A TV Dante

Peter Greenaway and Tom Philips have together created the single most visionary piece of television ever broadcast. Those who complain about the lack of 'cinematic grammar' are missing the very point - it's like an illuminated manuscript, but one created using the most cutting edge (for its time) technology, and employing a post-modern aesthetic that allows anything and everything to be thrown into the mixture, be it high medieval poetry or today's breaking news images. Grainy stock footage of blips moving on a radar screen is hauntingly used to depict angels passing through the heavenly spheres - a Muyrbridge sequence of a powerful boxer descending a staircase becomes Christ's harrowing of Hell - Dante's internalised world is rendered as a modern ultra-scan screen - desperate escapees attempting to flee across the Berlin wall become, literally, souls in Hell.

The actors performing Dante, Virgil and Beatrice give superb readings of the poem, whilst experts and commentators provide moving footnotes just as in a printed edition of the Inferno. The elaborate and meticulous word-paintings of Tom Phillips are beautifully interwoven with the bold filmic images of Peter Greenaway, creating a unique and inspirational experience that shows up just how thin and watery most of what passes for TV actually is.

A masterpiece.

I'm a Greenaway enthusiast, but I cannot recommend this film to those looking for a Greenaway experience. I often recommend those that I think are failures, like 8 1/2 Women, because it fails in an interesting way; the goals don't fit the skills.

But this is a different beast. It superficially looks like Greenaway. It works within a rich allegorical structure, has layered annotations, fine acting and casual nudity. But it is missing a key element, the one thing that characterizes Greenaway for me. So I suspect that this really a Tom Phillips film.

What we have here: Fine actors read lines of the epic poem. Directly relevant images are shown by way of obvious illustration. Frequent windows pop up with head shots of experts who provide explanatory footnotes. Everything points internally. It is hard to see how this is superior to reading an annotated text.

What we don't have here: Greenaway's work is characterized by various mixes of: a fascination with overlapping ordering frameworks (numbers, games, cosmologies, taxonomies); abstruse external references from those frameworks used allegorically; layering of images to these references -- in recent years simultaneously; lush scenes and compositions which refer to famous paintings; and regressing layers of self-reference and self-parody including references to his other films. Everything points externally.

You get none of that here. It is all internal.

The collaboration between director Greenaway and artist/translator Phillips in reimagining the first eight cantos of D. Alighieri's Inferno for the British TV succeeds in giving it a more contemporary feel without necessarily sacrificing their discerning tastes in an effort to make a work that's more mainstream-friendly.

The outcome does not an attempt to be a substitute for the written text because the imagery they rendered does not necessarily reflect the verbal narrative of the poetry. The visuals are more rooted in capturing the essence of the first of the three-part 14th-century masterpiece. The adaptation of the main text runs continuously while spoken verses affectingly delivered by Gielgud and Peck as Virgil and Dante respectively, also with Whalley cast as the sensuous Beatriz, are bundled together with interviews of academic authorities discussing the different points that need emphasizing regarding the history of the medieval text. This was brilliant because it was made at the time when the hypertext structure was still a novel idea. So, for people like me who has spent time in school but was unable to learn about Dante's work because it is not a part of the curriculum can easily look up the text in the Internet nowadays and access myriads of resources to help analyze and interpret those texts. The images of heartrate monitor, ultrasound and radar screens, and not to mention hundreds of naked damned people bound in the underworld create a picture collage proving that Dante's work remains just as pertinent as ever. The buzzwords: symbolism-heavy and polysemy.

The film is structured to look more like a documentary that attempts to make the Italian poet's seminal work relevant to the modern audience who will still have do the work in synthesizing whatever significance they could take out of it.

My rating: A-flat. A-mazing. The visuals are just way ahead of its time.

Forget that square-block superimpositions are cheesy. Forget that they become cheesier when you overlap three of them and flip colors. Even forget there is something oddly humorous about a naked obese man rolling in mud when recorded in slow motion. The fact is that there is a contract between audience and artist regarding the communication of aesthetics. An artist can agree to or flout that contract, but if he does not acknowledge it, then there is little hope for his work. Experimenting with the cinematic form can be done well; but Greenaway and Phillips (I hope that Phillips is more responsible for this, Greenaway is quite a director) have failed to communicate much with this series.

The stunningly bad compositions make their presence known throughout; when an actor whose head takes up the entire screen suddenly freezes as a square with an interviewed historian appears in his mouth to talk, it appears strikingly humorous. When digital flames appear behind the historian's head for no apparent reason, it becomes merely a hilarious disaster.

This work fails as both an annotated reading of the epic, and as a dramatization of that epic. Just read the damn thing. Translation is an art, and it takes a director with vision and skill to convert from the language of an Italian epic into the language of film.

Unfortunately, Peter Greenaway and Mr. Phillips (I truly hope it was mostly Phillips) do not have the vision or the skill.

I've not seen this since it appeared on Channel 4 back in the late '80s, when I enjoyed it a lot. However, that was all a long time ago, and many of the techniques used here were deployed more successfully in Prospero's Books a couple of years later, perhaps making this seem outmoded.

All I really want to say here is that reviews critiquing this as a piece of cinematic art are missing a pretty important point, namely that it was never intended to be shown in the cinema. It was made for broadcast on TV in (if I remember) ten-minute segments, just before the Channel 4 News. In that context, it worked very well indeed.