Compare And Contrast Benigni And Levi

The Holocaust is a sensitive subject. Many writers and filmmakers have approached it in diverse ways. Some base their story telling on documented history, others such as Benigni, mix facts with fantasy, creating popular entertainment. There are others, and this is a much smaller and yet diminishing group, Such as Levi, who tell a first-hand survivor’s account. Before engaging with ‘La vita èbela’ and ‘Se questo è un uomo’, one expects these works to be different in such a way that it would be impossible to compare the two. On closer examination, one finds that many points of comparison as well as contrast exist.

In both works, ‘La vita è bella’ by Roberto Benigni, and ‘Se questo è Un uomo’ by Primo Levi, despite the first being a product of someone’s imagination and the second being asurvivors account, we can still encounter many similarities. Despite the similarities, Benigni’s movie is a light-hearted story; it can even be considered a romantic comedy. After the first part of the movie, in which we see some pointers to the situation of and discrimination against the Jewish community in fascist Italy, the movie takes a more serious tone. The family is torn apart after Guidoand his son are captured by the German Nazis and put on a cargo train to be sent to a concentration camp. In an attempt to keep her family together, Dora, Guido’s wife, makes the decision of voluntarily joining the prisoners on the train. This shows us her innocence of the magnitude of the horror she was about to experience. Benigni makes use of comedy to highlight the importance of communicationand language. Having just arrived in the camp, Guido offers to translate the rules of the camp to the other new prisoners, taking this opportunity to invent a game so he could shelter his son from the horrible reality of the new circumstances. This creation of a fantasy world is also a way for Guido to avoid accepting this harsh new way of living. From the beginning of the movie, we see that Guidois a big child at heart, a fantasist. This characteristic of Guido is one of the framing elements of the movie. When we first meet him, he creates a fairy tale for himself and Dora. His child-like enthusiasm makes it real when he marries his ‘principesa’. While living his fairy tale with Dora, he meets a doctor with whom he establishes a relationship based on a mutual interest in riddles. Thisrelationship grows due to the doctor’s obsession with them and the admiration he has for Guido’s ability to solve them. Later in the movie, Guido reencounters the doctor, and the audience experiences a moment of hope and salvation for Guido and his family, but this hope is short lived when we find out that the doctor has no intention of helping him but only selfish reasons to talk to him.

Unlike‘La vita è bella’, Primo Levi’s ‘Se questo è un uomo’ is a first-hand account of his own survival of a Nazi concentration camp. Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919. In 1943, he helped to form an anti-fascist resistance group. He was later arrested as a political prisoner but chose to declare himself of Jewish race. Levi, in his innocence, thought that being held for being of Jewish origin would bemore tolerable than being held as a political prisoner. Throughout the book, Levi stresses several times the importance of language in the concentration camp, making reference to the Tower of Babel to emphasize the large number of different languages spoken in the camp and the great communication problem created by it. He talks about the existence of the many different languages in the camp, butmainly of the importance of understanding German. Asking questions was not an option, so, one’s survival depended on the understanding of the rules and orders to follow, given by the Germans. The little knowledge Levi had of German, allowed him to survive the winter while working in the lab, sheltered from the cold. While the understanding of German was crucial, the meaning of many words...