Stephen Collins Discusses the Representation of The Holocaust on Film, with Focus on Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997)
‘Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full’ - Leon Trotsky
Representations of the Holocaust have permeated most forms of culture, but to imagine the horror of mass extermination of human life in print, in paint or on film raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions, not least when you consider such narrative tropes as comedy and fiction.
Hollywood does not have the best track record when it comes to re-writing history (U-571 anyone?) and for many years, in-air battles, trenches and sweethearts back home were the acceptable face of World War II on screen. The realities of the Holocaust were considered so unspeakable that it’s no surprise it took so long to find a cinematic form. Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955) with its shocking archive images and Claude Lanzmann’s 10-hour epic Shoah (1985) are both documentary pieces that evoke an emotional reaction with their subject alone. Lanzmann’s use of the word ‘Shoah’ is an important distinction, as it is specifically associated with the ‘Jewish experience' of the Holocaust.
Although dramatic narrative films like Sophie’s Choice (1982) began to tell of the emotional fallout of life in concentration camps, it was not until Steven Spielberg’s epic Schindler’s List in 1993 that the realities of the Holocaust were exposed to the mainstream. Rewarded with the Oscar success that had previously eluded him, the film was not without its detractors, who disapproved of Spielberg deploying dramatic conventions in telling a story of redemption and optimism when the outcome for millions was somewhat different. However, the critical reception of Spielberg’s film and documentaries such as Jon Blair’s Schindler (1982) suggested that both historical drama and documentary filmmaking were appropriate narrative devices in the representation of the Shoah, but the use of comedy would be far more problematic.
Although comedic films like Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) or Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967) satirised the excesses of Nazism, they neglect to directly address the Holocaust. In Hollywood, from Brooks to Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld, the Jewish voice is often one of humour, but in relation to the Shoah, this comic voice has been suppressed. That all changed in 1997 when Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) broke the stoic mould as an irrepressibly comedic yet tragic fairytale set in a concentration camp.
Although not Jewish himself, Roberto Benigni’s films have often attempted to transform a dramatic subject into a comedy; his 1994 film The Monster (Il Mostro) depicted a petty thief mistaken for a serial rapist while Johnny Stecchino (1991) confronted the Italian underworld of the Mafia. Life Is Beautiful was Benigni’s greatest challenge to express his comedic potential outside of proven territory, commenting at the time that “I have this strong desire to put myself, my comic persona, in an extreme situation and the ultimate extreme situation is the extermination camp, almost the symbol of our century, the negative one, the worst thing imaginable.”
Benigni’s idea for the film came from his own father who was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp for two years after the German–Italian alliance collapsed; he weighed just 90 pounds when liberated in 1945. When his father returned to Italy, “he told stories about what a nightmare it was, like [author, poet and Auschwitz survivor] Primo Levi did”. Certainly, the story of Life Is Beautiful’s Jewish protagonist, Guido (played by Benigni himself), can be seen as a reflection of Levi’s experiences. Like Guido, he was also an assimilated Italian Jew, who was caught by fascist militia and deported to Auschwitz on his way to join a partisan unit in Northern Italy.
The first half of Benigni’s tragi-comic tale is a tender love story told in the best tradition of Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s, mixed with a dose of Capra-esque humanism. Historically, it is set in Mussolini’s Italy, but it is an idealised world. The vibrant cinematography emphasises the pastoral hues of the Italian countryside, providing the ideal playground for the lighthearted Guido.
Perhaps to underscore how those deported and subjected to a subhuman existence were indistinguishable from their neighbours, Guido is fully assimilated in Italian pre-war society. Even when the impending threat of fascism permeates his life, such moments are played for laughs by Benigni as Guido inadvertently Nazi salutes a crowd of fascist supporters and, during a lecture to schoolchildren on Aryan supremacy, reduces its principals to comic absurdity. Jewish Guido charms and marries Gentile Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), and they soon start a family with the addition of young Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini).
From this brief utopian existence, Life Is Beautiful quickly changes tone, both visually and musically, when Guido and Giosué are deported to a concentration camp. In a scene recalling Meryl Streep’s role in Holocaust (1978), Dora insists on accompanying her family and pleads to be allowed on board the packed trains. When the family arrives in what can be assumed to be Auschwitz, Life Is Beautiful follows its filmic predecessors (not least Schindler’s List) by drawing upon popular symbols of the camps, from the smoking trains and the shower rooms to the shaven heads and pin-stripe pyjamas. This portrayal of the camp deftly occupies a symmetrical filmic space to the first half of the film, where tears replace laughter and fear replaces Guido’s blind optimism. Although in reality it is likely that Giosué would have been slaughtered upon arrival, he manages to stay with his father, stubbornly refusing to ‘shower’ with the other children. The post-Schindler audience would be aware of the fatal implications of the Auschwitz shower rooms, and as such Giosué is saved from death.
