Moving images of Christianity

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.

He was not the first filmmaker to take on the work of the medieval Florentine poet. In the early 1970s, Fellini’s compatriot Franco Zeffirelli persuaded Dustin Hoffman to star as Dante Alighieri in his own version of the Inferno. Hoffman, dressed in a medieval coif hat and Tootsie-red robe, was supposed to wander through a sulphurous underworld accompanied by the Latin poet Virgil. Nothing came of either Zeffirelli’s or Fellini’s Inferno. For both directors, though, Dante was the pre-eminent writer of pre-Reformation Europe, whose three-part journey through hell, purgatory and paradise, The Divine Comedy, combined a Christian vision of redemption with classical Latin erudition.

In this superb cultural history, Mark Le Fanu considers the religious impulse that distinguishes so much European cinema in its golden age from the second world war up to the 1980s. Ours may now be a secular world, yet it is ‘impossible to escape’ from our religious heritage, says Le Fanu. Images of Christianity are poetically allied in his adored European directors to images of secular modernity. Fellini himself viewed Rome as a lasagna-like palimpsest of Christian histories and archaeologies waiting to be revealed on celluloid. He co-wrote the script for Robert Rossellini’s 1950 film about St Francis of Assisi, Flowers of St Francis, a work of roughshod humanity which Martin Scorsese, for one, reveres. ‘I find it hard to put into words why I find the film so charming,’ Le Fanu admits.

Andrei Tarkovosky’s Russian cinema radiates a sense of religious mystery.