Suicide Archives - Dante Today

Zone Blanche Netflix Series (2017)

October 31, 2021 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

Zone Blanche (“Black Spot” in English) is a French-Belgian series directed by Matthieu Missoffe. Two seasons are currently available on Netflix, with future seasons expected.

“The entire first season of Black Spot contains so many Dante references that any aficionado of Inferno can spot them: the deathlike forest impenetrable by sunlight; the suicide victims suspended from the trees, horribly disfigured by attacking birds; a teenage girl who cuts off her own fingers to escape a hellish coming-of-age ritual; a descent into a treacherous network of caverns to locate a missing person, assumed dead; encounters with beings who may be either alive or dead; a legendary monster called the Wendigo; a reservoir of waste guaranteed to kill what little life remains in the dying village. The careful viewer will spot yet more parallels to Dante, some of which are very subtle.

“With a vision as true as it is dark, Missoffe’s Black Spot not only recasts the evils of Dante’s Florence, but of our entire Western world.” –Contributor Jane Wineland

Contributed by Jane Wineland (University of Arkansas Ph.D. ’26)

Don Thompson’s “The Wood of Suicides”

April 1, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“The Wood of Suicides. Canto XIII, Inferno. These images were taken adjacent to campus, after the Malibu fires.” [. . .] –Don Thompson, d.t. pepperdine, October 2007.

Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963)

October 3, 2020 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’…” A reference to Pier delle Vigne, Inf. 13?

Contributed by Lorenzo Hess (Bowdoin, ’23)

The Sandman and Dante’s Inferno

August 26, 2020 By lsanchez

“The angelic appearance of Lucifer in Sandman #4 (April 1989), entitled ‘A Hope in Hell,’ features the Wood of Suicides from Dante’s Inferno (Canto XIII), the great expanse of which provokes comment from the titular character as he seemingly accidentally breaks a branch and allows the suicides, imprisoned in the form of barren trees, to speak. Despite this, the issue and The Sandman in general have more to do with previous DC comics than with Dante. Indeed, the issue features Etrigan, a colorful rhyming demon created by Jack Kirby for the inventively titled comic The Demon. At the issue’s conclusion, Lucifer swears Dream’s destruction, a move by writer Neil Gaiman to establish plot threads for subsequent issues.

[. . .]

Perhaps the inconsistency of Gaiman’s three versions of Lucifer should not surprise us. After all, Satan has always been a particularly malleable figure, changing even in his religious depictions over time. Huge gulfs exists between the serpent of Genesis, the prosecuting angel in Job, the Bible’s brief and vague references to a fallen angel, and the vaguely Manichean personification of evil in the New Testament, who were not even intended to be the same characters and were only united by exegetic interpretation. Equally, Dante’s bloated, immobile Satan is a world away from Milton’s deft, self-damned, self-hated rhetorical master.

In other words, Gaiman’s three Lucifers may not be consistent, but then, Lucifer never was.” –Julian Darius, Sequart Organization, May 20, 2002

What Dante did with Loss by Jan Conn

September 20, 2019 By Alexa Kellenberger FSU '22

“What Dante Did With Loss is Jan Conn’s fourth book of poems. Central to this powerful new collection is a suite of poems charting the explosive emotions surrounding her mother’s suicide. Other poems range from meditations on South American flora and fauna to postmodern encounters with immortality.

“Jan Conn was brought up in Asbestos, Quebec. She now lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and works as a professor of Biomedical Sciences whose research is focused on mosquitoes, their evolution and ecology. She has published seven previous books of poetry.” —Véhicule Press, 1998.

You can purchase Conn’s book of poetry through Véhicule Press or through Amazon.

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