An ambitious project from Britain’s channel four, A TV Dante was comprised of 6 artists in an effort to adapt The Divine Comedy: Peter Greenaway, Tom Phillips, Raul Ruiz, Terry Gilliam, Zbigniew Rybczynski, and Nagisa Oshima. The first eight cantos of the Inferno were co-directed by Peter Greenaway and Tom Phillips. Phillips, a composer, artist and critic, is perhaps best known for his interest in the art of the page. His 1983 translation of the Inferno is used for the production. Cantos 1 – 8 were shown on television and later released on video in UK.

Ruiz’s casting of his native Chile as the inferno visited by Dante and Virgil in Cantos 9 – 14 was met with criticism and never broadcast or released on VHS in Europe. Ruiz’s series later found a life in Latin America where it was eventually shown on television.

The remaining Cantos 15-34 were never made.

Director

Peter Greenaway

An avant-gardist who earned surprising access to the mainstream, Peter Greenaway is among the most ambitious and controversial filmmakers of his era. Trained as a painter and heavily influenced by theories of structural linguistics, ethnography, and philosophy, Greenaway’s films traversed often unprecedented ground, consistently exploring the boundaries of the medium by rejecting formal narrative structures in favor of awe-striking imagery, shifting meanings, and mercurial emotional tension; fascinated by formal symmetries and parallels, his material displayed an almost obsessive interest in list-making and cataloguing, earning equal notoriety for its provocative eroticism as well as its almost self-conscious pretentiousness. Born April 5, 1942, in Newport, Wales, Greenaway was raised primarily in nearby Chingford. After deciding at the age of 12 to become a painter, he entered the Walthamstow College of Art. By 1965, Greenaway had begun working as a film editor for the Central Office… read more

An avant-gardist who earned surprising access to the mainstream, Peter Greenaway is among the most ambitious and controversial filmmakers of his era. Trained as a painter and heavily influenced by theories of structural linguistics, ethnography, and philosophy, Greenaway’s films traversed often unprecedented ground, consistently exploring the boundaries of the medium by rejecting formal narrative structures in favor of awe-striking imagery, shifting meanings, and mercurial emotional tension; fascinated by formal symmetries and parallels, his material displayed an almost obsessive interest in list-making and cataloguing, earning equal notoriety for its provocative eroticism as well as its almost self-conscious pretentiousness. Born April 5, 1942, in Newport, Wales, Greenaway was raised primarily in nearby Chingford. After deciding at the age of 12 to become a painter, he entered the Walthamstow College of Art. By 1965, Greenaway had begun working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information, where within a year he started making his own experimental short features. The first of Greenaway’s experimental short films to gain widespread distribution was 1969’s seven-minute Intervals. He continued releasing work sporadically throughout the first half of the 1970s, ranging in length from 1974’s four-minute Windows to 1976’s 40-minute Goole by Numbers. With 1978’s A Walk Through H and Vertical Features Remake, Greenaway first garnered festival notice, and with 1980’s The Falls, a “documentary” set in the future, he made his long-awaited feature debut. The 1982 17th century drama The Draughtsman’s Contract was his critical breakthrough, and the film launched him to the forefront of the global experimental film community.

In 1983, Greenaway helmed documentaries on the American composers Robert Ashley, John Cage, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk for Britain’s Channel Four television network. Over the next two years he produced only short films and did not return to feature filmmaking prior to 1985’s superb A Zed and Two Noughts. Two years later he released The Belly of an Architect, its focus on themes of obsession clearly mirroring Greenaway’s own persona. Even more detailed was 1988’s Drowning by Numbers, which stuffed its blackly comic tale of a murderous family with numerological references ranging in tone from broad visual puns to nods to Dante’s Divine Comedy. With 1989’s more accessible The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Greenaway made his American breakthrough. A corrosive allegory of life in contemporary England, the film became the subject of much controversy in the U.S. when it fell subject to the MPAA’s new “NC-17” rating, consequently winning the biggest audiences of the director’s career. The follow-up, 1991’s Prospero’s Books, was his most experimental feature yet. A radical reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it employed a revolutionary new device called an electronic paintbox which allowed Greenaway to fill the screen with an intricate series of intertextual double exposures and transparent overlays, eliciting some of his most extreme viewer response yet. Greenaway then returned to television for the next two years, helming 1991’s M Is for Man, Music, Mozart and the 1993 revisionist biopic Darwin. Also in 1993 he returned to feature films with the highly controversial The Baby of Macon, a grim, violent satire of life in the 17th century which failed to find an American distributor. Two years later Greenaway directed Stairs 1 Geneva, a documentary commissioned for Swiss television, as well as The Pillow Book, an erotic fable again utilizing the electronic paintbox first seen on Prospero’s Books. In 1997 the film was finally picked up for American release, where it garnered some of Greenaway’s most favorable response to date. In 1999, he released 8 1/2 Women, a black comedy about the roots and consequences of male sexual fantasy.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:92456)

