On show business – Luca Peretti in Jacobin:

A friend forwarded me this article and asked me: ‘What do you think?’

Well, first the article and Benigni:

‘This April, Venice International Film Festival director Alberto Barbera announced that this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement will be awarded to Roberto Benigni. The director and actor — best known outside of Italy for the Oscar-winning 1997 Holocaust comedy Life is Beautiful — will be awarded for his “innovative and irreverent approach to rules and traditions.” There was a time when such a claim could have made sense. For much of his career, as well as being leftist in his politics — close to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) — Benigni was also artistically transgressive and inventive. Yet in the last twenty years he hasn’t been challenging rules or traditions, or been much of an innovator. Rather, he has obeyed pop culture conventions, becoming a rather flat and repetitive performer able to earn a lot of money without disturbing the expectations of his audience or, more importantly, the established powers that be.
So, why was he awarded the Golden Lion? The answer lies less in Benigni’s own lifetime achievements than in the political culture that surrounds the world of awards and film festivals.

(…)

‘More than that, Benigni, together with his onstage and life partner Nicoletta Braschi, is also a shrewd entrepreneur — a true money-making machine. He has his own production company and has built a large film studio in Umbria (central Italy), where some of his movies have been filmed including Life is Beautiful. The studios were later bought by the public-owned Cinecittà; the way this was handled is not entirely clear, spurring controversies in Italy. Today, they are abandoned and have fallen into complete decay. Benigni also receives attacks, often from the Right, for his high fee for appearing on public TV.
Benigni is also the actor that worked for directors such as Blake Edwards, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, and Federico Fellini, or in tandem with Massimo Troisi (in Non ci resta che piangere — a cult movie in Italy) and Walter Matthau. He was also a free and irreverent Tuscan comedian, part of a generation of “regional” comedians and comedic actors and actresses that shaped Italian cinema, popular theater, and television from the 1980s to the 2000s.
It is hard to overestimate the cultural impact of a film like Berlinguer ti voglio bene (Berlinguer, I Love You), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci’s brother Giuseppe and named after the 1970s PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer. The jokes and sketches from the film are definitely not politically correct: they are caricaturally sexist and at times outdated. They also remain part of the cultural imaginary of generations of Italians, especially men, especially in Tuscany (where the author of this piece also grew up).
But there is a Benigni that spoke truth to power and made fun of pretty much everything and everyone, and then there is the Benigni who appears in Los Angeles to receive an Academy Award. Many in Italy still long for the former — the director of Tu mi turbi (You Upset Me, 1983), Johnny Stecchino (1991) and Il mostro (The Monster, 1994) — even though some of his earlier material definitely looks disturbing (like the famous sketch with Raffaella Carrà where he jokingly asked to see her vagina) or has not aged well. Some efforts, like the song Inno del corpo sciolto — a snarky ode to shit — are still sung and loved.’

(…)

‘One thing does, however, mark out Benigni: Life is Beautiful, the movie that earned him lasting international fame and taught us that Auschwitz was liberated by US tanks. Despite criticisms from some (perhaps most notably, the Maus author Art Spiegelman), the movie is a stable icon of Italianness (and Jewishness) in the United States, still seen and taught in colleges and universities.
The film did untold damage: the bald historical lies (in reality, the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz), the idea that concentration camps can be told as a fairytale, its simplistic view of Italian Fascism, and more. In a favorable review, revered film critic Roger Ebert praised it for “sidestepping of politics in favor of simple human ingenuity”: he meant this as a positive thing, whereas it encapsulates in a sentence what is wrong about the film and why it did so well. Life Is Beautiful was received particularly well in the United States: the critically acclaimed work took in $57 million, to this day the second biggest foreign hit after Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.’

(…)

‘As always happens with this kind of honorary awards, past awardees have varied wildly depending on the cultural and political moment — and, naturally, on the personal inclinations of the director and the artistic board. But there are some established criteria. They are usually awarded to directors (the vast majority of whom are, needless to say, white men) who have an obvious place in the history of cinema, or to actresses and actors who have been stars of important films.
Sometimes, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement is also a sort of compensation for the relatively little critical or audience success that the awardee has received in their lifetime. This was the case, for example, of Frederick Wiseman, the documentary filmmaker whose name shines in critical and academic circles, but much less in the commercial mainstream. And, to take another major festival, this seems to be the case also for Marco Bellocchio, who will receive the Honorary Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival but has never won such a prize for one of his films.
Benigni doesn’t really seem to fit any of those categories. Barbera’s choice has probably to do much more with the festival’s need to be more “relevant” to a US audience and US cultural institutions. The point, then, is not to celebrate an Italian artist for his “innovation and irreverence,” but to tighten an American tie which seems increasingly important to the festival’s promoters.’

Read the article here.

Somewhere in the 90s I saw ‘Il mostro’ in Quad Cinema and I was delighted.

Pure slapstick is always slightly childish, or at least, it doesn’t disguise its childishness and that’s what makes it disturbing, what sets it apart.
I’m also a fan of the Mr. Bean by the way.

Yes, we might detect some misogynous elements in this movie, but the 90s where another epoch. I would say that ‘Il Mostro’ is still watchable, and more than that, and that ‘Il Mostro’ is still an instructive tale about false accusations and monsters in the community.

‘Life is Beautiful’ was a cheesy movie indeed. Janet Maslin saw a different movie:

‘Mr. Benigni effectively creates a situation in which comedy is courage. And he draws from this an unpretentious, enormously likable film that plays with history both seriously and mischievously. Piety has no place here, nor do tears until the final reel. ''Life is Beautiful'' plays by its own rules.’

Read her review here.

But Janet Maslin always had a knack of loving feel-good movies.

‘To Rome with Love’ – one of the worst Woody Allen movies, and I’m not a Woody Allen hater – is equally cheesy. I vaguely remember Benigni as opera/bathroom singer, but at least Auschwitz didn’t play a role in this movie.

The fact that a feel-good movie about Auschwitz became two decades ago such a critical and commercial success (yes, there were some negative reviews as well) says also a lot about the role of the Holocaust in popular culture.
It might explain why the Jew as a victim is not sexy anymore.

The avantgarde reached the conclusion that the Holocaust was commercial, Hollywood, mainstream et cetera. True victims are the victims forgotten by Hollywood.

Fair enough.

There is no business like Shoah business. Some claim that the Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol was the first one to utter this phrase – where has Sobol gone? – but whoever said it, Benigni smash hit fits into this category.

So, let’s concentrate on his early work.

After all lifetime achievement awards are tombstones.