Roberto Benigni's moving film, Life is Beautiful, is a film that is set in a concentration camp and combines comedy with the seriousness of the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. In Life is Beautiful, the real purpose of the film, is a love story on many levels. It is a tale about a man and his “principessa”, a man and his son, a man and his life. It is a tale about choosing how to exist and choosing how to die. The movie was primarily made for entertainment, using the Holocaust as its setting.
Despite the film’s failed attempt to really capture the seriousness of the Holocaust, certain details still appear to be accurate. The removal of clothing at the arrival at the concentration camp, the showers, the separating of the families, the lack of food, and the unnecessary gassing of hundreds of Jews, are clearly shown throughout the movie just as it occurred years before. Guido, the main character, is sent to part from his beloved wife, and taken to the other side of the camp with his son. Wanting to keep the truth away from his son, he explains...
middle of paper ... ... Life in Auschwitz was definitely not what many people thought it was. Life was hard, housing was rough, the guards were mean and brutal and the different things that could happen to you were terrifying. One day in there would have killed most people and they lived like that for years.
He recreated the images of destruction and showed the cruelty used against the victims of the Holocaust, “Without passion, without haste, they [the Nazi soldiers] slaughtered their prisoners. Each one had to go up to the hole and present his neck. Babies were thrown into the air and the machine gunners used them as targets,” (4). After reading his narrative, readers could not dispute the occurrence of the Holocaust, as no one could conjure up images of such horror and evil. He described their displacement in such a way that people couldn’t even imagine, only those who had experienced it could explain the internal reasoning of the victims.
In the Italian movie Life is Beautiful, the main character Guido, played by Roberto Benigni, prioritizes his son and wife’s well being over his own. A prime example of a time when Guido’s unconditional love was instrumental to his survival occurs when he resigned himself to an inevitable end while working in the anvil factory, until he recognizes that his survival is vital to his son’s (Benigni). Although his sense of self-sacrifice seems to contradict the notion of self-preservation, Guido’s motive to endure the atrocities of the concentration camp was so he could continue to care for his son, otherwise he would have given into the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and embraced death as an end to his
We watch death explore the beauty and ugliness of the human race in Markus Zusak’s book The Book Thief. We watch as Liesel, Hans, and Rosa do everything they can to help out a group of people who were treated with such disrespect during this time period. This group, the Jews, were beaten for taking food that was given to them, and when they died no one would even care. But, these few people gave them food, a place to hide, a sense of belonging, and and a reason to live. They have to work day and night, and do everything they can. Even though people aren’t so beautiful at all times, there is still hope. As we have learned in this book that even when 99 percent of humans aren’t so marvelous there is still that one percent that is to delightful that it would touch anyones heart.
The way Auschwitz fit to the larger history of the Second World War was how the prisoners of Auschwitz provided basically free labor and taking valuables from the prisoners attributed to the monetary cost of the Second World War. In the book, it mentions how the prisoners were even building a factory meant for synthesizing rubber, along with how the prisoners provided labor by means of mining coal and other various forms of unearthing and creating resources. However, with this free labor it was also accompanied by consequences after the Second World War. This results many cases of mental trauma on prisoners of the Holocaust. It broke up families and caused mass deaths, especially since Auschwitz is known to be a death
He convinced his son that his time in the camp was a game to help him imagine a different place than where they really were. The movie actually softens the Holocaust slightly, to allow humor to be possible. I believe that in the real death camps there would be no role for Guido. I believe that Life is Beautiful is not really made to show the Nazis, Holocaust, or Fascism in Italy. “It is about showing the human spirit. It is about rescuing whatever is good and hopeful in our lives from the wreckage of dreams.” (Life is Beautiful Movie Review) It is about hope for the future no matter what. It is about the necessary human conviction, or delusion, that things will be better for our children than they are right now. This is why I recommend this
I think something important is how awful the holocaust was and how they showed it. The concentration camps were nothing good, they used people for new experiments, torture, and executing. German authorities established camps all over Germany. They used some prisoners for construction and expansion for the camps. Many prisoners from the concentration camps died of maltreatment, starvation, poor health conditions, or execution.
