AMEDEO D’ADAMO
(Università Cattolica di Milano)

Dantean Space: An account of how Dante’s special creation of emotionalized Space in the Inferno is realize in Cinema and tv to empathetically link an audience's emotions to a protagonist.

Some of the most memorable of Dante’s characters are trapped specifically and singularly in a cage of traumatic memory. For example, when we meet Ugolino he is trapped eating Ruggero in a dimly-lit space of nearly complete immobility, frozen together with him in ice up to his neck, bound in the endless tableau of this cannibalistic embrace. But we soon realize with horror that Ugolino is also both trapped by and in the chilling Pizan tower’s sealed room eating his children’s bodies while he was alive. This ice-bound space in Hell and his cannibalistic embrace of Ruggero is architected by those spirit-freezing moments in his past. Ugolino lives in two times at once because the two imprisonments are joined: the icy lake is informed by, imbued with, and in a sense created by that Pisan cell and its terrible events. In a psychologically real sense, Ugolino is immersed in a space of double vision, one that links Ugolino’s constant present to the arresting emotionally-charged actions in his past.

Ugolino’s double-visioned space is not unique. Many of the characters in The Divine Comedy tell vivid tales of a specific past trauma, revealing themselves as still stuck like a fly in amber in that past Dantean moment while bound now in a specific and corresponding Dantean space. For each, their fateful spaces and actions in their pasts have now become the cage that surrounds them. Such characters live in a special form of narrative space that Dante invented, an emotionalized narrative architectural form which can be called Dantean Space.

In this way Dante is the architect of the emotionalized, powerful settings in such films as Aliens (1986)), Amelie (2001), The Third Man (1949) and certain television shows: these stories all use Dante’s technique to entangle viewers with the protagonist's past emotional struggles. In fact Dantean Space is arguably the most powerful form of empathetic involvement between protagonist, setting and viewers.

This account helps reveal the intersection of narrative space and empathy as well as the cues, materials and production design techniques commonly used to create these spaces across Media forms.

Amedeo D'Adamo currently teaches in the Directing concentrate at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles (where he is also a Thesis Mentor) and at the Universita Cattolica in Milan. A prolific author in the fields of film, media and celebrity, Amedeo is the author of Empathetic Space on Screen (2018: Palgrave Macmillan) which is about how to take certain techniques invented by Dante to use production design, locations, cinematography and sound-track to connect audiences with characters. As of March 2021 that book had been downloaded 548,000 times. He is also most recently the editor of Producing for the Screen (2020), the latest book in Focal Press's PERFORM series. He is also currently an associate producer and script consultant on Europa, an 8-part series for Sky written by Stefano Bises (the writer of HBO’s The New Pope and Gomorrah). He was the founding Dean and then President of the original Los Angeles Film School where he also co-created and ran the Feature Film Development program. An institution-builder, he has worked in film production and education in Hollywood, New York City, China (with the Beijing Opera), Africa, Europe and Jamaica.

Amedeo was also the original architect of and then ran the EU-funded traveling Feature Development Program Puglia Experience (2008 – 2011) which helped first-time feature screenwriters and directors get their first features to producers. A speaker at numerous conferences, he has also taught at many universities and labs including Royal Holloway, Universita Svizzera, the University of Zurich, Albascript, NAS lab and others. Trained in producing by James Shamus (long-time head of Focus Features) he has worked with Shrek Director Vickie Jensen (helping her produce her first live action short which won numerous awards) and others including Faye Dunaway, Thom Mount and Roger Corman. With his wife Nevina Satta he designed and ran both the University Feature Development Lab and the University Doc Lab for the Locarno Film Festival. Together they also co-founded The Traveling Film School, a non-profit organization that provides free film and theater training to children in underdeveloped regions; it has built small tuition-free film-schools in Cameroon and Sardinia. His features have been to Festivals such as Rome, Miami, Austin, Torino and others.