How "beautiful" can life be in a concentration camp? Relying on a child's sense of fun and fantasy, Oscar-winner Roberto Benigni looks at the experience of a young boy in a Nazi concentration camp.

Life is Beautiful (La Vita Bella) for which he won best actor and best foreign film awards at the Oscars a few weeks ago has angered Jewish groups ever since its debut at last year's Cannes Film Festival for its being a flippant portrayal of people's suffering.

Winner of 28 festival prizes already, Life is Beautiful has weathered its share of controversy. "The fear is that from fairy tale to fairy tale, we will head toward euphemisms that make the unacceptable acceptable," said Tullia Zevi, ex-president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities. "We must remember that no child left Auschwitz alive."

Critics have hailed it as a profound tragicomedy and have even compared Benigni to the legendary Charlie Chaplain.

"I liked it," Amos Luzzato, current president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said of the movie. "Not only that, it touched me. And it astonished me. I never suspected Benigni could do such a thing."

But whatever one's point of view, La Vita Bella raises some pertinent questions that straddle aesthetic and moral issues that one can only try to fathom by looking at what Benigni was trying to do in his movie and the cultural context which his film relies upon. Benigni treads on dangerous ground: the Holocaust. He can be commended for touching such fraught subject matter in that he goes beyond portraying the Holocaust as a litany of suffering.

Fifty-odd years on, one could argue, it is inevitable that humanity's indictment of itself the systematic killing of six million Jews and other "undesirables" should be looked at with a new aesthetic. We know by now what depths of depravity we as humans are capable of: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Rwanda you name them. Horror and evil are only experienced as such by those who are the victims, seldom by the perpetrators.

So why labour the point with documentation when art allows for the possibility of transforming these horrors into a realm where they can inspire an affirmation of life as in Life is Beautiful rather than ruminate on victimhood? Too much documentation runs the danger of desensitising subsequent generations. Besides, the horror of an atom bomb after breakfast, as happened at Hiroshima in August 1945, can never be known. The horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Maidanek and all those eerie sounding names belong to the realm, ultimately, of the unknowable.

We should have the humility to respect the victims by acknowledging this. No amount of accurate, detailed and manicured archiving can ever fully convey a feeling; at best it can approximate it.

Art and the realm of the imagination are perhaps the only means by which we can begin to assimilate the suffering. And here Benigni comes along making a child's fable out of the Holocaust.

Does he succeed in transforming our reading of the past, or has he trivialised it, as he has been accused of doing?

But in Benigni's film we're dealing with a country that had a relationship with its Jewish population going back to the days of Ancient Rome when Judea was part of the Roman Empire.

About 85% of Italy's Jews survived -- a better record than some other countries involved in World War II, barring probably Denmark. Why is this so? Some writers attribute it to the fact that Jews were virtually indistinguishable from their fellow Italians.

For the middle class, Mussolini's way of running the country and keeping the forces of Bolshevism at bay in the turbulent 1920s had an appeal, especially to those who perceived they had something to lose. Jews were among them.

Italian Fascism was not a race-based "ideology", rather it yearned for some audacious recreation of the Roman Empire. Some would argue that it wasn't an ideology at all, just a crack-pot farce that went too far.

This all changed with the Race Laws of 1938, the time in which Benigni's movie is set. Mussolini, eager to prove his allegiance to the Pact of Steel with Hitler, chose the course that required little or no material sacrifice. And, most horrified and bewildered were the Jews and the more circumspect Fascists, let alone those Jews who were members of the Fascist party.

Susan Zuccotti in her excellent study The Italians and the Holocaust (Peter Halban, London, 1987) points out: "Many middle-class Jews felt more comfortable with Fascism's anti-clerical strain, a remnant of its radical origins, than with conservative Catholic conservative factions. Obviously not all, or even most, middle-class Jews were Fascists, any more than most non-Jews."

She adds: "During the 1920s and 1930s a number of Jews held important positions in the Fascist government. Aldo Finzi, a pilot with Gabriele D'annunzio in Fiume and the only Fascist among nine Jews elected to the Chamber of Deputies in May 1921 (Mussolini came to power in October of the following year) became an under-secretary at the Ministry of Interior and a member of the first Fascist Grand Council. Dante Almansi ... served as vice-chief of police under Emilio de Bono until his forced retirement after the racial laws. Guido Jung served as minister of finance from 1932 to 1935.

"There were many others. Maurizio Rava was a vice-governor of Libya, governor of Somalia and a general in the Fascist militia."

These historical details illustrate that Jews in Italy were completely unprepared for the fate that befell them.

They were an integral part of Italian society and government in marked contrast to the position of their co-religionists in Nazi Germany.

In this context, Benigni arguably feels he has a greater licence and freedom to re-interpret the Holocaust. Guido (his character in Life is Beautiful) knows that Jews such as him are members of the very same party that is persecuting him. This painful paradox cannot be lost on him. The scene where he mounts a horse covered in green paint with the words cavallo ebreo (Jewish horse) symbolises the tragic absurdity of Jews in Italy.

Nor is Benigni new in exploring this shameful episode within the disaster of Fascism. Giorgio Bassani's sadly enchanting novel The Garden of the Finzi Contini examines the fate of a prominent Jewish family in the town of Ferrara and Vittorio de Sica made a superb film based on the work which details the tragic inertia of a family in the face of impending doom.

But Bassani doesn't examine the concentration camp experience. Wisely perhaps, he seems to stop short of trying to describe the ultimate horror: the allusion to it is more powerful.

Not so Primo Levi, whose If This Is A Man is well-known in the English-speaking world and who finds an elaborate, metaphorical a way of describing the indescribable.

Benigni's work therefore doesn't occur in a void when it comes to the theme of the fate of Italian Jews, nor does it come without allusions to the Italian cinema heritage.

The scenes where he roams around town on his bicycle with his son Giosu echo that other De Sica classic, Ladri di Bicicletta (The Bicycle Thieves) where a father and son have to face the world in a post-war urban nightmare. The unemployed father cuts a pathetic figure, imposing on the son his own inability to make it in the world. The son has to share the father's burden.

As if to not enact a repetition of this, Benigni's Guido takes on the whole burden of the world so as to shield his son from its horrors.

Go and see Life is Beautiful, and decide whether Benigni succeeds in allowing you to see the film through a child's eye or whether he is guilty of extreme navety.

Many scenes do defy credibility. But as to trivialising suffering, of this Benigni is not guilty. His only "sin" is that of daring to refashion horror so that it can inspire a more fruitful engagement with life: Guido makes a superhuman effort and the ultimate sacrifice so that his son Giosu can live his life relatively unscarred.

This is the central idea behind the film an idea for which Benigni at times compromises on-screen believability.

But imagine being the child when one sees the film and not an adult plagued by memory and perhaps one comes closer to Benigni's view.

It's not Spielberg's Schindler's List which relies on the adult need for verisimilitude. This is Benigni and he asks the viewer to remember what it was like being a child.

Life is Beautiful is directed by Roberto Benigni and stars him in the role of Guido with Nicoletta Braschi as Dora his wife and Giorgio Cantarini as Giosu, the son.

-- Wilhelm Snyman, Cape Times
All Material © copyright Independent Newspapers 1999.