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Postmodernism: WTF? An introduction to Postmodernist Theory | Tom Nicholas

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Roberto Benigni Wins Best Actor: 1999 Oscars

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Life is Beautiful (1998) Official Trailer - Robert Benigni Movie HD

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Life is Beautiful (8/10) Movie CLIP - Buongiorno Principessa! (1997) HD

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Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

-Leon Trotsky, letter, Feb. 27, 1940

In a 1987 essay entitled "Holocaust Laughter," Terrence Des Pres notes that "one of the surprising characteristics of the film Shoah is how often Claude Lanzmann and some of his witnesses take up a sardonic tone, a kind of mocking irony that on occasion comes close to laughter." Observing that Lanzmann "seems deliberate about it," Des Pres concludes that "if Shoah is a sign of the times, we may suppose that artistic representation of the Holocaust is changing-that it is trying a more flexible mode of response." Eleven years later, two films would prove his uncanny intuition right: Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful and Radu Mihaileanu's Train of Life. Whereas the latter has not thus far raised much controversy, Life Is Beautiful has been and is the focus of unbridled media attention, enormous popular success, and critical venom. This article aims to prove that Life Is Beautiful is an important film that, judging from the way it was received by several critics, might [End Page 47] unfortunately be overlooked by scholars. In the first section, I shall discuss the film's reception; in the second, I shall map out a textual analysis through eyes searching for "the pleasure of the text."

Reception

The film has become a sort of metal detector whose alarm bell signals ideas, defects, goodness, hypocrisy or wickedness in people's DNA.

-E. Gruber, International Herald Tribune, Jan. 21, 1998

The Award for the Best Jewish Experience, obtained by Benigni's daring project at the Jerusalem International Film Festival in 1998, is truly "a blasphemy," for "the Holocaust misrepresentations of Life Is Beautiful [are] unforgivably obscene," but "there are further horrors beyond the movie: ahistoric film critics who slaver over it, fuzzy-thinking crowds who embrace it," and favorable Jewish re/viewers "who definitely should know better." Thus ends Gerald Peary's review in The Boston Phoenix, leaving those who "don't have the honor of being Jewish" with no choice but to feel intimidated. Peary's strategy of moral intimidation is clear from his review's opening move: "Peary? My family name was Pisarevsky, changed at Ellis Island by American officials. My parents are Russian-born Jews. What you see below is, I suppose, an angry Jewish column." Peary's anger, however, is less cognitive than rhetorical, a justification for dismissing the film and its author while feeling good about it. Peary even calls Benigni, whose father spent two years in a Nazi labor camp, a "revisionist."

Peary's is but the extreme case in a series of negative reviews that appeared in several major publications (e.g. The Village Voice, Time, and The New Republic) upon the film's release in the United States. Their dismissal of Life Is Beautiful often adopts Peary's strategy: moral indignation. Only J. Hoberman, in the Voice, attempts a reading of the film, his anger being a cognitive tool that produces textual knowledge rather than moral outcry. In keeping with his Marxist perspective, he drags Steven Spielberg along with Benigni into the mud, for "it was Schindler's List that made mass extermination safe for mass consumption."

The existence of a large number of non-angry Jewish re/viewers belies the assumption that being Jewish should automatically lead to hating Life Is Beautiful. Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation [End Page 48] League, was approached by leaders of the Italian-Jewish community concerned by and divided on the film. Before viewing it, Foxman quipped that a comic film set in Auschwitz "cannot be done, [it] is trivializing." He changed his mind afterward: "The film is so poignant, it is so sensitive, it is so informed by creative genius, that the answer is-I give it a wholehearted endorsement." Likewise, in the Jerusalem Report, Daniel Kotzin argues: "Throughout, Benigni is walking the thinnest of lines-taking the risk in almost every camp scene of lapsing into the offensive, of cheapening his subject. It would take only one false note, one poorly judged wisecrack, to destroy the delicate fabric. Yet extraordinarily-the more so, given Benigni's madcap movie-star persona-there are no slips, the poignant balance is maintained."

Lest we too believe, with Peary, that Jews favorable to the film "should know better," attitudes toward Life Is Beautiful depend less on whether one is Jewish or Gentile than on other factors. In some cases, it is plain political animosity in moral garb, as with Giuliano Ferrara's vicious campaign from the pulpit of the right-wing newspaper Il Foglio. Ferrara, on Silvio Berlusconi's payroll, is merely settling the score with Benigni, who, at the time of Berlusconi's brief leadership of the Italian government, openly voiced his contempt for the Italian media tycoon.

In most cases, however, the appreciation of Life Is Beautiful is made difficult, if not impossible, by the presence of an obstacle that often goes undetected. To understand the nature of this obstacle, let us look at the field constituted by all those who write or talk about films from a position of some authority, from local or campus paper reviewers to academic scholars and high brow critics. An examination of the critical judgments on Life Is Beautiful, conventionally framed within a low-, middle-, and high-brow hierarchy, reveals that-within the limits inherent in all generalizations-the higher the reviewer's position the more negative is the review. A case in point is what happened in Boston and New York. The two major newspapers, The Boston Globe and The New York Times, wrote on the film in enthusiastic terms, but the weekly "cultural" magazines aiming at more sophisticated readers, The Boston Phoenix and The Village Voice, panned it. Likewise, most of the film specialists that I have interviewed either shrugged their shoulders or expressed contempt, but students were enthusiastic, and so were several academics from disciplines other than film studies (including Jewish studies). We are faced, then, with an obstacle that leaves popular or non-specialized audiences and those who negotiate film ratings for them unaffected, an obstacle to which middle- and high-brow film "authorities" are more vulnerable. This is not surprising, for "the obstacle" belongs to the slippery terrain that French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu ascribes to habitus as "the [End Page 49] incorporated form of one's class position and the conditionings imposed by it": taste. Taking Life Is Beautiful seriously goes against high cultural taste.

Taste, Bourdieu never tires of repeating, is the result of internalized economic and cultural capital. Academic film scholars and high-brow critics (people like Peary and I) usually belong to "the fractions (relatively) richest in cultural capital and (relatively) poorest in economic capital." Artistic consumption is for us one of the most "distinctive" socio-cultural practices. It yields distinction in the form of symbolic profit/status, and it distinguishes us from those who do not know better. By displaying refined tastes in the arts, we constantly (re)define and (re)position ourselves:

What is at stake is indeed "personality," i.e., the quality of the person which is affirmed in the capacity to appropriate an object of quality. The objects endowed with the greatest distinctive power are those which most clearly attest the quality of their appropriation, that is the quality of those who appropriate them, because their appropriation demands time and skills that, insofar as they require a long investment of time-like musical or pictorial culture-cannot be acquired in haste or by proxy, and which therefore appear as the surest indications of the intrinsic qualities of the person.

We tend, therefore, to valorize those films that show we do not fall for the baits of the entertainment industry (sentimentalism, media-hype, easy-to-understand plots, immediate pleasures). To complicate things further, we do not appreciate being reminded of all this, as if recognizing that the social function of our cultural habits diminish their value. Our tastes, choices, and reactions must appear as the result of freedom, talent, and intelligence rather than of socio-cultural logic, apprenticeship, and privilege.

Benigni's physical, comic style has little potential for yielding distinction. In Italy, his films have a mass following but are commonly shunned by "serious" critics. Indeed, dignified aloofness typifies high culture's reception of Benigni's films. For example, the intellectually sophisticated, Italian film journal Duel did not offer a substantive reading of Life Is Beautiful (which they had done for Titanic). Likewise, in France, the prestigious Cahiers du Cinema refused to give the film even the negative recognition of an attack, as testified by Thierry Jousse's report from Cannes: "a totally disproportioned Jury's special Grand prize for Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful which deserves neither its detractors' angered, grand moral declarations nor the excessive praise of its supporters who unhesitatingly compare it to Chaplin (!)." Not surprisingly, [End Page 50] Peary situates himself "in the minority who find Benigni a bothersome amalgam of agitated tics and feeble jokes." Had Life Is Beautiful not touched a raw nerve in the Judeo-Christian body, it would have been met with the same fate as others: silence.

Benigni is aware of this situation; it is the product, after all, of the choice he made when he developed a "popular" comic style ( comicità popolare). Drawing a distinction between humor and "the comic," he likens them to eroticism and pornography, respectively, and jokingly declares himself a pornographer, too physical and unsophisticated to please refined spirits. Much as he may seem at peace with the populism of his comedies, Benigni has now and then manifested his resentment of the way in which his films are typecast as "low." Interviews with him are filled with high cultural references (such as to Schopenhauer) that often surface in his films. In fact, his respect for and increasing appropriation of a traditional cultural capital (such as his recent public reading of Dante's Inferno) betray his anxiety over a seemingly impossible promotion of his comedies to a higher status.

Benigni's desire for a higher status is less a symptom of ambition than of a genuine wish that his ideas on comedy and laughter be taken seriously. Convinced that "laughter can save us," Benigni resents comedy's ancillary role. His latest films aim to bestow legitimacy on comedy by reframing topical issues through the subversive lens of laughter. With Johnny Stecchino (1991), for example, he confronted one of Italy's worst scourges, the Mafia. As I recall, Umberto Eco argued that Benigni's satire of a Mafioso's masculinity was an effective deterrent against the fascination that the gangster image exerts on young men-more effective than the countless realistic films made on the subject. In Il Mostro (The Monster, 1994), his depiction of a petty thief mistaken as a serial rapist was in many ways a regression to his earlier style of predominantly sexual jokes. On that occasion, however, Benigni spoke of "the big challenge of transforming a dramatic subject into a comedy."

Life Is Beautiful constitutes Benigni's attempt to maximize this challenge and prove his comedies' potential: "I had this strong desire to put myself, my comic persona, in an extreme situation. . . . [T]he ultimate extreme situation is the extermination camp, almost the symbol of our century, the negative one, the worst thing imaginable." The Holocaust then is not an end but a means-"I did not want to make a film about the Holocaust" -the means to prove that (his type of) comedy can respectfully treat the Holocaust and suggest an outlook that tragedy is unequipped to convey. It should be noted here that Benigni's project, far from cheapening it, confirms the Holocaust as history's worst nightmare and re-inscribes it in the collective memory through an unusual code.

