When the subject of Life Is Beautiful (La vita e bella) became public
knowledge, there was apprehension because of Roberto Benigni's reputation as a
comedian that he might not approach the subject of the Shoah with appropriate
sobriety and respect. The film adopted a visual and thematic strategy contrary
to the norm in contemporary commercial cinema because of the lack of scenes of
horror or violence. Criticism focused on the fun's historical veracity and
suspension of disbelief. For example, Daniel Vogelmann, an Italian Jew who lost
family members at Auschwitz, rejected the idea of presenting the evil of
Holocaust in a manner that might mislead new generations into regarding the film
as factual. In the United States, critic David Denby led the protest against the
film by panning the film as "unconvincing" and "self-congratulatory" and
accusing Benigni of perpetrating a Holocaust denial (Denby 96). A cartoon of a
despairing concentration camp prisoner holding an Oscar statuette accompanied
Denby's New Yorker review. Art Spiegelman, the author of the Holocaust
comic book series Maus, drew the cartoon and called the film a "banalization"
of the Holocaust (Polese 1).
Pezzetti was also aware of the disappointing history of Italian films depicting
the Shoah. Holocaust films have been infrequent, as demonstrated by the small
number of American films on the subject. In fact, eighty percent of films on the
Shoah have been produced in Europe, and American production is only half of
French production. Italy in particular was almost without films on the Holocaust
until Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo (1959) and a sequence of Jews praying
before execution in Roberto Rossellini's General Della Rovere (II Generale
della Rovere) (1959). The first Italian film on the subject had anti-Semitic
overtones: Goffredo Alessandrini's The Wandering Jew (L'ebreo errante)
(1947), a portrayal of the myth of the wandering Jew who expiates his sins in
the Nazi camps. Later Italian films on the Holocaust were not any more
convincing. Again despite intentions, Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo has
historical and plot inconsistencies such as the final love story between the
Russian prisoner and the deportee. Pontecorvo's film, unlike Benigni's, was
criticized for showing too many scenes of suffering deportees to the point of
being accused of "pornography." Other films presented more visually pleasing
portrayals of the deportations, such as Vittorio De Sica's bourgeois Holocaust
drama, the winner of an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, The Garden of the
Finzi-Continis (II giardino dei Finzi-Contini) (1970). In this film
the spectators identify with the attractive and semi-noble deportees as played
by such performers as Dominique Sanda and Helmut Berger.
Benigni had prepared for potential criticism by inviting Marcello Pezzetti of
the Center for Contemporary Hebrew Documentation (Centro Documentatzione Ebraica
Contemporanea) of Milan to serve as historical consultant for the film. The aim
was to gain not only the approval of the Italian Jewish community but also the
expertise of its members. Benigni had seen Ruggiero Gabbai's documentary film
Memory (Memoria) (1997), in which Pezzetti interviews Italian Auschwitz
survivors. Pezzetti, who refused to accept a fee for his services on Benigni's
film, realized the enormous professional risk involved in aiding an actor with a
comic reputation like Benigni on such a delicate project; indeed, there was the
danger that the film could spark a Holocaust comedy genre in the manner that
Liliana Cavani's Night Porter (Portiere di notte) (1974) spawned a genre
of Nazi pornography films in the 1970s.
If Benigni's film has any roots in Italian cinema it is in Lina Wertmuller's
Seven Beauties (Pasqualino settebellezze) (1975), a film also nominated for
the Best Foreign Film Oscar, which focuses on survival and a crude joy for life.
The film opens with a depiction of barbaric executions of Jews by Nazis in which
the Italian protagonists are forced to consider their own culpability as
Italians, Germany's allies in the war. Wertmuller, like Benigni, was criticized
for profaning the Holocaust in the scenes of Pasqualino's copulation with the
camp commandant and Pasqualino's later insistence on procreation as a means to
ensure survival (V. Pezzetti 1-20).
