In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Edipo (Oedipus), and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day...
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...
The panorama of human affairs encounters the “man with a movie camera”. His playground has no boundaries, his curiosity no limits. Characters, situations and places pitch camp in the life of a humanity that is at once the viewer and the thing viewed. But what are the last days of this humanity?...
Salome is the daughter of the second wife of King Herod. The King is infatuated with her and, after she fails to seduce the prophet John The Baptist, she dances for the King in order to ask for his execution.
The Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, is little interested in family affairs and the fate of the kingdom, and not at all attracted by a doll-like Ophelia sucking his finger. Annoyed by his friend Horatio, who tells him of the apparition of his father's spectre that would like to drive him to revenge, and...
To the protagonist, an intellectual so feverish that he seems pathologically unrecoverable, a confused memory resurfaces of a massacre carried out by the Turks in Otranto. Immersing himself in one of the victims, in the unconscious desire to eviscerate himself, a woman appears to him, Margherita,...
Frank was removed from an investigation into Mac Brown, the owner of a pharmaceutical company, who was suspected of drug trafficking and illegal experiments on teenagers. When Brown is murdered, Frank is called to investigate...
A few days after the arrival of the year 1000, bearer of great misfortune according to the Prophets, the cavalryman Fortunato and two soldiers, Pannocchia and Carestia, travel through Italy in the midst of numerous adventures: The prophetic year is marked only by the discovery on the part of the...
After a fight in their apartment, the story of a writer and a painter are divided. The writer is dedicated with his partner Manon to provoke continuous accidents in a field in which car carcasses abound. The painter is recruited to kill, through a poisoned picture, the old Arden to allow the...
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...
Riccardo III is a theatre play staged in 1977 and also edited for television and aired in 1981, which Carmelo Bene dedicated to his friend Gilles Deleuze, who wrote a book about it before even seeing it. Bene strips down the original Shakespeare play to the core, rejecting plot and characters,...
Hommelette for Hamlet, operetta inqualificabile (da J. Laforgue)
21990HD
A TV movie variation on Shakespeare's Hamlet. The movie is a part of Carmelo Bene's multi-medial project on Hamlet, also including the theatrical movie "Un Amleto di meno", a stage drama and the experimental video "Amleto di Carmelo Bene (Da Shakespeare a Laforgue).
In 1966, Bene presented The Pink and the Black, his successful theatrical adaptation of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ lurid Gothic novel from 1796. Experimental filmmaker Paolo Brunatto filmed some of the play’s rehearsals in a Rome apartment (also frequented also by the Living Theatre). Bene's...
