Mjeteconer Just perfect...

BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Holstra Boring, long, and too preachy.

Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Hitchcoc This was made in 1911! Give me a break! When one sees what was done with primitive assets available to this filmmaker, this is an astounding effort. I did not get in on the Tangerine Dream soundtrack. I watched it cold, without music. It was wonderful. And that is from someone who has absolutely no literal belief in any of this fairy tale. The director frames each circle wonderfully, barely repeating himself and giving us a view of the Danta/Dore woodcuts in cinematic terms. One could sit her and criticize the religious bigotry that brings about this portrayal of God's wrath and all that. There are some pretty nasty jabs at some remarkable people. Nevertheless, the film never strays far from what the great Italian poet intended. I was annoyed at Dante at times tormenting the already tormented souls. Lets face it. These guys are going to be here a long time. They don't need some jackass visitor pulling out their hair or reprimanding them. But that's neither here nor there. I've always wanted to see this film and it fills in a gap in my cinematic experience.

L B (LbFilmFanatic) A celluloid of wonder; When this movie was made, its Box Office Revenue reached 2 Million Dollars after it's premiere. It was made in 1910, released in Italy, and slowly hoisted itself into a larger audience, which ultimately lead to it being successful, financially and palatable enough to an audience subsequently dispersing around the world of the rather premature cinema in that time. It's pretty hard to believe with any sense of incredulity that this movie is so eidetic in it's own quality of imagery - of course, iconography is out of date, such as the spirits of Cleopatra, Seances and The Spirits that float around, but this is actually what makes the movie great, due to how adroit they were in crafting the paradigms of surrealism (essentially just expressionism) and so forth in our minds of how we react to this and how we assimilate it.I think what really entices me is the animatronics of Lucifer, the motifs of such things like the pride, avarice and lust all reflected in the form of animals (of course, not arbitrarily, but rather how it is codified, I believe that to be the case), the alchemy of an individual that is to be enough to immortalise her - Ergo, the inferno.Plot is really austere (but the narrative can actually make you think - it's funny how with movies of this time, it feels more like an actual form of denouement literature, and not like any other box office movie that can be mutilated by its own failure to communicate a story and rather how to show aesthetically, faux and overused concoctions on the screen). The plot centres around a story adapted by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, Giuseppe de Liguoro (who was the one with the most control over the movie, I think) of the Divine Comedy, a story about an allegorical acuity of the afterlife - "To the great beyond avoiding heaven" - Dante is on a quest to try and immortalise a potent 9 year old. He finds Virgil, a roman poet, who accompanies him through the trails of hell, the punishment of people - or rather ones who are under a despot's appetency for a lack of hope. The movie takes you through the dehumanising effects of these situations in kind of a vivacious way.There are problems like: You never get to understand why there was even introductions to avarice, pride and lust (of course, I feel this is just an ad hominem attack at it, but it just came to me like it was kind of off and dispensable to say the least)I can say briefly: This movie was just so fascinating! It's became an entity out of it's own acclaim in cinema, notwithstanding it's endowment of such methodology in cinema like: Tableaux framing, ambient lighting, anecdotal characters (Dante, The Men of Science, Bishop, Virgil - more even then that. The acting is kind of what can poise your understanding of what you're watching, but the odyssey works with how they interact with the out of body world; there is even slight scenes of nudity (some have said it's the first movie to really have this in it, which may not say a lot, but it actually does lampshade it's age, as you can see)"Mastiffs and Harpes leather "thongs"" - The language now, the metric system was back then used as to define "whips", which is another thing that I gleaned on this movie with the terse ways of speaking at that time. "Hell is ultimatum" - this quote alone reverberates the shear theme of the movie.The movies best parts for me involve the way in which smoke is utilised in order to become more transcendental in to the residing form of our normal world. The way in which Dante and Virgil feel like they're almost in a daze - Benign in even the most out of proportion places at once within hell, like a exploration and they're in the same perspective as the audiences - maybe even the emotive side to both hate, endurance and marvel - if you notice the girth of their ground is always higher then the ones underground like a metaphor for heaven and hell. There is so much to cover with this movie, but we cannot look at this movie in the context of this epoch, as it falls flat ultimately. It is a more a look into the depths of what we don't know, fantastically, and also what we didn't know has became a hybrid of elements in which movies nowadays have borrowed or shoehorned into movies.The movie in itself probably receives 7 on the radar, whereas the resonance of its importance ranks that up to a 9/10 (possible 10).

