L'INFERNO
Francesco Bertolini, Giuseppe De Liguoro, Adolfo Padovan
1911, 68'
With a special Saturday event of sonorization of the film L’Inferno (1911), we want to pay a tribute to the great poet Dante on the 700th anniversary of his death. Together with Jure Boršič (alto saxophone), Andrea Gulli (electronics) and Urban Kušar (percussions), we will descend into the first cantica of Divine Comedy and into the sounds of the wild forest, which Dante so famously called selva selvaggia.
Dante’s hellish plants weep and moan, when we find out that these are actually vegetative reincarnations of those who have ended their worldly lives by suicide. In hell, therefore, their souls remained chained to plant bodies, which represents the greatest possible punishment for the posthumous soul.
If, on the one hand, as the philosopher Michael Marder points out, plant reincarnation was the greatest possible honor for the ancient Greeks, Dante opens an ontological wound in his work - the rift between man and plant - which still remains unhealed today. Even worse: if the plants in Dante’s work were filled with human voice, today they are left completely voiceless. The three musicians will therefore try to offer a voice to everything which does not have that voice. And as befits a film based on Dante’s story, this voice will be hellish, loud and unhappy, as the author himself wrote.