Although a means to an extraneous end, the Holocaust was not [End Page 51] cynically exploited by Benigni as a sure attention-getter. The proof that Life Is Beautiful is not a cynical market move lies in the historical and cultural awareness that sustains the script. Take the title, for example. The film's working title was "Buongiorno Principessa!," a tribute to the phrase that introduces Guido's (the protagonist, played by Benigni) mythopoetic power to the audience. During post-production, Benigni came across the statement " Life Is Beautiful" in Trotsky's letters, written when the communist leader, barricaded in his Mexican compound, feared that his days were numbered. Trotsky's words immediately resonated with the spirit that animates Life Is Beautiful and became the definitive title. As such, it operates on multiple levels. In everyday language, the expression Dai! La vita è bella! (Come on! Life is beautiful!) is often employed to cheer someone up; it asks us to look at the causes of our despair from a broader perspective. "Life is beautiful" functions on a cinematic level as well, for it links Benigni's film with Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life and the optimism for which the Italian American director is (in)famous. Moreover, unlike "Buongiorno Principessa!," the new title has no apparent narrative justification, puzzles viewers, and forces them to ask questions. Benigni was certainly aware that, while nobody would recognize the reference to Trotsky, the title " Life Is Beautiful " would expose the film to further critical venom-"Can you imagine anyone who actually survived the camps saying that?" predictably asks Peary. Had Benigni wished to soften the prejudice and suspicion that a film marketed as "a Holocaust comedy" understandably aroused, he would have kept the original title. Evidently, "artistic" motivations had priority over marketing diplomacy. By calling, as it were, Trotsky to the witness stand, the new title offers the example of someone who celebrated the beauty of life under oppressive circumstances, someone who, like Guido in the film, was Jewish but did not make Jewishness the basis of his personal identity.

Ironically, those who could make the most out of the new title, high-brow film critics and/or academic scholars, seem uninterested in doing so because their attention is elsewhere. Benigni's efforts are likely to go unnoticed since, superficially, Life Is Beautiful has all the qualities that most film specialists despise. Their habitual distaste for Benigni's slapstick is exacerbated by the film's popular success and by the feel-good, Capra-esque humanism that oozes from nearly all favorable reviews. Then add the sentimentalism inherent in the story of a father with his innocent child in a death camp. From Bicycle Thief to Cinema Paradiso, Italian films have often won the favor of their audiences through the sentimental powerhouse of children in trouble. It is an emotional terrorism that works for "them" (the popular audience) but not for "us." And as if the obstacles of physical comedy, sentimentalism, and media [End Page 52] hype were not enough, Life Is Beautiful is not "beautiful." Benigni is not the type of director who will astonish you with sweeping camera movements against the beat editing, non-narrative detours. His films are not for those who value style over content, difficulty over simplicity.

It is my contention that Benigni's unsuitability to high-brow taste has prevented (and will continue to prevent) most critics and film scholars from taking Life Is Beautiful seriously. Which is too bad. If they did, they would discover what I myself was able to discover in the wake of a fortuitous event that confirms the legitimacy of my hypothesis. I know all about the intellectual bias against Benigni's vis comica because I held that bias myself.

When the manager of the Key Sunday Cinema Club invited me to Washington, D.C., to be the guest speaker at a review screening of Life Is Beautiful, I hesitated. Much as I respected Benigni's long-standing militancy as political satirist, I was no fan of his movies. Luckily, however, I accepted and set out to do my homework: articles, interviews, and multiple viewings of the videotape. My first impression was skeptical and, had it not been for my responsibilities, I would not have watched it again. But I did, and, as every film scholar knows, it is the second viewing that tells "the truth" about a film. Released from the duty of following the plot and from the pressure of laughing at gags unsuited to my taste, I began appreciating Life Is Beautiful 's quotes, internal rhymes, and intertextual links. An allegorical structure of sorts was emerging. And, far from cheapening the Holocaust, the film prodded me to know more.

Allegory

The war against the Jews was in many ways a war against the imagination (and at bottom the Jewish conception of God): to suppress the workings of that imagination-to deny the sufferings of the Jews any sort of symbolic representation-would make that a war that Hitler won.

-Leslie Epstein, Boston Jewish Film Festival program

A few people I know joked about how they went to see the much-discussed, touching film about a child in the Holocaust, and after half an hour they felt puzzled: "Did I enter the wrong theater?" they all asked themselves. With the exception of two premonitions (immediately defused by Guido's optimistic and childishly naive nature), the first hour of Life Is Beautiful is pure farce and fairy-tale romance, with no hint of the [End Page 53] impending tragedy. Inevitably, detractors hissed that the first half betrays the authors' real interests-making people laugh-and proves their facile approach to Jewish reality in 1939. Undoubtedly, the optimistic Guido is not a realistic portrait of the average Italian Jew in 1939. But even more unrealistic is his son Giosuè (played by Giorgio Cantarini) hiding out in his father's barrack, or the cryptic image of prisoners carrying anvils all day every day. Everything in this fairy tale is unrealistic or, better, has no verisimilitude. If we go to see Life Is Beautiful expecting reality, then we are in the wrong theater. That even sophisticated critics, normally suspicious of the expectations typical of mass audiences, resorted to criticizing the film on the basis of its violations of credibility proves the extent to which Benigni's parable asked them to do what they were unwilling to do: treat Life Is Beautiful as if it had been directed by someone they respect. To many, of course, the Holocaust allows for no artistic license; its depiction must obey the rules of tragic realism-the only mode/mood commonly held fit for fictions on a reality that vastly surpassed fiction. But, "according to what I read, saw and felt in the victims' accounts, I realized that nothing in a film could even come close to the reality of what happened. You can't show unimaginable horror-you can only ever show less than what it was. So I did not want audiences to look for realism in my movie."

In fact, Life Is Beautiful intentionally conceals Guido's Jewishness for about 45 minutes and rids the film's first half of tragedy. Benigni's choice emphasizes an uncontested historical reality: the "Italian-ness" of the Jews, their participation in Italian history at all levels. The storehouse that Guido's uncle Eliseo (Giustino Durano) lends to Guido and his friend Ferruccio has a bed on which Garibaldi, the symbol of the Italian unification process, allegedly slept. Eliseo also mentions an original manuscript of one of Petrarch's biographies-Francesco Petrarca being the name of the school to which the fascist official is due to explain the Race Manifesto, and where Guido/Benigni gives us a funny and intelligent satire of racism's arbitrariness.

Until the late 1930s, Italian Jews lived, loved, and laughed like anyone else in Italy. This is not to re-propose the convenient stereotype of "the good Italians even when fascist." Puncturing this idyllic image is necessary, but so is recognizing that there is some truth to the stereotype. Antisemitism did not enter official fascist ideology until race laws went into effect in 1938-Mussolini himself had a Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, until 1936. "The vast majority of assimilated and nonpolitical Italian Jews reacted to the racial laws with shock and disbelief," reports Susan Zuccotti in what has been called the definitive study of the Holocaust in Italy. Although "every Italian Jew was affected," the [End Page 54] situation was far from being homogeneous. There was even the case of fascist Jews who blamed the Race Laws on Zionism and non-patriotic Jews. Many Jews downplayed discrimination as a symptom of Mussolini's opportunism, which aimed to win Hitler's favor and to create the possibility of forfeiture of assets as well as bribes and corruption Italian style: "On July 13, 1939, the government introduced an Aryanization program, by which a special commission could simply declare arbitrarily that a Jew was not a Jew." In this tragic farce, Guido's oblivious optimism in 1939 constitutes an absurd response to an absurd reality.

The intentional creation of an optimist Jew who averts his eyes from the signs of impending tragedy is more than reflection on the advantages of dis-identity; it also serves architectural reasons. By refusing to make Guido and Eliseo icons of a foretold disaster, the film lets comedy reign supreme throughout the first half. Cleverly, something similar, but of opposite sign, happens in the second. Shortly after the prisoners arrive at the camp, we have the film's funniest scene: Guido "translates" for his son's benefit the camp rules as they are shouted out by one of the prison guards. It is the beginning of the "game." It is also the exhaustion of the film's vis comica, and we practically stop laughing. Benigni's gags are virtually nonexistent, and viewers' facial muscles are too busy containing emotions and tears to afford the liberating luxury of sincere laughter. "In the second half, there's only one joke, the game" commented an academic friend of mine. He meant it as a criticism. While agreeing with his observation, I do not regard it as a flaw-quite the contrary. The lack of jokes is, of course, a sign of Benigni's respectful restraint. But, as happened with the first half, letting go of comedy's prime objective serves architectural reasons. It purifies, as it were, the second half, so that tears replace laughter, fear replaces optimism. Life Is Beautiful has a remarkable architecture because it creates a filmic space that is virtually symmetrical.

It is, however, a weird symmetry. Far from producing the sense of balance and comforting harmony traditionally associated with it, symmetry here disorients viewers by forcing them to experience the anxiety of an unexpected schizophrenic attack. The film splices together two halves that do not belong together because they are, in fact, recalcitrant opposites, one the negation of the other: slapstick comedy and tragedy. The legitimacy of the film's aspirations to be treated seriously starts here, in the deliberate and uncommon short-circuiting of two modes of representation that may tolerate, and even profit by, mixing but cannot be merely juxtaposed without seeing their identities and effects unpredictably altered. Life Is Beautiful is not just tragi-comic but it is first comic and then tragic. There is quite a difference between thinking of a film as [End Page 55] a mixture of comedy and tragedy, the tragi-comic, or as a juxtaposition of two symmetrical and mutually negating spaces. The former is a healthy, if occasionally disturbing, mix aiming to make comedy serious by bestowing gravity on its lightness or, obversely, to defuse the depression provoked by tragedy. The latter is uncanny and unsettling, potentially sickening and always disorienting, insofar as spectators are forced into a schizoid experience. In a sense Life Is Beautiful successfully helps its viewers to imagine what many Italian Jews must have felt, the eruption of absurdity and the transformation of one reality into its opposite. This is how the film is faithful to reality-it dramatizes its deepest implications. To put it differently, Life Is Beautiful is faithful to reality in spirit and not in the letter.

