What kind of ideology is presented in bicycle thieves

The camera is far enough from them so that we can see two little boys on the street whom we had barely glimpsed previously , beggars, one of whom is playing an accordion. As the boy walks away, another man walks into the frame from screen right, moving down the diagonal in front of the men at their work.

He is well dressed, a tidy middle-aged bourgeois with a pipe. As he walks along the wall, the boys walk after him, and the camera, as if taking a casual interest in this event, pans away from Ricci and his colleague to follow the man with the two children in calm pursuit. It merely pans away from its central concern to observe this seemingly peripheral event.

The accordion player plays. The well-to-do man ignores the boy, who turns and walks back to his friend. At this point there is a cut back to Ricci and his co-worker, who continues his instructions, the shot framing them in basically the same diagonal position as before. The two men then get on their bikes and the camera pans with Ricci as he heads off on his own, passing the two boys on the sidewalk. Ricci pastes up the Rita Hayworth poster. Here, we might term the sequence milieu gathering, the expansion from direct concentration on the central character to his immediate world.

As observer, the camera attempts to be nonjudgmental and non-provocative as well. Its movements do not provoke us or confront the characters, do not lead us on or compromise them through a prearranged strategy, a reframing meant to excite expectation or anxiety.

We are asked only to share an interest in the commonplaces of this particular world, which become less common by the simple and unexpected attention given them. Ricci and Bruno walk the streets. Anxiety is created when Ricci—and we—think Bruno may have drowned, and when father and son discover the thief and are surrounded by the people in his neighborhood.

De Sica even indulges in a commentative montage. During their search, Ricci and Bruno stop at a restaurant. Nor is the digression with the street urchins entirely innocent of narrative import and emotional preparation. The beggars foreshadow his later situation, bicycle stolen, himself almost turned thief in desperation, walking the streets hopelessly.

Certainly not as great as, for example, Godard in Sauve qui peut La Vie Every Man for Himself , where he pans or cuts from a central narrative event to anonymous people on the street. But this is not yet the moment for criticism. Godard could indulge in radical dislocations of attention precisely because De Sica had pointed the way. As I indicated, neorealism was a delicate concatenation of theory and practice, and at this point I am more interested in ways in which the theory was successfully realized than in how it was compromised.

The images have become reality, not seen with lucid detachment as in a mirror, but grasped in their actuality and very substance.

The formal presence of the filmmakers has dissolved in that reality. The Hollywood style of the thirties did not concentrate on the image, but on the way the image could present stock characters in excessive situations, knitting these images into a smooth continuity that made up the narrative. The neorealists did not defy continuity, but neither did they sacrifice the image to it.

They allowed the image to create a world, casually, and with as little embellishment as possible. Rossellini tries to restrain the image, holding it to the observation of poor people doing heroic things—resisting and fighting the Nazi occupation—rather than making them appear heroic.

The heroism emerges from their acts and their deaths. No comment is made upon it because no comment is needed. This is what neorealism discovered and what was passed on to the next generation. There is an admiration of these people and their struggle which does not make them more than they are; perhaps just what they are.

Visconti is not dealing in the exaggerations of early socialist realism, the poster nobility of workers and peasants, but with a class of people in a particular geographical area Sicily to whom attention needed to be paid.

The documentary urge inherent in much of the neorealist aesthetic also leads him a step further; the rich images are accompanied by a voice-over commentary which, even though it often merely repeats or sums up what we have already seen or will soon see, also attempts to provide an extra objective perspective, a concerned voice to match the concerned eye that forms the images.

But some contradictions begin to emerge. Within this documentary impulse, almost contrary to it, there is a desire to go beyond creation of an illusion of unmediated reality.

Visconti will not drop all aesthetic pretense. He observes his world, coaxes it into being, frames and composes it, regards it in the light of his own admiration and compassion, honors it, and finally monumentalizes it. There are images in the film that call for an aesthetic response, an appreciation of the way they are lit and composed. And the manipulation of the narrative, like that of the images, is designed to move us in particular ways.

The outstanding fact about the movement is that they were committed to making fiction films, not documentaries, despite the impulse toward documentary in their theory and occasionally in their practice.

