Discovering Carmelo Bene

It is difficult to enclose in a single definition a protagonist of culture and art like Carmelo Bene. Actor, director, uncomfortable and unconventional intellectual, experimenter. Above all, a poet who made his human life an all-encompassing, daring and fantastic experiment.

Twenty years after his death in March 2002, a book celebrates his unrepeatable actoriality and his eternally current poetics. It is about “Being Carmelo Bene” (Porto Seguro, 2021, pp. 102), a small guide for those who do not know this great actor or know him badly and want to start loving him.

Let us first ask the author, Giacomo Maria Prati, what book is "Being Carmelo Bene"? An essay? A literary and theatrical biography?

“It is a song, an experimental work that wants to restore the sense of oral communication, based on speech. It is a book that does not set itself up as a text in order to be in resonance and coherence with the poetics of Carmelo Bene for whom the text is a dead thing and only the oral is alive. Mine is therefore a sort of monologue where my words are hardly distinguishable from those of Bene and where I summarize in nine chapters nine charisms-themes of the whole life-work of Carmelo Bene so that even those who do not know him can appreciate the creative, critical and, I would say, Baroque-Futurist spirit ”.

Where did the choice to deal with such a particular character come from?

“As a boy I saw on television his transposition of Manzoni's Adelchi and one of his versions of Hamlet (Hommelette for Hamlet) which I still love today and which I consider a total, lively, stimulating masterpiece. It was a healthy trauma. During the lockdown, Carmelo's work helped me keep the spirit alive and calm: his creations are more extreme than any external limit ".

Was he unrepeatable as an actor?

"As for all great interpreters and performers - a figure of which he was the Italian forerunner -, like all great artists, natural gifts, exercised to the maximum, are not reproducible as products".

In what was Carmelo Bene particularly distinguished, in your opinion?

“The current weather proves one thing: we have great actors but very few writers. There is a lack of poetics, a thought on art and beauty that rises above commercial and television immediacy. Carmelo Bene was the only one who managed to implement Nietzsche's aesthetic-ethical vision in which we are called to 'be masterpieces' and not to produce them ".

How is Carmelo Bene still relevant?

"In everything: in its poetry and paradoxicality, in the search for the extreme and excess in experimentation, in the centrality of the voice and the body as linguistic totalities, in mixing languages (opera, literature, art, theater, cinema) to research of a new language. At a level of free creativity of such vastness and depth I see very few other poets: Franco Battiato, Paolo Conte. Today in art, in all its forms, it is not possible to discern dissatisfaction and restlessness, traditional signs of artistic genius ".

In which works can we rediscover his genius?

“All, especially his four versions of Hamlet, so transformed but also so faithful to the essence of the tragic. And then the almost illegible poems of his poem 'l Mal de fiori and the marvelous Penthesilea, a theatrical show where the essence of the Myth emerges in purity as a Voice in the desert. Carmelo is a vitamin for the mind and soul. Just listen to his four philosophical monologues on You Tube, Four Moments on everything, nothing, to understand how he prodigiously managed to metabolize two centuries of modernity in himself and to bridge the gap between our time and the magical origin of theater as an action. total. My short but intense work is aimed at this: to give a sense of the genesis of art, of the creative labor that Carmelo magnificently embodied for himself and for all of us, as a living testimony of an ideal tension, of a desire to go beyond his own ego. , even authorial. In the society of ego and mass narcissism what better vital antidote? "