The film's architecture, its global structure, is too deliberately dual not to become significant in and of itself. Try to visualize these two halves, disposed one after the other, and opposed to one another as white and black would be. I am proposing to look at the film's formal arrangement as a spatio-temporal allegory. Spatially, the two opposites are kept separate and yet overdetermine one another, a bit like the Yin-Yang symbol, where the black and the white are well defined and symmetrically juxtaposed but each contain a speck of the other as a memento of their interdependence. Temporally, as Benigni himself reminds us through a humorous pun that works only in Italian, we are reminded of the devastating wisdom of the Bible's most mysteriously modern book, the Kohelet: "A time to laugh, a time to cry." Life Is Beautiful's deliberately strident, dual structure is then allegorical, as could perhaps to be expected because of Benigni's recent interest in Dante. The Divine Comedy's structure of 3 times 33 cantos was itself an indication of the mysterious reality of the trinity; likewise, Life Is Beautiful 's architectural schizophrenia suggests the irreconcilable duality in human history. It also points, as we shall see, at Taoist wisdom as the only possible way to accept and live such duality while transcending it in thought.

Seen in the light of the film's architectural allegory, both ending and beginning deserve attention. The ending seems to repropose schizophrenia by first violating then upholding the rules of comedy. Predictably, detractors concentrated only on the happy half, on the "many, many from his camp (too many) who survived" and who "seem immediately happy." True, there is a sunny feeling about the last few minutes of the film, but it cannot be seen in isolation from the fact that Guido, the protagonist of what is perceived as a comedy, dies. Benigni reminds us that he has created a film persona out of his string of comedies, that he is a bit like Donald Duck, and his death in Life Is Beautiful is as jolting to [End Page 56] most of his followers as the death of Donald Duck would be. "I am really Benigni in the film, and children identify with me. They ask their parents: 'Why . . . did they kill Benigni?' The parents can only answer by saying that he is Jewish. So, the children ask, 'What does it mean to be Jewish?'"

The film's beginning is retrospectively so revealing that viewers should be forced to see it again after the end. The credits flash on the images in an unusually slow and unpredictable manner, and cover three sequences. In the first, we get a shot of Guido, in a camp uniform, walking with his son asleep in his arms. Fog makes vision difficult, and a voice-over reminds us that the film we are about to see is a fairy tale (and therefore demands the suspension of the rules of realism). As if to make sure that we do not miss the prescription of fabulous semiotic lenses, "fairy tale" is uttered twice in the space of one short sentence. Also, (Italian) viewers are immediately aware that the voice-over is not Benigni's. Whose is it then? Only at the film's very end, in the scene of the "many, many, too many" survivors in the sun, do we find out that the voice-over is Giosuè's, who then retrospectively becomes the narrator of the film. Life Is Beautiful is the grateful recollection of a son who commemorates his father's sacrifice in a spirit that would have pleased him.

Giosuè's voice-over begins and ends the film, imparting a circular shape to it. But the first shot's pivotal function extends beyond the voice-over. It is also a flash forward, for, some 20 minutes before the end, we return to the same shot. Walking with Giosuè in his arms, Guido mutters to himself: "What if this were nothing but a dream?" And no sooner does he stop mumbling than we get a POV-shot of a heap of corpses: what looked like fog is in fact smoke from incinerated bodies. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of making the first sequence resonate with the rest of the film.

The second sequence contains, barely disguised in the sudden eruption of freewheeling slapstick, a ritual invocation to the creative muses and another prescriptive gesture. The scene per se is unfunny, a predictable brake failure in a car speeding downhill. In the allegorical scheme, it draws a tempting analogy between the zigzagging vehicle containing the author and the film itself. Significantly, the invoked deities are Chaos and Bacchus, and one can hardly imagine more appropriate choices, since the ideas of refusing to follow a predictable structure, of erupting disorder, and of the willful straying of Rimbaud's "drunken boat," to name just a few, are all evoked. The image of a brakeless car that cuts through the fields downhill, however silly, is then at once the material support to a slapstick routine (it has, in other words, a diegetic role) and [End Page 57] an apt allegorization of the text as an intoxicated/intoxicating fairy tale that will stray not only from the rules of realism but also from those of the fairy tale. It is also the film's attempt to convince skeptical minds that Life Is Beautiful 's slapstick is sustained by a textual awareness modeled after classic texts.

The third sequence shows Guido's accidental encounter with his princess-to-be, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), and offers the first example of what is in fact the true common thread uniting the two halves, the one thing capable of running through both "the comic" and "the tragic": the game ( il gioco). The game does not start in the camp, it starts with the courtship of Dora-hence the film's working title, "Buongiorno Principessa!" The game is the ability to transform each event into another story, the possibility that what happens in the unfolding narrative called reality may have another meaning in the make-believe text spun by Guido's imagination.

The game opened by "Buongiorno Principessa!" consists, then, in the art of living life as if it were an allegory to which our imagination can provide the key. Each occurrence can be lived in its humdrum, material significance, and/or it can also be seen as the indication of another text. When Guido calls out "Maria!" and the key drops from the window, he is successfully superimposing his own mythical story onto normal, everyday events. By saying "Buongiorno Principessa," he spellbinds Dora into believing that she too is part of a fairy tale. "Buongiorno Principessa" is the invitation to enter a mythical world in which our life overflows with secret connections and possibilities within our reach provided that we awaken to them. The game, then, has a name: spirituality. Spirituality, of any kind, is going to demand a similar move from you, that you stop thinking that our life has only one dimension/reading. You can reject the game/spirituality, and roast and boast in the material world; or you can conceive the possibility that everything that happens here and now, in history, can be wrenched away from a narrative that is increasingly devoid of sense, and can be grafted onto another story, another realm. Understandably, for leftist Hoberman this is "nonsense" and amounts to lying to children and spectators by re-proposing the opium of the people. He must be credited, however, for having seen, more lucidly than most celebrants, Life Is Beautiful's spiritual dimension. Indeed, our take on the game depends on our willingness to take seriously the sudden eruption of spiritual needs that characterizes this end of the millennium: where do we stand? And the question of the film's alleged revisionism should be thus reformulated: is it morally legitimate, when representing the Holocaust, to suggest that spirituality provides the key to unlock the camps' doors? Regardless of the answer, I am sure that a [End Page 58] great deal of the millions locked in the camps sought to flee with "the weapons of the spirit."

The game is also at one with the fairy tale-or, better, the game consists in the ability of living your life as if it were a fairy tale, a mythical world populated by gods and monsters. The Holocaust was the result of Nazi terror and Judeo-Christian history, but it was also the possession of some humans by the very demons they had unleashed. It is not a matter of choosing one reading instead of the other-both explain what happened. That is what life as an allegory means. That is why Life Is Beautiful's fairy tale can lift us from the Holocaust, not because the Holocaust has been cheapened but because our spirit has been enlarged. Furthermore, as a fairy tale, Benigni's film is itself an enactment of the game. It is the dream that comedic imagination triggers in our minds once we take seriously the question Guido asked shortly before discovering the heap of corpses: "What if this were nothing but a dream?" Differently put, the film/fairy tale/game suggests that we regard even the worst of nightmares as parts of a dream.

It is time to confront the air of Eastern philosophies that transpires from Life Is Beautiful. I do not know whether Benigni has joined the ranks of the many Buddheo-Christians populating the Western hemisphere these days, but to better understand this film, the game and the fairy tale, we must now enlarge a detail in the film and make a philosophical detour.

Early in the film, Guido hears from his friend Ferruccio (Sergio Bustric) a pop version of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Ferruccio claims he is able to sleep anytime he wants to by merely exercising his will, and he credits the German philosopher with divulging such power. Guido is intrigued by it. He will use "Schopenhauer" successfully a couple of times. He makes Dora turn around in the theater, and, above all, he wills the S.S. dog away from Giosuè's hiding place. It all seems like an innocent, low-brow, and basically inaccurate use of a philosopher who is still popular enough to suffer all sort of appropriations from "below." Benigni, however, seems to be aware that there is more to Schopenhauer than this, that the German philosopher was/is a site of competing readings, and that his philosophy matters.

After Marx's decline in popularity, Schopenhauer has been the most widely read among the nineteenth-century "greats," mainly because he was the first Western thinker to incorporate elements of Eastern philosophy into his system. Buddhism and the Upanishads had a large influence upon him and interacted with Kant to give rise to formulations that would subsequently trickle down in many beliefs and ideologies. Schopenhauer's central idea is that life is regulated by the Will-to-Live, which [End Page 59] is not of the mind but is rooted in the very fabric of our bodies. We think that our mental representations are autonomous, but everything that we think is subordinated to the physical duty of avoiding suffering and empowering our lives, even if this entails making other people suffer. It is an impassive and impersonal mechanism (on the surface somewhat reminiscent of his contemporary, Darwin) that Schopenhauer regards with a wisdom and a fatalism borrowed from Eastern thought (and easily mistaken for pessimism). Life is a game, and the ultimate deity has the dual face of Shiva, whose cosmic dance at once symbolizes creation and destruction, laughter and tears. Prompted perhaps by leftovers of Christ's most ideal message, Schopenhauer theorized the possibility of rising above selfishness. He regarded Mahayana Buddhism as the example of a possible, if difficult, escape from the rules of the selfish game played by the Will-to-Live in all organisms. Some exceptional human beings may reach such a level of empathy with the suffering of others that they come to regard it as if it were their own. At that stage, where all suffering matters, these extraordinary individuals stop obeying the tyrannical will and practice compassion-or, to put it in Buddhist terms, they become Bodhisattvas.

