Carmelo Bene

Open details →

Open details →

Approximately 15 hours of footage (contained on 28 tapes) for a television adaptation of Carmelo Bene's play "Otello o la deficienza della donna," produced by RAI in 1979 but only edited in 2002. The rushes were first broadcast in their entirety on RAI 3 in 2023.

Open details →

Open details →

Open details →

Video registration of Carmelo Bene's play 'Lorenzaccio, al di là di de Musset e Benedetto Varchi', performed in Florence in 1986.

Open details →

A montage dedicated to friends, actors and companions who have passed away over the years: from Francesco Tirone to Paviglianiti, two leading figures in the famous Cinico TV series, from Tommaso Lauria to Carmelo Bene. This journey down memory lane (and through pain), created especially for Fuori Orario, was broadcast on the night of Ferragosto.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Actor, poet and playwright Carmelo Bene offers a reading of excerpts from the collection of literary compositions called Canti Orfici by poet Dino Campana.

Open details →

A visit to the Rotoli cemetery in Palermo, while film director Carmelo Bene reads a fragment of Antonio Pizzuto's book "Signorina Rosina".

Open details →

Open details →

Rome, December 12th - 15th 1990.

Open details →

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).

Open details →

Recording by Rai Milan of Adelchi staged by Carmelo Bene at the Teatro Lirico in Milan in 1984, with the Rai orchestra and choir for the bicentenary of Alessandro Manzoni's birth. Broadcast only once on Rai 2 on September 9, 1985.

Open details →

Videotape produced by Ferruccio Marotti for Roma's University theatre students. A presentation of Carmelo Bene's "Performative matrix": not a performance yet, but it's not just text or ideas. Essentially, a work-in-progress on his Macbeth.

Open details →

Drama by Lord George Byron, music by Robert Schumann. Filmed at Teatro Comunale di Bologna, 1979.

Open details →

Carmelo Bene reads poems by Dino Campana

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Realized in 1980 for Rai 2, it recalls the main phases in the life of Giorgio Colli.

Open details →

An experimental video variation on Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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

Open details →

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.

Open details →

In this a baroque and claustrophobic take on Mozart’s opera of the same name, Don Giovanni tries to seduce a girl who is manically searching for Christian icons. Loosely based on Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's short story "The Greatest Love of Don Juan".

Open details →

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...

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Artists and poets meet in a dreamlike space between walks and performances.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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).

Open details →

Drama by Lord George Byron, music by Robert Schumann. Filmed at Teatro Comunale di Bologna, 1979.

Open details →

An experimental video variation on Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

In this a baroque and claustrophobic take on Mozart’s opera of the same name, Don Giovanni tries to seduce a girl who is manically searching for Christian icons. Loosely based on Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's short story "The Greatest Love of Don Juan".

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →