Carmelo Bene
Acting
Biography
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. Bene 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. 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. – David Pendleton
Known For
In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Oedipus, and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Oedipus that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he flees Corinth and his supposed parents - only to get into a fight and kill an older man on the road…
Oedipus Rex
Bob is a successful actor, but his career gets doomed by a strange phenomenon: the animal kingdom is taking on him!
Catch As Catch Can
Salome is the daughter of the second wife of King Herod. The King is infatuated with her and, after she fails to seduce the prophet John The Baptist, she dances for the King in order to ask for his execution.
Salomé
Frank was removed from an investigation into Mac Brown, the owner of a pharmaceutical company, who was suspected of drug trafficking and illegal experiments on teenagers. When Brown is murdered, Frank is called to investigate...
Red Hot Shot
Frankenstein's monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa.
Necropolis
A few days after the arrival of the year 1000, bearer of great misfortune according to the Prophets, the cavalryman Fortunato and two soldiers, Pannocchia and Carestia, travel through Italy in the midst of numerous adventures: The prophetic year is marked only by the discovery on the part of the cavalryman of his wife's betrayal
Tre nel mille
After a fight in their apartment, the story of a writer and a painter are divided. The writer is dedicated with his partner Manon to provoke continuous accidents in a field in which car carcasses abound. The painter is recruited to kill, through a poisoned picture, the old Arden to allow the latter's wife, Alice to live with her lover Mosbie.
Capricci
Riccardo III is a theatre play staged in 1977 and also edited for television and aired in 1981, which Carmelo Bene dedicated to his friend Gilles Deleuze, who wrote a book about it before even seeing it. Bene strips down the original Shakespeare play to the core, rejecting plot and characters, leaving on stage only Riccardo III and his ghosts, the female characters. The TV version is characterized by an exstensive use of close-ups and strong light contrast.
Riccardo III
In the words of the director, a movie about 'the colonizers in the view of the colonized', the movie presents a series of disconnected happenings throughout Europe and Brazil emphasizing the perception of human life as trance-like experiences and thus offering a view of the human history as a connection of symbolic behavior.
Claro
Artists and poets meet in a dreamlike space between walks and performances.
Umano Non Umano
To the protagonist, an intellectual so feverish that he seems pathologically unrecoverable, a confused memory resurfaces of a massacre carried out by the Turks in Otranto. Immersing himself in one of the victims, in the unconscious desire to eviscerate himself, a woman appears to him, Margherita, who, in the guise of Santa Maria d'Otranto, treats him with compassionate love. In the hallucinating succession of memories intertwined with historical events, the protagonist finds himself in contact with his environment, his land, his country.
Our Lady of the Turks
No description available.
BENE! Vita di Carmelo, la macchina attoriale
An experimental video variation on Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Amleto di Carmelo Bene (da Shakespeare a Laforgue)
No description available.
La parte maledetta. Viaggio ai confini del teatro - Carmelo Bene
A TV movie variation on Shakespeare's Hamlet. The movie is a part of Carmelo Bene's multi-medial project on Hamlet, also including the theatrical movie "Un Amleto di meno", a stage drama and the experimental video "Amleto di Carmelo Bene (Da Shakespeare a Laforgue).
Hommelette for Hamlet, operetta inqualificabile (da J. Laforgue)
No description available.
Carmelo Bene: Uno contro tutti
Hermitage, defined by Bene as "a rehearsal for lenses", beyond any literal rendition - its narrative trace comes from one of his anti-novels, Credito Italiano V.E.R.D.I - displays his immediate attitude to thinking a cinematic language completely based on actor's movements and actions, and more specifically, on his presence and his schemes. Camouflaged or naked, still or moving, his body seems to play and be played at the same time, shifted by objective and subjective tensions, both metaphorically and visually speaking.
Hermitage
The Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, is little interested in family affairs and the fate of the kingdom, and not at all attracted by a doll-like Ophelia sucking his finger. Annoyed by his friend Horatio, who tells him of the apparition of his father's spectre that would like to drive him to revenge, and by Polonius, Ophelia's father, who psychoanalyses him by explaining the Oedipus complex, he imagines escaping to Paris with Kate, the leading actress of the company performing in Elsinore, to become a playwright.
One Hamlet Less
No description available.
Tracce di Bene
Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders his king and takes the throne for himself.