[Channel 4 is showing Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful tonight at midnight. When the film first appeared in this country, I discussed it an article which was published in the journal Imprints (5/1 Summer 2000). Here I'm posting just the section of the article which deals with Benigni's movie. I'm posting it in two parts. Thanks to Imprints for permission to do so.]
You may be certain that the world is heading for destruction, but it's a good thing, a moral thing, to behave as though there's still hope. Hope is as contagious as despair: your hope, or show of hope, is a gift you can give to your neighbour, and may even help to prevent or delay the destruction of his world. (Primo Levi)
In what follows I offer some observations on Roberto Benigni's movie Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella) and on what I think is wrong with it. Let me signal at the start a difficulty I face in doing so. This is that central to what I shall be saying will be an idea of balance or proportion. In general it is often more difficult to argue such a case than one that is more unilateral and clear-cut. Where it is neither just 'this' nor just 'that' but something of them both, how to establish the proper proportion? More particularly, however, at issue here is hope and hope is not the most balanced kind of thing. Hope is, or at least may be, wild or grim, stubborn, even desperate. It can be hope in extremis, hope against hope. It is not the most apt of human attributes for those who like to measure. In due course I come to what I see as the important truth contained in this. Nevertheless, I shall be arguing for a hope which has the measure of what it is up against.
Life Is Beautiful
Assuming a degree of common knowledge on the subject, I begin by providing something very sketchy about Benigni's film and its reception. Life Is Beautiful is a comedy whose context is the Holocaust and it has divided the opinion of its audiences. There has been a certain amount of hostile criticism of the movie from reviewers and other commentators, and I know just from personal acquaintance that there are those who are repelled by it. At the same time, it has been acclaimed and done excellent business at the box office in Italy, the US, Israel and elsewhere, it has won approval from some Holocaust survivors, and in 1999 the Motion Picture Academy awarded it the Oscar for best foreign film. Again, even from within my own acquaintance it is clear that many who saw it found the film boldly effective, funny and moving.
Here is its basic concept. After a romantic and familial idyll involving the Jew Guido, his non-Jewish 'Princess' and then wife Dora and their son Giosué, the three of them are deported from Italy to a Nazi death camp and the father - who is played by Benigni - tries to save his son, as well as to protect him from the surrounding horror, by pretending that they are participants in a great game whose object is for the boy to stay hidden, not to be discovered. In the end Giosué survives and is reunited with his mother, after Guido himself is killed trying to rescue her in the chaos as the camp regime disintegrates. In a voice-over to the closing scene, we hear the adult Giosué's comment that this was his father's sacrifice, his gift to him.
The two sections of the film, the pre-deportation idyll and the period in the camp, are linked by Benigni-Guido's particular brand of clowning, brought to bear on satirizing the pomposities of Italian fascism and the absurdities (I suppose) of the camp regime, or simply wringing humour from a grim situation. I had better say that, though for my part I laughed once or twice, I am amongst those left cold by Benigni's style of buffoonery. Others are not. Let us merely sample a couple of the positive responses to Life Is Beautiful. Colin MacCabe in Sight and Sound (February 1999) called the film 'magnificent'. He sees its strength as lying in 'its settled faith that the affective bonds of the family can overcome the worst that society can offer', and says that it is the first film to recognise the enormity of the task of representation and comprehension where the Holocaust is concerned. Linda Holt in the TLS (March 12 1999) described Life Is Beautiful as 'audacious, transgressive and necessary', as 'a fable about the necessity of maintaining and protecting innocence'.
This variety of response I find troubling, to put it no more strongly than that. However, I want to preface my own critical observations about Benigni's movie by picking out from the tangle, so to say, of the more general critical reaction some familiar Holocaust-related themes that I do not subscribe to. I aim thereby to distinguish as clearly as I can the burden of what I want to say from these several themes. There are four of them.
(1) The theme of representational impossibility
This idea has a long pedigree now, from - most famously - Adorno's 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric', through Elie Wiesel's 'a novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or else it is not about Auschwitz', to the reaction of Claude Lanzmann and others to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List: the reaction that that kind of (Hollywood-style) treatment of the subject is trivializing, offensive, misconceived, doomed to fail. It is a trope that has turned up again, predictably, in the discussion of Benigni's film. The Holocaust, it is said, defies representation or defies artistic representation. At the very least, it defies comic treatment.
