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T
he Paramount Classics home page for Radu Mihaileanu’s 1998 film,
Train de Vie (Train of Life), asks: “Can the Holocaust be treated as a comedy?” Of course, the only appropriate answer is a resounding yes; indeed, the Holocaust can and has been portrayed as a comedy for years.
Train de Vie’s success at the Sundance Film Festival and the Oscar Award-winning
Life is Beautiful are only two of the most recent examples. On the other hand, just how successful such representations are is a much more contentious matter. In
Against the Comforts of Catharsis: Teaching Trauma and the Sobering Lessons of Train de Vie, Jon Morris argues that much of the criticism
Train de Vie has received has been misdirected. In fact, such criticism stems less from a resentment of “poorly paced comedy,” “sporadically amusing humor” or the risk of “trivializing a horrific period in recent history,” than from what we might call, borrowing from Walter Benjamin, its shock-effect. Drawing from Benjamin and more recent works in the field of Trauma Studies, Morris argues that shock-effect is both a meaningful and indeed a visceral means of teaching about the Holocaust to students, and that
Train de Vie is masterful in this regard. Director Radu Mihaileanu expertly uses humor not to amuse viewers, but to disarm them, and the ending serves not to comfort us, but to implicate us in our own desires—for control, for understanding, or even for just a familiar albeit painful ending, one which this film shockingly denies. Students who watch the film, Morris demonstrates, can hardly remain passive observers in light of it. They must not only reconsider the film narrative in light of what they have seen, but must also reconsider their own relationship to the film, and their own preconceived notions about the Holocaust and its representation.
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