Movies based on Dante's Inferno?

August 22, 2005 8:17 AM

A friend is teaching a Dante class to high school seniors and asked me the following: I am looking for several old, pretty obscure movies based on Dante's Inferno. Amazon doesn't seem to have anything that out of the ordinary. Do you have any recommendations? Nothing pops into my brain. How about you guys?
posted by spynotebook to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

IMDB's search page for Dante's Inferno brings up some interesting suggestions. I seem to recall there being a fairly psychedelic silent movie.
posted by selfnoise at 8:27 AM on August 22, 2005

There's not a lot, as you can see from Dante Alighieri's IMDb page.
posted by cerebus19 at 10:48 AM on August 22, 2005

There are many parallels between Apocalypse Now and Dante's Inferno; far too many for them to be coincidences. Essentially, each incident in the boat's journey down river is the counterpart to a circle or a round from The Inferno. Of course, some of these parallels are simply ported in from Heart of Darkness, which in turn got them from The Inferno, but I'm pretty sure that Milius and Coppola (the screenwriters in question) were responsible for a lot of what made it on to the screen. Also, I should point out that Apocalypse Now Redux contains several significant sequences that were left out of the original release. Without them, you may find that that the film skips a circle here and there.
posted by Clay201 at 11:03 AM on August 22, 2005

Didn't Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry cover this topic?
posted by feelinglistless at 2:16 PM on August 22, 2005

On a related note, one of my buddies ran into his middle school English teacher a few years back. They were chatting and, naturally, she asked him what he had been reading. "Dante's Inferno," he said. "Oh," she replied--and I kid you not--"Is that like Dante's Peak?"
posted by armchairsocialist at 8:01 PM on August 22, 2005

I never noticed it until I was high as a kite one night, but Barton Fink has a ton of Inferno allusions. Literally, 2000 pounds of 'em.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:11 PM on August 22, 2005

Try Facets Multi-media in Chicago. From a referring description:

"Facets Video, a division of Facets Multi-Media, is one of the nation’s largest distributors of foreign, classic, cult, art, and hard-to-find videos. We search the world for artistically important film on video - bypassing many mainstream releases to focus on the rare and the unusual. As a result, Facets' 40,000 (and growing!) title inventory is an astounding video collection unlike any in the world, famous for its breadth and diversity."
posted by thewhynotgirl at 10:01 AM on August 23, 2005