I do not, myself, agree with any of this. It is certainly difficult to present, summon up, communicate about, the enormity that was the Holocaust and other comparable enormities; it is difficult to do it appropriately, effectively, well. Yet we have no option but to try, for the alternative is not to do so and, aside from Holocaust-deniers and their ilk, nobody really believes this to be a preferable course. Moreover, in principle any medium and any genre available to us is a legitimate field of representational or communicative endeavour on the subject. We have the resources that we have and we are free to use them for this as much as for other purposes, even if we may end by doing it badly or indifferently rather than doing it well. One of the best answers to standard prejudices here is Art Spiegelman's Maus, a cartoon account of his father's Holocaust experience and later life in America, and as effective as many more conventional written accounts, the popularity and perceived unlikelihood of the genre notwithstanding. I would also cite, as a good counter-example to the specific taboo proposed against Holocaust comedy or satire, the television film Genghis Cohn screened some years ago by BBC2. (The film went out on March 2 1994. Rather more acerbic than Life Is Beautiful, its principal targets were the guilt and complicity of a generation of Germans, the unsettled legacy amongst them of their nation's crime; and arbitrary, pointless hatreds and the danger of their repetition. It closes on the powerfully discordant image of a Jewish prisoner in concentration camp uniform wandering down a busy post-war German street.)
(2) A would-be realist protest about inaccuracy of detail
It more or less follows from what I have said that I am reluctant, also, to accept objections to Life Is Beautiful centring on the inaccuracy of some of its elements: objections complaining, for instance, that the camp in the movie looks nothing like the real site of any German Lager but like a location, rather, in Italy, as in fact it is; or insisting that children arriving at Auschwitz were generally killed at once and not taken into the camp. Artistic or symbolic representation has its own rights, and one of these is surely a degree of choice with regard to realism, surrealism and other modes, and over the portrayal and adjustment of relevant detail. The criticism has always struck me as particularly misguided that in movies the inmates of the Nazi camps look like nothing of the kind, being too well-fed. I have still to see a production of Macbeth with anything remotely resembling Birnam Wood, or a production of King Lear in which (the actor of) Gloucester's eyes were really put out. It should be as evident in this as it is in any other case that what we are about is a representation of, not an attempt actually to simulate or reproduce, the circumstances and events providing the subject matter of the work.
(3) 'There's no business like Shoah-business'
This is a theme of more recent origin. Let me spell out what I take the burden of it to be. It is that there is now just much too much stuff, or second-order stuff, or the wrong sort of stuff, on the topic of the Holocaust, a plethora of books, articles, academic conferences, college and university courses, novels, plays, television, movies, memorials, museums. Here is one small - and, as these things go, relatively inoffensive - recent example. In a review of Tzvetan Todorov's Facing the Extreme (New Statesman May 3 1999) the historian Mark Mazower regrets the growing number of second-hand reflections currently being turned out based on the experience of survivors, when one can go directly to the classic accounts of the survivors themselves, to Primo Levi or Jean Améry. Mazower has 'had enough' of it. He neglects to say whether the same applies to the second-hand efforts of his fellow historians as to more philosophical reflections like those of Todorov, but in any event as an entertainment of sorts Life Is Beautiful has come under this rubric of complaint.
To repeat a point that ought to be obvious: with the Holocaust-related works appearing in every domain, artistic, intellectual or whatever, the material is bound to be of variable quality, from good or better than good, through indifferent, to worse than indifferent. However, I cannot agree with the view that in general too much attention is now given to the Nazi genocide or the Nazi camp system and to cognate topics of more recent or contemporary atrocity. On the contrary, these things in general do not figure enough in people's consciousness, which is to say that too little attention is devoted to them. As I shall go on to argue, what is really wrong with Life Is Beautiful is that it does nothing to remedy that.
(4) Incompatibility of the Holocaust universe with any discourse of hope
The doyen of this kind of view in contemporary Holocaust discussion is Lawrence Langer, my reservations about, and indeed distaste for, whose work, despite its undoubted merits, I have already expressed more than once. So I can be brief here. Against the counsels of unremitting darkness which derive from this tragedy it has simply to be insisted, and as often as required, that love, hope and, more generally, humanity (in the ethical sense) were a dimension, even if a severely attenuated one, of the whole terrible disaster; and that to deny or overlook this dimension is as distortive as telling a facile story of heroism and redemption about it. It is not therefore, to my mind, a valid objection to Benigni's vision to ask 'What good did love do anyone at Auschwitz?' (David Denby, 'In the eye of the beholder', The New Yorker, March 15 1999), or to bemoan the fact of the Holocaust's being used 'as an exemplar of the survival of decency and hope' (Anne Karpf, 'Let's pretend life is beautiful', Guardian, April 3 1999). Love did do some people some good there, and something of decency and hope did survive.
[Part 2 follows shortly.]