La Vita e Bella (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 1,5-2, University of Education Freiburg im Breisgau, course: Video und Film im Englischunterricht, 3 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: “For the last three months, I have had a recurring nightmare. Somehow, I am sitting in the audience at the Academy Awards ceremony. Two glamorous figures (…) stand at the podium. They are about to announce the award for “Best Foreign Language film”. The hall falls silent. ”And the winner is…” They pause; the suspense slowly builds. “Life is beautiful, Roberto Benigni, director”. The crowd goes wild. I wake up screaming….” (Stuart Liebmann) Sometimes? Often? As long as you believe in it? In my opinion a very successful film, Roberto Benigni ventures something apparently impossible. He confronts one of the cruellest occurrences, the Holocaust, with the humour and the humanity and in the end love triumphs. The dumb shock and the speechless through defiance, he tries to get closer to the impossible and inexplicable on a humorous way. He shows the viewer an unusual possibility how he can come along with the reality and creates a pleading against the oblivion, a hymn for the humanity. When I saw the movie “La Vita e Bella” for the first time, I was impressed of the emotional change which is included in the film. The pleasant and amusing humour of the main actor and his variety of imaginations develops a background of Jew- baiting and the fact of the sojourn in the concentration camp to a dramatically irony. This carefree “bella vita” is becoming a game of live and death through the fatal exterior conditions and lets the statement “La Vita e Bella” sound like a sarcastic phrase. Refer to the emotional conflict the viewer is getting in, the movie appeals in my opinio n very directly to humanity, charity and the joy of live. The movie encounters all live circumstances with optimism and shows the different perceptions, viewings and processors of “ live”. At the beginning it is still amusing due to the slapsticks and the running gags, which are designed to get in the second part of the movie sense and dramatically functions. I had to establish what emotional and moral effects this unknown combination of humour and fright they causes. Roberto Benigni as Guido Orefice is a sympathetic person with a lot of joy of life, who causes the audience to feel with him.