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De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Italian Humanism

De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Italian Humanism
Course

Italian Cinema (ITA1113)

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Academic year: 2023/2024
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University of Ottawa

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De Sica's cBicycle Thieves" and

Italian Humanism

HERBERT L. JACOBSON

HERBERT L. JACOBSON, formerly active in American radio and television production, stayed on in Europe after the end of the war as Director of the Trieste Radio Networkand other theatrical enterprises, including tributes articles on the theater arts to leading Italian and American journals. opera and the distribution of films. He con-

IN THEpostwar period the preeminence in serious films seems to have passed to the Italians. In fact it has become fashionable to observe that the mantle of realism has fallen on them from the French, as if the two schools were identical except for the differ- ence in language. As a result the very special nature of modern Italian movie realism-which is that it is Italian first and realistic afterward-has been overlooked. In fact, a case could be made that it is not fundamentally realistic at all, that the naturalistic back- grounds against which the Italians photograph their stories are only a means to an end and quite possibly a means imposed by lack of capital for elaborate studio sets. What, then, is the underlying philosophy or aesthetic theory that distinguishes their recent productions from those of other nations? It is not really hard to discover. Russian films, too, are

usually set in the lower depths, and French films are frequently concerned with the passions of fairly primitive people. But you would not expect to find in a Russian, French, or German realistic film that broad humanitarian sympathy combined with gentle

cynicism which Italians alone bear as their trademark. It is an old Italian recipe for living, buried under the garbage of Fascism for a quarter century but never really lost; the war, which scraped over the country like a rake, served to turn it up again. In a world still spinning from the blows of war there are few formulae more

practical for day-to-day living, or for making films that a confused humanity will recognize as true.

[ 28 J

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DE SICA'S "BICYCLE THIEVES"

But precisely because it lacks absoluteness artistically, such an

approach can easily result in diffuseness is true that, with this

formula of general pity for sufferinghumanity without any special

solution for its problems, Luigi Zampa made the beautiful and

touching Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace). But Roberto Rossel-

lini, after his pioneering successeswith Paisa (Paisan) and Roma

citta aperta (Open City), forgot to add the salt of cynicism to the

soup of sympathy when he came to make Germania anno zero

and served up a tastelessdish. Yet now, by a more intelligent appli-

cation and development of this same national recipe, the Nea-

politan stage and screen actor-director,Vittorio De Sica, already

world famous for his film about the precocious children of Rome,

Sciuscia (Shoe-Shine), has succeeded, in Ladri di biciclette (Bi-

cycle Thieves), in making what is generally recognized as the best

film since the war.

This new Italian Renaissance has one thing in common with

that of the sixteenth century which serves to set it off from the

respective "realisms"of the French, the Russians,or the Germans:

its stress on the role of the individual. The poor Italian lives as

miserablyas the poor of other countries, but his protest takesmore

individualistic forms. Rossellini's priest, Zampa'speasant and his

civil servant, De Sica's proletarian, and Visconti's fisherman all

go down fighting: but only the first, a public figure by nature of

his calling, has allies, and even he follows his individual con-

science and training rather than a group loyalty in sacrificinghim-

self. Indeed, the two most political of these new films, Zampa's

Anni difficili and Visconti's La terra trema, both present this pri-

vate form of rebellion as the central weaknessof the Italian social

consciousness.

Ladri di biciclette is the story of a workman's search for his

stolen bicycle without which he cannot make a living for himself

and his family. To him it is a personal wrong he has suffered: to

us, as we follow him through the streets of Rome, it gradually be-

comes apparentthat he is the victim of a social systemwhich forces

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DE SICA'S "BICYCLE THIEVES"

Tiber. It isn't the kid, but they become reconciled and celebrate by going to a fairly expensive restaurant, where they are shoved into a corner. They spot the thief on foot and the father chases him into a bordello. Confusion among the ladies. The thief gets out to his own neighborhood near by, where the father is threatened by the thief's friends; he is saved by the kid's calling a cop. The thief has an epileptic fit. Police examination of the thief's miserable room reveals some stolen goods but no bicycle. The policeman explains the hopelessness of the case to the father, who decides not to swear out a warrant and is driven out of the neighborhood by the thief's friends. The father de- cides to steal a bicycle himself near the stadium while a big football match is going on. He dismisses the kid, who hangs around neverthe- less. The father is nabbed in the act and beaten up, but he is saved from arrest by the appeal of the kid. Left alone, the father cries with shame, but his son takes his hand and leads him away, and they dis- appear in the twilight in the crowd pouring out of the stadium.

