Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) (BFI Film Classics)
Robert S. C. Gordon
Language: English
Pages: 61
ISBN: B0140D8Y1O
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) Vittorio de Sica, 1948 is unarguably one of the fundamental films in the history of cinema. It is also one of the most beguiling, moving and (apparently) simple pieces of narrative cinema ever made. The film tells the story of one man and his son, as they search fruitlessly through the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle; the bicycle which had finally freed him from the poverty and humiliation of longterm unemployment.
One of a cluster of extraordinary films to come out of post-war, post-Fascist Italy after 1945 – loosely labelled ‘neo-realist’ – Bicycle Thieves won an Oscar in 1949, topped the first Sight and Sound poll of the best films of all time in 1952 and has been hugely influential throughout world cinema ever since. It remains a necessary point of reference for any cinematic engagement with the labyrinthine experience of the modern city, the travails of poverty in the contemporary world, the complex bond between fathers and sons, and the capacity of the camera to capture something like the essence of all of these.
Robert S. C. Gordon’s BFI Film Classics volume shows how Bicycle Thieves is ripe for re-viewing, for rescuing from its worthy status as a neo-realist ‘classic’. It looks at the film’s drawn-out planning and production history, the vibrant and riven context in which it was made, and the dynamic geography, geometry and sociology of the film that resulted.
Went the Day Well? (2nd Edition) (BFI Film Classics)
The Godfather (BFI Film Classics)
The Films of Josef von Sternberg
Dream' is the democratic dream of the Individual, any individual, making it among the millions straining do the same. Conversely, Bicycle Thieves is shadowed also especially for an Italian film made shortly after the fall of Fascism by the anti-individualistic psychologies and philosophies of the crowd of Gustave Le Bon and others which permeated the rhetoric and ideology of Fascism., Given these and other back shadows to the recurrent staging of the individual against the crowd in Bicycle
restaurant scene shows an uncomfortable encounter between a rich, bourgeois family at Sunday lunch - aIl dressed up for the occasion and enjoying plentiful food, obsequious service and the buzz of restaurant music and conversation- and part of a poor, working-class family struggling upwards on the social scale, but failing. The decision to enter the restaurant and to keep up, for one comse at least, with the habits of the well-off, is a folly on Antonio's part, a gesture to win back Bruno's
utopian moment in Rome Open City, when two key characters sit on the stairs and dream of the better Italy that they are fighting for).62 A distinct, but re1ated line of response to the film is pitched at the level of character analysis, loading onta the hapless Antonio an array of LM ASSICS char>lctlcr flaws that are shown as the root cause of his travails (thereby, again, attenuating the film's wider critical capacity) . Thus, Antonio is passive, submissive to authority, indecisive,
oa chiunq'..le lavo.:re:ra alla :r>eat;i7.'za7,ione cimtm: smart people were completely submerged by the haughtiest crowd that ever attended a preview: the actors of the film, with their families and their families' friends, their acquaintances, their acquaintances' acquaintances, etcetera They al! carne in their Sunday best from the poor sections and suburbs of Rome where (with the help of a few radio announcements) De Sica had picked up his stars one by one The theatre was packed [ ] When the show was over, there was a good fifteen minutes' bedlam