We are now in a position to appreciate the complexity of the use that Life Is Beautiful makes of Schopenhauer. In the first place, the fact that Schopenhauer is a German philosopher resonates with a film on the Holocaust. This is particularly true because Schopenhauer was appropriated by the Nazis (through Nietzsche's Will-to-Power). The Will-to-Live that Schopenhauer regarded as the rule of the game-called-life became, in the Nazi reading of the philosopher, a legitimation for their aggressive search of a lebensraum -living space. Benigni/Guido then pits one misreading of Schopenhauer against another. What might go lost in the farce is the subtle irony of a film that takes a philosopher (mis)used by the Nazis and plays him against them, thus revealing their ignorance as well as the possibility of oppositional readings. Guido shows the possibility of a pop reading of Schopenhauer that does not result in Nazism but in a New Age-ish "fuzzy-thinking." But the film also offers a practical example of a life made beautiful by an individual's sacrifice modeled after a more accurate reading of the philosopher. For Guido regards life as a dream, a game. He detaches himself from his contingent suffering. As a numinous father, he exemplifies the individual who overcomes the gravitational pull of the Will-to-Live and sacrifices himself.

Schopenhauer's role in the allegorical scheme is but an example, undoubtedly the most substantive, of the pleasures offered by a close reading of the film. The Nazi doctor's name, Lessing (Horst Bucholdt), [End Page 60] evokes the author of the 1778-79 play Nathan the Wise, that famous championing of German religious tolerance toward the Jews. When Lessing stealthily draws Guido aside, Life Is Beautiful makes viewers hope that the doctor intends to help. But Lessing looses sleep over a riddle that he cannot solve, and, oblivious to Guido's reality, asks him for help. Is the film suggesting that writing (or making films) against oppression is futile unless backed by practice? Is it a sarcastic commentary on the value of intellectuals and their riddles? Be that as it may, the character of Lessing haunts us as much as he is himself haunted. And there is another ironic reference to a German "great" in the film: composer Offenbach, whose Barcarolle we hear twice, and who was, yes, Jewish. I could easily continue playing with the characters' names in the context of the film's allegory, or retrieving visual quotes and intertextual links. For brevity's sake, let me just cite one last example.

The father's and the son's names, Guido and Giosuè Orefice, respectively, function on both narrative levels: the historical and the allegorical, the real and the game. In Voices from the Holocaust, Sylvia Rothchild interviews only two Italian Jews, Ora Kohn from Turin and Gastone Orefice from Livorno, in Tuscany, the region from which both Benigni and Guido come (the film's first half takes place in the Tuscan town of Arezzo). Fragments of Rothchild's interview with Gastone Orefice were later published in Zuccotti's The Italians and the Holocaust, a book that Benigni consulted while researching the film. Gastone Orefice's testimony fits Life Is Beautiful 's design perfectly: "The majority of the Jews were more Italian than Jews," he says, "and thought they were living in a good regime-until the persecution began." In addition to being a Jewish last name with a referential dimension, "Orefice" means "goldsmith" and therefore has a surplus of symbolic potential-spiritual wisdom as alchemical work. Thus, by naming both of his heroes G. Orefice, Benigni increased their signifying potential, their semiotic brea(d)th.

As to "Guido," besides being a man's name with a famous antecedent in Italian cinema-the spiritually starved, albeit self-absorbed, protagonist of Fellini's Eight and a Half-"guido" is also a form of the verb "guidare," which means at once "to drive" and "to guide." Leaving unexplored the driving symbolism (although the film introduces its textuality as a brakeless car), let me concentrate on Guido-the-guide. We have seen how Guido's game (and Benigni's film) guides Giosuè out of the Holocaust. Giosuè of course is the name of the biblical leader who guided the Jews into the promised land of Canaan. Guido is then he who enabled Joshua to be the final guide of his people; he is the father, or, the Father, he who propels the Exodus and sustains the crossing of the desert [End Page 61] (and the Bible is full of God's rules for a "game," the correct playing of which warrants the promised land). As every Jew sadly knows, even something so absolutely horrible as the Holocaust had its positive sides: the return to Israel. The abbiamo vinto! (we won!) at the end of Life Is Beautiful is not the happy ending that seals a trivialized Holocaust-it is the cry of triumph with which a people marked for extinction transformed their darkest hour into a new beginning. But there is more. Giosuè/Joshua/Yeshua is not only the name of the prophet of the sixth book in the Old Testament. It is also the Jewish name for Jesus. In the film, Giosuè materializes suddenly, halfway through, as the product of the fabulous love story between Dora and Guido. I am not suggesting that Joshua is a Christ figure. If we remember, however, that Christians, and Italian Catholics especially, have the bad habit of forgetting Jesus' Jewishness, we may appreciate this additional ramification of the son's name, indeed a reminder to all Italians that their "cultural hero" is in fact the Other, someone they themselves persecuted (while blaming the Jewish Other for it).

Let me conclude by returning to "Holocaust laughter." Life Is Beautiful is not the first film to try a comedic approach in the depiction of Nazi monstrosity. Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940; Guido's number in the camp is the same as Chaplin's Jewish barber's), Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), and Mel Brooks' 1983 remake of the latter had already done that. Of course Chaplin's and Lubitsch's films were pre-Holocaust, but they can be considered precedents of Life Is Beautiful. Their authors thought that comedic spirit and laughter would constitute a weapon and a medicine, a response of resilience to an enemy that expected only tragedy's lament. There is then a mysterious, "lost" Jerry Lewis film, The Day the Clown Cried (1971), reportedly about a clown called on to sugarcoat extermination. Wertmuller's Seven Beauties (1976) brought grotesque comedy to the camp, but it did not really touch the Holocaust directly.

In addition to these films, there is a small but significant body of literary works that dared to stray from realism and high drama variously to introduce "the comic": Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1948!); Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just (1959); Jurek Becker's Jacob the Liar (1969); Leslie Epstein's King of the Jews (1979); and Aron Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 (1980). Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986) successfully proved that even comics could respect the Holocaust and provide yet another tool for the dissemination of its memory.

Of course, the crucial theoretical piece in the debate sparked by the juxtaposition of laughter and the Holocaust is the essay with which my [End Page 62] piece began, Des Pres' "Holocaust Laughter." Here, Des Pres argues that This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, King of the Jews, and Maus not only respected the Holocaust (in spite of their generic transgressions) but also turned out to be more effective than most tragic, realistic portrayals of it. Because "it's not fear and sorrow we need more of, but undaunted vision. The paradox of the comic approach is that by setting things at a distance it permits us a tougher, more active response" (286). Des Pres finds that "tragedy and lamentation affirm what is and proceed largely in a mimetic mode" so that we are "forced to a standstill by the matter we behold" (279). On the contrary, "as works of art that include a comic element," these three books "give us laughter's benefits without betraying our deeper convictions" (286). Des Pres' brilliant discussion opens up fascinating questions. If realism is all that is allowed in cinematic representations of the Holocaust, then where can we go next? Should we push on the Schindler's List model, piling horror on horror, pity upon pity? Should we escalate the representation of violence by becoming more graphic and tragic? Aside from the fact that realistic films may give the false impression that the Holocaust can be represented, "serious" comedy (which, like Mihaileanu's Train of Life and Life Is Beautiful, does not laugh at the Holocaust but against its deadening weight) may constitute a viable option. Provided, of course, that we take it seriously.

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Project MUSE - Life is Beautiful: Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter

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Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere.

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"The indomitability of the human spirit" is always a favourite theme with Oscar voters and, yes, Roberto Benigni's Chaplinesque fable picked up three of the little gold chaps.

The town in which zanily romantic Guido Orefice ( Benigni himself) has ambitions to open a bookshop is Arezzo, southeast of Florence in Tuscany (information boards pointing out the film's locations are helpfully dotted about the town).

The opera house, in which Guido shows more interest in his 'principessa' than in The Tales of Hoffman, is the 19th century Teatro Signorelli, Piazza Signorelli in Cortona, about 15 miles south of Arezzo.

The mood turns darker as Guido and his son are transported to 'Germany'. The forbidding concentration camp (designed by longtime Fellini collaborator Danilo Donati) was built on the remains of an abandoned chemical factory near the Marmore Falls in Terni, quite a way to the southeast.

The complex has since been developed by Benigni into the Papigno film studio, where his live-action film of Pinocchio was shot.

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la vita e bella (life is beautiful) film locations

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Filming Locations for La Vita e Bella (Life Is Beautiful).

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"The indomitability of the human spirit" is always a favourite theme with Oscar voters and, yes, Roberto Benigni's Chaplinesque fable picked up three of the little gold chaps. The town in which zanily romantic Guido Orefice ( Benigni himself) has ambitions to open a bookshop is Arezzo, southeast of Florence in Tuscany (information boards pointing out the film's locations are helpfully dotted about the town).

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BFI Film Academy: opportunities for young creatives

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1. Why I love … the depiction of the favela in City of God _ Film _ The Guardian

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2. How we made City of God _ Film _ The Guardian

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yperactive in style and content, this stunning Brazilian film feels controlled and unhinged at the same time. It pulls you into the unknown world of Rio's most notorious favela and keeps you locked in, intrigued and unnerved, as director Fernando Meirelles crams in a whole history of a gang growing up through the 1960s to the 1980s.

Nothing in it looks staged, and the violence and fear seem horribly real. With a huge, floating cast of non-professional actors, this is a staggering achievement - many were apparently trained for a year and then set to work on an autobiographical source novel containing true-life stories.

You won't have seen anything like it unless you're a Brazilian film expert and, I suspect, not even then. The nearest comparison I can think of is try to imagine Boogie Nights (surrogate family gradually destroyed by drugs and paranoia) in a setting that makes The Harder They Come look quite upmarket.

There's no real family life here: people don't live long enough to be families and the real Cidade de Deus was too dangerous to film in. Director Meirelles uses every camera trick - stop-motion photography, degraded film stock, split-screen, speeded-up and slowed-down moments - to create an anarchic, cathartic rough ride. It's great to watch, but you'd do anything not to live there. And there's more than a hint of hope that at least one of these characters can escape.

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Hyperactive in style and content, this stunning Brazilian film feels controlled and unhinged at the same time. It pulls you into the unknown world of Rio's most notorious favela and keeps you locked in, intrigued and unnerved, as director Fernando Meirelles crams in a whole history of a gang growing up through the 1960s to the 1980s.

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I began this article with a simple goal in mind: Write something, anything, about one of my all-time favorite movies, City of God. An unexpected challenge then arose: There's so much I love about this movie that I had a hard time narrowing it down to just one topic. For example, I could write you a whole article about the unusual narrative structure or the opening shot of the knife being sharpened against the stone. Hell, I could probably write you a whole book about the editing. However, in the end, I chose to write about the violence. Because that's what we all need right now, right?

