Tondal’s Vision

This psychedelic feature by Stephen Broomer presents a trip into the abyss through the manipulation of footage from an early film adaptation of Dante’s Inferno.

Five visions of hell cut through this work: those of Broomer, Dante and the original director, Giuseppe de Liguoro, but also their respective influences — in the 12th-century text ‘Vision of Tnugdalus’, the knight errant Tondal dreams of visiting hell, and de Liguoro mimicked Gustave Doré’s 19th-century engravings of Dante’s epic poem Divine Comedy (of which Inferno is the first part). Broomer densely weaves these images together, retinting so that the swirl of hell’s flame is matched by the molten moments of dissolved footage.