Forging Reality in Bicycle Thieves

     Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves is the quintessential neorealist film. However, it uses carefully sequenced, coded filmmaking to manipulate the audience into a sense of reality. While French New Wave directors called attention to form through avant-garde editing and cinematography in order to actively engage the audience, De Sica intentionally conceals the filmmaking process to immerse the audience into the story. 

    Ricci's character arc in Bicycle Thieves is extremely cruel. In the first shot, a mass of workers stand around, waiting to be called on for a job. Ricci is so hopeless that he does not bother to walk 20 feet over to the group, but he is called upon nonetheless for a job that requires a bicycle. It seems as if every other man in the group has a bicycle except for Ricci, but fate was on his side that morning. The way that Ricci navigates through hardships in the film is reminiscent of the bricolage sequences in Singin' in the Rain; instead of sequenced physical obstacles, they are sequenced narrative obstacles.

    The cinematography is aesthetically pleasing, but none of the shots are complex enough to call attention to themselves. Beauty is evoked through crisp distinctions between light and shadow and carefully composed shots of the streets of Rome. The pace of the editing is rather steady; some cuts are casually stylized through swipes, fades and dissolves, but they all fall swiftly into the pace of the film and add subtle aesthetic and emotional value without feeling overbearing. One shot in particular caught my eye on this viewing: there's something about this slow dissolve over Ricci riding his bicycle that evoked a deep sense of melancholy. Knowing the title (and having already seen the film), we know the fate of Ricci and his bicycle. This one-second dissolve immortalizes Ricci's image, in his singular moment of contentment. 

    Bicycle Thieves is a landmark, but around the same time in America, Frank Capra achieved something similar, perhaps even better, in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), one of the great subversive Hollywood films. Both give a maddening depiction of capitalism, where a single material object (a bicycle or an envelope full of cash) is responsible for the lead's livelihood. Bicycle Thieves can be read as more openly Marxist, with the bicycle acting as means of production. 

    Renoir's The Southerner (1945) also subverted Hollywood sentiments, calling for unity between agrarian and industrial working class Americans and depicting challenges of the working class that a wide audience could relate to. Renoir also uses the plot of The Southerner in a pattern similar to bricolage sequences, with various challenges such as floods and illness framed as narrative obstacles for the characters to navigate (they pretend to be real farmers in the same way that Judy Garland pretends to be an amateur in her musicals). In The Southerner, the "farmers" were all Hollywood actors; in Bicycle Thieves, the cast really did come from the working class.

    Part of the reason Bicycle Thieves is so effective is its timeless, universal appeal. Some of the shot compositions and editing techniques could be used seamlessly in film today. It is reminiscent of fables, offering complex moral questions and widely relatable characters and situations to create a progressive narrative that struck a chord for post-war Italy. Although Ricci makes the wrong moral decision in the end, the film clearly still sides with the working man, even if De Sica denies politicization of his films.

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