NEXT SCREENINGS


Ciné-Real
is showcasing two classic of Neo-realism; "Rome, Open City" Wednesday 20th March, 19:30, and "The Bicycle Thieves" on Sunday 24th, 13:45 and Thursday 28th March, 19:30 at The Castle Cinema. These screenings present an exceptional opportunity to experience seminal works of Italian neorealism in the intimate and historically rich environment of the castle cinema, offering a deep dive into post-war Italian society and cinema's potential to capture and influence the human condition.


ROME OPEN CITY (1945)


A classic is called a classic for a reason. I have no truck with that oft-debated oxymoron, ‘instant classic’. A classic, according to Wikipedia, is “an outstanding example of a particular style, something of lasting worth or with a timeless quality.” The online Oxford Dictionary, meanwhile, says that a classic is “a work of art of recognised and established value”, and for the adjectival use of the word proffers “judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind”.

Put simply, a classic must have stood the test of time. The test of time is what transforms an existing excellent work or masterpiece into a classic, proving it was no flash in the pan. Which is why ‘classic’ is probably best understood as a double-edged term. True, the word denotes greatness, but because of that temporal endorsement, it may also sometimes seem as if there’s an unfortunate connotation of old-fashioned-ness: of something solid, decent, probably very worthy, but lacking the brilliance of the brand new.

Sometimes people want flashiness, even if the pan itself turns out to be sparkling tin rather than luminescent gold. So ‘classic’ often commands respect, but it can’t always be relied upon to arouse excitement.

All this is by way of preamble to a consideration of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), a classic if ever there was one. The film is an outstanding example of the Italian neorealist movement, and its excellence was very quickly recognised. True, its initial reception in Italy was a little lukewarm – audiences there apparently preferred escapism to a hard-hitting reminder of how life had been under the Nazi Occupation – but it went down very well in America and at the Cannes Film Festival (where it won a prize), and its reputation grew thereafter. Since then, it has been regarded as one of the towering achievements not only of the Italian cinema but of filmmaking anywhere… a classic, through and through.

Rome, Open City (1945)

While I was well aware of the near-miraculous circumstances of its making so soon after the Germans had left Rome, of its brilliant performances by Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi as the pregnant bride-to-be and the priest caught up with the underground resistance movement, and of its hugely influential status, I did return to it wondering whether it would actually do anything more for me than inspire a cinephile’s admiration.

It did do more. So much more, in fact, that I was even a little surprised by my reaction. Despite or perhaps because of the extraordinary constraints under which it was made, Rossellini’s landmark movie remains considerably more than an important historical and artistic monument. It exudes a raw authenticity, a dramatic urgency and a dark, desperate power undreamed of by the vast majority of films being made now.

Rome, Open City (1945)

In so many regards, it feels as if it could have been made yesterday in one of the world’s war-ravaged cities. It certainly doesn’t feel like a classic: it doesn’t seem especially solid, decent or worthy. It simply stands out, head and shoulders, from the movie crowd, and feels both of its time and remarkably timeless. Which is why, of course, it’s a classic



THE BICYCLE THIEVES (1948)


Neorealism never got more real than in Vittorio de Sica's 1948 classic Ladri di Biciclette, or Bicycle Thieves - occasionally mistranslated as "The Bicycle Thief", though the plural is surely crucial. It turns out that there are two thieves: one at the movie's beginning, another at its end.

Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) is a poor man who is thrilled when he is at last offered a job: delivering and putting up movie posters. But he needs a bicycle, and must supply his own, so his wife Maria (Lianella Carelli) pawns the family's entire stock of bed linen to redeem the bicycle he had already hocked. On his first day at work, the unlocked machine is stolen and Antonio drops everything to go on a desperate odyssey through the streets of Rome with his little boy Bruno (Enzo Staiola) to get his bike back, pleading and accusing and uncovering scenes of poverty similar to theirs wherever they go. They create uproar in classic crowd moments: in the streets, in a market, in a church mass. Faces always gather avidly around the pair, all commenting, complaining and generally magnifying the father and son's distress and mortification.