What do they mean, "No plot"? Perhaps they are fooled by the perfect synthesis of plot and movement. One sequence flows into another so smoothly, and the action within each scene is kept so natural, that you find it hard to believe the story was ever written down on paper at all; it seems to live and grow under your eyes. There isn't a false note in the whole film. Everything that hap- pens is fresh, yet at the same time seems inevitable once it is over. De Sica's genius is the opposite of Orson Welles'. In Welles' better work you see the hand of the master like an artist's signature on

every scene. In De Sica's you are conscious only of a tremendous vitality seething in the actors, seeping out of the very stone build- ings, made eloquent by the camera, bursting the limits of the screen itself, but always as if it were an expression of nature, not of the ego of a director, however brilliant. For his hero De Sica cast a worker from the Breda arms factory, Lamberto Maggiorani, who had never acted before. Now the cur- rent mania among Italian directors to use amateurs is not a good

thing in itself, but it is a good test of what a director can do with- out being shackled to the star system with its corollary of being

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HOLLYWOOD QUARTERLY

limited to a certain side of somebody's face when shooting. Take Enzo Staiola, the son in Ladri, for example. He is a sturdy little fellow with an outsize nose and big expressive eyes, who can make

you run the gamut from laughter to tears in the course of a few minutes the way Chaplin does. De Sica is not solely responsible for this, of course; Italy as a whole should get some of the credit for producing such eloquent types, even among its children. But De Sica has a gift for finding this kind of talent and developing it in a fitting atmosphere. After his skillful handling of people, De Sica is perhaps most creative in his use of the camera (in the hands of the veteran Carlo

Montuori). Sometimes it seems that all he wants to achieve is an almost amateurish clarity, as the camera roams searchingly around workers' apartments or sets the shabby father and son off merci-

lessly against the majestic buildings which are all that remains of the grandeur that was Rome. But at other times, by a daring use of natural twilight or an out-of-focus lens, De Sica achieves mar- velous effects, such as the dawning of consciousness in a whole

city or the mixing of humanity in a common cauldron, which occasionally recall the great silent films. Ladri is not a film without precedents. The chase in the in- terests of social justice goes back to Griffith's Intolerance. But whereas in Griffith one can sometimes admire the technique with- out necessarily approving the social content (the dashing Kluxers in The Birth of a Nation, for example), in De Sica the two are so

completely fused that a critical separation is impossible. His genius lies in an almost flawless directorial technique coupled with a moral sense which he knows how to embed unobtrusively in the texture of his story-a morality that is the texture of his

story. It is a synthesis to which many artists have aspired, but at which few have arrived between Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Picasso's Guernica. And it has found its highest expression in our times not in a revolutionary work, but in this humanistic one, a movie about a workman whose bicycle was stolen.

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De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Italian Humanism

Course: Italian Cinema (ITA1113)

50 Documents
Students shared 50 documents in this course

University: University of Ottawa

Was this document helpful?
De
Sica's
cBicycle
Thieves"
and
Italian
Humanism
HERBERT L. JACOBSON
HERBERT L. JACOBSON, formerly active in American radio and television production,
stayed on in Europe after the end of the war as Director of the Trieste Radio Network
and other theatrical enterprises, including opera and the distribution of films. He con-
tributes articles on the theater arts to leading Italian and American journals.
IN THE
postwar period the preeminence in serious films seems to
have passed to the Italians. In fact it has become fashionable to
observe that the mantle of realism has fallen on them from the
French, as if the two schools were identical except for the differ-
ence in language. As a result the very special nature of modern
Italian movie realism-which is that it is Italian first and realistic
afterward-has been overlooked. In fact, a case could be made that
it is not fundamentally realistic at all, that the naturalistic back-
grounds against which the Italians photograph their stories are
only a means to an end and quite possibly a means imposed by
lack of capital for elaborate studio sets.
What, then, is the underlying philosophy or aesthetic theory
that distinguishes their recent productions from those of other
nations? It is not really hard to discover. Russian films, too, are
usually set in the lower depths, and French films are frequently
concerned with the passions of fairly primitive people. But you
would not expect to find in a Russian, French, or German realistic
film that broad humanitarian sympathy combined with gentle
cynicism which Italians alone bear as their trademark. It is an old
Italian recipe for living, buried under the garbage of Fascism for
a quarter century but never really lost; the war, which scraped
over the country like a rake, served to turn it up again. In a world
still spinning from the blows of war there are few formulae more
practical for day-to-day living, or for making films that a confused
humanity will recognize as true.
[ 28 J
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/4/1/28/121945/1209381.pdf by guest on 18 June 2020

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