Last year I find for the first time in my 10 years of collecting vhs,Oscar Wilde's SALOME in a basement of a closed video store.I saw it recently,and i think it's one of the weirdest psychotronic movies ever!Imagine Alejandro Jodorowsky directing a movie written by Kenneth Anger!Even Jesus Appears in the film as a Vampire!!!!I searched for more info in the web for other movies of the director carmelo bene but nothing serous.
Has anyone seen any other film from this director or has any clues about his bio etc??
p.s. the film was an italian production

It's totally insane, you have to abandon your senses at the door. Those with a low threshold for noise-montage pain or given to seizures with strobing lights had best sit this one out. It's a cacophony and overload of sensory stuff, both subtle as a flying mallet and as miraculously fit together and rewatchable as Eisenstein's last IVAN movies. The Italian is incomprehensible, but then again I don't think many Italians really understand it either. They might as well be uttering pig latin, it's the delivery that counts, another level of info-sensation. Keep in mind that this is an art film as well as a delirious cult experience, a lot more fun than Jarman and Greenaway (who Bene influenced, I suspect), in my opinion, but even more rigorous and challenging in some respects...

I'll post more after others weigh in. As to other film, there's a Bene stage-TV-film of Richard III in high resolution for free on the RAIclick network (I can link it later), about ninety minutes long, It's similarly excellent and cinematic though more 'disciplined', and even more claustrophobic. Bene takes the Shakespeare text and dices and slices it into really cool patterns, and recasts it as a Vampire movie, Richard (in a Bene performance that anticipates Pacino's Scarface pretty close) as count Dracula who's haunted by his 'Brides' in a circular nightmare just before he shrivels and shrieks "My kingdom for a horse". He keeps seducing and reseducing and failing to seduce satisfactorily the women he's wooed and betrayed over his lifetime, putting one prosthetic 'sympathetic gimp' device (Richard is famously humpbacked) on after another and turning on the Barnabas Collins fang-y charm. Meanwhile the bells toll, a strangled infant rival to the throne (and all those nice breasts exposed and re-exposed of the brides-moms) cries in its cradle, brought back to afterlife, and unspeakably weird and ghostly tableaus materialize.

The one I REALLY want to see is (translatable as) OUR LADY OF THE TURKS. The clips I've seen are fantastic (funny-absurdist, beautiful), and it had the biggest impact on Italian moviemakers and countercultural types all-round, I believe...

Last month, I had the luck to view, here in Venezia, two Carmelo Bene films theatrically released: SALOME and UN AMLETO DI MENO (One Hamlet Less). Both of them deeply impressed me. They are a totally free course of images, words, classic music, sometimes quotations from Bible, Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, everybody and everything; all of the above really skilfully edited. More than three hours without either one moment of boredom. Carmelo Bene has been one of the greatest Italian artists of late 20th Century. I know him as a stage actor, too, and have seen another of his movies on TV. Words are very important in his films, not because they would have a clear meaning, but because they create a sort of verbal score, full of refined literary jokes but also full of sounds. Carmelo Bene works here as a composer. He does use - with terrific creativity, and sometimes striking irony - cues from 19th and 20th Century classic music: Stravinskij (Histoire du soldat, Petruschka), Bizet (Peuchers des Perles, Arlesianne), Cajkovskij (Manfred-Simphony, The Tempest), Schubert (a very romaticized version of the Unfisished Symphony), Sibelius, Richard Strauss (Salome, obviously), Arrigo Boito (Mefistofele: from Goethe), Puccini (Tosca: the Te Deum as Salome's conclusion!) and many others. Fabulous. Sometimes these are just fragments: one-two seconds of music. But for Salome's streap-tease he didn't use classic music .... he used the song Abat-jour, that is the music on which the prostitute played by Sofia Loren strips herself for Marcello Mastroianni's pleasure in De Sica's IERI, OGGI, DOMANI. One of the finest ironic touches I ever saw in a film.

I'll just chime in here, tagging on to Francesco's very astute, and culturally accurate, personal appraisal, that Carmelo Bene was the closest that sixties into early seventies cinema had (or 'might have had') to an Orson Welles, a man of theater, first and foremost, who needed film to go further in a dramatic-dramaturgical direction than stage bound theater was (meta)physically capable of AND had a truly public personality and a popular touch to put at the center of his productions, and -one more Wellesian paradox- an old fashioned performing arts matinee and self centered ego (as with a Barrymore) that acknowledges the pleasure taken in 'ham' performances of genius while crafting a mystery of the maker's self that fulfills self-investigation at the deepest, narcissistic level, while creating a tabloid Great Man Rosebud mystery we all want to follow, and with great charm letting in everybody in on the joke...and teasing them to attend to the serious enigmas and really demanding art underneath. It's a great act, in other words, albeit a lot more cubist or 'crystalline' (to borrow his fan Gilles Deleuze's tem) than of KANE days (that dropped Crystal on the point of dying, reincarnating an indefinite multifaceted number of ways of reconstituting what made the man, being a true poetic link between them, however...and a key to one way auteur cinema works best).

And, like Welles, Bene did the TV and celebrity routine, as well, becoming as famous for being famous, perhaps, in his later years, a frequent 'interrupter' of popular TV programs already in progress, holding forth with his brand of crackpot street person opinionated genius, or suddenly becoming a Soccer on Sunday commentator as confident in his role as any pro or fan in the stands, or any part they chose to cast him in... within 'reality TV', a medium he mastered as easily as the rest to his credit. Too bad he didn't get the Nobel his fellow theater zany Dario Fo won (though I wouldn't begrudge the winner the honor)

SALOME
CARMELO BENE

To people interested in this rare film and with a friend in Italy.

Next night, Carmelo Bene's SALOMÉ will be on Italian TV, RAITRE, around 1.50 a.m.