A TV Dante - by Raoul Ruiz (1991)
A TV Dante - by Raoul Ruiz (1991)
DVDRip | English | 592x448 | XviD, ~1600 kbps | MP3, ~128 kbps | 757 MB
Subs: English, Russian | Drama, Experimental
Subs: English, Russian | Drama, Experimental
The first eight cantos of Dante's Inferno (up to the entrance to the city of Dis). The text is read entirely in "talking head" fashion, and punctuated with a kaleidoscopic blend of both newly shot and archival footage.
Onto the Raul Ruiz helmed cantos 9-14, which are quite different in form and style. Their reception was likewise extremely divergent from that of their justly celebrated predecessors: to date, Ruiz’s TV DANTE episodes have never been broadcast on TV or released on video in Europe or the US (although they were televised in Latin America), having been heavily criticized and claimed by some to be the main reason the project was discontinued.
Ruiz uses Dante’s text, narrated by John Gielgud, as an ironic counterpoint to his real intent: a trenchant portrait of Chile, a country Ruiz fled in the 1970s. Thus we hear Dante’s descriptions of the fields of Hell intoned over panoramic shots of the Chilean countryside, and see Dante (Francisco Reyes) wandering through a “Hell” of Chilean villages and graveyards. The effect, unfortunately, isn’t nearly as clever or revelatory as it could have been. Ruiz admittedly made his films extremely quickly and didn’t always bother viewing their final cuts, and the wildly inconsistent, rather perfunctory filmmaking on display here evinces that sense of undue haste.
Ruiz does at least impart quite a few arrestingly gruesome and surreal images, from a man expelling liquid through a torn-up throat to a brain cordoned off by tiny flags and a pile of plucked eyeballs turned into sugary delicacies. Yet in contrast to Greenaway and Phillips’ exhilarating triumph, Raul’s episodes, intermittently striking though they may be, are a massive letdown, closing out this monumental project on a weak note. Dante, and A TV DANTE, both deserve much better.
IMDB info
Run time: ~61 min
A TV Dante - by Raoul Ruiz (1991)
A TV Dante - by Raoul Ruiz (1991)
A TV Dante - by Raoul Ruiz (1991)
A TV Dante - by Raoul Ruiz (1991)
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