Contesting cinema: a Carmelo Bene project.

1. I would like to thank the following people for their assistance in preparing this essay: Sean Carle, Daniel Hendrickson, David Pendleton, and Erika Tasini.

In 1968, after a decade as one of the most important figures in Italy's experimental theater scene, Carmelo Bene, performer, director, and playwright, abandoned the stage in order to focus on filmmaking. When asked why he turned to cinema, Bene replied, "Why not? If you've been eating for three years, you can drink one day; that's what cinema is for me." (1) Over the next five years, Bene, working outside traditional film production and distribution networks, produced five feature films and two shorts. His features--Nostra Signora dei Turchi (Our Lady of the Turks), 1968; Capricci, 1969; Don Giovanni, 1971; Salome, 1972; and Un Amleto di meno (One Less Hamlet) 1973-played at Cannes and other international film festivals. Bene's almost single-handed efforts at producing, directing, writing, decorating, and performing in his films demanded an intense level of productivity that he eventually found difficult to maintain. In 1973, after making what many consider to be his most accomplished film, Un Amleto di meno, Bene abandoned the cinema just as quickly as he had taken it up. When asked why he returned to the theater, Bene answered, "To relax. The way I make cinema is extremely exhausting." (2)

Indeed, the technical virtuosity and visual splendor of Bene's films immediately garnered praise from critics. After Nostra Signora received a special jury's prize at the Venice film festival, one Italian film critic, for example, noted that "in Italy, we have a genius. Do we deserve him?" (3) For Henri Langlois of the Cinematheque Francaise as well, Bene was a "genius" who offered tasty but challenging pleasures.

I can't think of Carmelo Bene's work without thinking of Sicilian torte, caramel, pistachio, almonds, honey and candied fruit...[his films] are filled with stones just as Sicilian tortes are filled with candied fruit. Some break your teeth, others are taken hold of and transformed into rubies." (4)

In a recent special issue of Cahiers du Cinema that looks back on "Cinema 1968," critic Thierry Lounas has suggested that Bene's five films "trace one of the most dazzling and radical trajectories in modern cinema." (5)

Nevertheless, despite few exceptions, Bene's films have received little critical attention and only occasional screenings since their period of production. The most extensive discussion of his work written in English is still Amos Vogel's 1974 book, Film as a Subversive Art. Placing Bene within a category he calls, "Expressionism: Cinema of Unrest," Vogel briefly praises three films, Nostra Signora, Capricci, and Don Giovanni, for their "visual density," "black humor," and "grotesque burlesque." (6) In France, where Bene has continued to perform theatrically, his work has received slightly more commentary. Most significantly, Gilles Deleuze has written an extended essay on Bene's theater, "One Manifesto Less," that was published, together with Bene's script for Richard III, in a volume titled, Superpositions. (7) Recently, Bene's films have screened in festivals in Paris and in Montreal.

In the following article, I will provide a brief introduction to Bene's theater and films and to his critical project of "contestation." I do so primarily with the aim of attracting further attention to this unique body of work. For Bene's films, which attest to the achievements of past cinematic experimentation, also resonate with some of the most interesting experimental work in recent years.

Contesting Theater

Carmelo Bene was born in 1937 to a middle class family in a seaside city in the region of Puglia in southern Italy. He first gained attention in the Italian theater world in the late 1950s, most notably through his unusual adaptation and performance of Camus' Caligula in 1959. Founding his own theater company in 1961, Bene went on to create a scandal in the Italian art world with radical performances and stage productions in caves and small theaters around Rome. For Pier Paolo Pasolini, who cast Bene as Creon in the former's 1968 film, Oedipus Rex, Bene's theater was "autonomous and original." It was, according to Pasolini, the only bright spot in an experimental theater scene that had "succeeded in becoming equally as repulsive as the traditional theater." (8)

Throughout the 1960s, Bene's unlicensed performances were sometimes closed by the police. His reputation as a provocateur derived in no small part from an incident that took place during his 1963 production of Christ 63. At one moment during this piece, which was predominantly improvised, an Argentinean performer began a strip-tease, and, when nude, proceeded to urinate on stage and on the front row of the audience where the Argentinean ambassador was seated. The scandal made headlines and caused legal and political problems for Bene, who bemoaned the fact that the public was now distracted from what was really the scandal about his theater, namely the experimental theatrical practices enacted on stage. (9)

