''The Dante Quartet'' is an

experimental An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a ...

short film A short film is any motion picture that is short enough in running time not to be considered a feature film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes ...

Stan Brakhage James Stanley Brakhage ( ; January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an American filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film. Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a larg ...

, completed in 1987. The film was inspired by

Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian people, Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', origin ...

's ''

Divine Comedy The ''Divine Comedy'' ( it, Divina Commedia ) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun 1308 and completed in around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature ...

'', and took six years to produce.The Dante Quartet
Canyon Cinema: Film, Accessed February 13, 2011''By Brakhage: An Anthology'', Volume 1, DVD menu

Production

''The Dante Quartet'' was inspired by Brakhage's interest in

's ''

'', which he had first encountered in

high school A secondary school describes an institution that provides secondary education and also usually includes the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools provide both '' lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper seconda ...

at the suggestion of his English professor.Commentary by Stan Brakhage on ''By Brakhage: An Anthology,'' Volume 1, taken from 2002 interview with Bruce Kawin In the years since, Brakhage had read almost every English translation of the poem that he could find.

Then comes a moment when suddenly I can't handle the language anymore, like I can't read one more translation of ''The Divine Comedy,'' and suddenly I realize it's in my eyes all the time, that I have a vision of Hell, I have even more necessary kind of a way of getting out of Hell, kind of a springboard in my thinking, closing my eyes and thinking what I'm seeing ..and also purgation, that I can go through the stages of purging the self, of trying to become pure, free of these ghastly visions, and then there is something that's as close to Heaven as I would hope to aspire to, which I call "existence is song." And that all of that was in my eyes all the time, backfiring all these years ..It's lovely that I can have the language, but I also have a visual corollary of it, but that is a story.

''The Dante Quartet'' took six years to produce. The eight-minute silent film was created by painting images directly onto the film,Inez Hedges (2005) ''Framing Faust: twentieth-century cultural struggles,'' SIU Press, p135 though he often worked with previously photographed material that was then scraped away or otherwise manipulated. The paint was applied very thickly onto the film, up to half an inch thick.MacDonald, Scott (2005) ''A critical cinema: interviews with independent filmmakers'', p102 ''The Dante Quartet'' was originally painted on IMAX and Cinemascope

70mm 70 mm film (or 65 mm film) is a wide high-resolution film gauge for motion picture photography, with a negative area nearly 3.5 times as large as the standard 35 mm motion picture film format. As used in cameras, the film is wi ...

and

35mm 35 mm may refer to: * 135 film, a type of still photography format commonly referred to as 35 mm film * 35 mm movie film, a type of motion picture film stock * 35MM 35 mm may refer to: * 135 film, a type of still photography format ...

film; however, it has since been rephotographed onto 35mm and

16mm 16 mm film is a historically popular and economical gauge of film. 16 mm refers to the width of the film (about inch); other common film gauges include 8 and 35 mm. It is generally used for non-theatrical (e.g., industrial, ed ...

formats, in which it is now most commonly screened. ''The Dante Quartet'' is divided into four parts, titled ''Hell Itself'', ''Hell Spit Flexion'', ''Purgation'' and ''existence is song,'' respectively.James, David E. (2005) ''Stan Brakhage: filmmaker,'' Temple University Press, p92 Brakhage described the sections as follows:

I made ''Hell Itself'' during the breakup with Jane rakhageand the collapse of my whole life, so I got to know quite well the streaming of the hypnagogic that’s hellish. Now the body can not only feed back its sense of being in hell but also its getting out of hell, and ''Hell Spit Flexion'' shows the way out – it’s there as crowbar to lift one out of hell toward the transformatory state – purgatory. And finally there’s a fourth state that’s fleeting. I’ve called the last part ''existence is song'' quoting Rilke, because I don’t want to presume upon the after-life and call it “Heaven.”

Reception

Bart Testa praised the "radical daring" of Brakhage's filmmaking, and wrote that ''The Dante Quartet'' "condenses into eight visionary minutes what unfolded as great epic. This is the myth of Brakhage's aesthetic brought to bear."Testa, Bart (2004) "Dante and Cinema: Film Across a Chasm," ''Dante, cinema, and television,'' University of Toronto Press, p194 Adrian Danks, writing for '' Senses of Cinema'', described the film as offering "an obscure, off-centre and idiosyncratic perspective that is difficult to conceive – at least initially – as anything other than a glorious celebration of the experiential and material possibilities of film stock and projected light.""Across the Universe: Stan Brakhage’s ''The Dante Quartet (2004)''" by Adrian Danks
''Senses of Cinema,'' CTEQ Annotations, June 2004 – accessed 13 February 17, 2011

Notes

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dante Quartet, The 1987 films American animated short films American silent short films Films based on Inferno (Dante) Films directed by Stan Brakhage Drawn-on-film animated films Silent films in color 1980s American films