Illusions of Gardens, Conformity and Beauty: Performing Normality in Three Italian Holocaust Films
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Illusions of Gardens, Conformity and Beauty: Performing Normality in Three Italian Holocaust Films Jeremy Maron, BA (Adv), BA (Hons) A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Film Studies Carleton University OTTAWA, Ontario 1 Aug 2006 © 2006, Jeremy Maron Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these. While these forms may be includedBien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. i * i Canada Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract This thesis examines three Italian films, focusing on how the films represent Italian life at the time of the Holocaust, and how these representations reflect shifts in understanding regarding the experience of the Holocaust in Italy. Chapter One explores how the political environment for the Jewish characters in Vittorio DeThe Sica’s Garden o f the Finzi-Continis disposes them to perform their daily lives as normally as possible while anti-Semitic legislation deteriorates their rights as Italian citizens. Chapter Two examines Bernardo Bertolucci’sThe Conformist in terms of a split between the surface illusion of normality, manifest in the film’s polished aesthetics and the calm veneer of its protagonist, and the volatile reality lurking beneath. Chapter Three examines how Roberto Benigni’sLife is Beautiful makes explicit what had been left implicit in the previous two films: i.e., that official accounts of the Italian experience of the Holocaust have promoted as fact what is best seen as a fable. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgments This thesis has been both a challenge and a pleasure to write, and I could not have kept my sanity without the love and encouragement of many. First and foremost, I thank my God, the Holy Trinity, for His strength and guidance throughout this project. A huge thank you to Charles O’Brien, my patient and understanding thesis supervisor/editor extraordinaire, who even supported me when I decided, for one day, to change my thesis topic to Winnipeg’s conversion to sound theatres; to the rest of the Film Studies faculty at Carleton, especially Andre Loiselle for countless hours spent listening to my anxieties; to Lionel Steiman and Stephen Snyder from the University of Manitoba; and to the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba for providing a grant to participate in the 2005 March of the Living. Personally, I owe a large debt (both emotional and financial) to my parents, Melvin and Jocelyn Maron, for continual support, even if my goals of film scholarship seemed mildly perplexing at first; to Paul Little, Jason Sneath, Mike Enns and Dustin Wiebe for providing years of frequent and much needed laughter; to my extended family, particularly Ben Weissmann, Steven Hyman, Sandy Hyman and Jerry Katz. Thank you also to all my fellow graduate students who continually reminded me that my torture was not solitary, especially Matt Croombs, Steve Rifkin, Angie Chiang, Sonya Poweska, and Tim Rayne. And, of course, to the love of my life, Cheryl Martens - 1 was already in the midst of this project when I finally found you, and your encouragement through to its conclusion will never be forgotten. I love you. There are many more to whom I owe thanks, and although this space is limited, my gratitude is infinite. Thank you all and God bless. I lovingly dedicate this thesis to the memory ofBaba my and Zaida, Rose and Hymie Katz. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Introduction: The Holocaust...in Italy? pp. 1-18 Chapter 1: Safe in the Garden?: The Logical Catastrophe of Deliberate Ignorance in The Garden o f the Finzi-Continis pp. 19-45 Chapter 2: The Conformist’. Shadows of Conformity pp. 46-70 Chapter 3: “This was [my father’s] gift to me”: The Reality of the Fable inLife is Beautiful pp.71-100 Epilogue: The Historical Holocaust pp. 101-105 Bibliography pp. 106-111 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Introduction: The Holocaust....in Italy? What did they expect from us, the Della Setas, engineer Levi, and that boy who loved to play Chopin? Didn’t they understand that the conceivable became real because it concerned, fatally, onlythem? They were guilty without guilt. They should have known that the Vatican’s diplomatic maneuvers to persuade the Germans to give up some of then- human booty favored those who had owned up to the deicide, those who had washed away their guilt by bending their heads under the waters of baptism. The Jews who stubbornly refused to convert would sooner or later become victims o f their pride and perseverance in error. A painful and ineluctable destiny separated them from ws.1 - Rosetta Loy This thesis examines three Italian films, focusing, (1) on how the films allude to or depict the Holocaust in Italy via their protagonists’ performances of normality, and (2) how the films’ differences in this regard reflect shifts in understanding regarding the Italian experience of the Holocaust. The main films of myThe study, Garden o f the Finzi- Continis (II Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Vittorio De Sica, 1970),The Conformist (II conformista, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970), Lifeand is Beautiful (La vita e bella, Roberto Benigni, 1997) feature characters attempting to act normally in wartime Italy - a time and place whose demands are anything but normal. In constructing their protagonists as exemplars for specific modes of coping, these three films invoke an idealized understanding of theShoah2 familiar to Italian popular culture At the same time however, all three films, implicitly or explicitly, reveal the danger that these performances of normality can servehide to in the true reality of wartime Italy. As I argue in what follows, these films can be seen to enact limitations in Holocaust historiography of particular relevance to Italy, and they do so in ways that offer insight into film’s potential for rendering the past for the present. 1 Rosetta Loy.First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy. Trans. Gregory Conti (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000): 156. Original emphasis. 2 Shoah, meaning annihilation, is a Hebrew term often used as a synonym for the Holocaust, and is the title of Claude Lanzmann’s seminal nine-and-a-half hour documentary film on the Holocaust (1985). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 Why a study of allusions to and depictions of the HolocaustItalian films in in particular? Simply put, in spite of the official alliance that existed between Mussolini’s •5 Fascist regime and Hitler’s Nazi regime between 1940 and 1943, Italy’s role in and experience of theShoah has frequently been treated as a secondary topic within Holocaust scholarship.4 Historian Alexander Stille notes that at conferences devoted to Holocaust study in the mid-1980s, when the specificity of the Italian Jewish experience during the Holocaust began to attract more widespread scholarly attention, one would often hear remarks that echoed a character in Primo Levi’sI f Not Now, When who, thinking all Italians are Catholics, asks, “Italian Jews? How can that be?” Furthermore, Stille suggests that since these and similar remarks continued to inspire laughs at these conferences, they indicated “the paucity of general knowledge as well as historical work done on the subject.”5 A similar situation is evident in the field of film scholarship, where representations