Paying the price of perpetuating memory: Francesco Rosi's interpretation of Primo Levi's The Truce.

Francesco Rosi's adaptation of Primo Levi's masterpiece of Holocaust narrative The Truce caused great controversy. Besides being charged with exaggerated sentimentalism and dramatisation, Rosi's film allegedly profaned the unrepresentability of the Shoah. These critiques negate the autonomous value of Rosi's cinematic creation by assuming a subordination of cinema to literature. As a matter of fact, by enacting the relationship between the Holocaust witness and the audience, both diegetically and extra-diegetically, Rosi's film appropriates the notion of testimony and makes it the underpinning theme of his film. Rosi's feature thereby offers a renewed interpretation of the figure of the Holocaust witness which was crucial to Levi throughout his life and work. As such, Rosi's The Truce should be assessed as an autonomous text that updates and re-launches the fundamental role of the historical witness represented by Levi and as a warning against revisionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]