Kritiken (1)
The Theater of Essence or How to Achieve Purification not through Reduction but through Overload: a cleansing excess through which Carmelo Bene achieves his eidetic artistic style. Another person would hide behind an empty mask of minimalism and cowardice, which must protect what little it has to say in the incubator of a lack of further experiences. In contrast, Bene overwhelms the audience, explosions of sensations and paranoid cuts bombard the spectator's mind without pause, forcing it finally to free itself from the effort to grasp all the tangle of meanings, reconstruct a one-sided plot, capture every breath of meaningfulness; in short, it compels it to freedom, which can finally find the gesture behind all gestures, the speech behind all speeches, the acting behind all actors, and the film behind all theater. It is no coincidence that his collection of interviews and thoughts about film is called "Against Cinema," because it truly contemptuously tears conventional film to pieces in the name of essential expressionism, as his style should be called. The beauty of the true film image shines through the stylistic allusion, which is the filming of expressive facial expressions of the actors in ostentatiously colorful costumes of basic geometric shapes against a purifying-white backdrop of not theatrical but metaphysical scenery.
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