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"Life is Beautiful" ( Chicago/Turabian format
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| Running
head: ROBERTO BENIGNI'S ACTING AND DIRECTING
Roberto Benigni's acting
and directing in "Life is Beautiful"
[The Name of Writer Appears Here]
[The Name of Institution Appears Here]
"APA
Format"
Abstract
Several humorists have made an effort to tread that delicate
line between humor and tragedy. A small number of them
have ever been successful. Jerry Lewis, in ‘The
Day the Clown Cried’, featuring Lewis as a circus
clown trying to cheer up children in a WWII prison camp
even tried his hand at making a prison camp comedy. Most
recently, Billy Crystal has injected his films (Father's
Day, My Giant) with a cloying dose of schmaltz and even
Chaplin got the mixture right in films. Roberto Benigni
in his film, ‘Life is Beautiful’, applies
his tragedy with an eyedropper of a precise mixture of
optimistic humor and touching emotion. The idea of a comedy
set against the backdrop of the tragedy begs the question:
Are there subjects too dark to be dealt with comedically?
Perhaps comedy is the best way to deal with tragedies,
and besides all criticism Benigni has shown us so.
Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful"
An unlikely comedy about a father's effort to shield his
son from the dreadfulness of the Holocaust. According
to Halloran, “La Vita e bella is most disturbing
in the context of actor/director Roberto Benigni's filmography.
And it's plenty disturbing on its own, as it will forever
go down in film history as ‘that comedy set in the
concentration camp’.”
Benigni never considered writing and directing a movie
about Fascist Italy until he tried to envision the most
intense circumstance in which to position his comic alter
ego. He could reflect of no darker time in our entire
history than the Holocaust. Benigni read something that
struck his heart, it was a line ascribed to the revolutionary
Trotsky. At the time, Trotsky was trapped in bunker, waiting
for Stalin’s hit men to kill him, yet, in that very
instant of dread, Trotsky wrote that he still considered,
“Life is beautiful.”
While Benigni states that he is the first comedian to
make a film about the Holocaust, he's well aware that
Charlie Chaplin lead him by more than 50 years with his
1940 spoof on Adolf Hitler, "The Great Dictator."
In fact, the number on Guido's prison uniform in "Life
Is Beautiful" ‘ 0737’ is a nod to Chaplin,
who wore the identical number in ‘The Great Dictator’.
“Charlie Chaplin has influenced everything I've
ever done. Just everything,” Benigni says. “He
is the prince of each comedian in the world. Chaplin is
like our Michelangelo.”
But many a critics don’t agree on this, during the
press conference at Cannes, one French journalist stood
up to blame Benigni of scorning the victims of the Holocaust,
pronouncing that he was “scandalized” by the
movie. A reporter from the International Herald Tribune
vocalized that she “loathed this film”, and
the London Guardian wrote that it was a miserably insufficient
memorial to the vile events of the Holocaust. ‘Life
Is Beautiful’ is not a comedy about the Holocaust;
it's a movie by a comedian about the Holocaust. The character
he portrays might horse around, but the Holocaust is never
played down. “There's been some people, not a lot,
but some people who felt in a very, very strong way, like
I touched something untouchable,” Benigni says.
“The last thing I wanted was to hurt somebody or
be offensive with the memory of the Holocaust, because
I started from the opposite idea, of course. I wanted
to make a beautiful movie, and especially to say something
poetic.” (Milvy, 1998)
Benigni and Braschi declare that the intention of the
movie was to make audiences laugh and cry. “That
cry is purifying," says Braschi. "It makes you
feel better because there's something that gets near to
the essence of the life and the death. So it's a good
cry.”(Okwu, 1998)
Conclusion
Humor can be used as a salve and a leveler; it also helps
shape an understanding of events that are otherwise beyond
comprehension. The grimmest of national tragedies inevitably
triggers a backwash of sick jokes, the vileness of which
increases in proportion to the seriousness of the incident.
With his newest film, however, Benigni seems to have locked
onto a no-lose combination of humor and pathos. Life is
Beautiful is, ostensibly, a comedy about life in a Nazi
prison camp. That isn't a comic subject most folks would
dare to touch. We're not talking about a foolish POW camp
a la "Hogan's Heroes" either. We're talking
a real deal Jewish death camp. Benigni has crafted a wonderful,
funny and life-affirming little gem.
References
Halloran,
David: Review: Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful.
http://www.leisuresuit.net/Webzine/articles/life_beautiful.shtml
Milvy, Erika: Review on Life Is Beautiful: SALON. Oct.
30, 1998
Okwu, Michael: 'Life Is Beautiful' through Roberto Benigni's
eyes. Friday, October 23, 1998 http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9810/23/life.is.beautiful/
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