What connects Palermo to Carmelo Bene? Many things, as shown in Franco Maresco’s latest work. As the late Goffredo Fofi testified, Bene was a sincere admirer of Ciprì and Maresco’s cinema, especially their 1995 film Lo zio di Brooklyn (lit. ‘the uncle in Brooklyn’), a...
In 1968 Carmelo Bene made his first feature film, Nostra Signora dei Turchi, using a 16mm Arriflex ST. In moving from theater to cinema, his aim was not to adopt a new language but to dismantle the medium and its elementary grammar, undermining the very concept of representation. For Bene, cinema had already died with the Lumière brothers, with only a few exceptions: among them Buster Keaton, whom he regarded as a “human lens,” a true filmed and filming body, able to position himself both in front of and behind the camera.
A work of art, like man, is destined to wear out; likewise, the cinematic image, for Bene, is born already dead. The only true event that can occur in a movie theater would be the film stock catching fire: not by chance, in the final solarization of Salomè (1972), he pursued precisely this intent – to represent the destruction of the image.
