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.