Though I'd bring City of God with me on a desert island, it's a hard movie to recommend in certain situations. It tells the story of the escalation of gang violence in the Cidade de Deus ("City of God") neighborhood of Rio in the '60s and '70s, and it has, shall we say, a rather high body count. Furthermore, despite all the murder and mayhem, the movie maintains an unexpectedly vibrant tone, which is another difficult concept to explain to those who already don't have a stomach for violence. It's one thing to watch a bloody movie about the poor and disenfranchised. It's another thing to try to sell someone on the idea that City of God isn't depressing. (Or at least not depressing in the traditional sense.)

However, I'd argue that the tone of City of God works so well because it does a great job of showing the audience that violence is only a part of what defines the city, and that it doesn't treat murder like many an American crime movie. No death is pointless, and even the more blasé killings contribute to the bigger picture.

There's a lot of nuance to each of the many murders we see in City of God. However, as you may have gathered from the title of this article, there are three types I want to highlight. After all, there's a difference between how murder is portrayed in City of God and the way many films gleefully show you a Sylvester Stallone type butchering his way through a horde of unnamed goons. Let's explore some of those differences, shall we?

Spoilers for City of God below. Also, as City of God has an astoundingly complex structure, if you haven't seen the movie before, most of the plot descriptions will probably sound like gibberish. I'd watch the movie before reading if you haven't already.

These are the more traditional murders in City of God. They happen to the characters with whom the audience has spent the most time, or the characters with a more empathetic backstory. As such, the story sets these murders up for maximum emotional impact and they're usually shot in such a way as to set them apart. Of course, all the slayings in City of God are tragic. But in the confines of this particular story, these are the ones that hit us the hardest.

The first emotional murder in City of God is the killing of Shaggy, one third of the Tender Trio. In the beginning of the film, the Tender Trio are introduced as three teenage robbers and good friends. While they're not averse to a beating or two, they refrain from killing if they can avoid it. (A rule most of the gangsters we spend time with later don't follow.) One night, the trio, along with Li'l Dice, a kid who hangs out with the gang, rob a motel. The Trio get out without murdering anyone, but everyone in the motel still meets a grizzly fate at the hands of Li'l Dice (we'll get to this later), and thus they take the blame. As a result, the Trio become the most wanted criminals in the city.

After the robbery, the Trio split. Shaggy ends up finding Bernice, a young woman with a low opinion of the criminal lifestyle. The two eventually fall in love and plan to leave the City of God to pursue a peaceful life outside of Rio. Unfortunately, circumstances, of which we'll get to a little later, conspire, and Shaggy is shot by the cops on the way to his new life.

Shaggy's is not the first killing we've seen in the movie so far. It is, however, the first one framed as a tragedy. Shaggy was no saint, but he wasn't a murderer. He was a kid who made some bad decisions, and he was on his way out. But Shaggy is also a poor kid in the slums, and on the word of a less than reputable source (which, again, we'll get to later), the police have all the justification they need to shoot Shaggy on sight.

If the context around Shaggy's murder weren't rough enough, the way the killing is shot makes the heartbreak even worse. After Shaggy takes the first bullet, the camera lingers on Shaggy as he tries to run away. We know he's doomed, but human emotions are not always governed by rationality, and if you're watching the film for the first time, you may think to yourself that maybe, just maybe, Shaggy we'll get away. Or perhaps you know that Shaggy's already dead, and you're touched by the poetic nature of how we're going to watch him die running.

Either way, this is the first death we mourn. And it's also the death that sets up much of the rest of the movie. The cop who Bernice shoots after Shaggy takes his bullet is the one person preventing his partner from going full-on corrupt. Eventually, his partner will cause much more suffering.

Our next emotional murder is that of Benny, Shaggy's younger brother and arguably the most consequential death in the entire film.

Benny, as a kid, was Li'l Dice's best friend, and he remains so when Li'l Dice grows up and starts going by Li'l Zé. As Zé rapidly takes over the city, Benny remains his partner in crime. But he also has a much more important function as that of Zé's last connection to humanity. Benny stops many an unnecessary murder and he's the only thing preventing Zé from going to war with Carrot, a rival drug dealer whom Zé constantly wants to kill so he can take his territory.

However, Benny's priorities begin to shift. He begins to develop an eye for fashion and parties, as well as a loving relationship with Angélica. Soon enough, he becomes the most popular man in all the City of God. But he develops a distaste for the gangster life, and he and Angélica, just like Shaggy and Bernice, decide to leave. At Benny and Angélica's massive farewell party, Zé practically begs him to stay, but Benny tells him that he has to do what's best for him, and he'll always be his friend. Zé doesn't take it well, and he takes it even worse when Benny is accidentally shot with a bullet that was meant for him. Benny dies in Zé's arms, and from here on in, there'll be no more peace in the city.

Much of what was said about Shaggy could be said about his younger brother. Unlike Shaggy, Benny has killed and he's certainly been an accomplice. (It's a detail you might not catch, but you can see Benny shoot people in an earlier montage.) However, City of God is a story about the escalation of crime and violence as a whole. The city was never entirely safe, but up to this point, it's never devolved into an all out war-zone, and that's thanks in large part to Benny holding Li'l Zé back. Without Benny's presence, Li'l Zé would've gone to war with Carrot ages ago. Benny's far from a saint, but he was a keeper of peace, and that's not nothing.

Whether Benny earned your sympathy is up to you. (Personally, I go back and forth.) But the heartbreak is more than one person dying. It's the fact that we now know that on some level, the city is doomed, because now, one way or another, there's nothing stopping an all-out bloodbath. Nobody is safe anymore. Not even the innocent.

The omens are also present in how the scene is filmed. Shaggy's death was shot slow, in an almost romanticized fashion. We know where he is and where the bullets come from. Benny's death is chaos. Benny and Zé are in the middle of a crowded dance floor. As the music shifts from Carl Douglas's "Kung Fu Fighting" to Bachman Turner Overdrive's "Hold Back The Water," the DJ turns on the strobes, and we can barely tell what's going on. We see Blacky (yes, that's the character's name) approach, we hear a gun shot, we see Benny hit the ground, we see the crowd disperse, and we see how Zé and Angélica take it. But the strobes remain, and the whole sequence is intentionally disorienting.

We mourn the loss of Benny. (Or we don't.) But even if you can't tell where the story is going, there's a feeling that accompanies the visual disorder: Very bad things are afoot.

Our final examples are the deaths of Knockout Ned and his young murderer, Otto.

Shaggy and Benny entered the criminal life partially out of necessity, but mostly out of greed and want. Knockout Ned joined for revenge. Ned has had less than friendly encounters with Zé before, and this culminates in a particularly gruesome moment where Zé, literally on his way to kill Carrot, rapes Ned's girlfriend and kills his brother. Ned picks up a gun, joins up with Carrot, and the war is on.

As much as Ned tries to avoid other criminal elements that have nothing to do with killing Zé, he ends up falling deeper and deeper into the life. He helps rob stores. He gives out guns indiscriminately. He kills a security guard during a bank job. At the end of the movie, Ned and Carrot launch a final assault on Zé where dozens of people are killed. In the midst of the assault, Ned tries to nurse Otto, a kid in his gang who just got shot by Zé. However, Otto shoots Ned in the back, and it's revealed that Otto infiltrated Carrot and Ned's gang to kill Ned after he murdered his father, the security guard at the bank.

Ned is presented to us as a righteous man who hates violence. We meet him for the first time about halfway through the movie, and he tells our narrator Rocket to get out of the city to avoid the bloodshed and the gangs. But his desire for revenge overcomes him, and Ned travels further down the path of violence than most of the characters we've met so far. The tragedy isn't just how he ended up dead in the streets, but that his murderer's cause was just as seemingly righteous as his own.

Thus when the sound drowns out while Ned's being shot, we're not left with a sense of hope that maybe he'll make it like Shaggy, nor are we met with the dread that comes in the wake of Benny's death. We're left with a deliberate emptiness while we contemplate the tragedy of how seemingly inevitable it was that a man who was essentially a hippy ended up a killer, and he would up being murdered by a dying child whose demise was the result of a war Ned started when he first picked up his gun.

The moment you enter the gangster life in Rio, you're doomed. There is no escape, even if the reasons you entered are ultimately sympathetic. Ned's reasons may have been, but by showing the audience the story of Otto right before he shoots Ned, we know Ned was doomed before he fired his first round in the assault. So when all the audio mutes, it hits us with ultimate impact that this once honorable man is going to die in the street with no one and nothing. No matter his actions, it's hard not to feel something.

The emotional murders are designed to pull our heartstrings. The "casual" murders don't hit us as hard. In many ways, these are the kinds of murder that have more in common with American action movies. These are the deaths of a lot of nameless characters, or in this case, of characters we only barely know by name or characters we know quite well but whose deaths are met with little fanfare in order to make a point.

Though these murders may not break our hearts, I'd argue that they pull their weight on a subtextual level. These murders may not make a big impression on first glance, but pack a wallop if we think about how these killings are set up in the story or the way they're filmed. They're intellectual murders, so to speak.

Our first example of a casual murder is the death of Aristotle, a friend of future crime boss and enemy of Li'l Zé, Carrot.

In the beginning of act two, we're treated to "The Story of the Apartment." On the surface, it's a montage where we learn about the apartment our narrator Rocket finds himself standing in when he's buying weed for Angélica. In reality, it's the story of the rise of Carrot.

Back in the day, a woman named Dona Zelia started selling drugs out of the apartment. She also started trading drugs for sex with the local men. One of these men was Big Boy, who took the apartment from her by force to sell the drugs himself. He used the local kids as dealers, which included Blacky and Carrot. Carrot rose fast, and eventually became a manager. One day, he gave his good friend Aristotle, whose family gave Carrot a home, a package so he could raise the money for his wife's surgery. Aristotle didn't pay what he owed, so Big Boy made Carrot kill his friend under threat of death himself. Carrot wanted revenge, but Big Boy was arrested and would eventually die in prison. Carrot took control of Big Boy's empire, and gave the apartment to Blacky.

