Introduction

A TV Dante
booklet from Channel 4 Television in association with the Talfourd Press

INTRODUCTION

A TV Dante is a KGP Ltd Dante BV Co-production for Channel 4, first shown July 1990. Directed by artist Tom Phillips and film-maker Peter Greenaway, it covers the first eight of the thirty-four cantos in Dante’s Inferno, the initial volume of his 14th century tripartite masterpiece The Divine Comedy, and is based on Phillips’s translation of the text.

The collaboration makes crucial use of the use of video editing techniques, cutting-edge at the time, to layer imagery as an equivalent of Dante’s explicit use of simultaneous levels of meaning and to insert in place of footnotes cameo commentaries by various authorities, as well as decorative backgrounds and borders echoing the enriched pages of the illuminated books from Dante’s own time.

The project was commissioned by Michael Kustow for Channel 4 and much of the text which is featured in the following pages, detailing the approaches and techniques used by Phillips and Greenaway, are extracted from the booklet published to accompany the series by Channel 4 Television in association with the Talfourd Press.

A TV Dante

ACTORS

Bob Peck – Dante
Sir John Gielgud – Virgil
Joanne Whalley-Kilmer – Beatrice
Susan Wooldridge – Lucy
Suzan Crowley – Francesca
Robert Eddison – Charon
Lucien Morgan – Paolo
Laurie Booth – Cerberus
Robin Wright – Lucrezia

PRODUCTION TEAM

Translator – Tom Phillips
Production Research Supervisors – Milfid Ellis, Marietta De Vries
Sound Recordist – Garth Marshall
Sound Editor – Chris Wyatt
Editor – John Wilson
Video Post Production – Bill Saint at ‘The Palace’
Produced by – Denis Wigman. Kees Kasander
Directed by – Tom Phillips, Peter Greenaway

PRESS REVIEWS

"A dazzling and inventive piece of video-image making...an eye-stitching use of television."  The Guardian
"Nothing quite like it has been seen on television before. The extraordinary, multi-layered images on the screen are not so much state-of-the-art video but the state after that." The Times
"That rare and beautiful thing, an attempt to do something new with the medium."  The Observer