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.
Life is Beautiful and Night by Elie Wiesel have many similarities and differences. Some similarities is the hard labor Jews did, the gas chambers, the amount of food the Jews ate, etc. These two pieces have many things in common such as events, scenes, or situations, but they also have some parts that were different. For example, Life is Beautiful is shown from a different point of view than Night. Another difference is that the movie shows humor and the book doesn't. The movie talks about a really serious event that happened but it includes light humor in it, it's not a full blown comedy. The book on the other hand, it's dead serious about the Holocaust. The book talks about the Holocaust and its horrors seriously, not including any humor.
Based on what we have read, a connection between Life is Beautiful and Night is the hard labor the Jews did. In the movie they demonstrated a lot of that hard labor. In the movie when Guido had just arrived at the camp he was put to work in some sort of factory carrying heavy objects around. He was barely on his first one when the person behind him said that he couldn't give up on his first one because they still had the whole day in front of them. The movie also demonstrated the hard labor when Guido arrived at the barrack at the end of the day and looked exhausted. It showed how hard they were on them. In the book it demonstrated how how harsh the officers were on them. In the book it said,"And Auschwitz is not a convalescent home. It is a concentration camp. Here, you must work. If you don't you will go straight to the chimney. To the crematorium." This demonstrates how they forced the Jews to work. They gave them no other option. If they didn't work they would die right on the spot. They showed no empathy towards them. Just how the entrance of Auschwitz said, "Work makes you free."
A difference that Life is Beautiful and Night had was that they had completely mood and tone attached to them. The film Life is Beautiful focused on the less negative side of the Holocaust. It was more focused on love and humor. Night had a very dark mood to it. It was more focused on the deaths, horrors, and starvations of the Holocaust. In the movie Life is Beautiful it had mostly a love kind of tone to it. In the beginning of the movie it was all about Guido and Dora falling in love and having a child named Joshua. Then as the movie progressed things became negative. Though, the mood didn't change because it demonstrated how Guido was doing everything to protect Joshua (love) and hiding the true meaning of the concentration camp from Joshua (humor). Guido had told Joshua that it was all a game and he protected Joshua from finding out the truth. The movie was told from the child's point of view. Which made the film have a little humor in it since the child was innocent and had no idea what was going on around him. Guido made it humorous because he made the concentration camp seem like a game to Joshua.
In the book Night the mood was very different from the movie. The mood of the book was much darker in the book. It talked more about the horrors of the Holocaust. In the book it said,"The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing..." This demonstrates the horrors of the camps. The prisoners were forced to see people hang and/or die right on the spot. There was no humor in the book, no humor at all. This story was told from first person point of view which was Elie. It really didn't create a humorous mood because the writer personally went through these struggles.
There were many examples of how life is beautiful throughout the film. Most of it was shown before they entered the concentration camps. An example is in the beginning of the movie was when Guido showed up everywhere Dora was to surprise her. He wanted to make her fall in love with him so he did everything he could to make her happy. Another example, is when Guido and Joshua leave their work place and spoke into the microphone, and they everyone in the camp how much they loved Dora.
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