Tondal’s Vision

Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe De Liguoro’s L’inferno (1911), a Doré-inspired visualisation of the eponymous first canticle in Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia (1320), is commonly considered to be Italy’s first feature-length film – and also the first local attempt at making something that, in the eyes of a bourgeois audience, would be accepted as having artistic value.

Stephen Broomer, now takes the complete film and re-works it by all means, analogue and digital, available to the modern filmmaker – in the process also destroying some parts, which after too long in an acid bath had more or less dissolved, to give just one example. But who is Tondal? A knight errant who appears in the Divina Commedia, but also an older literary character (from the 1100s) whose story was re-told till deep into the 15th century. Seeing Hell makes Tondal more pious. Will sharing Tondal’s Vision humble its audiences? Expect a grand, exceptional audio-visual spectacle!

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