«Convenevoli del quotidiano fatti preghiere»

Actor and Saint according to Carmelo Bene

Abstract

In the first part of the novel Nostra Signora dei Turchi (1964), Carmelo Bene insists on the confrontation between the actor’s art and the condition of sanctity, focusing in particular on the paradoxical misunderstandings that could arise from an erroneous evaluation of certain apparent similarities between the two realities. The elements that seem to homologate actor and saint are: ritualism (common to both training and ascesis), and the tension towards overcoming the operational logic of rational self-consciousness. In Carmelo Bene’s vision, however, it is not a matter of confusing both an actor and a saint, but of envisaging a different concept of scenic artifex and a different concept of “sanctity”: both based on overcoming the rules that encode the actor as an interpreter and the saint as a useful pawn of the ecclesiastical machine.