In Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film “Life is Beautiful”, Guido Orefice, a Jewish Italian bookstore owner, shields his son from the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. In a scene where a nazi officer asks if any prisoners can speak german to translate, Guido puts up his hand. Without knowing a word of German. He instead, pretends to translate the Nazi’s words to create a game for his son who stands watching. “The game starts now”, “The first one to get a thousand points wins. The prize is a tank!”. The father strives to lighten such desperate times for his son who is so unaware and innocent.
This brave depiction of the value of imagination in taking back agency and dignity in the face of unprecedented dispossession and cruelty is an inspiration to me and can be an analogy for my work. However it is not without risk.
Storytelling is as old as human culture and is the way we make sense of our world and ourselves. It is even used in treatment of psychological trauma and distress through narrative therapies including existential psychotherapy.
By exploring a narrative from a multitude of perspectives—we are able to better understand the issue at hand. Complete fiction and imagination can also be a tool to explain ideas and concepts that seem untouchable or sensitive.
One of the places we see these techniques used often is cinema and fiction literature. A common device juxtaposes the different meanings made by various characters of the events in the story and their reactions.
Cinema is particularly effective in our collective experience of narrative as we know we are being asked to suspend our disbelief as we sit there together in the dark. We accept the depiction of the story ,even if we have read the novel on which it is based and may have imagined the setting and characters differently. We half expect a plot to have a twist or for things to be not as they seem.
The almost real world presented reflects our reality enough to allow us to be comfortable to consider and potentially accept a different point of view or experience. Our minds operate on two levels and by setting us at ease initially, we are then more likely to be open to “slow thinking” and reexamining our assumptions in the light of the experience of the characters.
I wonder what would happen if graphic design could apply similar narrative techniques as a way to test and play out our creations. We are able to explore our imagination with the freedom to tell any story and to capture many points of view. We can create entirely fictional spaces where we are able to offer a new translation to an exisiting plot.