The analysis places the films and their choice of narrator in the context of the child in European Holocaust film and argues that the child's perspective, often used to qualify the actions of adult characters and cast a questioning or even accusatory gaze on them, is used in these Italian films to perform the opposite function. This article critically assesses the use of children as narrators in two recent Italian Holocaust films: Roberto Benigni's La Vita è Bella (1997) and Ettore Scola's Concorrenza Sleale (2001). The composer John Cage said all that needs to be said about the performative nature of silence. Silences: liturgical, political, essentialist. They must be examined as part of the cartography of recollection and remembrance. In the framework of how we think about memory and forgetting, these hidden shapes cannot simply be ignored because they are concealed at some moments and revealed at others.
![ultionus meaning ultionus meaning](http://elpixeblogdepedja.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ultionus2.jpg)
We speak of those deposits below the surface of the water which emerge with the tides or with other environmental changes. Doing so enables us to observe a vertical dimension to the creation and erosion of the shoreline which is dynamic, unstable, and at times, intrusive. We need to see the landscape of the shoreline in all three dimensions. For the topographical metaphor employed here is clearly incomplete. It is time, though, to go beyond it, in the effort to transcend the now saturated field of memory studies dominated by scholarship which adopts this binary approach. Marc Augé's elegant formulation of the embrace of memory and forgetting draws upon a long tradition of philosophical and literary reflection. Marc Augé To be silent is still to speak. Memory is framed by forgetting in the same way as the contours of the shoreline are framed by the sea. Les souvenirs sont façonnés par l'oubli comme les contours du rivage sur la mer. From the narratives of innocence and sacrifice that populate the canon of Italian film about Fascism to the sanitised representations of Italy’s wars of aggression or the boycott of Moustapha Akkad’s The Lion of the Desert (1981), this paper argues that recurrent presences and absences in Italy’s cinematic memories of the long Second World War have not been random but coherent, cogent and consistent. The dominant narrative of italiani brava gente explains popular amnesia and institutional silences that still surround the darkest and bloodiest pages in Italy’s history. Through an examination of the long-term trends in Italian cinema about the Fascist period, this article explores its recurrent tropes alongside its recurrent absences, isolating in particular the act of killing and Italy’s African Empire as crucial absences in Italy’s memory. In Italy, cinema has contributed to constructing a paradox of memory in which the rememberer is asked to prevent past mistakes from happening again and yet is encouraged to forget what those mistakes were, or that they ever even took place.