Documentary about the life of Aldo Braibanti, an 'heretic' Italian intellectual, from early anti-fascist activism to his death, passing through the infamous 1968 mock trial which, under the flimsy accusation of “plagio”, actually aimed at his independence and homosexuality.
In 1966, Bene presented The Pink and the Black, his successful theatrical adaptation of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ lurid Gothic novel from 1796. Experimental filmmaker Paolo Brunatto filmed some of the play’s rehearsals in a Rome apartment (also frequented also by the Living Theatre). Bene's artistry is encapsulated in one sentence: “One cannot continue to prostitute the idea of theatre, which stands only for a magical, brutal link with reality."
"Virulentia was, above all, a place of theatrical experimentation and simultaneously a proposal to step outside the theater, set in motion by Aldo Braibanti —a 'place' where, through the individual real-life experiences that actors brought with them to the stage, life, research, poetry, and love intertwined. The camera approached this collective psychodramatic ritual in an attempt to 'reinvent' the history of vision, the biological evolution of the eye, which, emerging from the primordial waters as from amniotic ones, gazes upon the land; reliving with the actors the evolution that the species has undergone, and attempting to make visible how the past of our animal ancestors (what Ferenczi called onto-phylogenesis) is present in our dreams and everyday behaviors." (A. Grifi)