As with his films, Bene's theater is marked by his involvement at every level of production: as writer, director, performer, and set and costume designer. Gilles Deleuze has commented at length on the "critical" nature of Bene's theater, a theater that is largely based on pre-existing material. For Deleuze, Bene's stage productions are critical essays that interrogate the material that is adapted or "amputated" for the stage. Bene's work based on Shakespeare, for example, is

not a question of "criticizing" Shakespeare, nor of a play within a play, nor of a parody, nor of a new version of a play, etc. CB proceeds in a more original manner. Suppose that he amputates one of the component parts of the original play. He subtracts something from the original. To be precise, he does not call his play on Hamlet one more Hamlet, but like Laforgue, "one less Hamlet." He does not proceed by addition, but by subtraction, by amputation. (10)

In Bene's Romeo and Juliet, for example, he "amputates" the character of Romeo in order to allow for new potentialities within the play to emerge, in this case, the character of Mercutio who takes on a newfound importance, a new life, in Bene's production.

If Bene's scripts emerge through amputation of existing material, his staging is similarly marked by an act of subtraction. As he puts it, his theater is a "taking away of the scene (against the cultural industry of mise en)." (11) To this end, objects or set pieces are not employed on stage in a traditional way, say in order to add to the naturalism of an action or a situation, but as "handicaps" that stand in the way between an actor and the accomplishment of a task. (12) Impeded from performing simple actions, Bene's actors, or "actorial machines" (13) as he calls them, no longer act but evoke. (14) The use of microphones and amplification further adds to the machinic, evocative quality of Bene's performers, whose voices now separated from human bodies, can achieve greater variety in pitch and intensity.

Bene's "taking away" of the scene means that his theater does not necessarily strive to communicate with the audience. "Communication," as he puts it, "is corruption." (15) The impossibility of communication in the theater is nicely exemplified by his 1966 stage production of Nostra Signora dei Turchi. Adapted from his own 1965 historical and semi-autobiographical novel, the stage production featured a wall, with windows, at the proscenium where a curtain would normally be. The audience thus could not hear anything unless the actors decided to open a window and speak directly to them. By depriving the audience of the ability to connect actions with words, Bene sought to replace the habit of communication in the theater with the "total impossibility of communication." (16) He thus did not lay traps only for his actors, but for the audience as well. By obstructing the conventional means of communication, Bene hoped to generate new possibilities for theatrical expression.

In this collision between that which I'm in the middle of saying and that which I'm in the middle of opposing to that which I'm in the middle of saying, a third thing arises which is the impossibility of theater, and hence the unrepresentable theater. (17)

Contesting Cinema

"While shooting, I contest myself, I contest my projects, their production and while doing that I contest everything, I contest the whole world." (18)

If Bene's contestation of theater challenged the primacy of spoken dialogue, his attack on cinematic communication was waged at the level of the image. Bene's films, distinguished by their aesthetic innovations and intelligent frivolity, are, as Deleuze notes, anything but "filmed theater." (19) Indeed, though continuing his project of contesting naturalist representation, Bene attended to cinema with a rigorous and thorough awareness of the specificites of the medium. Nostra Signora dei Turchi is a non-narrative series of reflections, with numerous shots from odd angles, of the cathedral at Otrante, and of the Saint Margherita, who the protagonist (Bene) attempts unsuccessfully to encounter. Capricci combines Manon and moments taken from the Elizabethan play, Arden of Feversham, in a series of suggestive sequences, most notably the interior scenes of an old man who is coughing and wheezing in bed with a naked young woman just out of reach beside him, and the exterior scenes of a series of car crashes in an open field. Salome, based on Oscar Wilde's play, takes place in a pool colorfully illuminated by black light, and decorated with day-glo, cardboard palm trees and sparkling, jeweled costumes. Bene's perverse and mesmerizing spectacle features a naked, bald Salome who emerges from the pool covered in jewels to confront a slobbering Herod with her lust for John the Baptist. Don Giovanni, based on the story, "Le plus bel amour de Don Juan," by the 19th century dandy Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly, is a kind of chamber piece in which a frustrated Don sits in a room contemplating a young girl who plucks the same note on her piano while she clutches a rosary. Un Amleto di meno weaves together Shakespeare, Jules Laforgue, and Freud in a striking visual display in which the characters' oversized, colorful costumes--suggestive of playing cards or pieces in a board game--are set off against a stark white, stagy background.