The subjective urge was always present, and finally recognized. There was nothing for the postwar Italians to chronicle with documentary. There was no revolution and they did not find lyricism in work or sponsorship by government and business to create such lyricism as Grierson and his followers had.

Instead they chose to dramatize and give structure to postwar events and to a class of people rarely considered worthy of narrative in the cinema. They invented characters, but allowed them to be played by individuals who were close to those characters in their own lives. They told a story but at the same time attenuated it, subordinating conventional continuity and character development to the observation of detail.

Seeing an image of life itself is a dramatic event; it need not be manipulated into something greater than itself. The neorealists sought a form that would attenuate the structures of fantasy in traditional film. The spectator would be offered small, unelaborated images built from the lives of a certain class of people at a certain moment and in a certain place. The film integrates at least three approaches: it is a quasi-newsreel documenting the movement of American troops from Sicily northward to the Po; within this historical structure it presents six episodes, in specific geographical locations, sketching small dramas occurring between the soldiers and Resistance fighters and the people; and within these episodes it reveals, tersely and without embellishment, some attitudes, agonies, defeats, and victories, military and personal, that resulted from the deprivation of war and two foreign invasions, German and American.

In the Naples episode a black American MP meets a small boy, another of those street beggars who populate the neorealist universe. The episode is built out of a series of small ironies and understandings.

When they first meet, at a street fair complete with fireeater, the soldier is drunk, and a group of young children try to rob him. The boy follows the soldier and the two of them visit a puppet show, which depicts the white crusader Orlando battling a Moor.

The black American liberator watches a display of ancient racism and in his drunkenness attacks the white puppet. The boy leads him away through the ruined streets to a rubble heap where the two sit. The image fades to black. The soldier comes to a quiet understanding of the poverty that makes thievery an ordinary childhood activity. He does not take the shoes offered him by the little boy which are not the ones he stole from him anyway and simply leaves.

Swelling music provides the only punctuation. Rossellini need only suggest the horror that often proceeds from understanding, or, in more precise neorealist terms, permit revelation to occur through observation. He need not expand on these self-contained and self-expressive images: the poor children in primitive conditions who must steal to live; the black American soldier, hero, drunkard, understanding the poverty, unable to have any effect on it.

Recognition passes in the exchange of glances within the film and across the film to the audience, who are then left between the look of the child and the soldier in the distant jeep.

Some are a bit more melodramatic, such as the Roman episode, about an American soldier who spends the night with a prostitute he does not recognize as the woman he once loved. Or the Florence episode, in which an American nurse seeks her Partisan lover, only to discover he has been killed. But even here the personal drama is undercut by that essential neorealist wonder at things observed.

Again, Rossellini is most concerned with the way this piece of history looks, and the Florence episode is constructed primarily of scenes of the nurse moving through the streets of an open city. The visit of a group of American chaplains—a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew—to a Franciscan monastery would ordinarily threaten certainly in an American film either a great deal of cuteness, choking sanctimoniousness, or a lesson in the virtues of brotherhood. But again, Rossellini refuses to extend significance or commentary beyond the demands of the moment.

The Americans wonder at the age of the monastery and offer the friars cigarettes and chocolate, as well as more substantial provisions. The friars in return show hospitality and, among themselves, great consternation over the fact that one of the chaplains is Jewish and another Protestant.

When the friars confront the Catholic chaplain with their concern over the souls of the Jew and the Protestant, he quietly acknowledges it without sharing it.

It is just at this point that our expectations are denied. Our training in Hollywood melodrama would lead us to expect the chaplain to give a fulsome defense of his colleagues and a plea for understanding. I want to talk to you. Again, this is not the Hollywood style of invisible form; we are quite conscious of the effect of withholding and foreshortening. Artifice is present, recognized, and self-effacing simultaneously.

As viewers, we are aware of the restraint and its results, a continuous blocking of our desire for conclusiveness, for emotional statement, for closure. Paisan is a difficult film to evaluate fully. The acting—which is hardly acting at all in a conventional sense—is erratic and so against our expectations of professional performance that it appears amateurish. The cutting, even more than in other neorealist films, is perfectly functional, getting the narrative from here to there in the swiftest way possible.

