28 November 2009
Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net
ROGUE FEED
L’Inferno
NOV 27, 2009 09:44A.M.
The other day, after I’d expressed dismay at the upcoming Dante’s
Inferno video game, I was told that there had in fact been a film based on
Inferno. It was an Italian-made silent film from 1911 entitled simply
L’Inferno. As luck would have it, the film was recently reconstructed,
using footage from the Library of Congress and British Film Institute to
supplement existing prints of the film from other sources, many of which
were not complete. The entirety was released in 2004 on DVD and,
thanks to Amazon, I was able to obtain a copy, which I sat down and
watched yesterday.
The film is a little over an hour long (71 minutes, to be precise) and I sat
there the entire time rapt. I don’t know how often you’ve watched silent
movies, but I’ve become a big fan of them over the years and L’Inferno
only solidifies my affection for them. There’s something very primal
about images without spoken dialog. That’s particularly true in films like
this one, where the images are so bizarre and frequently unsettling.
Silent films, I also find, showcase a style of acting that ceased to exist
once talkies became common. It’s an almost-pantomime style that
reminds me a bit of the way opera singers behave when they’re on stage.
On one level, it looks patently ridiculous, but on the other hand, the
melodramatic, easily telegraphed emoting of these actors strikes a chord
somewhere deep inside me. It’s hard to explain, but, on some level, the
very unreal nature of the way they’re behaving makes it seem more real
to me. I admit that sounds like nonsense and maybe it is, but there it is
nonetheless.
Regardless, it works exceedingly well in this particular case, because the
1
images onscreen are so fantastical. I have been a huge admirer of The
Divine Comedy since college. For a long time, I was quite obsessed with
the work and, even now, I find it haunts my imagination. Though I prefer
Purgatorio to the other two parts of the work, there’s no question that
Inferno makes for the best spectacle. And what spectacle this early
Italian film provides! The special effects are, frankly, amazing for their
day and, again, their obvious artificiality — their unreality — made them
much more affecting for me. It’s similar to the way that I find the original
Night of the Living Dead much, much more frightening than any of its
successors. The rough, almost unfinished look of it strikes me as more
realistic and thus more terrifying.
It’s hard for me to judge how accessible this film would be to those
unfamiliar with Inferno. There are dialog cards between some of the
scenes, but they’re short and often cryptic if you don’t already know the
poem. For myself, seeing the various flashbacks the damned tell to
Dante, explaining how they wound up in Hell, was very moving. Piero
della Vigna’s tale of being falsely accused of treason, punished by
blinding, and suicidal despair at never again being able to see the sun,
for example, remains indelibly in my memory, as does the horror of
Count Ugolino forever gnawing on the head of his enemy, Archbishop
Ruggieri. I noted too that the film includes Mohammed among the
damned, his chest torn open as punishment for the sin of schism
(medieval Christians believed Islam to be not a separate religion but a
breakaway from Christianity). I somehow doubt the video game will
include such a detail.
All in all, L’Inferno is a remarkable movie, hewing very closely to the
source material but nevertheless being a satisfying experience in its own
right. I remarked to my wife that it would still make an amazing film
today, although I suspect its worldview is too alien to most modern
people and would thus have to be “updated” before Hollywood would
even consider it. If so, I’d rather this 1911 masterpiece be the only film
treatment of it we ever see.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net 28 November 2009

ROGUE FEED

More Cimmerian Goodness

NOV 27, 2009 08:18A.M.

Over at The Cimmerian, Brian Murphy posts a nice takedown of Michael

Moorcock’s “Epic Pooh,” perhaps Moorcock’s most famous windmill
tilting expedition against the work and legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien. The
funny thing is that I rather enjoy Moorcock’s literary creations — I’m
busily re-reading some of his later Elric stories right now — but I tend to
think his literary criticism is shoddy at best. Unlike many, I won’t engage
in amateur psycho-analysis of the man and impute jealousy to his career-
long denigration of Tolkien. A more likely explanation, I think, is that
Moorcock, like a lot of people, simply never really understood Tolkien.
The Lord of the Rings is not in fact a simple work and a surface reading
of it will undoubtedly leave one with many misapprehensions about it
and its author, misapprehensions I think Moorcock has consistently
demonstrated in his shallow critiques.

In Moorcock’s defense, I imagine that Tolkien was so temperamentally

opposite himself that understanding him would probably prove quite
difficult. It’s little wonder he didn’t really get either The Lord of the
Rings or Tolkien. In addition, I get the sense that Moorcock believes it’s
the duty of authors to “challenge” the status quo and, in fantasy, Tolkien
is very much the status quo (even if, ironically, the ideas his books
champion are not). Combined, these two facts make it all but inevitable
that Moorcock would engage in his little Quixotic crusade against the
good professor. That doesn’t mean there’s a lot of merit to the crusade, as
Brian Murphy quite ably shows in his post.

Speaking only for myself, I read Tolkien voraciously as a younger person

and enjoyed it well enough, but didn’t really fall in love with his writings
until comparatively recently. Like Moorcock, I engaged these books only
on a surface level and failed to appreciate just what Tolkien was doing
and why. Older and (hopefully) a little wiser, I better see Tolkien’s
project for what it was and stand in awe of it. It’s a pity Moorcock can’t
do the same, but we all have our blind spots, so I can’t be too harsh in
judging him, even if I do wish he’d at least recognize that his reaction to
Tolkien is a personal one and not necessarily a reflection of anything in
the man’s writings.