For Bene, challenging naturalist representation in cinema demanded that he contest the hegemony of the visual. All of his films feature an excessive number of shots--4500 in less than an hour for Salome--odd angles, frequent zooms, and superimpositions. Through this "surgical indiscipline of montage," (20) as he referred to it, Bene strategically attempted to saturate or exceed the visual image. "I make music for the eyes." (21) His soundtracks feature asynchronous sound; dialogue that is often whispered, declaimed, or stammered; excerpts from classical music and opera; and other heavily amplified sounds (breathing, wheezing, the slamming of doors, etc.). In Bene's films, in his "cinema as acoustic image" as he described it, (22) sound and voice are allowed to discover new expressive possibilities. As in his theater where amplification separated the voice from the performer's body, the intermingling of words, sounds, and noises on his soundtracks becomes, according to Erik Bullot, a kind of "sonorous prosthetic." (23) By challenging the relationship between sound and image then, Bene challenged as well the integrity of the body and, thus, the connection between actor and character.

Throughout his films, a performer no longer seems to represent a character, but instead appears to struggle with a role, staging, as it were, his/her own decomposition. In Salome for instance, Herodias seems engaged in a kind of struggle with a male servant as both characters speak the queen's dialogue. In other films, the sense of a character's decomposition is inscribed on the performer's body: the plaster encrusted faces of Don Giovanni and his lovers at the banquet or the mesmerizing images of Salome peeling the skin/make-up off of Herod's face as she demands the head of John the Baptist. These images, together with many others in which characters drool or sloppily let food fall out of their mouths (Herod's apple, Don Giovanni's chicken bones, pasta in Nostra Signora), further break down the integrity of the body. Dominique Noquez suggests that Nostra Signora offers neither a character nor a "persona" or mask/facade of a character. Instead, Bene reveals the body's "insides, stretched out, streaked with blood, slobbery, [and] ill-formed, like an interminable stream of vomit." (24)

The failure to get or to keep food in their mouths is part of a larger problem faced by the performers in Bene's films, namely their inability to complete an action that they begin. This inability manifests itself at every level of activity, from the execution of what is apparently a simple gesture to the accomplishment of a larger task. Indeed, if Bene's actorial machines evoke rather than act, it is in part because they contest the very gesture or action that they engage in. "You are in the middle of performing and at the moment when you perform you watch yourself performing...you watch your gestures, and in this very instant you perform a critical operation on yourself." (25) Perhaps the many shaking, hesitant gestures of Bene's characters are indicative of this critical operation on the self. We could cite for example, Don Giovanni's continually thwarted attempt to set down his teacup and saucer, his jiggling and spilling of the tea, or even the car crash sequence in Capricci, in which the "dead" bodies persist in repositioning themselves in order to appear more properly dead. (26) One of the most blatant, and notorious examples of the impossibility of a character to accomplish the task he has begun occurs in Salome. Christ, with hammer and nail, attempts to crucify himself, and succeeds in nailing down his two feet and one hand, only to be confronted with the impossibility of nailing down his final hand.

Condemned never to complete what they have begun, Bene's stuttering, stumbling, and drooling actorial machines remain tentatively in the middle. Deleuze emphasizes the importance of the middle for Bene. "What is interesting is never the way someone starts or finishes. The interesting thing is the middle, what happens on the way." (27) For Bene, contesting something then does not mean opposing it. Rather, it means engaging with a gesture or an action--with the elements of cinematic representation--in order to undo it. For Deleuze the political significance of Bene's work resides in this critical attention to the middle, to the possibilities that an anticipated action might instead lead us elsewhere. "It is in the middle where one finds the becoming, the movement, the velocity, the vortex. The middle is not the mean, but on the contrary an excess. It is by the middle that things push." (28)

One of the possibilities that Bene's cinema proposes is that heterosexual coupling should not be taken for granted. Indeed, his films abound with images suggesting the impossibility of heterosexual coupling. In Capricci, there is the sequence mentioned above in which a naked young woman lies asleep in bed next to a coughing old man. The man regards her with interest, but without the physical ability to move toward her. In Nostra Signora, a man in a suit of armor attempts to have sex with a naked woman, yet is unable to remove his metal outfit. Even Salome is denied her coupling with John the Baptist's head. Instead her desire is used as means of unmasking (literally) Herod's own discomfort with perverse sexuality. By turning heterosexual desire against itself, Bene's scenes of thwarted coupling become instead an interrogation of heterosexual male subjectivity. This is perhaps clearest in his "amputation" of the Don Juan legend.

