OUR LADY OF THE TURKS IBD

Sinopse

Carmelo Bene (1937-2002) was a notorious Italian actor, writer, and director who inaugurated his theater in 1959 with CamusâÇÖáCaligulaáthen exploded onto the artistic scene with his outré Christ âÇÖ63. Later, he collaborated with Pasolini, Glauber Rocha, Bussotti and others as well as philosophers, like Gilles Deleuze.âÇïHis noveláOur Lady of the Turksá(1964) recounts the bizarre, eccentric rituals of a young actor on a knightly quest, in the manner of the Crusaders, to hone his art so that he may ultimately become an idiot, if not a saint.áC.B. describesáOur Lady of the Turksáas theájeu de cartesáof a perverse novel on the idiolect. It is an amusing and merciless parody of 'interior life,' risibly entrusted to the third-person narrative form: a monody peopled by a thousand and one voices.áA setting and a vision of a south of the south of the saints (the 'homegrown' baroque, the Moorish kitsch of a palace, the cathedral-ossuary of the Otranto martyrs, etc.), 'crusts' summoned to feed an ethnic fire... The music is elsewhere.áThe only novel in C.B.âÇÖs prodigious oeuvre,áOur Lady of the Turksáwas (re)elaborated on stage (1966, 1973) and in images in an eponymous film, which Bene calls 'a 1968 film, or better yet, the âÇÖanti-1968 filmâÇÖ par excellence [that was] misunderstood to the bitter end.'âÇïTranslated by Carole Viers-Andronico, this is the second in a series of three separate volumes of BeneâÇÖs writings that Contra Mundum will publish. As one of the only true âÇÖspiritualâÇÖ heirs of Artaud, Anglophones must at last reckon with BeneâÇÖs genuinely radical transvaluation of every form of aesthetics.