He is ugly, arrogant, self-centered, politically neutral - and brilliant.

Gideon Bachmann (on Carmelo Bene), "Film Quarterly" winter '72/'73

 

Art is what we want life to be and therefore you cannot say "learn art and put it aside", because you can neither learn it nor put it aside.

CB, "Cinema & Film" summer-autumn 1970

 

He stretches out the north over the void, suspends the earth on nothing.

Job 26,7

... Still wearing the crown of thorns, he mesmerized about all the cretins in the world.
They all would have gladly traded their own idiocy with the lakes of his failures.

Carmelo Bene,"Nostra signora dei turchi" (book quote)

 

 

 

The first (and so far last) attack of the Turks on Italian soil began at Otranto. It was the whim of the wind (let's call it Chance) that made the Moors desist from attacking Brindisi; they retreated to the smaller Otranto, where they landed on July 28, 1480.

 

The historian Ilarione writes - in the following year - that "nobody knows the exact number, not even the king himself" but [they were] "all highly selected soldiers"; it would seem that 18,000 of them arrived, with 150 ships and "600 thoroughbred racehorses" and "the war equipment", a thousand "war machines."

 

For two weeks they raided the countryside, where "those who immediately listened to the rumors took refuge with their possessions in safer places."

 

Giovanni Albino Lucano, in the subsequent "De Bello Hydruntino" (1589), explains that preamble thus: among "the unfortunate inhabitants" the most trembling "ran away en masse (...) no longer supported by any hope, leaving their possessions, children, houses at the mercy of the winner, concerned only with finding a way out" while those who remained were taken prisoner and sent straight to Istanbul.

 

Less well did the knight Giulio Antonio Acquaviva who, fearfully awaiting the attack on the city, decided to make a night sortie with two hundred of his brave men, initially happy. Then "for greed of slaughter" he was surrounded and overwhelmed and it happened that his horse and his armor returned, although without a head.

 

From that ill venture was born the legend of the "headless horseman", whose ghost they swear they still can see wandering around Lecce today, on hot summer nights.

 

The hagiography that became mainstream will instead be based on what the abbot Giovanni Marziano wrote in 1583: on the 800 or more Christians harangued by the "priest Moplesi" who urged them to "recognize your heroism, and come closer to the faith of our Maumeth."

 

Then the Christian Antonio Primaldo "began to speak and say" on behalf of the others "I beg you all together to accept this death" ending up beheaded on the nearby hill called Minerva and "whose bust, by the work of God, remained upright (...) And even if Bassà made every effort to make him fall to the ground with the other bodies, all the forces of the Turks were not enough, since the said body was held upright by the hands of God."

 

Carmelo Bene, in the published novel "Nostra Signora dei Turchi", imagines the scene inhabited by "turbaned settlers" who "harvested ears of gold studded with cinnabar, driven to madness by the enchantment of that mine of faith."

 

Those 813 innocent souls occupied the Catholic imagination during a long process of beatification, between 1539 and 1771, and up to the present day.

 

 

DOUBLES

 

Spectator: "What were you looking for, making this film, Monsieur Bene?"

Carmelo Bene: "Certainly not you, madam!"

Brussels, 1969

 

NST is a game of mirrors, the epiphany of the double, of the Other multiplied to infinity, with at its base (the insecurity of) Narcissus: an individual in tragic search of himself, to the point of dying obsessed by it. A founding myth for the actor, when he imagines being able to give a "representation" of an Other (himself) (which - for CB - not by chance "can only be of the State.")

 

The audience, in turn, plays the actor's double: it is self-involved in the game, sharing the lie, identifying with the identification. For Bene it was clear that if you recite a text you only create a show, while if you become the text you create art... but at this point you break the consoling fantasy of "seeing yourself on stage" i.e. impersonating with the actor or actress:

 

The spectators witness my gestures (apraxia) or my words (aphasia) because they find their own dilemma counterfeited: "Is it there, in what happens on stage, that we can hope to recognize ourselves?". "Is it that agitated person who can reassure us about what we all believe we are?"

 

This happens in NST, where by identifying yourself... you become an idiot! in a sum of doubles that can no longer be counted. From the structural split between narrator and actor, to the Bene doppelgänger who symbolically assumes - we are in the first 10' of the film - the identity of the idiot by taking his passport, after killing him with revolver shots (very fake: the fatal shot is fired in the back, even if leaning on a rock; to say: I immediately deny filmic and Newtonian conventions.)

 

Double is also the temporal plane that tosses the spectator between 1480 and 1968; a double that - when the references are clearly addressed to the sacked Otranto - inevitably refers to the 'evil Turk' generated by the 15th centuryin th West: an inhuman "Other" in which our Western "civilization" could mirror itself, clean of all sins.