Despite the visual codification of Holocaust imagery, the film does not strive for realism and the set, costumes and lighting in the camp scenes are designed to produce a level of abstraction. The Germans, from the dehumanised brutal guards barking orders to the prosaic Doctor Lessing (Horst Buchholz), are simplistically presented as irrational and inhuman. As Benigni acknowledged, “I realized that nothing in a film could even come close to the reality of what happened. You can’t show unimaginable horror - you can only ever show less than what it was. So I did not want audiences to look for realism in my movie.” It is through this absurd existence that Guido can turn Giosué’s experiences of the Holocaust into a game, rendering the reality into a bearable fiction.
As Primo Levi recalled of Auschwitz, life had no rationality in the camps. Arriving in the camp, he broke an icicle off the windowsill to quench his thirst, only to have it snatched away by a guard. Levi was shocked enough to ask why, to which the guard matter-of-factly replied: “There is no ‘why’ here”. At the end of Primo Levi’s “The Truce”, the narrator dreams he is back in Auschwitz and realises that his life within the death camp “was, in fact, the repository of ultimate truth… all the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the sense, a dream.” Reflecting Levi’s sentiments, Guido - whilst carrying Giosué across a fog-shrouded courtyard - questions “maybe it is only a dream?”, but the fog separates to reveal a heap of burnt corpses, returning Guido (and the viewer) to the sobering reality of their existence.
While the film’s dependence on the reactions of children recalls Italian neo-realist directors like De Sica and Rossellini, Benigni’s mixing of comedy with pathos was pioneered by Chaplin, and Guido’s relationship with Giosué evokes Chaplin’s popular 1921 film, The Kid. Moreover, Benigni adapts the anti-fascistic slapstick that was anticipated in Chaplin’s 1940 film parody of Nazism, The Great Dictator, where the polarisation between the Nazis and the Jewish makes the comedic possible. However, Chaplin later noted of his film that “had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator: I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”
Although Guido is shot trying to find his wife during the impending liberation, Giosué survives and is reunited with his mother, proclaiming, “We won!”. Such a redemptive denouement can be seen as part of the reshaping of the Holocaust into a myth, where Life Is Beautiful, like Schindler’s List before it, makes mass extermination safe for mass consumption. Just as Guido hides the truth from his son, so Benigni does from the viewer.
This process of mythologising, and even ‘Americanising’ the Holocaust can be seen as a reinvention of the fundamental tales of democracy and human rights that America holds dear, perhaps in an attempt to expiate its own colonial guilt of genocide. Even today Hollywood is reticent to confront its recent history unless it is filtered through conflicts of the past, like Sam Mendes’ recent Jarhead. Similarly, mythologising the Holocaust is problematic when the ‘myth’ displaces the ‘actual’, and it has been documented that visitors of the Krakow ghetto now visit sites where Schindler’s List was shot rather than the sites where the actual Holocaust occurred.
The release of Life Is Beautiful raised questions over how the Holocaust should be ‘appropriately’ represented in popular culture and it was followed in 1999 by the Robin Williams vehicle Jakob The Liar which told the tale ofJewish shop keeper in Poland who spreads hope through the ghetto with fictitious news stories. In the years since Schindler’s List, the Academy Awards have given nods to a steady stream of films and documentaries with the Holocaust at their centre, prompting some cynical commentators to note, “there’s no business like Shoah business.” A Holocaust survivor himself, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist was one of the latest examples, for which Adrian Brody won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a Jewish concert pianist who survives the Warsaw ghetto.
Holocaust films do not guarantee success however, and films like Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001) show that you can have too much of a bad thing. Tagged as “the story you haven’t seen”, this film starring Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel tells the story of Jews who assisted their captors in the running of the camps in return for favours and stays of execution. Barely denting public consciousness, the film peaked at number 50 in the box office charts and soon faded from view.
Ultimately, we’re left with the nagging question over whether films like Life Is Beautiful really help us understand the past. The horror of the Holocaust defies all genres, and any exploration ultimately raises more questions than it gives answers. As Jean Cayrol narrates of the camps in Night and Fog, “no shot can restore their true dimension”. The enormity of the extermination and the extremes of human evil are on a scale beyond imagining, so we need individual examples - from Anne Frank to Oskar Schindler - to comprehend one of the darkest chapters of recent history. The advantage of film is that it offers us an insight into aspects of the past that are better understood through images than words alone, even if it brings up problems of its own. That said, as many survivors like Primo Levi have shown, it is vitally important that we bear witness and testimony to the tragedy in the hope that the Holocaust will not be forgotten, especially in light of the work of revisionist historians who deny its significance and even its existence. As Levi warned us, “those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”
Stephen Collings
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