Carmelo Bene
Also Known As: not available
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
Department: Acting
Place of Birth: Campi Salentina, Lecce, Italia
Birthday: September 03, 1937
Deathday: March 16, 2002
Adult: No
Gender: Male
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Known For:
Bis
Overview: In 1966, Bene presented The Pink and the Black, his successful theatrical adaptation of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ lurid Gothic novel from 1796. Experimental filmmaker Paolo Brunatto filmed some of the play’s rehearsals in a Rome apartment (also frequented also by the Living Theatre). Bene's artistry is encapsulated in one sentence: “One cannot continue to prostitute the idea of theatre, which stands only for a magical, brutal link with reality."
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1966-01-01
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Oedipus Rex
Overview: 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 Edipo (Oedipus), and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Edipo 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…
Genres: Drama
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1967-09-07
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Riccardo III
Overview: 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.
Genres: Comedy TV Movie
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1981-12-07
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Our Lady of the Turks
Overview: 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.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1968-09-03
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Carmelo Bene, il canto d'amore di Alfred J. Prufrock
Overview: Carmelo Bene read a text by T. S. Eliot
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1967-07-10
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La poesia dimenticata
Overview: Carmelo Bene reads poems by Dino Campana
Genres: TV Movie
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1982-01-01
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Don Giovanni
Overview: Spectacular Italian comedy-drama directed by Carmelo Bene. The narrative follows how Don Giovanni tries to seduce a young woman who is manically searching for Christian icons. The film is loosely based on Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's short story "The Greatest Love of Don Juan", from the collection “Les Diaboliques”. The film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival.
Genres: Romance Drama
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1970-05-14
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Necropolis
Overview: 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.
Genres: Fantasy Horror
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1970-10-31
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Catch As Catch Can
Overview: Bob is a successful actor, but his career gets doomed by a strange phenomenon: the animal kingdom is taking on him!
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1967-10-26
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Red Hot Shot
Overview: 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...
Genres: Crime
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1970-03-31
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L'Adelchi di Alessandro Manzoni in forma di concerto
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Genres: Music TV Movie
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1985-09-09
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Otello o la deficienza della donna
Overview: Produced by RAI and filmed in the Turin studios in 1979 but edited years later, in 2001-2002, this is the staging for TV of Carmelo Bene's play of the same name. One of his last works, it premiered in 2002, on March 18, immediately after his death, at the Teatro Argentina in Rome.
Genres: Action
Original Language: it
Release Date: 2002-03-18
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Capricci
Overview: 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.
Genres: Drama Comedy Romance
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1969-11-15
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Tre nel mille
Overview: 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
Genres: History Drama Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1971-03-06
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Modi di vivere - Giorgio Colli. Una conoscenza per cambiare la vita
Overview: Realized in 1980 for Rai 2, it recalls the main phases in the life of Giorgio Colli.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1980-01-01
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Hermitage
Overview: 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.
Genres: Drama Romance
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1968-01-01
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Salomé
Overview: 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.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1972-10-20
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The Last Days of Humanity
Overview: The panorama of human affairs encounters the “man with a movie camera”. His playground has no boundaries, his curiosity no limits. Characters, situations and places pitch camp in the life of a humanity that is at once the viewer and the thing viewed. But what are the last days of this humanity? Have they already passed? Are they now or still to come?
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: it
Release Date: 2023-05-08
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BENE! Vita di Carmelo, la macchina attoriale
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Genres: Documentary
Original Language: it
Release Date: 2022-12-20
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One Hamlet Less
Overview: 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.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1973-11-21
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Pinocchio, ovvero lo spettacolo della Provvidenza
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Genres: Drama
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1999-05-29
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Amleto di Carmelo Bene (da Shakespeare a Laforgue)
Overview: An experimental video variation on Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Genres: TV Movie Drama
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1978-04-21
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Manfred, versione per concerto in forma di oratorio
Overview: Drama by Lord George Byron, music by Robert Schumann. Filmed at Teatro Comunale di Bologna, 1979.
Genres: Music
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1983-09-12
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Macbeth Horror Suite
Overview: 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.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1997-04-05
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Bene! Quattro diversi modi di morire in versi: Majakovskij-Blok-Esènin-Pasternak
Overview: Performance shot in 1977, in which emblematic actor Carmelo Bene, in the charming reconstruction of the ruins of a theater on fire accompanied by the disturbing notes of Vittorio Gelmetti, reads four poems of the Twentieth Century russian poets Vladimir Majakovskij, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Blok and Sergej Esènin.
Genres: TV Movie
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1977-10-27
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In-vulnerabilità d'Achille (tra Sciro e Ilio)
Overview: One of the last TV performances by Carmelo Bene, from Publio Papinio Stazio and Henrich Von Kleist, mixing the myth of the amazon Pentesilea with the invulnerability of the greek hero Achilles. Bene performs alone in a stage filled with mannequins, acting in playback.
Genres: TV Movie
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1997-01-01
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Hommelette for Hamlet, operetta inqualificabile (da J. Laforgue)
Overview: 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).
Genres: Drama
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1990-11-25
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Umano non umano
Overview: Artists and poets meet in a dreamlike space between walks and performances.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1969-05-07
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Ventriloquio
Overview: Adapted from the ninth chapter of the novel "Controcorrente" (1884) by Joris Karl Huysmans. Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes 19th-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1973-05-01
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Cos'è il teatro?!
Overview: Rome, December 12th - 15th 1990.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1990-12-12
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Ai Rotoli
Overview: A visit to the Rotoli cemetery in Palermo, while film director Carmelo Bene reads a fragment of Antonio Pizzuto's book "Signorina Rosina".
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1996-01-01
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Lorenzaccio, al di là di de Musset e Benedetto Varchi
Overview: Video registration of Carmelo Bene's play 'Lorenzaccio, al di là di de Musset e Benedetto Varchi', performed in Florence in 1986.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2003-09-01
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Voce dei Canti
Overview: On the occasion of the bicentenary of the birth, Carmelo Bene returns to the verses of the poet from Recanati. In this film the most beautiful poems by Giacomo Leopardi (La Ginestra, Il Canto Notturno, Le Ricordanze, A Silvia, L'Infinito ...), but also some passages from the Moral Operettas, as well as the unfinished Project for a hymn at Ahrimane, follow one another with deep and moving simplicity, with a quiet immediacy that causes the void of every other voice: therefore the listenere is ensnared in the pauses, bewitched by the unexpected descents of silence. The voice assumes a dark and ancestral tone in which the words seem to find their original nuances.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1998-12-01
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Carmelo nei Canti Orfici
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Genres: No genres available
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1996-08-01
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Un'ora prima di Amleto, più Pinocchio
Overview: Backstage short documentary on Carmelo Bene’s theatre works Amleto and Pinocchio.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1965-01-01
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Claro
Overview: 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.
Genres: Drama Documentary
Original Language: it
Release Date: 1975-11-20
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Tracce di Bene
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Genres: Documentary
Original Language: it
Release Date: 2017-10-26
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