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‘The filmmaking career of Carmelo Bene (1937 – 2002) lasted from 1968 to 1973, six years out of a lengthy time spent in the theater that made Bene one of the most celebrated figures of the Italian avant-garde in the second half of the 20th century. He first made a name for himself with a controversial production of Camus’ Caligula in Rome in 1959. Subsequent productions retained this sense of notoriety, and Bene (like Pasolini) quickly acquired a police record. Bene, however, would come to bemoan the controversy his work created, because it attracted an audience looking for shocks and titillation, while he himself was more concerned with reinventing the vocabulary of the theater: sets, gestures, texts.
‘Bene’s turn to cinema expanded that quest to reinvent. His films resist synopsis because, although they are often derived from narrative sources, Bene uses these sources against themselves and as a springboard for his critique of the stultifying traps of representation and interpretation. The films are wildly inventive and visually arresting on several levels: the performance styles of his actors, including eccentric movements, gestures and grimaces; the sets, costumes and makeup; the editing; and the use of the camera, with stable shots regularly punctuated by handheld camera work, extreme close ups and the occasional baroque use of zooms, dollies, cranes, elaborate pans and exaggerated camera angles. They resemble something like the work of Jack Smith crossed with the experimental Pasolini of Teorema and Pigsty.
‘At some point Bene worked closely with Gilles Deleuze and was interested in the complete annihilation of the “self”, intended as a conscious entity. He refused to “exist” and became a rather popular figure in Italy because he was controversial and every time he appeared on TV he aroused all kinds of outrage and scandal. In particular he was accused of speaking in riddles, of nothing and being just a clever trickster who kept fooling the audience with his nonsensical, artificially shocking performances, just to draw the attention. Most of everyone was against him, he was deliberately an antagonist, and had a very troubled and animated relationships with his critics, who were continuously trying to frame him, diminish him or celebrate him, depending on their credo.
‘One constant feature of Bene’s work is its satire of heterosexuality. The two sexes keep trying to communicate with each other, but always fail to do so. Bene’s work constantly deflates masculinist pretenses at mastery: his male characters tend to be hapless and often hysterical, while his female characters are alternately predatory and remote, and unknowable in either case. But this satire is merely the most visible form of Bene’s revolt against convention and communication. Over and over again in the films, everyday actions become hopelessly complicated or endlessly interrupted. His characters often end up staring quizzically offscreen or even into mirrors, as if they were no more sure than we are of the meaning of what they see. Indeed, identity and by extension agency seem to get suspended, along with meaning. What is left is glorious spectacle and enigmas for the eyes and ears: endless music; babbling, stuttering text; excessive and exciting images.’ –– Harvard Film Archive
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Stills
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Further
Carmelo Bene obituary @ the Guardian
Carmelo Bene @ IMDb
Carmelo Bene @ Anthology Film Archives
Carmelo Bene @ mubi
‘Retro: Carmelo Bene’
Carmelo Bene oriented Blog
‘Cosmic wonderful magic Carmelo Bene’
‘Carmelo Bene, genius’
‘Eccentric and Visionary, the Films of Carmelo Bene’
‘Surgically Imprecise Notes on the Great Carmelo Bene’
‘Carmelo Bene, Lectura Dantis’
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Extras
Carmelo Bene – Macbeth Horror Suite (finale)
Carmelo Bene’s home
Carmelo Bene – Four Moments on All Nothingness
Carmelo Bene as Pinocchio
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Quotes
from Looping Wor(l)d
If someone has defined the “phonè” as a dialectic of thought, then I deny being part of it. I’m looking for the emptiness, which is the end of every art, of every story, of every world. The language of the Great Theater, incomprehensible by definition, becomes completely comprehensible on a different level of understanding, being all about the signifier, and not the signified, or sense.
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Language creates failures, it is only made of black holes and failures: (quoting Montale/ Nietzsche) “Only this we can now say: what we are not, what we do not want.” Who says “I say I exist, I say this” is two times a stupid. First because he believes in his self, secondly because he’s convinced of saying, and even a third time because he’s convinced of saying what he’s thinking. Because he believes that what he thinks is not signifier, but signified, a sense. That happens under his authority. It’s all noise. I think conscious intelligence is misery. I refuse to consider the ontology.
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I do not speak, I am being spoken.
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“The gods, plural is the noun, played yourself. The gods returned you to the mythical dawn of times. They carved you empty of simulation. Freed you of codes.”