tedg What a remarkable film! Start with Dante. He underwrote the corrupt institution that was the Church. It was hardly teetering in the short run, but its role in the Florentine tradition of literature was non-existent.In so doing, he quite literally and singehandedly invented the Italian language. Previously, it had been thought unsuitable for intelligent, nuanced expression. Indeed, the language was as diversely varied as were the autonomous regions of Italy. His triumph was in showing that the language could indeed be used at the highest and most beautiful level.(Centuries later, Shakespeare would be of a group doing this for the similarly vulgar English language.) In a very direct and auditable way, Dante can be said to have invented what became a nation and set a direction for selfappreciation often bordering on intellectual foppishness.The two together (Rome and the Church) are archetypes of institution. Dante is rightly revered in Italy and the mere mention of him or his works is enough to begin motion without actually turning on the machinery of the poetry.That's why this film was made, an odd thing if there ever was one. Here is poetry, whose value isn't in anything mentioned, but in HOW it is mentioned. And here on the other hand is a silent movie with images that roughly illustrate the "story" told in the poem and boldly ignoring the matter of language. The idea I am sure is that the mere illusion to Dante would evoke notions of ecstatic artistic quality woven into national pride.It would help that the effects were the most elaborate of the era. But there is no poetry in this film, no cinematic virtuosity of any kind. It is as if there were institutional beads on a chain. By showing us one, the entire necklace is supposed to be imagined, imaged. More, the neck it adorns, her beauty and the charm of the party she sits in and commands.You don't have to watch it; the thing is unremarkable as a direct experience except to students of the history of effects and national self-definition. But it is remarkable in its reach.Being non-Italian, this viewer is amazed by the assumptions, that by invoking the merest whiff of Dante, the whole weight of it all was supposed to be experienced: the art, the institutional gravity. You should probably watch it because it illustrates things happening today that are similarly worked.A movie today might show a stiff Nazi, a coy soft woman, a flag, a cigar, a silhouetted cowboy. And we are supposed to pull the whole institution (often commercial) they denote into our minds and taste them again. Other than music (which cinema subsumes) is there another art where this is so pronounced? Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

chaudeurge Fantastic film for anyone interested in film history, Dante's Divine Comedy, or genre movies. The pure ambition of setting this story to film and the impressive staging of the circles of hell overcome the lack of sophisticated cinematic language to which we are accustomed. This is the era before the closeup, remember. What is absolutely unpardonable, however, is the presumptuous manner in which the company that put out the DVD has left their clumsy fingerprints all over this film and somehow decided that it is theirs. It is embarrassing, infuriating and obscene. These folks should be put in movie jail for plastering their names all over it in the artificial credit sequence and marrying the modern and inappropriate Tangerine Dream music to the picture - not as an audio option, mind you, but as the only option! This is the problem with public domain films - there is no one there to protect the film from the likes of these folks. The ridiculous way in which the credits are appended (tons of credits for each Tangerine Dream musician down to whoever provided the donuts during their sessions, but only a bare few credits for the 150 people who actually made this fantastic film in 1911. And no attempt to provide any information about the film, its production, the artists and technicians who made it, or what kind of music it was originally screened with. This is not as disgusting as the Queen version of Metropolis, but not far from it. There is a circle of hell in L'Inferno for film 'remix' people like these.