As Benigni's historical consultant on the film, Pezzetti was well aware that ninety-eight percent of the deported children were killed immediately upon arrival at the camps and that the Benigni-Cerami plot in which a parent saves a child in such a setting would have been extremely unlikely. Yet Pezzetti claims that there were cases of children found alive on the liberation of the death camps, including about fifty at Auschwitz who were waiting to be gassed or had undergone experiments. [1] After the film was released, stories appeared from survivors deported as children whose testimony seems almost as unlikely as the plot of Benigni's film. [2]
According to Pezzetti, some of the most effective Holocaust films have deliberately eschewed depictions of graphic violence and horror to evoke the imagination of the spectator. Examples include Ambulance (Ambulans) (1961) by Janusz Morgenstern and The Passenger (Pasazerka) (1960) by Andrzej Munk (M. Pezzetti 135). Benigni's screenwriter Vinceazo Cerami has written on the manner in which the increasing technological ability of film to portray any event has actually decreased the evocative power of the medium. With the advances in special effects and computerization, material previously considered obscene or not shown because of the logistical expense of creating a believable representation is now readily depictable. Thus by not showing the horror of the camps, Life Is Beautiful avoids seeming fantastic. According to Cerami the decision to limit realistic displays in Life is Beautiful was a conscious effort to avoid the manner in which the "hyper-reality" of the contemporary cinema has led to a lessening of film's poetic qualities (Cerami 15). Benigni has defended himself against charges relating to the film's suspension of disbelief by citing Proust and Edgar Allan Poe, who felt that a story should never provide all the details but allow the participation of the reader or spectator's imagination (Grassi 1). In fact, the film is rigorous in its avoidance of scenes of violence or cruelty. Nazi horrors are limited to verbal abuse of prisoners without direct depictions of murder or torture. Guido is machine-gunned off-camera. The scenes in gas chambers are limited to the antechambers where victims undressed. The only depiction of dead bodies is a fog-filled vision of a heap of recognizably artificial corpses. Given the reaction of a public perhaps numb to depictions of violence and murder, Benigni adapted an approach that recognizes the event as so vast and incredible that it defies description. The central problem of representing the Shoah is that the level of honor required for a realistic depiction would be so explicit that it would prevent a wider public from acquiring a sense of solidarity and political consciousness. [3]
The other aspect of this reduction of horror was the decision by Benigni and
Cerami to present the story as a fable. Benigni has stated that Life Is
Beautiful was partly inspired by the stories his father, Luigi, told of his
experiences in a Nazi work camp in Erfurt, Germany. Luigi Benigni was drafted
into the Italian army that occupied Albania during the war and was later forced
into a Nazi work camp. Roberto has claimed that conditions in his father's camp
were quite similar to those in the death camps, with the important difference
that there were no death chambers. Benigni recalls that his father never told
the story of his internment in a way that would frighten or depress his
children. This respect and protection of innocence had a profound impact on
Benigni, who sought to repeat his father's approach to the subject (Simonelli
7). Benigni and Cerami's script therefore is presented as a fable; the premise
of the film in which Benigni's trickster protagonist defeats the ogres of
Italian fascism and German Nazism is offered in a basic fairytale format. The
reconstruction of the camp as a stone building rather than a more realistic
wooden frame complex adds to the fairytale setting.
By contrasting the violence and evil of the Shoah with the innocence of a child,
Benigni and Cerami hark back to the greatest films in the Italian canon.
Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini presented the injustices and
contradictions of Reconstruction Rome though the eyes of Bruno, the son of the
poster hanger in The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di biciclette) (1948). Roberto
Rossellini and Sergio Amidei presented the brutality of the Nazi occupation of
Rome through the eyes of the children in an apartment complex who witness the
murder of Pina and the execution of Don Pietro in Rome Open City (Roma citta
aperta) (1945). Benigni's film and his co-star, the child actor Giorgio
Cantarini, are very much in the tradition of the neo-realist dependence on the
reactions of children. However, if Benigni's film owes a debt to the realist or
neo-realist school of filmmaking, it is to the more poetic or magical approach
seen in De Sica/Zavattini films like Miracle in Milan (Miracolo a Milano)
(1951), The Final Judgment (II g iudizio universale) (1961), or
Rossellini's The Machine That Kills Bad People (La macchina ammazza cattivi)
(1952). In these films the style of realist filmmaking is adapted to a story
with elements of a fable. In fact, Benigni has stated that his goals and
approach to the cinema are quite the opposite from the school of realism by
citing his apprenticeship with Zavattini and his experience in Fellini's last
film, The Voice of the Moon (La voce della luna) (1990) [4]
In Life Is Beautiful, the child's point of view is expressed with camera
work that is anything but documentary style. When Guido is taken for execution,
Giosue is hidden in a utility box. Once Guido realizes that he is within the
field of vision of his son, he performs a comic march with a broad smile for the
benefit of his chuckling son. The camera shows Giosue's reduced field of vision
in a sort of rectangular camera obscura (Tesson 529). In so doing, the film
placed the boy in a filmgoer-like position-a point that deserves a closer look.
