Title of film : Bicycle Thieves
Director Name : Vittorio De Sica
Cast & crew :
Producer : Ercole Graziadei
Editor : Eraldo Da Roma
Cast :
Synopsis : Ladri di biciclette certainly is neorealist, by ail the principles one can deduce from the best Italian films since 1946. The story is from the lower classes, almost populist: an incident in the daily life of a worker. […] Truly an insignificant, even a banal incident; a workman spends a whole day looking in vain in the streets of Rome for the bicycle someone has stolen from him. Plainly there is not enough material here even for a news item: the whole story would not deserve two fines in a stray-dog column. In itself the event contains no proper dramatic valence. It takes on meaning only because of the social (and not psychological or aesthetic) position of the victim. Without the haunting spectre of unemployment, which places the event in the Italian society of 1948, it would be an utterly banal misadventure.[...] If Ladri di biciclette is a true masterpiece, comparable in rigor to Paisan it is for certain precise reasons, none of which emerge either from a simple outline of the scenario or from a superficial disquisition on the technique of the miseen scène. The scenario is diabolically clever in its construction; beginning with the alibi of a current event it makes good use of a number of systems of dramatic coordinates radiating in all directions. […] The thesis implied is wondrously and outrageously simple: in the world where this workman lives, the poor must steal from each other in order to survive. But this thesis is never stated as such, it is just that events are so linked together that they have the appearance of a formal truth while retaining an anecdotal quality. […] Clearly, and I could find twenty more examples: events and people are never introduced in support of a social thesis – but the thesis emerges fully armed and all the more irrefutable because it is presented to us as something thrown in into the bargain. It is our intelligence that discerns and shapes it, not the film. De Sica wins every play on the board without ever having made a bet. This technique is not entirely new in Italian films and we have elsewhere stressed its value at length both apropos of Paisan and of Germany Year Zero, but these two films were based on themes from either the Resistance or the war. Ladri di biciclette is the first decisive example of the possibility of the conversion of this kind of objectivity to other, similar subjects. De Sica and Zavattini have transferred neorealism from the Resistance to the Revolution. André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, University of California Press, 1971 Restored in 2018 by Cineteca di Bologna, Compass Film and Istituto Luce Cinecitta, in collaboration with Arthur Cohn, Euro Immobilfin and Artedis at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. The 4K restoration of Bicycle Thieves was carried out byFondazione Cineteca di Bologna,Compass Filmand IstitutoLuce - Cinecittàusing original negatives (image and sound), a Compass Film's lavander print preserved by Studio Cine, and a vintage positive belonging to Cineteca di Bologna. The original negative was in an advanced state of chemical decay.Some sections were found unable to be unwound and severely compromised.The unusable sections were replaced by two first generation elements: a lavander print from the 1997 photochemical restoration, carried out by Studio Cine, and a vintage positivepreserved by Cineteca di Bologna. Over time, the original negativehad undergone various interpolations with second and third generation images, which have now been replaced with frames from the first generation positive. The grading process was supervised by Luca Bigazzi.
Director Bio : Vittorio De Sica (Italian pronunciation: [vitˈtɔːrjo de ˈsiːka]; 7 July 1901 – 13 November 1974) was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement. Four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: Sciuscià and Bicycle Thieves were awarded honorary Oscars, while Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Indeed, the great critical success of Sciuscià (the first foreign film to be so recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) and Bicycle Thieves helped establish the permanent Best Foreign Film Oscar. These two films generally are considered part of the canon of classic cinema.[1] Bicycle Thieves was cited by Turner Classic Movies as one of the 15 most influential films in cinema history.[2] De Sica was also nominated for the 1957 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for playing Major Rinaldi in American director Charles Vidor's 1957 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a movie that was panned by critics and proved a box office flop. De Sica's acting was considered the highlight of the film.[3]
Filmography :