 

[In reality the war of Otranto was a hotbed of fake news and embarrassing duplicity. With the Aragonese slow in providing aid, held back in Tuscany by the war following the "Pazzi Conspiracy" of 1478, and the (other "duplicities")  changing political alliances with the "Serenissima" Venice ("abstained" but for this in cahoots with the Turks.) Ludovico il Moro even accused the Aragonese of complicity with the Turks and the Medicis of Florence - cheering for this added burden for the aggressive Aragonese. Even the father of Roman Church, the Pope came in pretty slow, with the bulla against the Turks published 10 months after the Sack. Double (games) ultimately killing some 25,000 people, a tragic metaphor of the duplicities and fake news of today's media.]

 

What should we then say about the out-of-phase "dubbing" of NST's speech, asynchronized with respect to the image? A good example can be seen during the meeting between the autobiographical idiot (author of the book) and his publisher, a "businessman" ("we have to sell") and a "mean business" man (he dances, kisses and presumably screws the author: so much so that the next day you see the once serious publisher swimming happily in the sea, pirouetting his naked bottom in the water.)

 

Shortly after the Interval, the voices fall into aphemia with the "boat scene" to - shortly after, in the black and white clip - reappear with the idiot mistreating a fake double of the lady/saint protagonist (photography wiz Masini's wife) covering himself with forced smiles and other "duplicities."

 

When the b/w section ends and the film returns to color, here are other (double) doubles during the curious card game scene, described in the novel as follows: "Soon afterward, all four were at the table: he and the Saint, the memory of her and himself. All four were at the table."

 

The female doubles are - if ever possible - even more double, perhaps stamped onto CB's mind ever since the frail Carmelo was an altar boy at an infinite list of masses attended during Catholic school. Bene grew up counting hosts among holy ointments (and the blasphemies of the officiants, if ever the wine was not the good one.) He was nevertheless enraptured by the beauty of Christian rituals and by this rhetorical femininity of immen-intact Madonnas.

 

At Madonna's exact opposite stood the smell of menstruation the young Carmelo associated to in his father's tobacco factory: with one hundred and eighty women who were anything but stilnovistic (they threw dead rats at each other, for fun), suddenly catapulted

 

"into a Dantean hell, into an interference that I couldn't wait to end so I could return to that other marvelous, religious, nonexistent life of mine. This interference was made up of female nudes who then dressed themselves in certain types of overalls raised up to the pubis, who wallowed in manure, in an indescribable quantity of tobacco."

 

No wonder if in NST, in addition to a dirty friar and a totally submitted novice alter-ego, we find the scullery maid whose "body was robust, turgid, capable but not fat, imperfect, present, sinful" and Carmelo glimpses from down under, at the shadow of the "Moorish belly of the domes" evoking a happy and sensual Mediterranean childhood. Instead Margherita the Saint is a bit of a slut:

 

"Either the Saint was so good or she wasn't any Saint at all. And in any case she was naked, panting, disheveled and: 'Come here you idiot (...) because I'm cold, hug me... damned the day that I met you!'" (...)

(NST- book - page 111)

But let's just focus for a moment on the aural tour-de-force of the first ten minutes of the movie.

 

The initial, only sound is the silence of the first, distorted images of the castle... then torn apart by the voice, joined after 1'11" by the musical commentary of the opening title Musorgskij's "Night on Bald Mountain." Here presented in the performance conducted in Vienna by Vladimir Golschmann, it morphs into a Leitmotif of the "Moorish palace" and of the whole film.

 

The composition is based on the story "The Witch" by Georgij Mengden: a sabbath on the night of the summer solstice, which inevitably introduces a pagan and demonic element associated with the palace, the Turks and the whole story (which ends, not by chance, with Gounod's "Faust" and the un-Christian suicide of the protagonist of Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor").

 

But after Musorgskij, Jacques Brel and his Brussels come out (which introduces us to the idiot: tied up, struggling to fill a suitcase.) A "little song" also mixed with circus music: to unite the charlatan protagonist from Brussels (and his grandparents... possibly swingers?) with the existential impotence of the idiot. An idiot who immediately splits in two and kills himself to the sound of a pounding proto-industrial electronic percussion. To flow into a folk accordion theme, commentary on the idiotic lust for the maid. All this in 10 minutes flat.

 

Bene entrusts music with the role of semantic overlay, source of constant messages with different degrees of intelligibility: in Morse code or Marchiani.

