Afouotos
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Roy Hart
If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.
Darin
One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.
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with any sense of incredulity that this movie is so eidetic in it's own quality of imagery - of course, iconography is out of date, such as the spirits of Cleopatra, Seances and The Spirits that float around, but this is actually what makes the movie great, due to how adroit they were in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).
Tobias_R
This film, as the title plainly indicate, is a dramatization of Dante's Inferno which comprises a third of his Divine Comedy. As is well-known to all, the Inferno relates Dante's journey through Hell being guided by the Roman poet, Virgil. Dante is shown the nine circles of hell where sinners are punished with afflictions appropriate to their sins. The climax of the work is seeing Lucifer himself at the very center of hell.The influence of this work in Western art and literature is staggering and obvious. Much of what Christians believe to be typical of Hell is derived not from the bible but from Dante. Artists and illustrators from the late Middle Ages through the 19th century have depicted scenes from Dante's work. Indeed, this movie uses Gustave Dore's illustrations of the Inferno as the basis of the cinematography.As for the film itself, its technical crudity and the highly uneven quality of the film stock, really make it mainly of archival value. Moreover, the acting is of the broad gesturing variety associated with early silent movies.Still, despite these limitations, the care and effort that went into this film is obvious. The special effects are not half-bad and the Dore illustrations are brought to life reasonably well. To a film audience in 1911, this was plainly seen as a momentous event. In its runs in Europe and America both before and after World War I, the film was extremely successful and grossed for the time enormous box office.Indeed, in the liner notes to the DVD edition of this movie, an advertisement by a British distributor from 1911 encouraged theaters to rent this film by pointing out how profitable it had been to other exhibitors. In this ad, one can see how the feature film, a film longer than 60 minutes, became established as the basic mode in which film would be presented in the future. From the 1890s until 1911, the short subject was the only medium in which film was shown. With the success of this film and other Italian feature films which followed like The Last Days of Pompeii and Cabiria, film makers like D.W. Griffith were inspired to direct long, involved films like Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.Unlike most other commentators, I wasn't too put off by the Tangerine Dream soundtrack. I agree it wasn't great but it wasn't the worst I've heard.
waywardastronaut
Casting an 8/10 for "L'Inferno" was perhaps the hardest vote I've cast so far on IMDb, and it wasn't because I doubted the film's quality. Considering it was made in 1911 for approximately $2 million and had to be rebuilt almost a century later, it's a fantastic exercise in early cinema. The footage is spectacular, and the primitive special effects still evoke the same shock and emotion they must have upon its premiere.My issue with the film is the soundtrack. Just as so many others on IMDb have noted, the Tangerine Dream music added to the DVD is terrible. Normally a bad soundtrack wouldn't be a problem, but with "L'Inferno" it's not optional. So, for my second viewing, I muted the television and played an old piece of classical music based on Dante's original epic. Needless to say, the second viewing was much better. Unfortunately, since there's no other version of "L'Inferno" to watch, I have to cast a bad vote for this film.
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.