This is a story that magnificently withholds the comic or dramatic palliatives another sort of film might have introduced. Antonio and Bruno are a world away from Chaplin and his Kid. The son is the intimate witness of the father's humiliation, his inadequacy as a provider. The scenes at the beginning of the film, when Antonio casually leaves his bicycle unlocked but it remains for the moment miraculously unstolen, have to be watched through your fingers.

Antonio seems unable or unwilling to embrace the obvious redemptive moral - that his son is the important possession, not the wretched bicycle - and De Sica is unwilling to embrace it either, perhaps precisely because it is too obvious, or because this moral is a luxury that only well-off people can afford. The father is obsessed with finding a stolen needle in the urban haystack, obsessed with getting his job back. Again and again, he ignores his little boy while scanning the horizon for his bicycle. At one stage, he hears an uproar from the riverbank about a "drowned boy". With a guilty start, he looks around. Do they mean Bruno? No: there he is, safe and sound.

But the lesson is not learned. He doesn't even hold Bruno's hand! And, in a later scene, we see the poor boy almost run over by a car because his father isn't looking out for him. Bruno's simple physical survival is the movie's secret miracle, and he is finally to be his father's saviour, but in such a way as to render Antonio's humiliation complete. This is poverty's authentic sting: banal and horrible loss of dignity. Bicycle Thieves is a brilliant, tactlessly real work of art.

NOTES

The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette) is an Italian Neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Sica, with the screen play by Cesare Zavattini and shot in 1948. Neorealism, as a term, means many things, but it often refers to films of working class life, set in the culture of poverty, and with the implicit message that in a better society wealth would be more evenly distributed. Set in poverty stricken post-war Rome, the stories of the poor were close to De Sicca’s heart, he himself was born into poverty and only managed to escape through a career as a theatre and then film actor. De Sica’s first films as a director were light comedies like the ones he often worked in. However, maybe due to the harsh realities of World War II, his 1942 film "The Children are Watching," had mush more depth and sensitivity than his earlier work.

When De Sica was looking for a producer to finance his film, he finally found one, but on condition that the workman was played by Cary Grant. The mere statement of the problem in these terms shows the absurdity of it. Actually, Cary Grant could play that kind of part extremely well, but it is obvious that the question here is not one of playing of a part but of getting away from the very notion of doing any such thing, The worker had to be at once as perfect and as anonymous and as objective as his bicycle.

Creation from limitation

De Sica famously used non-actors, in location. Not one scene shot in a studio. Everything was filmed in the streets. As for the actors, none had the slightest experience in theater or film. The workman came from the Breda factory, the child was found hanging around in the street, the wife was a journalist.

In his journals, Cesare Zavattini writes about how he and De Sica visited a brothel to do research for the film, and later the rooms of the Wise Woman, a psychic, who inspires one of the film's characters. De Sica hunted for his cast for a long time and selected them for specific characteristics. Natural nobility, that purity of countenance and bearing that the common people have… He hesitated for months between this person and that, took a hundred tests only to decide finally, in a flash and by intuition on the basis of a silhouette suddenly come upon at the bend of a road.

With the disappearance of the concept of the actor into a transparency seemingly as natural as life itself, comes the disappearance of the set. Now De Sica's film took a long time to prepare, and everything was as minutely planned as for a studio superproduction, which, as a matter of fact, allows for last minute improvisations. Nevertheless, the numbering and titling of shots do not noticeable distinguish Ladri di Biciclette from any ordinary film. But their selection has been made with a view to raising the lucidity of the event to a maximum, while keeping the index of refraction from the style to a minimum.

Cinematography

The long, drawn-out takes add to the feeling of desperation and fear that Antonio faces in his pursuit of finding his bike. Bicycle Thieves can feel like a documentary in it’s subject matter, and though the cinematography is unpretentious it is incredibly beautiful. Bazin (who is regarded as one of the most important or influential writer on cinema and was a co-founder of the French film review "Cahiers du cinéma") stated that the film was "pure cinema"; that it tells a simple story composed of "real" events involving "real" people in "real" places. The truth of its extraordinary emotional impact is another element of the story's purity.

"The Bicycle Thief" had such an impact on its first release that when the British film magazine Sight & Sound held its first international poll of filmmakers and critics in 1952, it was voted the greatest film of all time.

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