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“We are but ghost lights, representation and model. You and I, in the illusion of being. Sincerity in the lie, truth in contradiction. As truth does not exist, given only in the delirium of language.”
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“Voice and language, delirium of omnipotence. Delirium because it’s not there. It does not exist.”
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(talking of amplification through a microphone, in theater) The actorial machine is the consequence of the Great Actor, stripped of expressive corporeal human capabilities (vocal, facial expression, gestures, etc..) to wear an amplified attire, both visual and voiced. The voice of the actorial machine is not just a simple amplification, but an extension of the tonal range, becoming a whole. The autorial machine is a fusion between actor and machine; amplification is not a prosthesis, but a further organic extension where the voice is defined by the process. In the same way one doesn’t “have a body” but one “IS a body”, so one is or becomes amplification, equalization, etc…
This amplification is not a mere enlargement of the sound. As an example, it’s as if I’m reading this page at this distance. So I see and understand. But if I bring this page very close, the outlines begin to blur. Closer and closer till they vanish, and I see nothing. At this point, “everyone has his own visions”. What is infinitely large, as discovered in physics, corresponds to what is infinitely small. A step beyond the threshold. That’s why I make myself smaller, “so that he can augment, I have to wane”. It’s the conscious “self” that needs to get smaller. The emptying of the “I”, the abrogation of subject, and so of history. I refuse to be in history. I stepped out of thought.
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Art has always been bourgeois, consolatory, idiotic, stupid, it has been especially blathering, whorish and pandering. Art has to be incommunicable. Art has only to overcome itself. That’s why it’s up to us, once we get outside ourselves, to become masterworks. Exit modality to reach the place where modality ceases to be. I can only try to explain my discomfort. I can’t engage with what’s real, what’s obvious, what’s rational. The darkness. Turning off the lights. I even hate symbolism as an artistic language. Poetry is shit. We’re still within words, trying to find a way and unable to come out. I have found in myself a desert, and I speak to the desert who’s the other, and not to someone else’s desert. I possess absence. That’s all. I am being honest because I am not myself.
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Universe is one, one only. The pluriverse… is. One can’t say the pluriverse is “what’s left”. The universe is just a tiny, tiny sliver of pluriverse.
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6 of Carmelo Bene’s 8 films
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Nostra signora dei turchi (Our Lady of the Turks) (1968)
‘Our Lady of the Turks is a film that is hard to categorize. Then again Carmelo Bene’s films are hard to define. Often beautiful, The film starts off as a sort of mocumentary about Ontranto, Italy. This is where the Turks tried to invade 100 years before; killing the Saracens. Then we are treated to Bene in front of the camera in a series of bizarre, surreal images and comical mishaps. Bene’s character is taunted by the Madonna. Wherever he goes this beautiful virgin Mary is sure to follow, making his life a real headache. She is symbolic of man’s desire and dreams. This is a film where visuals overpower story. It is quite a journey with it’s bizarre experimental style, but altogether it’s breathtaking.’ — IMDb
Excerpt
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Capricci (1969)
‘Bene’s second film, is, like its predecessor NOSTRA SIGNORELLA DEI TURCHI, a hallucinatory, non-linear, and ultimately apocalyptic look at life in “modern” Italy. CAPRICCI has no “story” to speak of, just a series of surreal vignettes. It begins with a dissatisfied Communist (played by Bene himself) getting into a dual with a superior; they fight with, appropriately enough, a hammer and a sickle. An old man lies in bed beside an alluring naked women; making noisy rasping sounds, he tries to have sex with her (and has about as much success as Bene did in NOSTRA SIGNORELLA DIE TURCHI, where he tried to screw wearing a suit of armor!). Bene and a lady companion make out furiously in the back of a smashed-up car. Bene’s pictorial sense is so striking he gets away with an approach that most Hollywood directors would love to fall back on (but can’t). Add to that a preference (evident in all his films) for sentimental arias and you’ve got one bizarrely impressionistic film, one that must simply be experienced rather than “understood.”’ — fright.com
Excerpt
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the entirety
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Don Giovanni (1970)
