Making the Series

Michael Kustow
oil on canvas
110.6 x 75 cm
1987

Edited from Michael Kustow’s account

A TV Dante began when I had the idea of bringing Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway together. As Channel 4's Arts Commissioning Editor, with a mission to innovate, one of my priorities was to search for new participants in the medium. I especially wanted artists' ways of seeing and making to connect with television's imagery and its enormous and indiscriminate appetite. And I wanted to bring the great classics of world literature (as the living things they are) into the homes of the television audience.

I had long followed the progress of Tom Phillips’s massive illustrated version of Dante's Inferno in his own translation, and had admired the imagery that sought to capture Dante's many-layered poem of the journey of a human soul. I thought it could provoke the kind of television art I had been seeking.

At Channel 4 I had become aware of the virtuoso films of Peter Greenaway, who had just completed The Draughtsman's Contract. For me there were intriguing affinities between the work of Phillips and Greenaway: their quest to make rich artefacts of multi-levelled meaning, their serious use of games, systems and catalogues, and their fascination with old modes of thought yoked to the most modern forms of expression.

As a result of their encounter, a furious work began between them. Storyboards, notes, technical explorations sparked off in all directions. Suddenly and pyrotechnically there was a host of possible television Dantes. Phillips quickly learned from Greenaway the grammar of the moving image and Greenaway absorbed the scholarly and patient rigour of Tom Phillips' practice as a painter.

The eight Cantos of the Inferno that were completed stand as a rich example of television art rooted in a classic text of the human condition. At first glance (and in comparison with the customary thinness of most TV fare), the episodes may seem unusually dense. They repay (and are virtually designed for) multiple viewing and will reward their viewers' hearts and imaginations with ideas and emotions about Dante's world and ours.