 

A subtle game between action and musical con/text. Which can be predictive, as when Beniamino Gigli sings Stanislao Gastaldon's 1881 romance Canzone proibita and thus forewarns us of the finale an hour and a half before (spoiler!): "vorrei morir con te angel di Dio." Or sends messages under a parodic guise; like the tearful Jarre of the theme from "Lawrence of Arabia" (in an unbearable piano-bar version, but mixed with machine guns): Anglo-propaganda to follow the idiot who downs a - autobiographical - bottle of Hepatos B-12 and throws it off the terrace and gets a "Fuck you!" in return. Or he makes subtle sarcasm, as in the fireworks scene, where "The Dance of the Hours" (from the third act of Ponchielli's "La Gioconda") is even more popular and parochial in the performance of the... (Turkish) Carabinieri Band.

 

A recurring leitmotif happens with Johann Strauss's "Rosen Aus Dem Sueden" (Op. 388 - a beautiful waltz from the Austro-Hungarian empire), chosen in its triumphant and pompous final section, in a parodic commentary on the baroque 'pomp' of Lecce and (in the publisher's scene) not only that... that. Or that other "soundtrack squared": Karas's zither from "The Third Man", aurally gangrenous of the aforementioned game of doubles and triples. And the meta-quotations of middle school poetry with (read by Arnoldo Foà) the famous Garcia Lorca-loop ("alle cinque della sera") And the speech of cil/Indro Montanelli on "his" general della Rovere to comment on a certain Italianness, while Bene shooting his naked ass 'in piazza,' under the eyes of a carabiniere.

 

When the action itself becomes a diegetic soundtrack, it does so in striking ways.

 

As in the scene (in the b/w section) of the soccer ball becoming an electric percussion, bounced across the screen by a child. Or when, between the stone walls of Salento, the protagonist's nocturnal mental battle is dazzled by sonorous sheep, all (I would say) voices-dubbed-in-bleating by Carmelo, in a shocking and ingenious sui-generis exercise of concrete music, to deceive the audience that "doesn't understand anything anyway," as he used to say.

 

Or the diegetic bombardment of bangs and explosions and hisses of firecrackers and "fireworks" like free-falling Stuka bombs and arrhythmic gunshots, a the festivity of a Madonna-with-Crown becoming a lysergic battle, described in the book as... "it felt like running on a drum" under a "magnesium sky."

 

Around the middle of the film, "Il duetto della barca del pescatore" (fisherman's boat duet) is a sonic moment that explains why - in 2019, in Rome - an exhibition ("Il corpo della voce") strung together diverse artists as Carmelo Bene, Cathy Berberian and Demetrio Stratos ("a Carmelo Bene born elsewhere" - see BU#253.)

 

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Cathy was Armenian, Demetrio Greek and Carmelo from the easternmost part of Italy! But returning to the duet, here Bene plays the "disheveled fart-sniffer" director/lover, presumably Strehler-izing the "Saint" Mancinelli to act while getting to his house for making love - "in a public car" or "in a carriage" but most importantly without attracting too much attention also she, the Saint, has her cumbersome halo.

 

The Saint Margherita supports director/Bene in this exemplary vocal duet veering towards the frank Turkish accent of the North ("or pretend to take a speedboat"). Incredible vocal piece, between the deaf interjections of the Saint/Lydia ("eeeh? eeeh?", "hahaha!"), bi-syllabic games and the pure nonverbal electricity of Carmelo taken by a futurist, electric fury that shakes verses, syllables, grunts and noises out of his body.

 

The intrusive sonic presence of the splashing, in saturation, against the hull, provides for an extraordinary addition to the scene as an improvised Cageian orchestra of marine background. Just as the colors of the film are all hyper-saturated (something that annoyed more than a few "purists") also the sounds of the environment, used as geodetic music, and in general all the sounds are hyper-saturated, distorted.

 

This become more evident in the latter half of the movie, when thunders and lightnings and pouring of rain, or the crashing of a glass door become an industrial/ambient music to accompany the sex and power dialogue between friar and novice, a reminder of those priests, in the Salento confessionals, who let themselves be touched by children (young Carmelo - apparently - excluded.)

 

And if we ever forget Bene's vocal technique, his remarkable range and chameleon-like timbre, at least as much as his facial expressions, we cannot remain silent about the unicuum that married this voice to an obsessive theatricality in his generation.

 

Confirming the intuition of Massimiano Bucchi who (in BlowUp Magazine) called Bene "the only great Italian rock star," Nick Pinkerton went further by writing about Bene's "crazy" tone, capable of "changing registers without restraint, almost as if he contained within himself a dozen men fighting to be able to speak through him," seamlessly combined with "guttural tantrums, a sense of grandeur and the grotesque" and a "shameless taste in tearing up entire trunks of costumes" that made him "the missing link between Orson Welles and Alice Cooper."