‘The third Bene film, Don Giovanni (1971), is taken from a story by 19th century author and dandy Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, Le plus bel amour de Don Juan. Bene’s films are critical explorations of the texts they are based on. He operates by returning these stories to a sort of primordial dramatic and intellectual state of chaos where ideas, narratives and characters struggle to come into being. As Deleuze pointed out, Bene is concerned not with beginnings or endings, but with the middle, an engagement with a perpetual becoming, a world of constantly shifting potentiality. He achieves this by questioning and throwing off balance every aspect of his films. The frequently hysterical performances of his actors – or ‘actorial machines’ – are caricatures amplified to the level of the grotesque. Rather than playing characters, the actors become stylised embodiments of some of their defining characteristics, shrieking, slobbering, whispering and drooling their way through a series of events that resemble variations on certain themes or gestures rather than a developing narrative.’ — Senses of Cinema
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Salomè (1972)
‘The opening scenes of Bene’s claustrophobic and dreamlike 1972 Italian adaptation warn the viewer that this is going to be a strange ride. Immediately after the film starts a number of strange images appear including an animated camel passing through a needle and a bejewelled and glittering woman swimming in pitch black water. The whole film is a contrast of colours with the majority of the actors – those who are wearing clothes anyway – entirely clad in spiky neon robes and jewels and all of what constitutes the action (except the final scene) taking place on what appears to be an island floating in some kind of black lake illuminated by a mysterious light source that refuses to stay in one place. These violent colours assault the eyes as super-fast cuts jump the camera from one person to another and the disorientation is increased by the rapid overlapping conversations in stage whispers that accompany this movement.’ — Suite 101
Excerpt
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Un Amleto di meno (One Hamlet Less) (1973)
‘Bene described his films as “music for the eyes” put together with a “surgical indiscipline of montage”. He constantly strives for a glorious visual excessiveness, with unusual camera angles, shifts between black and white and colour, interesting superimpositions and either overtly theatrical – as in One Hamlet Less – or otherwise expressionistically employed settings. This anti-naturalistic approach is further heightened by the asynchronous use of sound, which incorporates heavily amplified sounds such as breathing and coughing, shouted or stammered dialogue and sudden bursts of mainly classical music, most commonly opera. If Bene’s cinema is one of constant becoming, of repetition and incompletion, perhaps the most common recurring theme in his scenes is frustration. Yet the films that comprise his self described “cinematic parenthesis” are seldom screened or written about, especially in the English-speaking world. For a director whose work matches the visual power and representational complexity of Kenneth Anger or Derek Jarman’s best work, this a particularly unfortunate oversight.’ — Senses of Cinema
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the entirety
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In-vulnerabilità d’Achille (1997)
‘Why did Carmelo Bene specifically choose Achilles as the last personality with which to confront himself? Is it possible to identify in the «progetto-ricerca Achilleide»? – a project that encompasses more than a decade of Bene’s opus – his testament? These are the questions that animate and direct the hereby study that attempts to carry out a global reconnaissance of the project, confronted by its intermedial nature. The primary subject of interest is Pentesilea. Ovvero della Vulnerabile invunerabilità e necrofilia in Achille, a text that represents Bene’s poetry debut. The object of analysis is not merely this specific literary work, but also the “pre-texts” which constitute its skeleton: Homer, Statius, Kleist. A rereading of these classics in the light of later Bene’s work, in an attempt to specify the reasons behind a choice. Therefore a reconstruction of the voicing of the text – that is already “aural poetry” by itself – is proposed, passing through various “moments” of the «progetto-ricerca», inspecting all the available reviews, critical texts, and testimonies. There is particular attention given to the «spettacolo-sconcerto» from the year 2000, last of Bene’s opus, a conclusive desertion from the scene in an encounter with the absolute musicality of silence.’ — Niccolò Buttigliero
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the entirety
