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Milano Films, 1911: Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de Liguoro stage Dante's descent with Virgil through the circles of Hell. Salvatore Papa as Dante, Arturo Pirovano as Virgil. About an hour, more than fifty tableaux, many copied from Gustave Doré's engravings: Paolo and Francesca, Ugolino, the frozen lake. Italy's first feature and, unlike the fragmentary Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the oldest feature that survives nearly complete. Shown in the United States with a lecturer. Smithsonian and others note the Doré debt and the claim of earliest intact feature-length print.
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The job: go long. An hour, fifty tableaux, Doré's engravings restaged with real bodies. The feature film arrives from Italy with a lecturer standing beside it. Watch the frozen lake and Ugolino. The compositions are copied. The horror is not.
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