Carmelo Bene
Salomè

It came out a bit long for me, but I needed to delve deeper into a work that could be used as a touchstone to discuss "cinematic deception," bringing it back to the eternal question of what art is and where its objectivity resides. To overcome the pleasure of the codified without showing up in the registry office. If you have the patience to bear it, you're all invited to partake in the "querelle," so let's begin...

"One of you will betray me... Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Meeee!!!" "Any enjoyment that emancipates from the exchange value takes on subversive traits." And it sparks guerrilla warfare in theaters, just as it did during those few screenings back in 1972 when the film was shown before being quickly withdrawn, only to be later resurrected for more docile art-house circuits. True war bulletins from cinemas: ripped-out seats, damaged wallpapers, screens riddled with rotten eggs. "Give us back our money!" (both cash and Albertone). A short circuit that was released in the brutal manifestation of primordial animal instincts: everyone was seriously pissed off... Dissonances from those inviting you to disappear and hide, slavery to those there to "kill time." "Cinema is mediation to unconsciousness, it cannot access the incomprehensible" (Carmelo Bene).

A sign should be written for this film, along the lines of: "Why do you come to the cinema? We aim to dispel all illusions in a bad way." The reactions will reflect the ignorance due to distance, but there is no justification. Do not try to understand; there is nothing to understand if you use reason, do not try to remember, do not try to consider; forget the bank account, try to examine why you can't make connections outside the sparse plot you falsely believe you know and the images you watch passively. Ban timelines, abandon logic, erase thoughts: entry is allowed only to holders of the "Ancient Soul" card no. ∞. Text theater, image cinema, go away. The image is vulgar... and unpleasant is the word just to talk.

But enough is enough with telling stories, the actors have their roles and don't act as actors. They are set employees who don't slap themselves out of the way in front of the mirror. They want to be present, want to perform, want to "be there," we want to hear them act. Perverts! A common couch potato need: we want the "to be or not to be" of the film as we sit in our armchairs with popcorn and cola. Wretched! If you don’t risk, you don’t eat. And a spoiled cry rises: "We want to forget and not get lost!" But forget what... Where’s the whip, where is it?

Deceptive comfort, here nothing is suggested, this "film" requires detachment, otherwise, one gets hurt; don't pursue the ridiculous or the misery any further. The vision asks you to accept your misery, the scourging is unforgiving. No, no, don't use the usual trick of saying that things that deviate from the reassuring familiar (that we believe to be originality) mean nothing, that they signify nothing when we don't understand a damn thing, not even attempting to be swept away while staying quiet. Deception, trickery, and falsehood. Shame! Strangeness is played with while clinging tightly to illusions that further ensnare you.

Often one doesn’t realize a damn thing about what's around them, and do they want to play headspace with this film? Here there's no play, it's pure play, and on the part of the consumer, there's a miserable attempt to ennoble oneself on command, but we'd love to see how long the aesthetic endurance lasts. Subscribers! You have nothing else to do but be swamped with external crap that makes you talk about your work, your feelings, your suffering because others don’t understand you... "How was the movie? Cute..." But let's throw ourselves from a top floor (eighth at least), stabbing ourselves in the heart, and shooting a bullet in the head (scene from a film with Renato Pozzetto), that way we’re sure one gets out of the way. If we had to choose between cinematic pie and the cheese product that we are, we'd fall on the dairy product as we are so used to receiving it like sheep.

For most people, cinema is relaxation, pretty images, flashes of color, a story, the dialogue, the good guys fight the bad guys with punches for a homosexual desire for touch, love for the seat blossoms, filthy winks, many jerk-offs... basically, the fiction (even though, in my opinion, they really do take it up the ass) "makes us" feel alive, and we always bite the hook. But let's stay in the damn game, as we're inside the rectal probe game of "art consumers."

One shouldn't say when they can’t play that the real game isn’t good, that it’s not nice, that we don’t like it: let’s start from kindergarten, surrender, confess we understood nothing! In this "Salome," we play with the spiked club of non-representation, not with the ethereal balloon of consolation, let's get it into our heads, even though, as drunkards of mediocrity, we'll always respond to the saying "up your ass it goes, in your head it does not..."

Play is millennial, speed is invisible, shores are precipices, water is blood, the tangible a handful of flies. The dismantling in obscenity of any form of communication must be the impersonal priority.

Find a place for induced thoughts, for the false self that desires pleasure for others, cut off resources to the possessions that blind us, to avoid being a fool who wastes their brain for an incestuous hope of screwing a teenager hidden behind deflated regal triumphs. The triclinium is double-edged, cut and you're cut, the supine relaxation transforms into prone, sodomization included. That fool of a King, with his right of life and death over his subjects, must taste the horror of retaliation: longing for the screwing of Salome, the screwing effect awaits you, the head of the Baptist will speak to you every night of your fears and anguish.

But this is the story; it interests us to a certain point. What we're not able to fathom is how C.B. managed to represent the invisible with such a limited medium like cinema. But let's say it, cinema ends the day it is born with the train that deceives us with its trajectory and immediately disappoints us because it didn’t pierce the screen, the fairground trick ends after a few seconds, viewers at the first are impacted, but by the second locomotive, they tell you to bug off. The trick of movement petrifies dynamics, the wall of separation remains intact.

