And see, in the boat came


an old man, who was white because of the age of his hair,


and exclaimed: "Woe to you, you wicked souls!"



Maria Wiesner

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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    Ed ecco verso noi venir per nave


    un vecchio, bianco per antico pelo,


    gridando: "Guai a voi, anime prave!"




    (Inferno III, 82–84, translated by Karl Witte)


    Florence is not always the best place to get close to Dante. Sometimes that happens in Venice too. In 2010 the film festival showed “La commedia di Amos Poe”, an approach by the New York New Wave director named in the title to Dante's Divine Comedy. What was shown in one of the smallest screening rooms in the basement of the festival palace was less a film than a collage of images: a hundred minutes, 20,000 alienated photos from a trip to Italy. In the style of the famous Eadweard-Muybridge photographs, which show a horse in motion in individual shots, Poe arranged his pictures, letting streets, people and animals come to life in jerky movements. In addition Dante's verses (performed by the Italian actor Roberto Benigni, among others).

    Poe is known for experimenting with films.

    To the terzine of the approaching Charon, who at first refused entry to the two hikers of hell and granted the passage at Virgil's behest, fiery red images danced on the screen, forming a vibrating stream of consciousness from hell.

    Half of the audience left the hall.

    Anyone who remained seated and surrendered to the stream of images also had to succumb to Dante's speech magic.

    From the bloody depths of hell to the fragrant realms of paradise, he spins ever more delicate images, adapting the language to the terrain he has traversed.

    From the silent film to the murder hunt with Brad Pitt

    Of course, Poe wasn't the first filmmaker to look at Dante's work. As early as 1911, the Italian silent film "L'inferno" was dedicated to stories from the circles of hell. In the thriller "Seven" (1995), Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman followed the trail of a serial killer whose punishments for the seven deadly sins were loosely based on Dante's descriptions. “Dante's Inferno” (2007) takes up the plot with paper dolls and adds Adolf Hitler to the inhabitants of hell. And for Lars von Trier's “The House that Jack Built” (2018) some people need a similar stamina as for Amos Poe's picture installation, but the end then holds the key to this Dante adaptation.

    Von Trier doesn't send a poet into dialogue with Virgil; he lets a murderer (Matt Dillon) take his place. That Jack brags about his deeds, if Virgil wants to sell them, to whom Bruno Ganz lends his face and voice in one of his last appearances, as great art. Virgil dismisses this as “an original variant among many bad excuses” for such murders and destroys the genius mania: “Everything I see is a full-blown obsessive-compulsive neurotic.” What can be seen until the two actually descend into hell, arrives explicit brutality like Dante's bloody verses from hell.

    The point at which the film explains itself after more than two hours of lively murder has to do with Charon's boat.

    Like

    a

    tableau vivant

    arranged by Trier Matt Dillon in the red Dante robe next to Virgil on Charon's boat. Naked bodies hang in mannerist contortions under the hull of the boat. The storm waves whip them in slow motion. The shot is just long enough to make sure that Eugène Delacroix's painting “The Dante Bark” is being recreated in every detail. Von Trier counters the talk of the murderer, who wants to put the cloak of art on his deeds, with real art in the picture. Art does not destroy in blind rage, art creates anew.

    Whoever wondered to the end whether the character of Jack could not be misunderstood as a misunderstood hero, Bruno Ganz 'Virgil shows the way and a detail that makes the scene of the translation in Charon's barge clear.

    In Dante's verse, the ferryman initially refused to take the poet with him, because, as Vergil explains: “No good man ever drove over here.” Von Trier, on the other hand, sent the mass murderer Jack onto the boat and into the deepest circle of hell without Charon's contradictions .

    All previous episodes of

    our series can be found at www.faz.net/dante.