La pellicola cede a tanto oltraggio. l’inferno dantesco come Development Hell

This contribution hinges on some precise questions: what does it mean to say that a film has been “inspired by Dante’s Inferno”? How can films from different eras and geographies form an organic corpus based on a common inspiration? What kind of hermeneutics are to be applied to works so different in terms of claims, genres, and aesthetics, beginning from a premise that ultimately appears rather weak? Is limiting oneself to identifying punctual connections (a specific narrative episode, the presence of a well-known verse) or even relying on the unique observation of the presence of a hell perhaps not doubly demeaning, both for the Comedy (reduced to a reservoir of sterile quotations) and the films (in turn reduced to forms of aping)? Is the history of the cinematographic Comedy perhaps concealed behind these issues as an eternal “development hell”? While great energy has been devoted over the centuries to the literary Comedy from an interpretative point of view, its cinematographic transpositions - almost always dedicated to the first cantica - are instead often considered transitory, minor, necessarily faded in the face of the majesty of the source text. As if the source text were resistant to any attempt at intersemiotic translation. It is therefore necessary to consider a plural filmic hermeneutic, which no longer contemplates a single “Dante’s Inferno” but rather a multiplicity of hells, and that reconstructs a semantics of the “Dantesque” attribute, relieving it from the weight of an – impossible – direct comparison with the original.