The nature of film as a medium allows an audience to feel a sense of control of
the images being projected. The spectators, because of their privileged position
in the screening room, feel that they dominate the world the film portrays. This
is due to the laws of perspective, which, as noted by Baudry, derive from the
camera obscura of the fifteenth century from which the camera descends. When
Giosue is in the camera obscura--like box, he, like the spectator, controls the
world and is able to accept his father's version of reality, laughing as Guido
is taken away for execution.
The voice-over narrations that begin and end the North American print of the
film also add an element of omniscience that conditions the spectator's
interpretation of the following sequences of the film (Chion 6). The spectator
is informed that he will receive a happy ending in the opening sequence of the
film since the narrator, Giosue, will survive. Pezzetti actually voiced his
opposition to the decision to allow Giosue to survive. However, Benigni felt
that the death of his character, Guido, was enough to imbue the film with a
sense of tragedy, especially since Benigni, who had always been a comic actor,
had never died in a film before. Pezzetti has later commented that most films on
the Shoah are portrayals of exceptions. Examples include Agnieszka Holland's
Europa, Europa (1991), the story of Solomon Perel, the only Jew to join the
Hitler youth. There is also Steven Spielberg's film about the only German
industrialist to save Jews, Schindler's List (1993), or Jack Gold's
Escape from Sobibor (1987)--a film on the only documented revolt and escape
from a death camp. A more realistic portrayal of the Holocaust would, of course,
have to be compared to the documentaries from the Allied armies and the
hidden-camera interviews of the death camp personnel in Claude Lanzmann's
documentary Shoah (1985) or Resnais's compelling Night and Fog (Nuit
et brouillard) (1956).
If the style of the film consciously attenuates graphic depictions of evil,
there are explanations for the Holocaust in cultural and historical terms that
provide the spectator with another point of reference for understanding the
event. For example, Benigni's film identifies the Nazi destruction of some
traditions of German civilization with numerous references to the German
Enlightenment. Guido observes Dora at a performance of the fourth act of the
opera The Tales of Hoffmann by German-born composer Jacques Offenbach
(1819-80). The reference to Ernst Hoffmann (1776-1822) may in turn be read as a
reference to the spell cast over the German people by the Nazis as in the
Hoffmann tale The Sandman. [5] Guido is a fan of the philosophy of Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860), an opponent of Hegelian idealism who had a great
influence on Wagner and Nietzsche. In his best known work, The World as Will
and Representation, Schopenhauer wrote that the world that makes up the
object of our consciousness is based upon the reality of our own will, which
Schopenhauer thought was essentially evil. Guido, at Ferruccio's instigation,
makes a joke of Schopenhauer's philosophy. He prevents Ferruccio from sleeping
by repeating the phrase, "Wake up." Guido's re-creation of the camp as a game is
an application of Schopenhauer's lesson on the power of the will to represent or
imagine (vorstellung) the world.
However, the character most identifiable with the defeat of German high culture
is Captain Lessing, a guest at the Grand Hotel, who shares the surname of one of
the greatest exponents of the German Enlightenment, precisely the cultural
tradition that was destroyed by the Nazis. In fact, Benigni's film could be
interpreted as an artistic representation of Lyotard's idea of how the barbarity
of Auschwitz rendered obsolete the scientific optimism that grew out of the
Enlightenment. The Lessing character appreciates Guido's company and quick wit
and speaks Italian in the tradition of German artists who made Italy a second
home. The Lessing character reappears in the second half of the film as the camp
doctor, a figure with a horrible aura given the record of war criminals such as
Josef Mengele. Because of Lessing's previous friendship with Guido, there is the
expectation that he will be the "good German" who might reject the insanity of
the Nazi system. However, in the second half of the film Lessing reappears a s a
broken man who has retreated into the part of his mind occupied with solving
riddles. The riddles from the first half of the film are quite beautiful, even
poetic. The final riddle that Lessing asks Guido to solve seems like a metaphor
for the cowardice and failure of the better angels of German civilization to
resist the Nazis.
