Stan Brakhage's "The Dante Quartet" is his abstract, visual interpretation of the 12th c. master' Dante's poem, "The Divine Comedy". Dante's original work had three parts: Inferno (Italian for Hell), Purgatorio (Italian for Purgatory), and Paradiso (Italian for Paradise or Heaven). Brakage was apparently obsessed with reading translations of the poem and found himself at a point conjuring images from the poem and equating them with the circumstances in his life.
Brakhage composed four movements for his "Quartet". He worked on the first, Hell Itself, while he was going through a divorce with his wife and experiencing the collapse of his "whole life". Brakhage's view of Hell was accompanied by a vision of how to get out of Hell, which he entitled Hell Spit Flexion and which apparently "shows the way out". These two movements are followed by Purgation and existence is song, which is Brakhage's interpretation for Heaven, as he did not suppose an after-life.
I found Brakhage's use of extra footage, super-imposed and blended with his hand-painted in Purgation and existence is song to be interesting. I also liked the explosive/colorfulness of these two movements, the rapid pace of the images and the use of fading from one image to the other and to blackness. Aside from this, I do not find the piece to be particularly obvious in its portrayal of Hell/desperation as juxtaposed with "a way out" or of Paradise/sublimity. I really liked the review Adrian Danks, a writer for Senses of Cinema, described of the film: "an obscure, off-centre and idiosyncratic perspective that is difficult to conceive – at least initially – as anything other than a glorious celebration of the experiential and material possibilities of film stock and projected light."
-Wikipedia, "The Dante Quartet"
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