Aristotle is not vital to the audience's understanding of the story. He's on screen for about thirty seconds, all of which is contained in the structure of a montage, and if we want to get into the nitty gritty, he could've been cut out of the movie and the story would've been relatively unaffected. This murder is essentially presented to the audience as mere background information.

That said, I think Aristotle's murder is vital in giving us a complete picture, one we may not have known we'd have wanted if we didn't have it. From a narrative standpoint, Aristotle's death is only necessary in telling the story of Carrot. However, at least for me, this murder made me wonder: Carrot wields more power than most, but he's hardly the only drug dealer in the city. How many other loved ones or friends had to die so that someone could advance or save their own skin?

Death is such a common occurrence in this world that it could be part of just about anyone's story, whether they're nobodies in the criminal world or they're sitting on the throne.

And there's a deeper and arguably more tragic element to the death of Aristotle: Carrot murdered a man he says is practically his brother and in the grand scheme of his story, it means almost nothing. Sure, it tells the audience that Carrot can be ruthless. And it was almost the impetus for righteous revenge against Big Boy. But Big Boy was already destined for death in prison. Effectively, it's just another thing that happened.

We don't know much about Aristotle, but his family gave Carrot a home and he was trying to raise money for his wife's surgery. We can assume that there's at least some level of humanity in this man. But in the end, it didn't matter. You enter the criminal world in Rio, it doesn't matter if you're a good guy who just wants to sell some dime bags. You're doomed.

Our next example of casual murder is that of Tuba, the perpetually annoying foot soldier in Li'l Zé's empire.

Tuba is a character that pops up every now and then for the sole purpose of irritating Li'l Zé. One of his earliest appearances is at Zé's eighteenth birthday party, when he was still going by Li'l Dice. Right as Zé is about to present Benny with his plan to rapidly take over the drug trade in the city, Tuba blusters into Dice's path, loudly wishes him a happy birthday, and accidentally spits a bunch of food into Dice's face. Dice shoves him and tells him to go away.

This is how most of Zé's interactions with Tuba go. Zé has other things on his mind, Tuba shows up and annoys him, and Zé assaults him and tells him to fuck off. It's either that, or Zé's just generally making Tuba his whipping boy and insulting him. This cycle continues until the night Zé earns the wrath of Knockout Ned, who sets off the war by killing one of Zé's men and shooting Tuba in the arm. You'd figure that be enough to shut Tuba up, but after the attack, Zé's in no mood to entertain, and he shoots Tuba dead for talking too much.

So what did we learn from Tuba's death? Unlike Carrot being forced to kill Aristotle, there's no sense of Shakespearian tragedy. Tuba was a more-than-willing accomplice in Zé's empire who never showed any signs of remorse or desire to leave the life behind him. He's almost comic relief, his death means nothing from a narrative perspective, and his inherent disposability is part of the reason he's funny.

But a little bit of context is important.

In the previous section, we talked about the sense of dread we feel after Benny's death. Indeed, before Benny's murder, every act of violence we saw at least had a reason. We know that Shaggy dies because he's blamed for the motel murders. We watch a montage of Zé and his soldiers kill the other crime bosses because we're learning how Zé came to be the boss.

After Benny's death, Zé's truly free to do as he pleases. This is the nightmare scenario for the citizens of the City of God, and Tuba's death represents how indiscriminate the violence is about to become. Now we're in a world where you can be killed for being annoying.

But it also represents just how far things are about to spiral out of control. The war between Zé and Knockout Ned (as well as Ned's partner Carrot) vastly accelerates the flow of guns into the city, and as a result, the violence becomes much more arbitrary. Now if you need a gun for any reason, no matter how old you are, you will be happily supplied with one by either Zé or Carrot. Tuba was just the start.

Our final example of a casual murder is the death of Tiago, Angélica's ex-boyfriend, former beach bum, drug addict, and finally, foot soldier for Li'l Zé.

Unlike Aristotle and Tuba, we've spent a substantial amount of time with Tiago. We first meet him on the beach, where he's dating Angélica, much to the chagrin of Rocket. It doesn't take long to spot some red flags as one of the first things out of Tiago's mouth is his glowing endorsement of cocaine. Tiago ends up befriending Benny, who tasks him with buying all his new clothes and completing his transformation into the coolest guy in the city. However, when you're around drug dealers, you're also around drugs, and after Tiago and Angélica break up, Tiago becomes a full blown junky. Eventually, he joins up with Li'l Zé's gang to get more drugs and meets his fate in the final shoot-out when he takes a bullet in the head from Knockout Ned. (Specifically, he's shot trying to drive Zé away from the gunfire in a stolen gas truck, mirroring the opening robbery by the Tender Trio.)

Of course, the narrative framing of Tiago's death is tragic enough. In a certain sense Tiago's life is almost worth its own movie, as the tale of how a hippy beach kid descends into the life of a gangster has a built in sense of irony and tragedy.

However, the reason I want to call attention to this particular death is how it's shot and how the film handles the aftermath.

City of God ends with a final shoot-out between team Li'l Zé and team Knockout Ned/Carrot. The shoot-out takes up most of the final fifteen minutes of the movie, and it's an incredible execution of organized disorder. It's shot in a way that you generally know where everyone is and what's happening, but only if you're paying attention. (And even if you aren't, information is provided in such a way that you know what's happening anyway.) In the midst of the shoot-out, Zé and Tiago steal the gas truck. If you're not paying attention, it's entirely possible to not notice the detail that Tiago is the one driving. Granted, it's a difficult detail to miss, but it is possible, particularly since most of the visual emphasis goes to Zé. As they drive down the road, Ned emerges from cover and shoots Tiago. Zé takes the wheel and shoots Otto, thus dooming Ned in the process.

The editing in this sequence is incredibly fast, and despite the significance of Tiago as a character, we linger on him just enough to process the information before Zé takes over the frame. Then we cut away, and while we get the occasional quick shot of Tiago's corpse, we never stay on the shot for more than a second or two, and even in those shots, Tiago is never the emphasis.

This is a character we've spent a sizable percentage of the movie with, and he's killed off like it's nothing. More importantly, the film never grieves his loss. Granted, the movie never goes particularly far out of its way to make you feel for him. In fact, he's introduced as kind of/sort of/not really villain. But he's never advances to the role of full-blown antagonist either, and on paper, he's not a "bad guy" in the same sense as Li'l Zé. Thus, if you take into account his downfall, on some level he has our sympathy. Or at least we feel something for him.

Yet he dies like many of the nameless soldiers, and his death is filmed as such.

When it comes to City of God, some murders are meant to break our hearts, and some are meant to frame the violence in a new angle, provided we the audience are willing to engage. As we've discussed, City of God has a high body count. ( One source says that the film's body count is sixty. I haven't gone through and counted myself, but that sounds about right.) Of course, it's not easy to classify each and every murder, but most of them fall in between the two categories we've discussed so far, and the more prominent killings left are designed to knock the audience off balance.

Action movies, provided they're effective, have a way of lulling us into accepting often ridiculous amounts of brutality and bloodshed. We're presented with worlds where, say, a hitman can mow down men by the dozens, and we the audience never question it. (Not knocking it by the way. You want to watch John Wick? Let's watch John Wick.) Most of City of God has the same effect. But sometimes, it wants us to realize that what we're seeing is far from ordinary, and there's something eerie about the fact that we take it at face value. That's why some of the murders in the film are designed to unsettle us. To punish us for our complacency. To remind the audience, "No, this is actually pretty fucked up."

The first of these jarring murders are the killings at the Motel Miami. This is the location of the robbery that puts the Tender Trio on the map, for better and, mostly, for worse. The robbery itself goes pretty smoothly. Li'l Dice stands watch with instructions to shoot a window if the cops show up while the Trio go into the motel. They tie up the staff, rob all the guests and the motel itself, and make the occasional joke at the expense of the copulating patrons. However, Dice shoots a window, and the Trio flee in a car, leaving Dice behind because they hear gunfire and assume the cops got him.

The Trio never a fire a single bullet. Yet once they leave, we're shown these slow tracking shots of the now dead motel staff and guests, leaving the audience to wonder what the hell happened.

(Apologies for the lack of subtitles in this video. It's the only one I could find. This video includes them fleeing, the the shots of the bodies, and then their escape. It also includes the introduction of a character we'll be talking about later.)

The motel murders happen around thirteen minutes into the film. Every scene in those thirteen minutes have, so far, provided nothing but a sense of boundless energy. We're robbing gas trucks, we're running around the favela, we're jumping back in time, we're all over the place. And even when we're watching crimes, there's an infectious restlessness to it.

Then we track across those bodies, and the illusion is shattered. Now we know how bad things can get in this world.

The motel killings are the first murders we see in City of God, and they provide a chilling tone and some bad omens. This won't be the last time we watch slow silent shots of dead bodies piling up, particularly in the coming war between Li'l Zé and Knockout Ned. And the dead in the later portions will include children and other innocents.

To a certain extent, this is a point of no return for the movie. We'll eventually learn that all these people were killed by Li'l Dice, a young boy. Given the fate of Shaggy and the Trio, it's not hard to guess that Li'l Dice will meet a similar fate when he inflicts even more chaos onto the city.

Our second of these uncomfortable murders is the death of Shorty's Wife, the unfortunately unnamed wife of, as you may have guessed, Shorty, the town snitch who plays a role in the unravelling of the Tender Trio.

After the motel murders, fate puts the Tender Trio on separate paths. Shaggy finds Bernice. Clipper, the least talkative member of the Trio, has a vision while hiding from the cops in the woods and eventually joins the church, never to be heard from again. (Hey, maybe you can escape after all!) Goose, Rocket's brother, goes to work for his father as a fishmonger. However, Goose starts sleeping with Shorty's Wife, causing Shorty to brutally murder her with a shovel when he catches them in the act.

(Apologies for the poor quality of the video. I believe it's an Italian dub and it doesn't have subtitles. But it's the best I could find. Basically, Shorty watches Goose hit on his wife, Shorty's Wife talks with her friend about a fun thing you can do in bed with a banana, she does it with Goose, and then Shorty catches them.)