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p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Cool, I’m happy you like his work. I find it really irresistible. Your wifi managed to eek it through. Well, obviously. My uneducated guess is that home wifi issues would get old very quickly. But I love the spirit behind your daydream. Amazing about that box of childhood goodies. I have literally zero memory of my childhood bedroom and what was in it. My teenaged bedroom with its posters and disguised drug paraphernalia and piles of French novels, no problem. But earlier? Nothing. Strange. I must have been a minimalist as a kid. ** _Black_Acrylic, Wonderful about your friend Morgan! She must be awfully cool. Thank you so much for alerting her! ** Malik, Yes, that’s the book! I do highly recommend ‘Negrophobia’ if you’re in a fiction reading mood. It’s brilliant. True, such a tireless and visionary artist, that Bakshi. ‘Wizards’! I haven’t watched that since forever. I’m going to cue that up. Thanks, pal, and very bon day to you. ** Bill, That splattered construction paper piece is so great. If I could have one of Tom’s pieces, I think would be it. How great about the Yasunao Tone piece. He’s so incredible, and his very late work is as incredible as his earlier work if not even more so, I think. There’s a mind-blowing video out there somewhere of him performing at Cafe Ono very late in his life, and it’s astounding. ** kenley, Hi. Mutual fans is the best! Ok, the guitarist. My guess was totally wild. I’m sure the bespectacled guitarist is the kingpin. Do your bands ever play together. I’m imagining you guys with all lights on juxtaposed with his band’s heavy atmospherics could be quite exciting and flattering to you both. It was very cool to be able to clearly see your audience members exploding. Oh, as a writer, you don’t really get any say in the presentation. You just show up, and they show you the set-up — usually just a spotlit lectern, and then you do your thing. Simple is okay for me. The only thing I won’t do is read with music playing. Big no on that, but projections or whatever are fine. Do let me know if any Searing gigs in my general hood get cemented. Even a tourist visa gives you Schengen travel. Unless you mean some kind of special travel. It’s really easy. They rarely even look at your passport. ** Hugo, Such a beautiful description of Alice’s work. Alice is lucky to have you as an insider/intoner. Mm, yeah, in a way I guess the blog is like keeping a journal, although I’m pretty discrete about my actual life. But, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. ** Eric C., Here’s hoping the film shows near you. We’re working on midwest screenings right now. It’s going to show in Iowa, but I doubt that’s near you. And maybe Cleveland. So far. The ICE stuff going on around is just so nightmarish. Great that you’re doing what you can to fight it with your presence. The only good thing about all of that is what you said — people actually uniting for a cause that’s bigger than the personal. I have to think the unifying will have to help kill off the monsters, but I guess we’ll see. I will search Drone Not Drones on bandcamp. How totally interesting. Wow, thanks. If you get in the area of Paris on your trip, do let me know so we can meet up, if you like. ** Lucas, I saw your email. I’ll open it in a bit and get back to you. Thank you so much, pal! Like I said, I got so sick recently, and I never get sick, so that shit is happening out there. I hope the doctor starts fixing it. ** Måns BT, Oh, cool, happy you like his work. It does have a scariness, sure, that makes sense. Shit, Moodysson is pro-Israel? God, that does throw a wrench into the works. But I should make the post anyway and let what happens happen, so I will. But that’s a really boring, gross provocation on his part. Ok, I’ll use those release clues to help find ‘Thriller’ if possible. Awesome that you and your friend are making those works. Excited to hopefully see the results. Getting stuff out there? Hm, well, with short films you’re kind of stuck trying to get them into festivals and screening them probably with other shorts. Photos … social media and TikTok and all of that, and gallery showings if you want to get ambitious enough because that can be a toughy. Just make them and believe in them and dedicate yourself to people seeing them and the paths will appear. That’s my policy, I guess. xo. ** Jeff J, Welcome back, and thanks. TF used to show at Hudson’s great Feature gallery, and I saw most of his early works there. And they appear in museums and stuff. And I did a long interview with him for a big book on his work that Phaeton put out, and I saw a bunch of his work around that. I think this weekend could work for a Zoom if that suits. ** Steeqhen, The Granary Theater, yes, that rings the bell. Luck with the Library/CV of course. I don’t know where Logan is off the top of my head, but southern Utah is one of the most beautiful areas on the face of the earth, so you might have had a helluva of a view and playground if nothing else. ** HaRpEr //, The thing with editing is to not make snap judgements and give yourself time to try rejecting and embracing the possible decisions before you decide. I love editing, but you have to fight off the personal stuff. I think John is right as long as you think the decision through and don’t just lop things off on a whim. ** Laura, Yeah, making his things on tightrope, it feels that way. I thought ‘Adolescence’ was quite impressive. The single shot thing is kind of incredible just on a technical level. And it’s gotten boring to say so, but that young actor is really good in it. I think assuming the new script works out and there would then be three narrative film scripts, publishing them together could be a possibility. Happy Wednesday to you (too)! ** Right. Carmelo Bene was kind of a big deal in Italy, as far as I can tell, but his work seems to be barely known outside of Italy, and it’s curious work, so I thought I would give you guys a look at it. See you tomorrow.
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