Center for European Studies | “Dante After Dante” Film Series

NOTRE MUSIQUE – 4pm

France, Switzerland | 2004 | 35mm| 80 min. | French with English subtitles

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Sarah Adler, Nade Dieu, Jean-Luc Godard

Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, Godard has crafted a brilliant three-part examination of the contemporary war-ravaged world and its politics using both fictional and documentary footage. Beginning with a hellish montage of war images from 1940 to the present, the film moves into a section set at an artists’ conference in modern-day Sarajevo (where Godard himself has come to participate) and concludes with a surreal final section set in an ambiguous paradise. 35mm print courtesy Yale Film Archive. Preceded by Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987, 35mm, 6 min.).

FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN 3-D (ANDY WARHOL’S FRANKENSTEIN) – 7pm

France, West Germany, Italy | 1974 | DCP | 94 min.

Director: Paul Morrissey

Cast: Joe Dallesandro, Udo Kier, Monique van Vooren

In what is perhaps the most “out there” adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic, Baron von Frankenstein (Kier) creates a pair of male and female monsters from discarded and purloined body parts.

His plan to have his zombies mate and create a master race is thwarted by farm hand Nicholas (Dallesandro), who is having an affair with the Baron’s sexually frustrated wife (van Vooren). One of two (the other is Blood for Dracula) taboo-breaking variations on classic horror movies filmed in Europe by director Morrissey and produced by Andy Warhol, Flesh for Frankenstein has an abundance of campy, laugh-out-loud humor and, best of all, plenty of 3-D gross out effects. Restoration courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome and the American Genre Film Archive.

For more information about the film series, click here.

For more information about the “Dante after Dante” Conference click here.