"Fat, fat, ugly, ugly, all yellow in truth, if you ask me where I am I answer
here, here, here.... Walking I make poo poo, who am I? (Grasso, grasso, brutto,
brutto, tutto giallo in verita, se mi chiedi dove sono ti rispondo qua qua
qua.... Camminando faccio poppo, chi son io dimmelo un po)." (Benigni 172)
Benigni has explained the riddle as a "nonsense" that appears at a point when
Guido expects a more rational response from Lessing. As Lessing's name recalls
the German traditions of the Enlightenment, the character's retreat into a
cacophony is a deep blow for Guido and emphasizes the utter irrationality of the
Shoah. [6]
Evil in the film is not limited to the failure of German civilization. Unlike
many other nostalgically themed Italian films such as Salvatores's
Mediterraneo (1991), Life Is Beautiful does not gloss over the
responsibility of the Italian fascist regime that permitted and aided the Nazi
crimes. The first half of the film is set in the Italy of the empire after
Mussolini's victory in Ethiopia in 1936, which is celebrated at the engagement
party for Rudolfo and Dora. [7] The film confronted Italian audiences with the
image of Italy as an aggressive nation, not the country defeated and torn by the
civil war after the Allied invasion of 1943. Life Is Beautiful makes specific
references to the regime's 1938 racial statutes (leggi razziali), by which Jews
were prohibited from intermarriage, owning more than a limited amount of
property, and attending public schools. Benigni brilliantly parodies these laws
in Guido's explanation to Giosue of the signs prohibiting Jews and dogs from
entering stores and in the subvers ion of the minister's speech on racism at
Dora's school. The film also has an exposition of the racist mentality that
allowed the Shoah. During the Grand Hotel engagement party celebrating the
regime's conquest of Ethiopia, an Italian teacher recounts an anecdote about the
skill of German children in mathematics. Her attitude expresses the Darwinian
rationale of Nazism, according to which the elimination of unhealthy students
would save the state the money needed to sustain them. Of course Italian war
guilt is lessened by the implicit comparison with German culpability. Rather
than focusing on stereotypically German efficiency and the modern industrial
techniques used to execute Nazi crimes, however, the film examines the
progressive dehumanization in Italy that led to the deportations. Instead of
depicting fascism as the exclusive realm of brutal soldiers and black-shirted
thugs, Benigni's film portrays the pervasiveness of fascist and racist ideology
in everyday life. For example, government service deteriorates from the prefect
Rodolfo's refusal to issue Guido a business permit to the appearance of
plainclothes police who harass Guido with endless paperwork at the town hall
before his deportation. There is a jump from arrogant government service to the
idea that an elite of functionaries can appropriate the right to eliminate
entire populations because of an insane ideology.
The theme of the abuse of power has appeared in earlier Benigni films. In The
Monster (Il mostro) (1995), police investigators and a psychologist invade
Loris's life to frame him as a serial killer. In Johnny Stecchino (1991), the
government minister is a cocaine-sniffing business colleague of the Mafia boss
in hiding. Therefore, Life Is Beautiful is not Benigni's first attempt to
depict evil. These films had elements of horror and violence, such as the
severed hand at the serial killer's table in The Monster or the
assassination (off-camera again) of the Mafia boss in Johnny Stecchino. In
Benigni's previous films, the contrast between Benigni's jocular or giullaresque
approach and the underlying terror of his subjects (Mafia, serial killing)
provided occasions for comedy. However, with Life Is Beautiful Benigni tackled a
subject whose aura of evil was much larger than the topics he had chosen before.
To handle such a subject, Benigni had to challenge public and critical concepts
of film genres by reversing expectations. Benigni attempted to solve this
problem by adopting the mixture of genres seen in later Chaplin films such as
The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947) (Simonelli 9).
Pezzetti has defended the attenuation of horror in Life Is Beautiful by stating that the comedic elements are limited to the first half of the film and that Benigni never laughs at the Shoah but rather portrays the laughter within the Shoah. In fact, survivors such as Viktor Frankl have written of the existence of humor among deportees as a "weapon in the fight for self-preservation" (Frankl 63). In this context, Benigni's exposure to Gabbai's documentary Memory, in which Pezzetti interviews Italian Auschwitz survivors, is important for an understanding of the film's approach to the subject. Gabbai's film documents survivors such as Romeo Salmoni, who describe their attempts to retain their sense of identity through song and humor in the midst of the tragedy, an extreme example of the Italian idea of canta che ti passa (sing and it will pass). However, Pezzetti concludes that Benigni was interested primarily in making a film about the love of a father for his wife and son, rather than a Holocaust film. Give n this reaction by Benigni's own historical consultant, one is tempted to accept Vogelmann's criticism that the film might give a false impression of the evil of the Holocaust to an ignorant audience. [8] However, the very idea of realism in the Shoah is paradoxical because no amount of technical artifice can adequately portray the evil of the event. Benigni and Cerami therefore decided to rely on the evocative power of the spectator's imagination to avoid the "hyper-reality" of the contemporary cinema.
