Stockholm Film Review:Essay 1

BEYOND LAUGHTER ?

This essay is a follow-up to my review of Life is Beautiful.

Roberto Benigni's Life is beautiful (La Vita è bella) has been criticised by some critics for trivialising the Holocaust. The tone of some of the criticism is one of incredulity that a comic movie could be made with such a serious backdrop. Some of the criticism expresses discomfort at the presence of slapstick comedy and mass-murder within the same film. Should moviegoers really emerge from a Holocaust movie with smiles on their faces? Other critics express the fear that this film is the beginning of a 'dumbing-down' of the Holocaust, and that by refusing to explicitly show the horrors of World War Two concentration camps, it will encourage other movie makers to use the Holocaust as a mere backdrop, rendering it as an unextraordinary event or mere dry historical fact.

"Comedy is tragedy plus time", according to Lester (Alan Alda), an amoral TV producer, in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours. His theory was that almost any event could be a source of humour, if enough time had passed. Perhaps he has a point. Imagine a movie maker mocking a major religion, openly questioning both the basis of its founding figure, its definition of God and the wisdom, if not sanity, of its followers. A cinematic version of The Satanic Verses? No, The Life of Brian, actually. It was an irreverent movie, in every sense, but despite mocking the Romans' habit of sacrificing Christians and the crucifixion, it didn't seem to cause any lasting damage to the faith of 1.7 billion Christians around the world. Even in this century, great traumatic events have been recycled to provide either the backdrop or indeed the punchline to cinematic or television comedy.

World War One was supposed to be the war that ended all wars, after the sickening slaughter of trench warfare on the Western Front. For many years, from All Quiet on the Western Front to Oh, What a lovely War, filmmakers treated the subject in a serious manner. But when the BBC comedy Blackadder set its fourth and final series in the trenches during 1916, there wasn't much protest. The series did cast an acidic eye over the conduct of the trench campaign, but it was still primarily a sitcom set in the trenches. Recently, an advertisement for jeans has been running in cinemas (in Sweden, anyway) which depicts a WW1 soldier who, while admiring his new, branded, jeans, forgets where he is and stands up in his trench, and getting shot as a result. His death is supposed to be the humorous punchline of the advertisement. Two decades later, World War Two began.

The Holocaust has a special place in the annals of human cruelty. Massacres on vast scales have happened for centuries. In terms of sheer numbers, the Final Solution accounted for a relatively small percentage of fatalities in World War Two. And anti-Semitism had existed all over Europe for centuries - Emile Zola's famous essay J'Accuse highlighted the campaign of the French government against a Jewish army officer in the last century. However, the manner in which a society, renowned and respected for its reforming zeal and industrial efficiency through the centuries became corrupted by the warped ideals of the Nazi party is particularly chilling. The German security apparatus, once the 'problems' of the Jews and other undesirables was posed unto them, devised horrifically streamlined solutions. Concentration camps (which seemed relatively innocuous at the beginning of the war) were served by an efficient transport and distribution system. Propaganda encouraged the general population to assist the Gestapo in rooting out undesirables. Engineers and chemists designed compact gas ovens, which would generate enough heat to destroy human remains. A gas was developed which dissolved and became effective at the same temperature as the human body, so that the huddles masses jammed into the 'shower rooms' triggered the gas that would kill them. This was not murder driven by primal hatred and fear, but by cold logic, and delivered with an accountant's eye and an engineer's efficiency. It was murder, raised not to an art form, but to a science.

The most depressing legacy of the Holocaust is that it didn't deflect humanity from repeating such slaughter since. Genocide has haunted the post-war geo-political landscape. China, the U.S.S.R., Rwanda, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia have each proven that Man has learned nothing, robbing the victims of the Holocaust a meaning for their suffering - if it has not prevented the repeat of such evil, was their suffering utterly meaningless? Subsequent slaughter has lessened the 'shock value' or 'newsworthiness' of the Holocaust. Against this backdrop, it is easy to see how some people can be uneasy at a movie like La Vita è Bella. The fear is because the film has been made at all, then the Holocaust is in the process of being slowly but inexorably reclaimed into popular culture, and that if no voices of protest are heard for this movie, it will encourage more films. And the next filmmaker might not be so meticulous or talented. Movies like Schindler's List, Bent and La Vita è Bella are heartfelt movies, with a strong moral voice (however subtle or strident) running through each of the stories.