Murder in City of God is, relatively speaking, a straightforward affair. There are only two murders that aren't committed with a gun (at least I think that's the case), and the other non-gun murder is that of Blacky's girlfriend, whom Blacky beats to death offscreen so he could "avenge his honor" a little over halfway through the film.

In other words, Shorty's Wife is the only killing that indulges in any grim serial killer style of murder. It's quick, it's unexpected, and it becomes even more off-putting once we see how Shorty attempts to get rid of the body.

All of this is to say nothing of how the scene is actually shot and put together. We don't actually see the death on screen, but the brutality is more than made up for, at least for me, by the audio of the impact of the shovel. We hear it multiple times, and each time is a little bit more stomach churning. It may not be the most graphic murder in the film, but it might be the one we feel the most on a physical level because it allows our mind to fill in the blanks.

Much like the death of Aristotle, it's only a tiny fragment in the patchwork of the story. But it has massive consequences. As Shorty is being arrested, he sees Shaggy trying to escape with Bernice, and identifies him as one of the robbers. In a sense, this is the murder that also dooms Shaggy.

Our final jarring murder is the incident involving The Runts.

Part of why Li'l Zé keeps control of the city for such a lengthy period of time, besides the presence of Benny, is that Li'l Zé maintains a strict zero crime policy in the slums. (Or at least for crime he doesn't control.) Murder brings attention. Robberies bring attention. Attention means business stops, which means money doesn't come in. Thus if you commit crimes in the City of God, you have to face Li'l Zé. Nobody's stupid enough to mess with Zé, and everybody understands the message.

Except The Runts. The Runts are a group of little kids who regularly roam the streets of the city, causing mayhem and robbing stores everywhere they roam. On their first introduction, they're relatively harmless. They don't have guns and they commit most of their robberies by throwing things at the shopkeepers and running away with their collective junk. Compared to Zé, they're a mere nuisance. But their antics bring attention, and Carrot refuses to do anything about them. So Zé decides to handle things his own way.

Fun story: In my freshman year screenwriting class in college, we all had to pick a movie and make a chart of its structure, and everyone had to watch each others movies to prepare for the presentations. I picked City of God. (At the time, I thought I was being clever because of the way the story is divided into chapters. Little did I know that I created a nightmare for myself.) I showed the movie to some friends. It had been a while since I'd seen it, and for whatever reason, I had completely forgotten about this scene. Then we got to this scene, and a feeling of dread consumed me because I was worried that I had inadvertently traumatized my whole class.

Not everyone has a stomach for cinematic violence. Personally, there's always something in the back of my mind that knows it's fake. But some stuff gets to me, and this scene is one of them.

It's not hard to figure out why. After all, it's a scene of a group of men torturing two very young children, than having another child murder one of them, and it's shot in an intentionally claustrophobic manner designed to hit you in the gut. You don't need me to explain what makes this particular scene uncomfortable.

However, let's ask ourselves a question: Does City of God have a protagonist? If so, who is it? Is it Rocket? Personally, I'd say no. True, he's our narrator, and equally as true, he's one of the few characters who never descends into the criminal underworld. (Though there is a section where he tries, albeit haphazardly.) However, Rocket doesn't really have an arc, and the events in his life are rarely the result of his own decisions but rather the changing circumstances around him.

I don't personally think City of God has a protagonist. In fact, I don't think this is a movie that deals with "good" guys and "bad" guys in the traditional sense. It's an ensemble film where everyone's actions effect one another, and the only real difference is that there are those in the slum who have power and those who don't.

However, could an argument be made for Li'l Zé? He goes from a poor kid, to a kingpin, to losing his best friend, to dead in an alley. There's an arc there. One that's not entirely unlike other gangster movies like Scarface. More importantly, his decisions are the most consequential in the story. He kills the people in the motel. As a result, the Tender Trio ends and Shaggy (and Goose) wind up dead. He kills most of the other drug bosses. As a result, he becomes the most powerful man in the city. He rapes Ned's girlfriend and kills his brother. As a result, the City of God plunges into war and it costs him his life.

Characters who make decisions and act on them, who drive the story and keep the momentum going forward, earn something from the audience. It may not be sympathy, but we want to see what they do next. In Zé's case, we may not be rooting for his success. He is, to put it mildly, a shit human being. However, for the vast majority of the film, he's not exactly acting against an easily identifiable protagonist. Granted, I'm focusing on the technical definition of things a little too much, but my point is that for the first half of the movie, I don't think it's as easy to call him an "antagonist" as you may think it is.

Then this scene happens, and the brutality of it sends a clear message: Zé has to go.

Now who'll be our knight? It's certainly not Rocket. In fact, I'd argue at this point that if we want anything from him, it's for Rocket to succeed as a photographer and leave the Cidade de Deus behind him forever. How about Ned? Nobody has a more righteous claim to Zé's life than Ned. However, our sympathies towards Ned eventually falter as he becomes complicit in the extreme escalation of violence in the city. Is it the other Runts? They also have a claim, but then we'd be rooting for a group of young boys to commit murder.

There is no easy answer, but we know there's a limit. We know that there are acts heinous enough to provoke a sense of justice. Men like Zé will always get what's coming. Even if it takes years.

But it's strongly hinted that The Runts will grow up to become the Comando Vermelho. Maybe the Runts will do things just like Zé. Maybe the cycle can only repeat itself. As we learn later, the party selling the guns to Zé and Ned's gang is the same corrupt cop from Shaggy's killing. Maybe so long as there's a system where corrupt cops can profit off of kids in the slum shooting each other, nothing will ever change.

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Three Types of Murder in the City of God - The Midpoint

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I began this article with a simple goal in mind: Write something, anything, about one of my all-time favorite movies, City of God. An unexpected challenge then arose: There's so much I love about this movie that I had a hard time narrowing it down to just one topic.

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City of God (2002) Review - Some of the Best Editing I've Ever Seen

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City of God: Making Scenes Feel Real (Scene Analysis)

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Director Fernando Meirelles discusses the making of 'City of God'

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City of God - The Open World Movie | The Cinema Cartography

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City of God Analysis - Characters, Worldbuilding & Themes

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Vertigo - Ernie's Restaurant Scene Analysis (Hitchcock Movie Video Essay)

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Vertigo Analysis - Love, Identity & Relationships

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Filmmakers on Vertigo, (Hitchcock Truffaut, 2015)

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Spot the movie subliminals - Hitchcock's VERTIGO (driving scene)

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Vertigo (2/11) Movie CLIP - Uncanny Resemblance (1958) HD

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Vertigo (1/11) Movie CLIP - Officer Down (1958) HD

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Vertigo, Hitchcock & the Spiral — Vertigo Film Analysis and the Perfect Symbol for Obsession

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The American Society of Cinematographers

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Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Acrophobic Vision - The American Society of Cinematographers

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Revisiting Hitchcock‘s classic tale of duality and obsession, photographed in VistaVision by Robert Burks, ASC.

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The mark of a classic is that it is an inexhaustible experience, a refutation of Einstein's definition of madness: seeing a great movie or listening to a great piece of music over and over, one has reason to expect different results and one gets them. That's one of the things that makes it a privilege and a delight to write about movies appearing in revival. So it is with Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," which played two weekends ago at IFC Center in its ongoing retrospective of his films. On the occasion of this new screening, we ran my my capsule review of it in the magazine again, and I'm grateful to the editors of New York magazine's Approval Matrix for taking note of the piece in their current issue: "Brody boldly but delusionally states that Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' has a happy ending."

I confess: I disagree with both adverbs. I don't think there's anything bold about calling the ending happy, especially since I hedge that so-called happiness within the very tight limits "of health restored and crime punished." In those terms, it's not delusional but merely lucid to say so-and the point is proved in the lovely still, from the end of the film, with which the Matrix illustrates the entry. Of course, to consider the film's mortal conclusion truly and fully happy is a joke worthy of The New Yorker' s own Charles Addams, but it's worth considering, in light of the jibe (despicable me), the tone of the movie's ending, what it says about happiness according to Hitchcock, and how it reflects Hitchcock's over-all sense of life, and, for that matter, of death. (I'm not going to worry about spoilers or about exposition, assuming that everyone has seen it.)

"Vertigo" is built on three parentheses that open at the start of the movie and close at its end:

The suspicion of crime: The first shot of the movie is of a man being pursued by the police and chased over the rooftops of San Francisco by an officer and by a plainclothes detective (James Stewart), who misses his leap and is hanging onto a gutter for dear life. (The officer, attempting to help, falls to his death.)

Mental illness: As the detective, John (Scotty) Ferguson, tells his erstwhile fiancé and good friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), "I have acrophobia, which gives me vertigo, and I get dizzy."

Sexual desire: Scotty's rescue entailed physical trauma, which leaves him using a cane and bound in a corset that comes off just as he's asked by a college friend, Gavin Elster, to do some detective work, which, of course, is a plot-the plot that sets the movie's plot in motion. Scotty is asked to keep an eye on Elster's wife-actually, of course, his mistress, who is dolled up to resemble his wife, and who impersonates someone in the grips of a mental illness that plays out like a family curse; her act (including her seduction of Scotty) is a part of Elster's plan to murder his actual wife.

All three of these parentheses close at the end of the movie, with its crude and partial justice (a woman who is an accomplice to murder, albeit not its master plotter, ends up dead) and its psychological cure (Scotty loses his acrophobia and his vertigo). As for desire, the woman who dies is Scotty's beloved, and with her death, his sexual desire-which made him an accomplice, albeit an unwitting one, to the same murder-vanishes into memory. As happy endings go, it's an ironic one (and I'm surprised that my own shadow of irony went unnoticed), with its tragic contrast-one of an utterly classical pedigree-between the points of view of man and of God.

