Rescreening "The Holocaust": The Children's Stories

Abstract

The final ecstatic burst of the five year old Giosue in Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful gives voice to both a truth and an obscenity. As an obscenity it reminds us egregiously through paradoxical inversion of those who did not win and whose story will never be known. Yet its truth also lies in what it reveals about the dilemma of memory and representation for those who come after the Holocaust, after the survivors of the Holocaust, and after the claims to authenticity by such megafilms of meaning as the 1978 television mini-series Holocaust and Schindler's List fifteen years later. Using Benigni's Life is Beautiful and Michael Verhoeven and George Tabori's My Mother's Courage as two recent examples of European cinematic treatments of the Holocaust, this essay will focus less on the precise interworkings of their textual organization, and more on what their impact and metaphoric message might mean for alternative cinematic representations of the Shoah in the future; less, that is, on the parents' stories and the parents' movies, and more on what the children's screen memories of those stories might hold for understanding the complexities of rescreening the Holocaust.