CARLO CELLI is an assistant professor of Italian and film studies at Bowling Green State University.
NOTES
(1.) Marcello Pezzetti's statements are in an unpublished interview with Carlo Celli, Vaiano Cremasco, June 30, 1999.
(2.) For example, Joseph Schleifstein was four years old when American troops liberated Buchenwald in 1945. He had been sucessfully hidden by his father in a story similar to that of Guido and Giosue except for the fact that Buchenwald was not an extermination camp. Pezzetti put Benigni into contact with two sisters, Anna and Tatianna Bucci-Perlov, who as four- and six-year-olds survived Auschwitz without undergoing experiments despite being separated from their mother.
(3.) Ishayahu Nir, a professor of communications at Jerusalem University made
comments in this vein on the television program in which Benigni, Pezzetti, and
Ceraml also appeared as part of a panel discussion. Pinocchio, Rai 2, Gad
Lerner, 1999.
(4.) Unpublished interview with Roberto Benigni by Carlo Celli, Nov. 3, 1999.
(5.) Film historian Siegfred Kracauer has interpreted German film history, from
the Hoffmann-like film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to the films of
Goebbel's propaganda machine, as a metaphor for the rise of Hitlerism. See
Kracauer.
(6.) Unpublished interview with Roberto Benigni by Carlo Celli, Nov. 3, 1999.
(7.) Benigni would continue his criticism of the arrogance and cruelty of
fascist imperialism indirectly in Asterix (1999), in which he plays Deterious, a
villainous Roman officer occupying Gaul during the period of Italian history
(the Roman Empire) idealized by the fascist regime.
(8.) The best remedy to this possibility would be for the two films, Memoria and
Life Is Beautiful, to be screened together.
WORKS CITED
Baudry, Jean Louis. L'effet cinema. Paris:
Albatros, 1978.
Benigni, Roberto, and Vincenzo Cerami. La vita e
bella. Milano: Einaudi, 1998.
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen.
Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Cerami, Vincenzo. Consigli a un giovane autore.
Torino: Einaudi, 1996.
Denby, David. "In the Eye of the Beholder. Another Look
at Roberto Benigni's Holocaust Fantasy." New Yorker Mar. 15, 1999: 96-99.
Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning. New
York: Washington Square, 1984.
Grassi, Giovanna. "Benigni: Moretti ha gia vinto
l'Ulivo d'oro." Corriere della sera May 18, 1998.
Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1966.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Defining the Postmodern."
Postmodernism. Ed. Lisa Appignanesi. London: Institute for Contemporary Art,
1986.
Lerner, Gad. Pinocchio (television program). Rai
2, 1999.
Pezzetti, Marcello. "Considerazioni sulla
rappresentazione della Shoa ad opera del cinema." Storia e memoria della
deportazione. Milano: Giuntina, 1996.
Pezzetti, Vanina. "Kapo." Unpublished essay 1998.
Rivette, J. "De l'abjection." Cahiers du Cinema
120 (1961).
Polese, Ranieri. "Spiegelman, una vignetta per non
dimenticare." Corriere della sera March 30, 1999.
Simonelli, Giorgio. Datemi un Nobel! L'opera comica di
Roberto Benigni. Alessandria: Falsopiano, 1998.
Tesson, Charles. "L'enfance de la memoire a propos de
La Vie est Belle." Cahiers du Cinema 529 (Nov. 1998): 46-48.
Vogelmann, Daniel. Rev, of La vita e bella.
Il tirreno 18 (Dec. 1997): 1.
From the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Summer, 2000, by Carlo Celli
PLEASE NOTE: This is a copy of an on-line article which
can be found at
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0412/2_28/64688898/p1/article.jhtml?term=
Because it is on several pages and therefore somewhat awkward to read, I have
reproduced it here.