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Raúl Ruiz

Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man’s Bluff

Chilean filmmaker Raúl, or Raoul, Ruiz (1941-2011) was one of the most exciting and innovative filmmakers to emerge from 1960s World Cinema, providing more intellectual fun and artistic experimentation, shot for shot, than any filmmaker since Jean-Luc Godard. A guerrilla who uncompromisingly assaulted the preconceptions of film art, this frightfully prolific figure – he made over 100 films in 40 years – did not adhere to any one style of filmmaking. He worked in 35mm, 16mm and video, for theatrical release and for European TV, and on documentary and fiction features and shorts. His career began in avant-garde theatre where, between 1956 and 1962, he wrote over 100 plays. Although he never directed any of these productions, he did dabble in TV and filmmaking in the early 1960s. In 1968, with the release of his first completed feature, the Cassavetes-like Tres tristes tigres (1968… read more

Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man’s Bluff

Chilean filmmaker Raúl, or Raoul, Ruiz (1941-2011) was one of the most exciting and innovative filmmakers to emerge from 1960s World Cinema, providing more intellectual fun and artistic experimentation, shot for shot, than any filmmaker since Jean-Luc Godard. A guerrilla who uncompromisingly assaulted the preconceptions of film art, this frightfully prolific figure – he made over 100 films in 40 years – did not adhere to any one style of filmmaking. He worked in 35mm, 16mm and video, for theatrical release and for European TV, and on documentary and fiction features and shorts. His career began in avant-garde theatre where, between 1956 and 1962, he wrote over 100 plays. Although he never directed any of these productions, he did dabble in TV and filmmaking in the early 1960s. In 1968, with the release of his first completed feature, the Cassavetes-like Tres tristes tigres (1968), Ruiz became one of the key Chilean directors of New Latin American Cinema. A committed though critical supporter of the Marxist government of Salvador Allende, Ruiz was forced to flee his country after the fascist coup of 1973. Living in exile in Paris from that time onwards, he found a forum for his ideas in European TV and was championed by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, several of whom appeared in his first European successes, The Suspended Vocation (1978) and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979), two enigmatic Pierre Klossowski adaptations. Between 1980 and his death in 2011, Ruiz was one of the world’s most productive but least known auteurs, in part through a long-term working relationship with Portuguese producer Paulo Branco. Other regular collaborators included Ruiz’s wife and editor Valeria Sarmiento, composer Jorge Arriagada, cinematographers Sacha Vierny, Henri Alekan and Ricardo Aronovich, writers Gilbert Adair and Pascal Bonitzer, and actor Melvil Poupaud. Key early works from this period included the surrealistic masterpieces Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983), City of Pirates (1983) and Manoel on the Island of Wonders (1984), three of his many French-Portuguese co-productions perversely yet charmingly addressing the recurring Ruizian themes of childhood, exile, and maritime and rural folklore. In the 1990s, Ruiz embarked on larger projects with prominent actors such as John Hurt, Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and John Malkovich, alternating this sporadic mainstream art-house endeavour with his usual low-budget experimental productions and the teaching of his Poetics of Cinema (two volumes of which he published in 1995 and 2007). In the 1990s and 2000s, he also shot several films and TV series’ in Chile, though usually without Chilean funding. Ruiz is beloved among cinephiles as a poet of oneiric imagery and a fabulist of labyrinthine stories-within-stories whose films slip effortlessly from reality to imagination and back again. A manipulator of wild intellectual games in which the rules are forever changing, Ruiz’s techniques were as varied as film itself; a collection of bizarre angles, close-ups and deep-focus compositions, bewildering POV shots, dazzling colours, and labyrinthine narratives which weave and dodge the viewer’s grasp with every shot. As original as Ruiz was, one can tell much about him by the diversity of his influences; he was clearly inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Louis Stevenson, Orson Welles, “Left Bank” New Wave directors such as Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, and baroque low-budget Hollywood B-movie directors like Edgar G. Ulmer, Ford Beebe and Reginald Le Borg. His erudition also extended to medieval theology, Renaissance theatre and quantum physics. Ruiz remains a much-admired auteur on the European continent, having won prestigious prizes at Cannes, Berlin, San Sebastián, Locarno, Rome and Rotterdam. He is little-known in his native Chile, however, despite having made the widely seen Palomita blanca (1973), receiving several major arts prizes and having a National Day of Mourning dedicated to him on the day of his burial there. In the English-speaking world, only a handful of Ruiz’s films have been distributed and it is on these few films that his reputation there is built: most notably, major art-house fare such as the Ophüls- and Visconti-inspired Time Regained (1999) but also Comedy of Innocence (2000), Klimt (2006) and Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) and straight-to-video thriller pastiches like Shattered Image (1998) and A Closed Book (2010). Little of his huge oeuvre is available on DVD. The works that are, however, bear witness to the unique genius that informs his entire body of work. —IMDb

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