DANTE
Inferno to Paradise

a two-part four-hour documentary film
by Ric Burns

Part Two: Resurrection

Original Soundtrack by Brian Keane

DANTE Inferno to Paradise – an unprecedented two-part, four-hour film from acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ric Burns – explores the life, work and legacy of the great 14th century Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, and the incomparable masterpiece he left behind, The Divine Comedy – a stunning poetic account of a life-changing journey through the three realms of the afterlife, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, long considered one of the greatest works of art ever created in the history of Western literature.

The hypnotically beautiful and often deeply moving soundtrack for the film was composed by Burns’ long-time collaborator and veteran Grammy, Emmy, Peabody, and Oscar award-winning film composer, Brian Keane.

“Dante knew he was writing something very different and very special,” Oxford scholar Elena Lombardi declares in the film. “The Divine Comedy is one of these books that are made every once in a while in human history.”

Conceived by Burns and the distinguished Italian scholar, Riccardo Bruscagli, the film presents a gripping odyssey into Dante Alighieri’s turbulent life, the faction-torn times he lived in, and the astonishing 14,233-line poem he left behind. Filmed across six years in Italy, England and the United States, DANTE juxtaposes haunting live cinematography from across northern Italy; a dazzling archive of paintings, drawings, manuscripts, and frescos filmed on location; and riveting interviews with a distinguished cohort of scholars, writers, poets, politicians, clergymen, and historians. Woven throughout are dramatic re-enactments filmed for the production in locations across Italy – from Florence to Carrara and Ravenna and beyond – bringing to life scenes from Dante’s life and from The Divine Comedy and the Vita Nova, the masterwork of Dante’s early career – featuring Dante himself, his life-long muse, Beatrice, and a cavalcade of gripping figures whom Dante encounters during his journey through the three realms of the afterlife.

Keane’s luminous, hauntingly beautiful score brings to powerful life the events of Dante’s biography and work – as Dante goes from promising poet and ambitious politician to falsely accused criminal and exile from his native Florence – and as, in the hallucinatory almost cinematically vivid action of the poem, which he wrenched into existence amidst the harrowing circumstances of his banishment – Dante’s alter ego is guided through hell and purgatory by the shade of the towering literary forebear he revered most, the great Roman poet, Virgil – and then through paradise itself by an ineffably beautiful woman named Beatrice – a Florentine girl he had met in childhood – who had died when she was 24, and whom he had loved passionately from afar and written obsessively about all his life.

From first to last, Keane’s rapturous score captures the depth and breadth and soaring heights of Dante’s extraordinary imaginative journey down into the darkness of Hell – up the Mountain of Purgatory – and on into the infinitely luminous spheres of Paradise. Indeed, taken as a whole, the music to DANTE Inferno to Paradise comprises its own kind of revelatory spiritual and experiential journey – as cinematic, mystical, and erotically and spiritually moving as Dante’s poem itself, and as limpid, self-reflective and thoughtful.

In this, the music for the film’s climactic second episode – the accompaniment to Part Two: Redemption, the final act of the two-part cinematic journey Keane has undertaken together with Burns and his colleagues – Keane has created a musical soundscape as redemptive, hopeful, and transcendently uplifting as his treatment for the first part of the film – The Inferno – is harrowing, dark, and often frighteningly forbidding.