Rationality, Representation and the Holocaust in Life is Beautiful

Roberto Benigni’s 1997 fi lm La Vita è Bella (Life is Beautiful) was met with mixed reactions, from popular acclaim evinced in the fi lm’s 1998 Academy Award, to accusations launched by both academic historians and the popular press of sentimentalising the Holocaust. This article situates Benigni’s movie within its fi lmic context and explores La Vita è Bella in comparison with Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Linda Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. I argue that far from sentimentalising experiences of the Second World War, Benigni develops the cinematic structure of a fable to purposefully avoid representing the worst atrocities. Absence is an essential element of La Vita è Bella, allowing Benigni to present a fi lm which resonates with the idea that non-representation is the most signifi cant strategy a fi lm can deploy and that when used to its fullest effect it emphasises the idea that ‘Silence is the most powerful cry.’ In effect, the fi lm thus develops a consistent moral and epistemological argument that the horror of the Holocaust is beyond representation.