Francesco Bertolini; Adolfo Padovan
Inferno

Far be it from me to exalt fascism here, but the creation of Cinecittà, strongly desired by Mussolini in the 1930s (it came to life in 1937, after a year of work), had a profound logical sense: to counter the overpowering dominance of the large American majors (Warner, Fox, Universal). In fact, every country of a certain importance had, within its borders, a production company capable of aggregating all the small distribution houses that were rampant in said country: in Germany there was Ufa, before the Nazi regime plundered it for its own gain. Italy did not; it was still divided into many small local distributors, each operating in their own area, and whose only advertising tool was the haphazard posting of billboards in town centers, and sometimes even on the outskirts, of the main cities across the peninsula.

The first film produced in Italy dates back to 1905: “La presa di Roma” (of which only scattered fragments remain today, totaling about 5 minutes) by Filoteo Alberini. It was a leap in quality for Italian cinema, which moved from the countryside and fairs to the (few) movie theaters available at the time. According to critic and historian Gian Piero Brunetta, it was “an opus-monument of national history, recreated to offer the greatest possible realism […] so as to use the images on screen as a privileged place of collective memory for the Country.” Alberini, a Freemason, had no trouble obtaining financing from the Army and from the Committee Celebrating the Anniversary of Porta Pia. Alberini, born in Orte, had the film screened in Rome, with an advertising campaign in which he plastered half the city with posters. It was a success, but was seen only there, precisely because there was no national production company.

Things went even worse with the first ever “Pinocchio” in cinema history, dated 1911, directed by Giulio Antamoro, known as Gant. Polidor, born Ferdinand Guillaume, the most famous clown of the era, played a very unusual Pinocchio in which narrative freedom and artistic inventiveness even led him to the Wild West, encountering Indians and cowboys. It was produced by Cines, also Roman, and thus unable to bring its work beyond the city limits (except, at best, to nearby towns). Yet Italy was the nation that invented the concept of the kolossal, and “Cabiria” (1914) by Giovanni Pastrone is probably the most important Italian work (and not only) in the world. Not because it lasted three hours and cost a sum far beyond the logic of the time, not even for the invention of the character Maciste, nor for the intertitles written by Gabriele D’Annunzio, nor even for the premiere held simultaneously in Milan and Turin on April 18th, 1914, with King Vittorio Emanuele III in the front row. Rather, it was because it originated what the Americans called the “Cabiria Movement”; until then things worked like this: the director would place the camera, call ‘action!’ and the actors would do their part. Cut. Pastrone understood that the camera could move, and created the first tentative zooms or pioneering tracking shots: without Cabiria, cinema would have remained “static”, but instead, it moved. And it inspired the imagination of Griffith, Ejzenstejn, and the whole American film apparatus, who had not (yet) thought of camera movement.

Before Cinecittà, however, the capital of Italian cinema was not Rome, but rather, alternately, Turin and Milan. And here our story begins (the preamble was necessary to frame the historical context). In Milan there was Milano Films, founded in 1909 and ceasing activity in 1926. It lasted little, not even twenty years. There are many vicissitudes revolving around this courageous production house, but it would take too long to lay them all out here, so I invite you, if interested, to look them up on Wikipedia (let’s just say that one of the founders was a descendant of the Visconti family). Today, of that glorious past, only a wall remains, on which drawings and writings have been placed that the unknowing passerby could (but almost never does) read while waiting for the bus. Bovisa area, northern Milan. The complex that once housed Milano Films has become a modest city park, “framed” by an imposing real estate complex, and in one of these apartments live shady and “dangerous” characters, including myself. Thus I can proudly say that I live where there once stood the film complex that, in 1911, produced the only extant film version of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.

There is no other version of such an opus, no one who has ever dared to tell Dante’s Inferno (let alone the Paradiso, or least of all the Purgatorio) in a film, since such a venture seems mad – imagine, in 1911! Direction was entrusted to Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan, and it was the first Italian film in 5 reels, as well as the first to be registered in the Public Register of Protected Works. In fact, a version of the Inferno was shot two years earlier, in 1909, by the same Milano Films, and given its good success, the operation was expanded with the Paradiso and the Purgatorio. It was even sold in the United States (it was easier to export abroad than to distribute within Italy!) and was brought to the screen thanks to the intuition of the brilliant producer Gustavo Lombardo, who based distribution no longer on selling prints, but on licensing rights. And he beat even the small Helios Film, based in Velletri, which had made another Dantean Inferno focusing everything (or almost) on risqué scenes (we’re in 1911, the “risqué” of that era is today’s chaste), including a scene in which Francesca’s bare chest is shown, in the segment of Paolo and Francesca.

The work, which is 53 minutes long, is a technical and narrative masterpiece like few others in the world. An explosion of superimpositions, medium and long shots, Méliès-style tricks. We are not yet in the phase of cross-cutting montage, first by Griffith and then Ejzenstejn, and the Cabiria Movement was still to come, but some technical escamotages left audiences dumbfounded, such as the extensive set design—no expense was really spared—and so, if the interior scenes were shot at the above-mentioned Milano Films studios, for the exteriors the crew moved to the Grigna, in Val Camonica, in the Brescia area. The intertitles, hitherto used little and poorly (sometimes too much, and still poorly), acquired an essential logic, and some sequences are real visual masterpieces, capable, why not, of amazing even today: the lustful dragged into the storm; the ripped-open chest of Muhammad; Bertrando dal Bornio with his head severed from his body. It spread, across half the world, the typical stylistic devices of Méliès while adding technological marvels that even the great French illusionist had not dared imagine, and gave Dante’s work an international resonance that perhaps, starting from here, helped make the Divine Comedy known to the world (or better, to the masses). The faintly horror accents that pervade the work did the rest: never in cinema, so small and so young, had one ever seen such grand guignol as in the work of Bertolini and Padovan.

The Italian screenings were historic. The few cinemas extant throughout the country were stormed by audiences who were part curious and, it must be said, part intimidated. It should also be remembered that in the silent era films had no musical soundtrack on the reel, but in the theater a pianist (sometimes more than one) would accompany the film live (in Japan, in the 1920s, they even invented a guy in the theater who would narrate the story aloud, so as to do away with the intertitles—the most famous example in this sense is “A Page of Madness,” 1926, by Teinosuke Kitugasa). In Naples, the front row included Matilde Serao, Benedetto Croce, and Roberto Bracco. The latter described it as even too beautiful for contemporary audiences’ tastes. In Paris it was screened to favor and enthusiasm; in the US, perhaps more coolly, but still with considerable (and remarkable) interest.

The renowned Cineteca di Bologna (where I worked between 2015 and 2017, forgive my personal aside) released it on DVD with a soundtrack by Tangerine Dream (an operation often done by the Cineteca, consider for example the “Thief of Bagdad,” the 1924 silent version, with soundtrack by Avion Travel).

I am told from the director’s booth (as they say) that apparently another version of Dante’s Inferno was released in 2010, directed by Boris Acosta, “Dante’s Inferno”, which, coincidentally, in its scant 40 minutes often uses entire sequences from the 1911 film and uses some illustrations by Gustave Doré, nineteenth-century French painter and engraver, who inspired Bertolini and Padovan to a large extent.