ABSTRACT
The search for the reception of Dante's text in contemporary cinema can involve the search for the domination of the present by Dante – the enquiry attended by a reverent expectancy. The kind of material the cinema has needed has been partly conditioned by how the cinema has been trying to place itself culturally and commercially. Dante's Inferno was pillaged for a mock-epic featuring Pagano in 1926 called Maciste all'inferno. Dante's own work was produced in the context of a poetic and aesthetic endeavour which has been labelled as the dolce stil novo. Dante then took this further, and developed what was essentially a realist aesthetic for the expression of his ethical vision in the Commedia, explicitly challenging Aristotelian notions of genre, and conventions of linguistic decorum. Neorealism offers more thematic parallels with Dante's development of the dolce stil novo than might be expected.