In Don Giovanni, Bene, after Barbey d'Aurevilly, amputates the legend, so that the 1003 conquests of the don are reduced to one. (29) In this case, there is no more catalog, just a single woman and her daughter. The possibility of any kind of physical contact between Don Giovanni and the women, let alone any sexual coupling, is continually thwarted. The don sits in a chair, slobbering and leering at the young girl, a religious hysteric who is perched at the piano with her rosaries. The woman--alternately a mother figure and a maid--makes repeated efforts to approach and comfort the girl, but is unable to reach her. Instead, we see numerous images of the nude woman, reclining alone on her bed in postures that recall the female figure in the paintings of Titian, Velasquez, Botticelli, and Rembrandt. Denied his conquests, Bene's don is instead immobilized by the anti-sex hysteria of Catholicism and the unattainable, aestheticized female figure. According to Bene, Don Giovanni's conquest becomes his own downfall, a "swoon that undoes the illusion of any sex and of every relationship between the sexes." (30) By stripping Don Giovanni of any "donjuanism," he turns this legend of heterosexual male promiscuity into an interrogation of heterosexual male subjectivity.

This discussion of the failure of heterosexuality in Bene's films suggests something of the political implications of his work. It should not, however, mislead us into linking Bene's project of contestation to an ideological critique. As Giuseppe Bartolucci has noted, Bene's is not an "ethico-ideological" project, but a "technico-formal" one. (31) Bene does not set out to critique the institution of heterosexuality or the anti-sex hysteria of Catholicism. Rather, his "technico-formal" project of contesting the conventions of cinematic representation, of questioning the relationship between sound and image, actor and character, character and action, undoes the relationship between the sexes as well.

In this sense, Bene's films are not political cinema because they stage or represent preconstituted ideas or espouse political ideologies. Rather, his films, by deforming the process of representation, allow for new possibilities for conceiving of or even sensing the political. It is worth noting in this regard that Deleuze's often cited discussion of political and minority filmmaking in Cinema II: The Time-Image is inspired in part by Bene. Bene has said that he makes popular, ethnic theater, but that "it is the people who are missing." (32) Instead of attempting to represent an already existing people, Bene's work and that of the other minoritarian filmmakers discussed by Deleuze, attempt, through the systematic deformation of representation, to invent a people.

The extent of Bene's challenge to the elements of filmic representation escapes some critics who nostalgically praise (or is it condemn?) his work as a relic from a bygone period of experimentation. According to Erik Bullot, Bene's films fit in squarely with the end of the traditional avant-garde concern with form and with the end of any concerted theoretical challenge to cinematic signification. As he puts it, "today one could ask oneself why this questioning of form, this visualizing of the destruction of the sign, this insolent irony has so abruptly disappeared from the cinema, in favor of a massive return of narrative and its mastery, of psychology, of naturalism." (33) But, as I have argued, Bene's contestatory project did not involve merely questioning cinematic form. Furthermore, by acknowledging that cinematic experimentation can be more than just a questioning of form, and can, as is the case with Bene, involve an attack on performance, on the body as well, we might not need to be so nostalgic after all.

While Bullot suggests that Bene's work solidly marks the end of a period in experimental cinema, I propose instead that it hesitantly, sloppily indicates the middle. For Bene's "acoustic images" resonate with many that have come before and after his "cinematographic parenthesis," as he has recently described it. (34) There are indeed many affinities between Bene's theatricalized cinema and a performance-based tradition of experimental filmmaking, a tradition that links cinematic experimentation to a reinvention of the body. This tradition, which includes the work of the American underground, continues after the early 1970s to include some of the most interesting experimental work in recent years. I'm thinking particularly about the `70s feminist work of Ulrike Ottinger and Yvonne Rainer, the `80s work of the Black British film coops and other postcolonial filmmakers, the experimental films and videos of AIDS Activists, and the works of Derek Jarman and others associated with recent queer cinema. (35) What aligns this disparate group of films and filmmakers with Bene is a conviction that a political cinema must challenge the means of representation itself at every moment of its realization. This cinema must contest itself, its projects, their production, the entire world.

Far from seeming dated, from having its relevance restricted to an earlier time period, Bene's contestatory cinema instead speaks to the concerns of the present. Indeed, incorporating Bene's films into our history of recent cinematic experimentation will not only help provide a more complete picture of this history, but will also enable us to reconceive the possibilities for cinematic experimentation in the present.

Marc Siegel is a doctoral student in Critical Studies in the Department of Film and Television at UCLA. He has published articles on Jack Smith, queer cinema, and French literature.