The structure of the episodes is so truncated that it produces an off-handedness that elevates incompleteness to the status of a structural necessity. But the attenuation and lack of climax is thematic as well as structural. The history covered by the film goes just up to the complete liberation of the country and does not even permit a final satisfaction from that event.

The last episode concerns the joining of American and Allied soldiers with Italian Partisans against the Germans in the Po Valley during the last weeks of the war. The episode ends with Germans shooting their captives on a boat, the bodies falling one after the other into the river. In between these events is a chronicle of terrors: the liberation army surrounded by Germans on the Po marshes, peasants attempting to gather eels for food, a weeping child on the river bank, a Partisan shooting himself in his despair.

Within the war film genre, this episode negates completely the conventions of individual heroism and substitutes a barely cohesive group struggle that is itself apparently hopeless. It is bearable only because we know that the Allies and the Partisans did win. A few weeks later spring came to Italy and the war was declared over. Or more accurately, in neorealist terms, it comes to represent itself, its images self-sufficient in their historical validity, demanding of us nothing more than an immediate comprehension of them.

But when I say that Paisan or any other neorealist film comes to represent itself, I am not suggesting that it is a self-referential form. The creation of a film narrative that comes to signify mainly the creation of a film narrative was the work of the modernist movement that followed neorealism and was made possible by it. What I am suggesting is that the foreshortened emotions created by the foreshortened structure of Paisan, their incompleteness and inconclusiveness, permit and indeed force the viewer to deal with them with a minimum of directorial assistance.

Which may be why this film, more than any other of the period, is so unsatisfying within the context of our cinematic expectations, and most successful in the context of neorealist theory. It refuses to do more than show, or demand more than that we understand what is shown. Beyond that there is the possibility for us to integrate the narrative with our understanding of the history its images reflect, a history of pain and loss, of deprivation and struggle, and of some kind of victory.

Rossellini gives us nothing in the way of past, future, or psychological background for his characters. But in neither case do the thoughts and feelings of these characters provide the psychology or motivation we are used to finding in melodrama, and in neither case do their feelings lead anywhere.

Carmela is herself killed when she tries to shoot the Germans. The pathos threatened when the prostitute attempts to re-create the past by slipping away from the drunken soldier and leaving him her old address, hoping he will come to her and recognize her as his former love, is left unfinished.

The next day the soldier looks at the address and throws it away without recognition. Francesca is left waiting; the soldier drives off. Nothing more is made of it. The character talks, has memories, passes through events, indulges in introspection and confrontation, suffers, endures, triumphs, or dies, often triumphing in death. In short, the psychologically motivated character has experiences and memories which reveal a personality. They may change from period to period and country to country, depending on changes and differences in reigning ideologies; they often reflect contemporary fantasies and change as the fantasies change.

For them situation takes the place of psychology, the type replaces the individual, the ordinary the heroic. What we know about a character is what we see of that character in action in his or her environment; no other motivation is needed. The camera makes no pretense at being psychologically subjective As if making an impartial report, [it] confines itself to following a woman searching for a man, leaving us the task of being alone with her, of understanding her, and of sharing her suffering.

This episode, like all the others in the film, gives us permission to move on and not be alone with the heroine, not identify with her. The spectator is not distanced from the characters as in a film by Resnais, Godard, or Fassbinder, filmmakers who want completely to cleanse their characters of psychological conventions and their audience of expectations.

In his war trilogy Rossellini comes close to conventional character psychology in the figure of Edmund, the child of Germany, Year Zero, who commits suicide after following the advice of a Nazi to kill his ailing father. Again the physical and political landscape merges with the individual and his actions in an almost allegorical interchange. The child is as ruined as his surroundings.

When he is not in the tenement flat his family shares with others, he is walking the shattered streets of Berlin an activity he shares with most neorealist characters , as lost as the country he represents. His life and death outrun their local narrative function and come to stand for a greater history. At one point in his wanderings, he is given a recording of a Hitler speech by his old Nazi teacher to sell on the black market. We see an old man and a young child listen in some bewilderment. The camera pans the ruined cityscape as Hitler boasts of bringing the country to its glory.

