Benigni's postmodern storehouse of culture

Benigni has ransacked all sorts of intellectual artifacts to mobilize his own highly individual style. Far-ranging source material pile together in a postmodern pastiche: folk legend, fable, documentary history, political satire, and many other sources. Beginning with the paradox of deeply serious comedy, his memorial to World War II surprises us with unorthodox juxtapositions. For the comic approach to Nazism's horrors his most important model was Charlie Chaplin's "The great dictator" of 1940