Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette, 1948) is an Italian Neorealist film directed by Vittoria De Sica that I feel not only is the high point of that particular genre but still stands the test of time as among the greatest films ever made.
It's as simple but powerful as movies get. A man, Antonio, gets a job as a bill sticker on the condition that he has a bike. On his first day of work, his bike is stolen and he spends the entire day combing the city with his young son Bruno searching for it.
The basic idea of neorealism, was rather than going to the studio and conjuring up fantasy stories for escapist entertainment, to instead bring the filmmaking out onto the streets and capture the “real” world.
Bicycle Thieves is just that, it’s about ordinary people in ordinary situations and shot almost entirely on location using non actors who were drawn from the working-class enviroment covered in the film.
Cesare Zavattini, who co-wrote Bicycle Thieves, articulated this idea in an essay, where he argued that whereas Hollywood first construct a narrative and then try to give it a convincing window-dressing, what we shoud do first is find the narratives naturally in existing in real life. The idea is that when we start with the real, we then naturally incorporate all the contextual circumstances that characterize it.
Of course there was more to Italian Neorealism than attempts to capture “reality”. A big part of it was motivated and driven by important sociopolitical issues as well, and Bicycle Thieves is clearly a product of its times, with unemployment, poverty and critiscism of post-war Italy, very much in the foreground.
One can look at the film as a sociopolitical message or, as I see, a simple story that touches on very human truths and evokes a very real enviroment, told quite movingly and vividly.
And the great thing about this film is that it works on both those dimensions and the overlapping and is exactly what I feel often characterizes great literature and art.
De Sica is emphasising on the absurdity and fatalism of daily life, as we see a father’s hope and proud determination to keep his household afloat while keeping a sense of dignity, and a son’s crisis of faith in his hero, all the while everyone, the rich, poor, pious alike leave the father and son to their own fate, as all of them are fully aware that everyone’s first duty is to themselves in dire circumstances.
This was exactly what struck me the most and drew me in to the film when I first saw it several years ago, before I could probably really appreciate it, but I understood the truth it was telling, it resonated with me and turned my gaze sympathetically in the right direction so that I could see a wide scope of what the world is, the very basic nature of people and a reality I had never encountered in film before then.
Bicycle Thieves perfectly crystalizes a specific point in time yet stays so effortlessly relevant and significant still.
What I only wish to achieve in my lifetime..
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