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Life is Beautiful and Holocaust Comedy - Coggle Diagram
Life is Beautiful and Holocaust Comedy
Holocaust comedy: an oxymoron?
Terrence Des Pres: Holocaust comedy violates three cardinal rules of Holocaust etiquette
Uniquness
The Holocaust should be portrayed as a unique event
Accuracy
Holocaust representation should be accurate
Solemnity
The Holocaust should be approached solemnly
And yet, Holocaust comedy is as old as the Holocaust itself.
Holocaust Comedies: The War Years
Comedy as propaganda prior to full knowledge
The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940)
Satire of Hitler (and Mussolini) as tyrants. Gives speech as if he was Hitler.
Mocks Nazi ideology by having Chaplin play both Hitler and a Jewish barber
You Natzy Spy (Jules White, 1940)
Moe = Hitler; Curly = Goering; Larry = Goebbels.
Three Stooges - very slapstick group
They end up getting eaten by lions
The Goose Steps Out (Basil Dearden and Will Hay, 1942)
Will Hay passes himself off as a German officer, outwits the Nazis and folds plans to invade Britain.
To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
Mocks the Nazis, tricked by a company of (poor) actors-resisters, and their ideology. Sophisticated comedy. Fled Germany and became important Hollywood figure. Remade in the 1980s, and around 2004.
Chaplin after the war: 'Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.' Charles Chaplin, My Auto-Biography (1964).
Holocaust Comedies: 1945-1990s
Comedy as rare exception
Me and the Colonel (Peter Glenville, 1958)
Polish Jew and anti-Semitic Polish aristocrat join forces and outwit Germans
Wir Wunderkinder (Aren't We Wonderful, Kurt Hoffmann, 1958)
Satire of postwar German historical amnesia (doesn't want to remember the Holocaust). Main character is liberal, saves his Jewish friend, does not support Hitler.
Le vieil homme et l'enfant (The Two of Us, Claude Berri, 1967)
Similar satire mocking ideological beliefs of not recognising what is in front of them. Anti-Semitic French peasant unwittingly shelters Jewish boy; viewers laugh at incongruity of the man's tirades and his affection for the boy.
The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1968)
Based on (mistaken) assumption that any comedy about Hitler would offend Americans. Mel Brooks important and famous American Jewish comedian.
Exception: Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmüller, 1975)
First film to extract laughter from the plight on an inmate at Auschwitz (Baron, 2005)
Plot: Italian murderer sent to fight in Russia; arrested and deported by Germans after 1943 armistice. There he selects inmates for execution, kills his best friend, seduces obese camp commandant, only to survive.
Bruno Bettelheim
Falsification and degradation of survivors' experience; symptom of contemporary societies' inability to fully connect with those traumatic events.
Terrence Des Pres
Laughter not escapist but enhances viewers' awareness of deformity of life in camps
Carnivalesque laughter represents revolt against any order that claims to be fixed, and is therefore in itself antifascist.
Holocaust comedy life-reclaiming response to terror no less effective than tragedy and realism
Antidote against desensitisation of viewers.
1990s: Rise of Holocaust comedy
So many films about the Holocaust, and so Holocaust comedies too.
Search for original approaches and a film that might be successful. Comedy becomes something that is relatively under-explored.
Widespread basic knowledge - viewers have a basic idea of what the Holocaust was really like. Doesn't have to try to be realistic because people already know what it was like.
New generation of filmmakers - increased distance from the event itself.
Fairytale and fantasy:
Genghis Cohn (Elijah Moshinsky, 1993)
Ghost of Holocaust victim returns to haunt his execution and transforms him into a Jew and a victim of neo-Nazis.
Not about what happens in the camp itself, but a spiritual element to it.
La vita e bella (Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, 1997)
Jewish father invents 'game' to hide truth of concentration camp to his son. By far the most successful Holocaust comedy.
Train de vie (Train of Life, Radu Mihaileanu, 1998)
Jewish shtetl survives the Holocaust by dressing up as Nazis, or do they? Reality has the final say.
Jakob the Liar (Peter Kasovitz, 1999)
Jakob pretends to have a radio and spreads 'good' news in his ghetto. Remake of an East-German film. Tragic story but uses the comedy register.
In more recent years Jojo Rabbit.
It is a film that satirises a certain aspect of the past or the present.
Life is Beautiful
68 awards and 39 nominations
'Not since [...] Holocaust, or [...] Schindler's List, had a film about the Holocaust roused the praise and the ire of so many' Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust (2011)
Loved or hated it
Loved it
Millions of viewers
Film festivals
Mainstream reviewers
Most survivors - the more the Holocaust is talked about the better in a sense
Some academics and intellectuals
Hate it
Most Holocaust scholars
Most second generation Jewish intellectuals, most famously the author of The Maus
The political right in Italy and many leftwing intellectuals elsewhere
Scholarly defences
Antidote to 'compassion fatigue'
Flanzbaum: film 'compels viewers [...] to take another look [...] at the event'
Questions for similitude is 'severely limiting fresh discussion, and [keeps] a wider public audience from coming to terms with the event. [...] When critics scoff and sneer at these attempts [...] they [...] and take a step toward erasing the topic from the larger cultural agenda.'
Realism cannot represent the Holocaust
Zizek: Holocaust so extreme that attempts to represent it realistically would fail
Comedy is antifascist
Le Figaro: totalitarian states hate humour; LiB laughs in the face of 'will to humiliate'
Film mocks racist ideology
Holocaust scholars and 'cultural capital'
Importance of context of reception
In France, unlike in Italy, liberal right praised film (le Figaro), while most of the left-of-centre press disliked it (Le Monde, and 'denial'); Liberation defined it 'simplistic enchantment'; l'Humanite 'trivialisation' of extermination.
Victim's agency
Misplaced illusion that purposeful action could have saved children in the camps, while in reality this was a matter of pure chance - bias for realism
Denial
Le Monde: film is 'negationniste'; David Denby, The New Yorker: 'a benign form of Holocaust denial'
Displacement
Enzo Traverso: displacement of actual event in favour of sanitised 'Holocaust' that privileges emotional stimulation over critical understanding
Film and reality: Samuel Blumefeld, Le Monde: camp too unrealistic; film's fantastic dimension fails because it never encounters reality.
Escapism
Denby: audience comes away feeling relieved and happy, and rewards Benigni for allowing it, at last, to escape
Exploiting the Holocaust
Education
Stuart Liebman: new generations will believe that that was the Holocaust
Train de vie: comedy, fairy-tale, and history
A Jewish shtetl buys a train and 'deport' themselves, with ambition of escaping to Palestine via the Soviet Union
Principal character is village idiot Shlomo, who first had the crazy idea that saves his community.
At the end, Shlomo in voiceover says, as the train recedes into the distance, 'Once in the Soviet Union, mostly everyone espoused the communist cause. Some went to Palestine, mostly the gypsies. Others went to India, mostly the Jews'
In a dissolve, transitioning from the train to a close-up of Shlomo he tweaks his head to the side, and the camera zooms out to reveal that Shlomo is speaking to us from behind a barbwire fence and wearing a concentration camp uniform.
'Well... Almost true' Shlomo concedes.