BENE! Vita di Carmelo, la macchina attoriale

Hermitage

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.

Necropolis

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.

Bene! Quattro diversi modi di morire in versi: Majakovskij-Blok-Esènin-Pasternak

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.