Zavattini wrote:. We can calmly say: give us an ordinary situation and from it we will make a spectacle. Centrifugal force which constituted both from a technical and a moral point of view the fundamental aspects of traditional cinema has now transformed itself into centripetal force. Rossellini reverses the melodramatic urge of the war genre, collapses it into the immediate images of ruin in Germany, Year Zero , or the particular struggles and defeats in Rome, Open City and Paisan.

Most neorealist cinema operates on this principle: characters inhabit a ruined, collapsed world; their fight against it is momentarily and minimally heroic, like that of the Partisans in Rome, Open City , or the fishermen in La terra trema.

Their struggle is an external one; little psychological torment is involved. All of these characters lose by the end of the film, but in their loss there is the attempt to express a wider gain. The whistling of the Partisan children gathered around the executed priest at the end of Rome, Open City is the most commanding sign of life coming out of destruction in any of the films, and the executions of the Partisans at the end of Paisan suggest not a dismal end of struggle, but the necessary conditions of its victory.

No glory is given to the deaths, but nothing is taken away from their function in the wider fight. And besides they allow us to hate fascism even more. Neorealism as a coherent movement was fading when Zavattini wrote them between and , and there were many attacks upon it from both right and left. They permitted the spectator to see a particular world, but never to see past it. They sometimes suggested, but never clearly presented, possibilities for change in that world.

For all they did accomplish, they could not, or would not, move away from an essentially sentimental attachment to their subject. The desire for objective observation never replaced sympathy for the characters, a sympathy which manifested itself in the communication of the social-political despair the characters suffered. Images which in theory were meant to be intense observations of daily existence were, in fact, perhaps by the nature of that daily life, images of pathos.

Melodrama is just barely avoided in Bicycle Thieves, as it is in Rome, Open City, by the refusal to allow the characters to suffer psychologically and by keeping the movement of the characters and their story simple, without predictable curves of passion, and anchored in the physical and historical environment the images create. Rossellini does make special demands on our reactions in the death of Pina, the torturing of Manfredi, and the execution of Don Pietro in Rome, Open City.

In that film he is perhaps too close to the realities of fascism to be able to distance himself from its terrors, and not yet aware that an identification with and emotional reaction to viewed pain and suffering can preclude an understanding of it. De Sica and Visconti never learned it. It is easy to understand the attraction, for children are the most visible and obvious sufferers in any political, economic, and social disaster.

They are helpless and therefore wronged the most. To see these wrongs through them, from their perspective, or at least with them as central participants, is to perceive the scope of these wrongs most immediately. The problem—and it is unclear whether Rossellini and De Sica were aware of it—is that the use of children results in a special pleading which, at its worst, becomes cynicism, a vulgar way to assure audience response.

The neorealists fortunately missed being vulgar; they did not miss a certain cynicism and a great deal of naivete. Eric Rhode, one of the few historians not captivated by neorealist children and able to see the faults of the movement as a whole, accuses the filmmakers of committing moral blackmail.

His analysis is important enough to be quoted at length:. Through his portrait of Peachum in The Threepenny Opera, [Bertolt] Brecht had implied that all claims to charity are a form of licensed thievery. He had recognized how in an unjust society the exploited can exploit the exploiters in a way that traps everyone into some form of guile. De Sica and Zavattini are not willing to accept responsibility for this conception of society.

They reduce everyone to a childlike state, as though everyone were a child in the sight of God. Their childlike perception of the minutiae of daily life tends to be passive, for all its delicate precision.

They cling to the surface of things, and in their clinging assume a perpetual complaint. Brecht had understood that once adults slip back into childlike states of mind and displace responsibility for the community elsewhere, they prefer to complain rather than take action when the community fails to satisfy their needs; and since these needs are seldom satisfied, they tend to imagine that their lives are ordained by some malignant power.

The passivity in their films exists elsewhere. I do agree, however, that the omnipresence of children is a way for them to avoid a certain responsibility. A child, by all the definitions of middle-class morality, is helpless and in need of constant protection by either parents or charity.

The neorealist child gets none from the latter and only as much from the former as the parents can spare in their own desperate attempts at survival. Within this desolation the children suffer mutely and serve as witnesses and as surrogates for our point of view.

And so their stated desire to see the world clearly and without conventional cinematic preconceptions came into conflict with their inability to withdraw themselves from a sometimes cliched sympathy for the helpless.