(1) . Interview with Noel Simsolo, Cahiers du Cinema 213 (Juin, 1969), 19. All translations from the French, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

(2) . Quoted in Ginette Herry, "Biographie artistique," Carmelo Bene: Dramaturgie (Paris: Editions Dramaturgie 1977), 126.

(3) . See excerpt from Oreste del Buono, "Il Male del Bene," in Carmelo Bene: Opere (Milan: Edizione Bompiani 1995), 1456. All translations from the Italian are by Daniel Hendrickson.

(4) . Henri Langlois, Trois Cents Ans de Cinema: Ecrits (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema/Cinematheque Francaise/FEMIS 1986), 343.

(5) . Thierry Lounas, "Que les vivants me pardonnent...": Interview with Carmelo Bene. Cahiers du Cinema/numero hors-serie "Cinema 68" (1998), 55.

(6) . Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House 1974), 56-7, 86-7. Bene also receives a listing in The Companion to Italian Cinema Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith with James Hay and Gianni Volpi (London: Casell/BFI 1996), 21.

(7) . Carmelo Bene and Gilles Deleuze, Superpositions (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit 1979). Deleuze's essay, translated into English by Alan Orenstein, appears in The Deleuze Reader Ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press 1993), 204-222. There is a brief discussion of Bene's films in Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. (Minneapolis: UMinn Press 1989), 190-1.

(8) . See Pasolini's introduction to his play Bestia da Stile in Porcile, Orgia, Bestia da Stile (Milan: Garzanti 1979), 195-6.

(9) . See Herry, "Biographie artistique," 113-4. For another account of this incident and an appreciation of Bene's theater in general, see Mario Moretti, "Carmelo Bene Story," Le Theatre 1 (1970) Ed. Christian Bourgois, 180-193.

(10) . Deleuze, "One Manifesto Less," 204.

(11) . Bene, "Autografia d'un ritratto," in Carmelo Bene: Opere, xiii.

(12) . Quoted in Herry, 120.

(13) . Bene, "Autografia," xiv.

(14) . Bene has said, "The actor is not one who acts, but one who evokes." See Bene's interview with Thierry Lounas, "Que les vivants me pardonnent...," 59.

(15) . "Carmelo Bene: Fragments," Compiled by Jean-Paul Manganaro, in Carmelo Bene: Dramaturgie, 141.

(16) . Quoted in Herry, 120.

(17) . "Carmelo Bene: Fragments," 160.

(18) . Interview with Jean Narboni. Cahiers du Cinema 206 (Novembre, 1968), 25.

(19) . Deleuze, "One Manifesto Less," 215.

(20) . Bene, "Autografia," xiii.

(21) . Interview with Noel Simsolo, 19.

(22) . Bene, "Autografia," xiii.

(23) . Erik Bullot, "Sur quelques films de Carmelo Bene," Trafic 22 (Ete, 1997), 70.

(24) . Dominique Noquez, Le cinema autrement (Paris: Editions du Cerf 1987), 24-5.

(25) . Quoted in Herry, 115.

(26) . Bene's critical work on the gesture, his images of shaking, tentative movements, resonate with similar images in the American underground films of, for example, Jack Smith and Ron Rice. I'm thinking in particular of the floppy genitals in Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) and Rice's The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1965-7), but also of the close-ups of the shaking martini glass in Smith's No President (1967-9).

(27) . Deleuze, "One Manifesto Less," 207.

(28) . Ibid., 208.

(29) . See Bene's fascinating discussion of Don Giovanni in his "Ma quelli che vedono, non vedono quello che vedono...," in Carmelo Bene: Opere, 1140-44.

(30) . Ibid., 1142.

(31) . See excerpt from Giuseppe Bartolucci, "Per una lettura di Carmelo Bene dal sessanta al sessanta, "in Ibid., 1419.

(32) . Quoted in Herry, 113. For Deleuze's discussion, see Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 215-224.

(33) . Bullot, 70-1.

(34) . Quoted in Lounas, "Que les vivants me pardonnent...," 55.

(35) . It is worth noting the affinity between Bene's amputations and the oppositional filmmaking practices of some of those mentioned here, Derek Jarman "violations" of history for instance. As Jarman puts it in relation to his film based on Marlowe's Edward II, "how to make a film of a gay love affair and get it commissioned. Find an old dusty play and violate it.... The best lines in Marlowe sound like pop songs, and the worst, well, we've tried to spare you them." See his Queer Edward II (London: BFI, 1991).