Panem et cinemensin is entertainment, as entertainment is the theater, with those "actors" who play someone else and strive to run, shouting, from one side to another of the stage, possessed by some form of dementia. They declaim their memorized ravings, shouting even when the moment’s pathos suggests a whisper, because otherwise, the last rows wouldn’t hear: thus the wreck of a ship never sailed. There is a danger that if they applied the "acting machine," microphones would be used as vibrators. They provoke me skin rashes, their stubborn foot-stamping delusion: we make art, we make ART! Gasoline! Gasoline! ... ridiculous and pitiful don’t even manage to make chickens laugh.

Returning to the film, here you go beyond, an omniscient language is used, everything is foreseen, even the unexpected, amidst colors, images, logos, reflections, thought, shadows. In every single frame, everything is filmed, and by everything, it is meant everything happening in tandem with the present entities, visible and invisible, representing reality for what it is, all together. Mario Masini's astonishing photography abundantly surpasses the boundaries of film. Quantum physics is casting light on the invisible reality surrounding us, they could have saved thirty years of research by consulting Carmelo Bene where the author here (1972) already exposes only the invisible Real. Phantasmagoric is the "mise-en-scene" (blasphemy!) of the whole: bodies, thoughts, voices, presences, feelings, carnality, objects and beyond (and this is genuine catharsis) the level of consciousness of every single particle present is revealed, sensations are filmed!

It’s a ruthless scanner that teletransports us to a transcendental perception where you must necessarily have a millennial shell as an absorbing shield. No, here there is no democracy, it’s not for everyone, it’s not about elitism, it’s just not for everyone! There is nothing to explain. Continue to demand the holiday "democracy," deluded. Here the ancient of the ancient is present, and no discounts are given. Carmelo Bene, with a prison-like editing, in the company of Mauro Contini, films the moment of the totality of the stars' immobility and we are part of it.

The poses are abandonments in bottomless wells where eternal laughter bounces. A sacred dance that reaffirms the infinite: "There is no other love than the love of God, there is no other love than love, there is no other love, there is no other..." Even the only possible "love" is merely hinted at, disappeared in the end with the fear of ourselves, with the wrong choice of the little king who decrees self-condemnation in the solitary limbo of the horror of perdition: and then why?, for a little head, a touch... Soul sales.

At most, you fall asleep on the chair when not in tune with the Unity, and there they are, in the arms of Orpheus, the champions of amateur aesthetic dilettantism: the audience! Come on damn, let’s learn something from these lives, let’s sacrifice some of our desires if we don’t want to end up like the Tetrarch. Madness must be sought, not provoked, nor avoided, chaos must be transformed into conscious delirium. Come on, little daily tasks: five minutes, think about one thing, just that, five minutes... You can't, can you? After a few seconds, you think of something else, your centering flutters drunk: "I Am!" Who is it? 'This cock!!! Idiot, but if you can't stop your thoughts for more than five seconds, keep watching the Hollywood card castles and don’t break the balls, we can’t trust you, for your Good you aren’t invited to the revelatory vision. And you’re offended... my sensitive friend, but didn’t you know that these feelings (which you consider the temple of human) are whims of the shell we temporarily occupy? Absolutely no bit of soul protruding, huh?

It’s true that we would need an act to manifest legend, but here we snore beautifully: dead asleep, it's the drug we build that thinks for us! We can only hope for a big cudgel of forgiveness because one knows not what one does! The compassionate gaze is an achievement; go on, die murdered. I'll charge you ten times the ticket price, encephalitic intellectual, conformist I take you apart!

The tempting wink, the federalizing eye-roll is absent in the film: a true religion at last, without gurus or disciples or dogmas. The "religion" of Carmelo, where there is certainty of the absence of devout proselytism, revels in solitude. Here Bene knows well that the compliment, the honor, is an insult and carries out all the steps to banish it by paving over, with the reflection of that little mirror he uses to eat grapes, vanities: "He also owes me money..." Shut up and fork out the cash, starving mortals that you are. One can consciously enjoy the "Special effects obtained with 3M reflective materials," or pay. And the music, the music, what music...

Deo Gratias then that feuilletons, novels, stories, chronology, consequentiality, and all the illusory chatter around these things are decapitated, finally! Needle’s eye, camels, slaps, missed self-crucifixions, Lucullian orgies, spanking devices, shaved and decapitated heads, silver basins, sacred cacophony. The extraterrestrial beauty of Veruschka together with the earthly beauty of Lydia Mancinelli trying to explicate the "impossible" beauty of Donyale Luna who proposes herself for the role by stating "I am Salome": "Salome, dance for me. Ask me for anything, even if it’s half of my kingdom." With that voice, that sound, that delirium: "I forbid him to resurrect the dead!"

Through the distortion of "flavors" we lose the deception of identification laying the grounds for a triumph of the unfathomable. We all are "skinned" by Salome and we feel it on us, oh yes: "Salome, let’s stay friends..." Tangling with the nothingness leads to the disintegration of a Status Quo of the mirage, a breach in the wall of imposed ignorance reshapes the perception of perfection. Now this is a gift, Christ! Wait for Christmas, wait. It’s up to us to transform the round dance from "fall down the world" to "imperial horse dance." Now it’s up to us if "to be masterpieces."

As our soul is eternal, the film is interminable, it settles forever within us. We’d all like to eat that snow and "the blood stains are as beautiful as rose petals, it is more beautiful this way..." Carmelo Bene respects the Divine which is in him reflecting for us the uniqueness in function of Unity. Pharaohs are born. Here the Epiphany is ever-present. We like this Nativity...

"Manasseh! AAAAAAAAAA! Issachar! Uzziah! Extinguish the torches! I don't want to see anything anymore. I don't want anything looking at me. Extinguish the torches! Erase the sun, hide the moon! Hide the stars! I'm starting to become... afraid."