Unlike the other prisoners in the camp, Guido uniqueness shows by his ability to use a perfect mixture of will, humor and imagination which protected his son from the dangers in their camp. At the beginning of the film Life is Beautiful, Guido’s friend tells him, “With willpower, you can do anything.” Guido took that to heart and lived his life accordingly. His mentality that he could not change what was happening to him did not affect his willpower to save his life and the lives of those he loved. The fear of losing his life or that tomorrow may not come, did not seem to affect Guido’s determination to survive. Unlike many of the prisoners surrounding him who had given up hopes of survival, Guido pranced around the camp with his genuine smile and liveliness about himself. His positive expression and attitude is what afforded him the ability to maintain a functional life. It also gave him, as a father in camp, the presence of mind to be positive for his son despite the tragedies around him. His family and his unique way of living kept him safe when others failed. He knew that at any moment he or his loved ones could be sent to the gas chamber, but this did not change his outward disposition. Guido’s refusal to let the uncertainty of life and death dictate how he lived his days in the concentration camp gave him an even deeper meaning of life. He had an extraordinary way of keeping his son 's innocence, even in these horrible conditions about the
Every camp and killing center forced each prisoner to send home cards that state they are living well and the authorities from the camp make sure the film used propaganda to cover up all the mass murders (“Nazi Propaganda”). One sided propaganda didn’t let out info on how the Jews were massacred and out into gas chambers to suffer (“The Role…”).
This progressive history and the facts revolving around the most widely discussed concentration camp from the Holocaust offer the reader something to relate to. Because Auschwitz is referred to most c...
The story seeks to make the argument that children are not born with prejudice and hate, but they are instead taught those ways of thinking. However, to make this point the story suspends much of reality in order to bring about an unlikely friendship between Bruno and Shmuel. However, even though the message is clearly a good one, it severely misrepresents the life during the Holocaust and could mislead uneducated viewers about the level of danger and cruelty in the camps. This begs the question: is it moral to use the Holocaust to teach a lesson if in the process the truth of the Holocaust is muddled and softened? Do these inaccuracies not give the viewer the impression that a child could survive fairly well in a camp and possibly escape? This does not do justice for the one and a half million children who perished during the Holocaust. Furthermore, it paints the Nazi family in a light that offers them plausible deniability. This seems to pass all responsibility to the SS officers in charge. Despite the fact that not every German knew of the activities in concentration camps, the whole of the German people share a responsibility for the atrocities of the Holocaust, from which the movie seems to absolve
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
Society is fascinated with suffering. Haunted houses, horror movies, documentaries based on the greatest tragedies—a culture has been built around the human enthrallment with misery. Fear, lies, and regret all tragedies that cause human suffering. As youth, one learns of the great disasters that these immoralities have caused in hopes of preventing them. Many have attempted to comprehend such atrocities through the art of film, the holocaust is no exception to this phenomenon. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a faithful embodiment of the pain suffered during the Holocaust. It personifies these human vices leaving the viewer in a state of near emotional collapse Viewers of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas can sense the impurities of fear, lies,
This camp was designed to kill every Jew in Europe. Hundreds, even thousands, of people were packed tightly into small cattle trains for days. Many of people died on the train rides. When they arrived to Auschwitz they were still being greatly deceived because music was playing at the stations to make them feel welcomed. Working men and children were separated; the sick, elderly, and woman were taken in another direction, right to the showers. As they were getting ready to go into the shower they were continuously being lied to by the Nazi. They were being told to remember the clothespin number and that the shower would delouse them. The Jews instead of showering were gassed and taken out in massive numbers. This is a horribly painful and extremely inhuman way to
Bomba explained how people would walk through the “gate” and was never seen again. His job, along with sixteen or so other prisoners was to clean up the place so that when the next transport comes in, they would not see what was going on. His experience is very similar to the experience described by Mr. Mueller. Although they were in different camps, they were the experiencing the same torment. Ms. Farkas was deported to the Auschwitz camp where she worked in the kitchens to receive extra food. She was deported to another camp and later forced on a death march. Her experience is also very similar to Mr. Mueller’s. Toward the end of the war, he describes how he and other prisoners were forced on a death march. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas indirectly shows that there is no survival from the camp. Shmuel tells Bruno how his grandparents died shortly after arriving at the camp and later asks Bruno to help him look for his father because he hadn’t seen him a few days. Unbeknownst to Shmuel and Bruno, his father had already suffered the fate of the gas chamber. I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Mr. Mueller, Mr. Bomba and Ms. Farkas endured to live to tell their stories. It is hard to believe the cruelty they experienced at hands of other human beings. When faced in difficult situations, it is the survival of the fittest and I would like to think that I could be as strong in order to