Dante, Cinema, and Television

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

The 13 essays in this volume establish Dante’s enormous influence on
film and television and will be of special interest to scholars,
historians, educators, and students of both cinema and literature.
Edited by Amilicare Iannucci, professor of comparative literature and
the founder and director of the University of Toronto’s Humanities
Centre, and arising from two earlier conferences and film festivals
celebrating the Italian literary master, the book is a broad-based
compilation from contributors with academic credentials in languages,
literature, history, theatre, film, and television studies and from
centres as diverse as Ottawa, Toronto, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Oxford,
Rome, Florence, and Notre Dame.

The essays range from the relative obscurity of “the penumbral world
of early Italian silent cinema”; to the work of more widely known
filmmakers Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Rossellini, and Michelangelo
Antonioni; to current Hollywood productions such as Taylor Hackford’s
The Devil’s Advocate, David Fischer’s Seven, and Woody Allen’s
Deconstructing Harry. Through critical and textual analyses of various
Italian, European, and North American films, including Nell Shipman’s
Canadian feature Back to God’s Country and Torontonian R. Bruce
Elder’s experimental Illuminated Texts, each author provides
insightful commentary on the impact of Dante’s Commedia, Inferno,
Purgatorio, and Paradiso upon the films. Supplementing the detailed
examinations in the essays are notes and bibliographies for each one, an
index of more than 160 films referred to by the contributors, and an
index of the names of individuals mentioned in the text.

Dante, Cinema, and Television makes an important contribution to
cinematic research in general and Dantean literature in particular.