Dante's Inferno

Dante's Inferno (1911)

L’Inferno

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The classic tale of Dante's journey through hell, loosely adapted from the Divine Comedy and inspired by the illustrations of Gustav Doré. This historically important film stands as the first feature from Italy and the oldest fully-surviving feature in the world, and boasts beautiful sets and special effects that stand above other cinema of the era.

Date of release
1911-03-01
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (168)
Runtime
1h 12m
Genres
Fantasy, Horror
Director
Giuseppe de Liguoro, Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Grigna, Mandello del Lario, Province of Lecco, and Lierna

L'Inferno is a 1911 Italian silent film, loosely adapted from Inferno, the first canticle of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. L'Inferno took over three years to make, and was the first full-length Italian feature film. It is also one of the first films to be shown in its entirety in the United States.

Production

L'Inferno's depictions of Hell closely followed those in the engravings of Gustave Doré for an edition of the Divine Comedy, which were familiar to an international audience, and employed several special effects.

As Dante's Divine Comedy places Muhammad in hell, the film also has a momentary unflattering depiction of Muhammad in its Hell sequence (his chest explodes, exposing his entrails).

Nancy Mitford recorded seeing the film in Italy in 1922, referring to it as Dante. She records that it lasted from 9 until 12:15 including two intermissions. She details many of the deaths and tortures from the film. Her description of the film in her letter home is quoted during the biography Nancy Mitford by Harold Acton.

The scenes from Hell from the film were reused in an American 1936 exploitation film, Hell-O-Vision and the 1944 race film Go Down, Death!. Some American state film censor boards required removal of the hell sequences from L'Inferno used in Go Down, Death!, such as one where a woman's bare breast is momentarily seen.

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