Films in 1911 has remained a model of referral for the adaptations that claim to be, at least in intent, completely faithful stagings of Dante’s text (relatively few), mainstream production, on the other hand, has often reinterpreted the first Canto as moral tale (e.g. the two American Dante’s Inferno, the one directed by H. Otto in 1924 and the one directed by H. Lachman in 1935; but even indirectly, Seven by D. Fincher, 1995) or as an authoritative cultural myth secularized by laughter (from Maciste and Totò, to T. Danielsson’s Mannen som slutade röka, 1972). The most experimental production, on the other hand, has proposed hallucinatory reinterpretations (The Dante Quartet by Stan Brakhage ,1987; La commedia di Amos Poe by A. Poe, 2010), while animation cinema has drawn many different inspirations from it (L’Enfer by J. Lenica, 1971; Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic by M. Disa et al., 2010 ; Dante’s Inferno by S. Meredith, 2007). Finally, television has taken cues from it to verify and rethink its own educational potential (A TV Dante episodes, A. Rajnai’s Pokol of 1974, the recordings of Dante readings by Vittorio Gassman, Vittorio Sermonti, Carmelo Bene and Roberto Benigni and the wealth of documentary production on the theme).

In the last decade, perhaps due to the upcoming anniversary of Alighieri’s death, the media seems to be even more swept up by the Comedy. Echoes of Dante, for example, reverberate in Hollywood blockbusters (first and foremost, Ron Howard’s Inferno, 2016), in television series (Hannibal by B. Fuller, 2013-2015), in ‘film d’auteur’ (The House That Jack Built by L. von Trier, 2018; Onirica- Fields of Dogs by L. Majewsky, 2013), in documentary production (L. Nero’s Il Mistero di Dante 2014; R. Loop’s Botticelli Inferno, 2016), to the Dante parodies published on the most popular video-streaming platforms.

This ongoing proliferation and regeneration of the media Infernos, a sign of a renewed popularity of the universe of the Comedy, as well as of a certain dispersiveness, brings up a few fundamental questions. Is Dantesque imagination capable of proposing itself as a “low-intensity” myth? And, if so, in what form and with what connection to history, to traditions of their own audiovisual representations and to the powerful iconographic tradition on the theme (pictorial, illustrative, theatrical)?

A wealth of literature exists on cinematographic and media works inspired by Inferno, though dedicated, above all, to the most famous names and authors, and only rarely committed to taking into consideration lesser-known cinematographic productions. There is still space for research in less-developed and unexamined areas of research, at least potentially, on new filmographic discoveries, unpublished documental research and other interpretive hypotheses.

The Conference Shadowed Screens proposes to tackle these questions and to put such potentiality to good use, opening up a space for exchange and opportunity to reflect on new research perspectives tied to the representation of the Comedy’s Inferno in the sphere of audiovisual media, by taking into consideration the very research proposals that emerge throughout 2021, the year dedicated to celebrations for the 700^th  anniversary marking the year of the poet’s death.

We thus invite those scholars interested in these themes to send us their proposals.

Of particular interest are those proposals which emphasize interdisciplinary perspectives, unpublished documental sources, the analysis of less-researched or noncanonical films and audiovisual products, or those which were done in less-researched production contexts like Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. (provided that there be a direct and documented connection with the Dante’s first Canto).

The deadline for proposals (in Italian or in English), of a maximum length of 300 words, along with a short curriculum (max. 200 words) to be sent to the following e-mail addresses, is June 30, 2021: (schermi.oscuri /at/ unito.it) <mailto:(schermi.oscuri /at/ unito.it)>

Conference participants are required to pay a conference fee of EUR 100,00, or EUR 70,00 for PhD, Graduate and Undergraduate Students of other Universities.

The results of the evaluation of the proposals will be communicated by July 15, 2021. The conference proceedings are expected to be published in 2022.


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