Life is Beautiful - Night Connections

Writing Prompt:

 1) Based on the Holocaust literature and poetry we have read, what connections can be made between Life is Beautiful and our reading?

2) How is life shown as beautiful throughout the film. Pull out at least two examples from different parts of the film and explain your rationale.

The movie Life is Beautiful and the book Night have some similarities and many differences. One major difference is the fact that the two have a completely different tone and mood attached to it. Night focuses completely on the negative side of the Holocaust and being in a concentration camp. Night talked about how people were tortured, killed, starved, and beat on. Life is Beautiful focuses much less on the negative, and more about love, and even includes many moments of humor. In the beginning the film showed a man named Guido trying to get the women he had fallen in love with. Then they got married and had a child named Joshua. Even once Guido and Joshua were in a concentration camp it didn't focus on the negative things. Instead it focused on Guido trying to protect his son and keep him from finding out what the camp was really like.

Another difference is the way the concentration camp was looked at through the eyes of the child. The author and narrator of Night had arrived in a concentration camp when he was 15, and he lived through the whole experience knowing the kind of place he was in. He knew that these concentration camps were a place of pain and torture. Thanks to his father, Guido, Joshua had no idea the kind of terrors the concentration camp had in store. Guido protected Joshua by telling him that this was all a big game. Guido made up rules for the game that would keep Joshua safe and protected. Unlike Elie, Joshua went through his whole concentration camp experience without knowing what was actually happening around him.

A similarity between the film and the reading is that there is a father and a son. In both movie and book, there is a boy with his father, surviving in a concentration camp. Both boys also  get to stay with their father until near the end, before they were liberated. Although in different ways, in both situations the father dies in the concentration camp.

There are different ways life is shown as beautiful thought the film. One example would be when  the main character, Guido, finds love. Love is something very beautiful and magical, and it was a very wonderful thing that Guido was able to find someone to love, and someone to love him back. Along with that, it was a beautiful thing that they were able to get married and have a son together.

Life is shown as beautiful in the concentration camp during the different times Guido tried to show his wife, Dora, that him and his son were still alive, and that he loved her. One time Guido even risked his life by sneaking into a room and talking to Dora over the speakers that were all over camp. Guido also expressed is love by playing a song very loudly out a window, in hopes Dora would hear it. The song is from they both went to the opera.