Ian Thomson

Moving images of Christianity

Mark Le Fanu examines the great directors of classic European cinema and their moving representations of Christian themes

issue 16 February 2019

The Italian film director Federico Fellini was not known for his piety (far from it), yet towards the end of his life in around 1990 he determined to film Dante’s Inferno for national television. The brimstone poem appealed to Fellini for its comico-grotesque scenes of mass writhing human nudity amid firecracker detonations.

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