ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications of the change as well as its divergences from and links with the preceding tradition. The decade 1900–1910 opens with Victorien Sardou's Dante Alighieri and Gabriele D'Annunzio's Francesca da Rimini and closes with Inferno 1911. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Commedia was deployed to lend both credibility and vitality to cinema as an art. The political implications of putting Dante on stage are linked to the earliest ideological uses of the poet at the time of the Italian wars for independence from Austria. By comparison with earlier plays on Dante, D'Annunzio is innovative for its almost 'archaeological' interest in the Middle Ages. In the first decade of the century their implicit project was shared by the film industry at large, which sought to overcome the widespread opinion among intellectuals that cinema was a poor art devoted to the masses and performed in dubious circus-like gatherings.
