While reading Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, I was reminded of a film shown to my International Studies class in high school: Life is Beautiful, the saga of Guido Orefice, a fictional Jewish man who finds purpose and meaning amidst the Holocaust's terrors.Guido's story, though not as somber as Frankl's, is just as poignant. He observes prisoners mostly devoid of hope, but for the sake of love, he endures the concentration camp and gives hope to his wife and son, also imprisoned. It was love that drove him to go on each day, even though the pain was great.
Frankl relates a similar experience in his book:
Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind... But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness... Real or not, her look was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.Like Frankl, Guido "grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and human belief have to impart: The salvation of a man is through love and in love" (Frankl 37).
Life is beautiful not because the world is pristine- indeed, it is marred with bitterness and unspeakable cruelty- but because there is a glimmer of hope in the eyes of a child, untainted in innocence, and a memory of a wife, to whom her husband once clung in hidden joy. Life is beautiful because love is found in the rough. The hint of light that shines through the darkness is reason enough to live.
EDIT: I commented on Will Drake's "Adding to the Noise."
Life is Beautiful is one of my favorite foreign films. I've seen it many times and I never cease to be greatly affected by the story. The devotion of his wife to him and their son is heartwrenching at times. The most poignant part of the film to me is at the very end where he gives his son the chance to live, even while not knowing if help is coming. As for the scene between the son and mother at the end, well, I'm normally bawling by that point, so what's another hundred tears?
ReplyDeleteI believe that this love is discovered through the devices that God has granted us. It is the same scenario that we discussed while in class before spring break. We attempt to break through these human horrors using philosophy, science, and logic. In the end, they do serve a purpose, but only by discarding everything that our corrupted minds believe in. We discover that we cannot rely on ourselves for anything. This, as Talmage says, leaves us between the Tomb and the foot of the Cross.
ReplyDeleteIn 2009 I toured with the continental singers and my director was Italian. He decided that we needed to watch a film in his native tongue just to show us what we were missing out on by being dumb Americans. The movie he chose was "Life is Beautiful" and I haven't forgotten it since then. It remains one of my all time favorite movies because of everything that you've mentioned. I totally was thinking about it the entire time I read "Man's Search for Meaning"
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