There used to be a joke going round when Spielberg first announced that he would make Schindler’s List. Someone calls the Simon Weisenthal Centre in New York and says "I’ve got god news and I’ve got bad news". The good news is that Oliver Stone is making a film about the Holocaust". "That’s great", replies the voice from the Centre", Oliver Stone is a passionate, committed filmmaker, full of integrity. I’m sure his movie will help our cause immensely. What’s the bad news?" Comes the reply," Kevin Costner is playing Hitler". Now, I’m sure Stone could indeed make a worthy Holocaust movie if he so decided. Imagine, however, if a producer decided to make a ‘high-concept’ thriller on this topic. The mind boggles!

In a sense, those complaints are valid. Hundreds of movies (particularly mediocre ones) will dilute the impact of the Holocaust. In a couple of decades, there will be no one alive who was in a Nazi deathcamp. All the memories will be second-hand; all the images shall seem more and more archaic. But decent and talented filmmakers will always be able to touch and move an audience. How many World War Two movies had appeared before Saving Private Ryan? How many had achieved the same level of impact?

Funnily enough, a couple of movies made at the outbreak of the war seem more likely to cause offence. The Great Dictator (1940) was Charlie Chaplin's attempt to satirise the Nazis. He admitted afterwards that the movie would not have been so light-hearted had he know the extent of the suffering in Germany. The other movie is To Be or Not To Be (1942), Ernst Lubitsch's darkly humorous satire of a Warsaw theatre troupe whose performance is interrupted by the German invasion. Carole Lombard (in her last role before her death in a plane crash) jokes about what to wear in the camps - a dark enough joke in 1942, but one that sounds particularly hollow after the war.

Given the sensitivity of the topic (particularly amongst the former Axis powers), Benigni’s approach is understandable. Filmmakers in Germany have also been gingerly poking at the scars left by the war. The Nasty Girl (Michael Verhoeven; 1990) told of one girl’s attempt to discover the history of her German town during the Second World War, and the hostility she encounters as she discovers how her fellow citizens conveniently re-invented themselves to hid their wartime roles.

Schtonk! (1992), Helmut Dietl’s witty and fast-paced satire was ostensibly about the Hitler Diaries, a fraud perpetuated by an amateur forger on the Sunday Times and quite a few respected historians. But Dietl used the movie to highlight the sneaking regard that some Germans held for their Nazi past. In a similar way, Benigni’s film did not just explore the fate of those sent to the camps – it also explored the attitudes of the people who sent them there, but in an oblique manner. For all the slapstick and whimsy in the first half of his movie, Benigni subtly points up how Italians nonchalantly subscribed to the Nazi’s racial theories – how seemingly minor harassment and denigration of Jews had a dreadful consequence.

There is a very subversive undercurrent to the story – the deportation of the Jews may seem clearly wrong today (with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight), but it could be claimed that it did not seem so during the war. Today, refugees from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia (and other troubled regions of the world) are desperately seeking asylum in nations throughout Europe, including Italy. Only recently has evidence of genocide in that war been revealed. Are Europeans, including Italians, in danger of failing the same moral test that they failed sixty years ago, in failing to guarantee the safety and freedom from persecution to these refugees?

As I concluded in my review of Life is Beautiful, the criticisms of insensitivity and crassness are ill founded. The Holocaust should not be an ‘untouchable’ subject. Cinema can be an extraordinarily effective means of exploring the human psyche and communicating ideas. Well intentioned but sterile films will influence no one and educate no one because few will bother watch such films. Schindler’s List demonstrated that a well-constructed movie could attract a wide audience for such a grim topic, and generate healthy debate on the topic. But not every Holocaust-related movie needs to defer to Spielberg. If more moviemakers cover Holocaust-related topics with the same amount of integrity and dexterity as Benigni, we can consider ourselves lucky indeed.