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“Observations on Heaven from Dante’s Paradiso That Also Apply to These Stills of Linda Hamilton”

January 19, 2020 By lsanchez

“In a literary and historicist sense, Dante’s Divine Comedy was a multi-volume narrative poem that advanced some notable theological suppositions about the afterlife as well as some hot takes about Italian political and religious figures of the age and also working in some somewhat yikes fantasies about Dante’s crush, Beatrice, and idealized bromance with dead poet Virgil. In a looser, more abstract, in some ways more honest sense, though, Dante’s hysterically adulating depictions of Heaven and his crush Beatrice hanging out in it in Paradiso are also about what a fucking unreal silver fox Linda Hamilton is in the latest Terminator offering, Dark Fate. (Mackenzie Davis gays, you will have your day; this one is mine.)

When Dante was writing about being so overcome with emotion at the luminous landscape of Paradise that he was unable to speak, he may have been originally referencing an extremely specific medieval Catholic spiritual concept — but we have the benefit of centuries of context and wisdom that Dante did not, and can see that in another, more accurate way, they also reference the fact that Linda Hamilton remains an untouchable smokeshow, and is arguably even more of one than when she originally featured as my root in Terminator 2.”    –Rachel, Autostraddle, October 9, 2019

Categories: Performing Arts, Written Word
Tagged with: 2019, Beatrice, Divine Comedy, Films, LGBTQ, Movies, Paradise, Paradiso, Virgil

“Brakhage: When Light Meets Life”

December 28, 2019 By lsanchez

“His mission, which he pursued with a zealous intensity, was to liberate the eye from such ‘prescribed’ ways of seeing. The insect wings, twigs, and fragments of flowers and leaves that he applied directly to strips of 16mm film in Mothlight (1963) and 35mm in The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981); the streaks and globs of paint that seem to shine with an inner illumination in films like The Dante Quartet (1987); the arcs of light that bend around the underwater surfaces of Boulder Creek in Commingled Containers (1996): Brakhage’s films train you to look at the world as if it were—as he wrote in the first paragraph of his 1963 book Metaphors on Vision—’alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement.’

[. . .]

“In these cases, figurative footage occasionally still appeared in odd and unexpected settings—one section of The Dante Quartet was painted over what Brakhage identified as ‘a worn-out 70mm print of Irma la Douce.'”    –Max Nelson, The New York Review of Books, June 8, 2017

Still from Brakhage’s film The Dante Quartet, 1987

Categories: Image Mosaic, Performing Arts, Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 1987, 2017, Art, Films

Patch Adams (1998)

November 13, 2019 By lsanchez

“Or as the poet Dante put it, ‘In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, for I had lost the right path.’ Eventually I would find the right path, but in the most unlikely place.”    –Robin Williams as Hunter “Patch” Adams, Patch Adams (1998)

See IMDb for more about the film by Tom Shadyac.

Categories: Performing Arts
Tagged with: 1998, Dark Wood, Films, Inferno, Movies

Dante’s Inferno Room Pop Town

October 12, 2019 By Professor Arielle Saiber

 

“Back in August, Hot Topic and Funko revealed the Beetlejuice with Dante’s Inferno Room Pop Town figure. You probably recall that Dante’s Inferno Room was a strip club full of demonic women in the film, so this is one of Funko’s saucier Pops. Though they toned it down a bit by removing the “GIRLS” and “Live Nudes” signage. On that note, Beetlejuice was a PG rated film – Tim Burton and company clearly pushed it to the limit.

“If you want to get your hands on the Beetlejuice with Dante’s Inferno Room Pop Town figure, you’ll be able to grab it right here at Hot Topic (exclusive) starting tonight, October 10th / 11th between 11:30pm – 12am ET (8:30pm – 9pm PT). If it sells out, you’ll be able to find it here on eBay.”    –Sean Fallon, Comicbook.com, October 10, 2019

Categories: Consumer Goods, Performing Arts
Tagged with: 2019, Action Figures, Films, Funko, Hot Topic, Inferno

Khan’s Bookshelf in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

August 7, 2019 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

star-trek-wrath-khan-bookshelf-inferno“Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan involves a complex weaving of many borrowed elements, the most important of which is the Star Trek television series, as well as Moby-Dick, and A Tale of Two Cities. The intertextual mix is suggested in a shot early in the film when we are first introduced to Khan by scanning his bookshelf. In addition to a sign from his ship, the Botany Bay (named after a historic port in Australia through which many convicts entered the country), there are Dante’s Inferno, King Lear, The King James Bible, Moby-Dick, and two copies of Paradise Lost. Each book suggests aspects of Khan’s character. Though other references remain implicit, the Moby-Dick references are explicitly explored throughout the movie.” — Posted by ebreilly on Critical Commons

Categories: Performing Arts
Tagged with: 1982, Films, Inferno, Intertextuality, Science Fiction

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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