For Hitchcock, the merest stuff of existence brings inevitable punishment. To exist is to be punished, and, therefore, in God's just universe, to be guilty-as in the movie that Hitchcock made just prior to "Vertigo," "The Wrong Man," in which the protagonist, though innocent of the crime of which he's wrongly accused, is nonetheless guilty of something. (His appearance of guilt marks, rather, the sin of pride: the belief that one can guard against misfortune through good intentions and good planning). In "Vertigo," Scotty is, first of all, guilty of not jumping as well as the regular police officer who preceded him across the abyss-the physical man who does his job modestly. Scotty is, rather, is a man out of a place, a lawyer who, dreaming of political power, holds a job for which he's not quite physically apt. He's also guilty of an immoderate lust-the plot runs on his old friend Elster's accurate assumption that Scotty will be quite as turned on by Elster's mistress as Elster is. (The answer is, more so: he's so turned on by "Madeleine," the simulacrum of Elster's wife, that he doesn't hesitate to cuckold his friend).

Like Hitchcock himself, Scotty is something of a fetishist; he's turned on not just by her general beauty but by the particulars of her porcelain blondness and of her severe fashion. And like the viewer himself, Scotty is taken in by the melodramatic acting-out of gothic mumbo-jumbo about the curse of Carlotta Valdes. Kim Novak, as Madeleine, is delivering a terribly overblown performance of an absurd "script," the one that Elster concocted to lure Scotty to the mission bell tower where the murder plot is to be put into action. In fact, Hitchcock is suggesting that Kim Novak isn't much more of an actress than Judy Barton-that she even is, in effect, Judy Barton, a country girl who, under the guidance of a master manipulator such as Elster, gets roped into a plot to play platinum blonde and alabaster temptress, and that he himself is Elster, the behind-the-scenes plotter who ropes viewers in (and even turns them on) with a hokey plot and a country girl wearing a lot of makeup.

Lately I've written about filmmakers who consider that love and friendship are different things and who give priority to sexual desire as the basis for a relationship, and my prime example is Hitchcock (as in a scene from "Rear Window"). "Vertigo" provides an even sadder view of the same idea, in Scottie's thwarted connection to Midge, a smart and capable woman who has everything Scotty needs but doesn't turn him on. So, when Scotty is in the process of transforming the shopgirl Judy into the object of his desire and she implores him, "Couldn't you like me, just me, the way I am?," Scotty's unspoken thought is, "I don't like you; I like Midge, but I might love you." The way she is isn't anything special, not in Scotty's world of accomplishments and interests. Judy doesn't seem to have a better mind or more distinctive abilities or talents than the average young woman-she is the average young woman, but one who radiates a powerful, iridescent allure when she's dressed the right way and made up the right way and when the light and Scotty's eye (or the camera-eye) catch her the right way. That's the strange truth about movie actors: the skill takes a back seat to grace, to a metaphysical gift. "Vertigo" is one of the great movies about movies, and about Hitchcock's own way with them.

By the movie's end, Scotty has seen behind Elster's fourth wall no less surely than viewers have figured out that they've been had by Hitchcock's narrative trickery, but neither Scotty nor viewers can get over the image of the false Madeleine into whom Judy was twice transformed, once by Elster and once by Scotty himself. The theatrical illusion remains an unshakeable reality, the eye remains an implacable engine of desire, but what the eye desires, penetrates, and is possessed by is the soul itself, the profoundest mystery of all. Without that mystery-without the sense that the eye is the gateway between two souls, the dam that bursts and breaks down the barrier between two souls-Hitchcock would be the mere showman that his erstwhile detractors mistook him for.

At the outset, Scotty attempts to overcome his vertigo through moderate and incremental steps, and Midge tells him that, according to a doctor, the vertigo will be cured only by a comparably great shock (one comparable to Scotty's having narrowly escaped death and having seen his colleague fall and die). At the end of the movie, he gets a shock-he realizes that Madeleine is a made-up being, that Judy wasn't merely his simulacrum of Madeleine but was one and the same, that he had been taken in not by his own obsession but by her, that he was not the master of the game but its pawn, that he was duped by Judy and by Elster. He has the shock of recognizing that the sardonic remarks of the local judge regarding his unfortunate failings were entirely accurate, that his lust had in fact made him an unwitting accomplice to murder.

He sees Judy fall to her death, but seeing that fall isn't what cures him of his vertigo. He has already had the shock of realizing that his lust had turned him unwittingly evil-thus he is cured even before he gets to the bell tower, and is propelled up the steps, powered by righteous anger, not to cure himself but to prove himself already cured. He is cured of his acrophobia and of his vertigo, but not of his desire or of his memory-of an illusion and a pleasure that he'll never be able to lose or to recreate except there. He's finally free to get on with his life; at the moment that he regains his future, he's swallowed up in his past. That's the free fall, the famous dolly zoom in the tower staircase, in which he's caught; it's the visual metaphor that captures man's fate. So, please allow me my irony of suggesting that the movie has a truly happy ending: the revelation of unhappy truth. Scotty returns to the world in love not with a dead woman but with the image of a dead woman; he is in danger of becoming a real-life cinecrophile. The best he can hope for is another metavisual shock. Happily, the movies, new and old, keep providing them.

P.S. The most controversial entry in my recent all-time ten-best list is Hitchcock's "Marnie"; it's the film in which the filmmaker finally realized his ideal of feminine appearance and performance and faced his own obsessional consequences.

P.P.S. My review of "Vertigo" included an error that slipped through uncaught, and I'm grateful to the reader Velda Cornelius for catching it and writing in to let me know: Barbara Bel Geddes plays not a "designer" but an illustrator. The downside of familiarity is imprecision.

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The mark of a classic is that it is an inexhaustible experience, a refutation of Einstein's definition of madness: seeing a great movie or listening to a great piece of music over and over, one has reason to expect different results and one gets them.

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he unbearably sad, exquisitely macabre love story that is Vertigo now reaches its 60th birthday, and this week sees its rerelease, not much liked on first appearing in 1958 but now hugely canonical and prestigious, recently unseating Citizen Kane at the top of the Sight and Sound critics' poll, due very much to unending critical interest in "the male gaze", pioneered by theorists such as Michel Foucault and Laura Mulvey. This is that act of seeing that, so far from being transparent and neutral, is an imposition of power, and therefore extremely applicable to this drama of obsession and voyeurism, although I never tire of pointing out that there are very few members of the hetero-patriarchy who have the confidence or fanatical connoisseurship to pick out a woman's clothes or exactly specify her hairstyle. Vertigo also combines in an almost unique balance Hitchcock's brash flair for psychological shocks with his elegant genius for dapper stylishness. Like Psycho, it ends in an "o", or maybe "oh!" The ancient house adjoining the Bates motel in Psycho certainly has an unearthly similarity to San Francisco's creepy old McKitterick Hotel in Vertigo.

James Stewart plays ex-cop Scottie, invalided out of the police due to vertigo brought on by a traumatic and shaming calamity during a rooftop chase. He is hired by old schoolfriend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) for a strange job: to shadow his beautiful and enigmatic wife Madeline ( Kim Novak) whose behaviour is worrying him. This bizarre situation unlocks lonely Scottie's gallantry and romanticism and he falls passionately in love with this mysterious, troubled woman with her quiet, wondering voice and the manner of a sleepwalker. And later, when his vertigo prevents him from stopping another disaster, Scottie is to fall in love with another woman, Kansas-born Judy Barton, who has an eerie similarity to Madeline. With fanatical dedication, Scottie forces Judy to dress and sound like his lost love.

There are two ways of approaching Vertigo. One is to see it as a male film on the side of the male view of women; the other is to see it as a satirical attack on the misogynist mindset. They are, in fact, two sides of the same interpretative coin. The imaginative sympathies and dramatic voltage are wired up to Scottie's anguished point of view. (Actually, Hitchcock did make a film from the viewpoint of the woman, the female gazee, forced by a controlling man into the shoes of his obsessed-over first love - Rebecca.)

One of the film's most brilliant moments concerns Scottie's platonic pal and ex-girlfriend Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a commercial artist in whose messy bohemian apartment Scottie is in the habit of hanging out. Midge crucially wears glasses, the sort that in other circumstances might be removed by someone saying: "Why Miss Wood, you're beautiful!" These glasses are there to make her less attractive and signal that she is not the movie's romantic interest, but also that she herself is a seer, a gazer - noticing from afar evidence of Scottie and Madeleine's affair with a wry smile, but also perhaps a twinge of the heart.

Platonic pals ... Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge with James Stewart as Scottie. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures

Inspired by Scottie telling her about Madeleine's own trance-like obsession with a 19th-century portrait of a beautiful tragic ancestor, Midge paints herself in the same pose: glasses and all. When he sees it, Scottie winces. So do we, the audience. The pure wrongness is shocking: smart, wry, detached Midge is completely wrong in the role. The portrait has to be of someone infinitely, demurely, fatally passive and gazed upon - not a humorous, intelligent woman with her own visual judgment and indeed her own job.

The Freudian images are everywhere in Vertigo, and not simply in the showstopping dream sequences or the nightmarish light-filter changes bringing out the hypnotic pale blue of Stewart's eyes. The "brassiere" or bra that Midge is drawing for an ad is cantilevered, she says, like a bridge - thus associating the famous Golden Gate Bridge scene with a woman's underwear. (When Scottie brings Madeleine back to his apartment after saving her from drowning, he undresses her and puts her in bed while she is still unconscious: although perhaps he left her underwear in place. It isn't clear.) The tower could be phallic, and the nestling nosegay of flowers that Madeline buys is also emblematic of something, though not as obviously as the tight whorl of hair at the back of her head: a mesmeric circle (again, like bloody water circling a drain) or an orifice of some sort.

When I watched this again, I felt more strongly than ever that Hitchcock's decision to give us a story in which the Clouzot-esque twist is given away well before the end is no misjudgment. It is a brilliant way of putting us inside Judy's tormented, guilty soul, and of avoiding, just for a while, that male gaze. I also realised what it is Vertigo has been subtly reminding me of for many years: Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. A treat to see this back on the big screen.

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Vertigo review - still spinning its dizzying magic

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he unbearably sad, exquisitely macabre love story that is Vertigo now reaches its 60th birthday, and this week sees its rerelease, not much liked on first appearing in 1958 but now hugely canonical and prestigious, recently unseating Citizen Kane at the top of the Sight and Sound critics' poll, due very much to unending critical interest in "the male gaze", pioneered by theorists such as Michel Foucault and Laura Mulvey.