History and memory in 'Life is Beautiful' (Film as Text)

'Despite Theodore Adorno's famous remark that 'writing poetry after Aushwitz is barbaric,' the Jewish Holocaust has remained a subject for not only poets, but novelists, painters and film-makers to this decade. There has been an ongoing fascination with this particular example of extreme, sustained and organised cruelty and the stories of survival in conditions of mass psychological and physical torture. 'Life is Beautiful' (Roberto Benigni, 1998) does not simply denounce Nazism and Fascism, but shows how the conditions inside the concentration camps revealed and reinforced the tenacity of certain human qualities and the strength of familial bonds.'