Life is Beautiful

There is a famous quotation that has been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Lenny Bruce, Carol Burnett, Steve Allen, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, and a fictional character played by Alan Alda in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). That quote is "Comedy is Tragedy + Time." Can we successfully explore this old cliché to see if it has any use-value in terms of trauma and terror? Can we (and should we) find humor in excruciating personal, national, and global catastrophes? What is the ultimate role of comedy in our lives and in our cinemas-i.e., is film comedy a positive force that provides a coping mechanism for the eternal suffering of the human species or is it just another "opiate of the masses" that conceals the true nature of reality from our eyes? These are, of course, big questions-and the jury may still be out, unless the response is "Yes, it's both!" or "It depends on the circumstances." Perhaps interrogating the issues of trauma and terror from the context of comedy will help us find a solution to a conundrum that many scholars thought had been settled, at least to their satisfaction, many years ago.

This study examines these questions in connection with Roberto Benigni's Academy Award-winning  LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1998)

Una comedia narrando el horror de un pasado real parece, para muchos y a simple vista, un oxímoron. No obstante, un sobreviviente de Auschwitz, el escritor Jack Fuchs, dijo: "Imagino que, dentro de pocos años más, todo lo acontecido será la visualización de una película. (…) En este caso La vida es bella, comedia costumbrista y romántica, se convierte, de golpe, en 'un manual de supervivencia en el infierno'. Claro está: el celuloide genera riesgos y el mayor de todos es tomar la película como la realidad sabiendo que la Shoah desafía al arte". Surgen así dos cuestiones: la importancia cada vez mayor del cine, que genera un desafío a la disciplina histórica como único modo legítimo de representar el pasado; y otra, que expresa dos grandes problemas de la representación cinematográfica del Holocausto: el de la adecuación o correspondencia entre el evento y su representación y el de los límites de esa representación. La vida es bella (Benigni, 1997) reactualizó los puntos ya tradicionales de esas discusiones, como la estetización de la violencia, la cuestión de los géneros "nobles", la validez o no del humor en el contexto del horror, entre otros. Así, nos preguntamos, ¿qué podemos conocer sobre el Holocausto mediante esta película? ¿Qué puede decirnos (históricamente) una comedia, costumbrista y romántica, que se convierte, de golpe, en un manual de supervivencia en el infierno? En este trabajo reflexionaremos sobre estas cuestiones a la luz de los aportes de Hayden White (2014), respecto de las características formales de la comedia en la representación del pasado, y de otros autores que han trabajado profundamente el problema de la representación cinematográfica del Holocausto, tales como Aaron Kerner, Rudolph Herzog y Annette Insdorf, entre otros.

Roberto Benigni’s 1997 fi lm La Vita è Bella (Life is Beautiful) was met with mixed reactions, from popular acclaim evinced in the fi lm’s 1998 Academy Award, to accusations launched by both academic historians and the popular press of sentimentalising the Holocaust. This article situates Benigni’s movie within its fi lmic context and explores La Vita è Bella in comparison with Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Linda Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. I argue that far from sentimentalising experiences of the Second World War, Benigni develops the cinematic structure of a fable to purposefully avoid representing the worst atrocities. Absence is an essential element of La Vita è Bella, allowing Benigni to present a fi lm which resonates with the idea that non-representation is the most signifi cant strategy a fi lm can deploy and that when used to its fullest effect it emphasises the idea that ‘Silence is the most powerful cry.’ In effect, the fi lm thus devel...

Spinoza ayakları oldukça yere basan ve buna rağmen başka bir dünyayı tahayyül etmemizi sağlayan araçları bizim için temin eden bir filozof. Benzer şeyleri Hayat Güzeldir (Roberto Bengini, 1997) filminin başkahramanı Guido için de söylememiz mümkün. Bu ilginç benzerlik, bize bir o kadar ilginç bir yöntem sağlayabilirve Spinoza'yı anlamamızı kolaylaştırabilir. Guido karakteri üzerinden ilerleyerek Spinoza'nın "ruh kuvveti" (fortitudo) kavramını açmayı deneyeceğiz bu yazıda.