Into the Video-Inferno: Vertical Television, Experimental Seriality and the Moving Collage in A TV Dante

This paper focuseson one of the most unique experiments in the history of television: A TV Dante, a fourteen-episode mini-series which aired between 1990 and 1991, partly directed by Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway, and partlyby Raúl Ruiz. We will analyze A TV Danteas an early attempt to explore the aesthetic potential of television seriality through theadoption ofan avant-garde approach towardsa fundamental work of the Western canon.We will begin by analyzing Phillips’ illustrated Infernoas a work aimed at constructing amulti-layered andtotalizing representation of the Inferno’s own reception, of the history of mediality and of Phillips’ own identity as an artist. We will then show how the poetics of Phillips’ and Greenaway’s A TV Danteare shaped by what we may call the aesthetics of the moving collage. We will finally focus on Rúiz’s A TV Dante, which dismantles all coherent narrative structures, transforming Dante’s Infernointo a series of powerful images, symbols and visions.