Carmelo Bene

Carmelo Bene
Born	(1937-09-01)1 September 1937 Campi Salentina, Italy
Died	16 March 2002(2002-03-16) (aged 64) Rome, Italy
Occupation(s)	Actor, theater director, writer, film director, screenwriter
Years active	1967-2002

Carmelo Bene (1 September 1937 – 16 March 2002) was an Italian actor, poet, film director and screenwriter.

Life

No doubt all over the Western world, he is considered the greatest actor of multifaceted throughout the twentieth century. Born in the deep Salento in the midst of a society that is still backward and bigoted, Carmelo Bene immediately began to attend theater school, beginning with his first theatrical performance in 1959. From then on Carmelo Bene recite by staging various shows gender ambiguous and elusive, although the characters are famous figures as Caligula, Hamlet or Othello. In fact, Carmelo Bene was very fond of the tragedies of Shakespeare and his characters, and setting them rimodificandoli in a very personal way, depriving them of all their classical cultural and completeness. Precisely because of its themes elusive and extremely complex for its time and also for ours Carmelo Bene was opposed by the lower and middle classes of Italy and also by critics more cultured.
In 1967, Carmelo Bene debut in the film thanks to his friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, which makes him act in his film Oedipus Rex, based on the tragedy by Sophocles. The following year, Carmelo Bene direct and interpret his masterpiece: Our Lady of the Turks, who won the second prize at the International Film Festival of Venice. In the following years up to 1973 Carmelo Bene has shot films based on his plays, which nevertheless are of great importance to the style highly complex and personal, as the work is Salomé by Oscar Wilde or Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. In the following years Carmelo Bene, loved by critics and the public educated in Italy and France, continued to compose short stories and plays, until his death of a heart attack in 2002.

Philosphy of Carmelo Bene

We can say that the philosophy that Carmelo Bene uses as the theme of his work is truly unique. He states in any context, even in interviews that were made in real life, it was nothing and had never been born. What Carmelo Bene said and repeated over and over again is the fact that he is a desert that speaks to another desert (the world, society, humanity, the ontology in general), who will never meet for eternity. To strengthen his argument that might seem trivial, Carmelo Bene (man of exceptional culture) use quotes from the greatest philosophers such as Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, speaking also of the poems of Baudelaire and Leopardi. Because of his stubbornness to declare what he thinks, often in various interviews Carmelo Bene silences his critics, who often are amazed at speechless in front of so much science. Carmelo Bene also loved the theater Russian and German, including works of Chekhov.
In his books and especially in his films includes the theme of the impotence of the anonymous protagonist (also played by him), who wants to escape from society and from the existence, in that he considers repugnant and repulsive. For example, in Our Lady of the Turks, Carmelo Bene preaches the philosophy of being an "idiot", who tries affonnasamente the way to eternal sank into loneliness and how to contemplate her in that state. However, this is impossible for a living and facing the society he would appear as a simple and poor crowds.

Macchina attoriale (Actorial machine)

The means of communication by Carmelo Bene in the theater is very distinct from all others, as Good itself called it "machination actor." The actor reciting automatically becomes the character and with the exaggerated amplification of his voice will appeal to an audience that no longer exists, the theater was almost empty. Maintaining this balance, all of the plays of Carmelo Bene are very different from any other theatrical script, even if it is read from the paper.

Literature

In 1979 he wrote, in collaboration with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the essay "Superpositions". In 1984 his play Adelchi was published.

Selected filmography

• Oedipus Rex, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967)
• Nostra Signora dei Turchi - Our Lady of the Turks, Venice Film Festival Special Jury Prize (1968), director and actor
• Capricci (1969), director and actor
• Don Giovanni (1971), director and actor
• Salomè (1972), director and actor
• One Hamlet Less (1973), director and actor

References

• Umberto Artioli - Carmelo Bene, Un dio assente. Monologo a due voci, Antonio Attisani and Marco Dotti eds., Medusa, Milan, 2006. ISBN 88-7698-051-2

External links

• Carmelo Bene at IMDb