Carmelo Bene

  • Carmelo Bene – Capricci (1969)

    1961-1970ArthouseCarmelo BeneExperimentalItaly

    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.Read More »

  • Carmelo Bene – Don Giovanni (1970)

    1961-1970Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtArthouseCarmelo BeneExperimentalItaly

    Synopsis:
    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.Read More »

  • Carmelo Bene – Salome (1972)

    1971-1980Carmelo BeneExperimentalItalyPerformance

    Synopsis:
    A psychedelic re-telling of the biblical story. 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. The story is told in a bizarre way of fast cuts, repetitive dialogue and extreme satire.Read More »

  • Mario Schifano – Umano non umano AKA Human, Not Human (1972)

    1971-1980DocumentaryItalyMario Schifano

    Human not human is not only the best Italian “experimental” film of the 60’s, but also one of the richest and most involving documents of “cinema of protest”. – Lino Miccichè

    Schifano’s cinema is, as his paintings, spontaneous and gesture-based, quickly objectifying the world, and at the same time deeply thougth-out, and progresses by building up pictures and sounds.
    Dissolves and pulsing images of television broadcasts plunge us in a completely unstable state of vision, allowing the author to avoid choosing, including in the same space different visions and distant, fragmentary, expanded timeframes.
    If anything, the choice is left to the viewer and, from this point of view, “Human not human” becomes almost an interactive film, one that needs to be mentally rebuilt.Read More »

  • Carmelo Bene – Nostra signora dei turchi AKA Our Lady of the Turks (1968)

    1961-1970Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtCarmelo BeneCultExperimentalItaly

    Synopsis:
    A man (Carmelo Bene) can not bear to be part of society. He considers himself a “jerk” and so invents its own philosophy, which involves the destruction of his land of Puglia where all citizens are devoted to the Catholic religion. However, the man can not destroy the belief of the pilgrims of Salento, because a woman would prevent that. It is an unknown “Santa Margherita”, which tries to divert man from his weird and impossible philosophy. Successive scenes of the film show various situations unreal and dream in which the two protagonists try to obtain the best one on the other. After a blasphemous dialogue between monks, the man includes his whole philosophy in a Moorish building. In fact, this seems to have been the scene of the massacre of the famous 800 Martyrs of Otranto, which are considered by the scetic man the absolute death of Christianity.Read More »

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