They were not, however, revolutionaries. Though they changed the aesthetics of Western cinema, they did not call for a change in the structure of Western society. What was more, the aesthetic they promoted countered the idea of change. It demanded they observe, but not alter what they saw; it constrained them from offering their characters much more than pity and sentiment. A notion of passivity is built into neorealist theory, and as a result the filmmakers only allow their characters and their audience to reap the rewards of passivity: more pain, more poverty, softened somewhat by a notion of stoicism and endurance on the part of the characters and sadness, understanding, and not a little bit of superiority on the part of the audience.

There was no such support in postwar Italy only the grimness of a ruined country with an uncertain future. Suffermg overtook celebration, and the filmmakers who emerged to document this moment were more taken by the suffering than by anything else.

After all, suffering of this stature had never before been documented on film, certainly not without softening and an artificial leap to a change in fortune. Committed to the retention of simple but eloquent details, to an unadorned but compassionate image, the neorealist filmmaker was not free to alter them or to express anything more than what he saw.

This film was to be the first part of a great neorealist revolutionary trilogy about the social and political struggles of fishermen, miners, and peasants living in the poverty-ridden south of Italy. The project was started with financing from the Communist Party and in its original conception had a revolutionary thrust and a notion of the poor triumphing over their oppression that might have taken the film beyond the usual neorealist observations of passive suffering Visconti did not follow through on this original concept, partly be cause his ideas changed as he was shooting and partly because the project never worked out as intended.

Visconti used a non-professional Sicilian cast who spoke their own dialect, largely incomprehensible to the rest of the country which is one reason a voiceover commentary was added. For some time after its initial screenings, the film was available only in a cut, greatly reduced version. But seen whole, and despite or because of its changed intentions, it can be taken as a summa of the movement. All the immediate textbook concerns of neorealism are attended to.

The film is shot on location and acted by the inhabitants of the location, who play roles close to their own lives. The catch is that he must have a bicycle, and his is in hock. Desperate to stay employed, he mounts a wide-ranging search across Rome, accompanied most of the way by his young son, Bruno.

Far from being shot guerrilla-style, with minimal crew and technical support, it was mounted by a team of movie professionals working on a budget generous enough to allow for large-scale scenes, hundreds of extras, and even the apparatus necessary to create a fake rainstorm. Here, the situational imperatives of early neorealism have become a conscious aesthetic—one, it must be noted, with proven market value in the cinephile capitals of Europe and America neorealist films were always mostly an export commodity.

Though they perhaps elected to compete with Hollywood on a comparable level of technique, they were still embarked on the heroic quest of speaking about the real people and places and social hardships that most moviemakers then as now took pains to avoid. In the shop where his wife pawns their sheets, the camera leads our eyes up a veritable tower of such linens, a catalog of forestalled dreams.

In the search for the bicycle, Antonio both casts his own looks and receives looks of suspicion, curiosity, and, most prevalently, indifference. Sometimes looks are significantly blocked by a slammed window, say or misdirected Antonio hurries on, looking ahead, while Bruno falls twice in the street behind. The employment office, the Communist party, and the police are influential institutions, but unfortunately, they use their power to undermine the poor and maintain their marginalized subservience within the established social hierarchy of Rome.

Not only do the police and the employment offices fail to improve the destitute circumstances of the poor, but they showcase an indifference toward the cruel poverty affecting thousands of powerless individuals across Rome.

Though not wholly distinct from religion, spirituality in The Bicycle Thieves is mainly represented by the seer, while religion is represented by the church. In two different scenes, we see a crowd of people line up to receive insight from the seer. This suggests that people turn more to spirituality when institutions the police, the government, religion, employment services fail to offer them security and hope.

This reliance on blind faith explains why Antonio visits the seer, despite having belittled her earlier in the film. Having received little help elsewhere during his journey to find his bike, Antonio desperately insists on having some authority figure offer guidance and hope to him.

Go now, and try to understand. Through this exposition, we become aware of the love Antonio has for his family; if he fails to provide for them, he will be left with nothing, no real sense of happiness or purpose. While Antonio does indulge in some of his worst qualities carelessness, selfishness, and short temper and at times treats Bruno poorly, we know his motivations are ultimately noble—he wants to do right by his family.

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