The Bicycle Thieves

Directed -Vittorio De Sica

Written - Cesare Zavattini.

Have you ever watched people on the street and tried to decipher them from the clues your eyes gather, to make
up life stories for them? At the beginning of The Bicycle Thieves a man emerges from a crowd of unemployed
workers, and after we have contemplated his working-class tragedy, he blends back with the masses as the
movie comes to its end.

Antonio is one man among thousands trying to find a way to survive with his young family in the chaos of post-
war Rome. He is offered a job hanging posters as the movie begins, but to keep the job he will have to get his
bicycle out of hock. To do this, his wife offers to pawn some bed linens that comprise her dowry.

Their happiness and security don't last long. One day while Antonio is struggling to smooth out a poster of an
impossibly nubile Rita Hayworth on a rough stone wall, a shifty-eyed passerby jumps on his bike and rides it
away. Antonio and his young son Bruno begin a desperate odyssey through the neighborhoods of Rome to find
the bike, without which he will lose his job.

The Bicycle Thieves is one of the crown jewels of Neorealism, Cesare Zavattini, the script writer for Bicycle
Thieves, was the most important theoretician of Neorealism. He wrote his screenplay in just four days after
watching an attempted theft while sitting at an outdoor Roman cafe. "My fixed idea is to de- romanticize the
cinema," he said. "I want to teach people to see daily life with the same passion they experience in reading a
book." A committed Marxist, he spread his ideas in polemical essays and critiques as well as in many
screenplays and collaborations with Vittorio de Sica and other directors.

Both Open City and Bicycle thief documented contemporary social circumstances. Rossellini’s film that
depicted the war was endowed with drama and urgency by the very nature of the history it records while De-
Sica story reflected instead the banality of the stabilized post war conditions.

Di-Sica’s explanation of Bi-cycle thief “My purpose is to find out the element of Drama in daily situations, the
marvelous in news [local news] consider as worn out by most people.

When Antonio reports the target of his by-cycle theft to the authorities, the journalists asks if there’s any news,
the officer answers “No, nothing just a bi-cycle” The bi-cycle theft meant nothing to the authorities where as it
was so much important for an individual families well being.

Just as historical circumstances gave the event of open city its natural drama, so too they dictate its technical
style i.e. primitive equipment, absence of studio facilities and improvised modes of production were the
technical problems that Rossellini had at its disposal.

But in 1948, film making was no longer an obstacle ridden process as it was in the immediate aftermath of the
war. The technical possibilities were wide open to Di-Sica and Zavattini.

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Bi –cycle thief was too a big budget film. A cast of 100 and a meticulously worked out shooting style. The film
costed 100 million liars owing a lot to the large number of extras in the entire film.” The shooting was done
with painstaking care to minimize visual complexity while concealing the art that went into its making.”

The degree- zero filmmaking film making was never a norm for neo-realist films. Rossellini’s expedient in
open city has become a stylistic norm for neo-realism. These norms were location shooting, authoritarian non
intervention. Film makers were forced in creating through elaborate technical means an illusion of technical
poverty

Bi-Cycle thief was against the spectacular conventions of commercial cinema.

a. The co worker curses the Sunday rains and compares that there is nothing to do except going to cinema
b. Antonio’s trouble starts as he puts the posters of the new film.

In a commercial cinema concrete details re always governed by the consideration of the plot. We can except the
dent in the bi cycle that appeared in the beginning of the film to re appear later in the story to play a part in the
narrative resolution i.e. a happy ending where Bruno identifies the lost cycle with the help of the dent but
instead the dent just remains a metaphor of great damage that Antonio allows his bike to suffer in theft itself.

Bi-cycle thief can also be a said a film about father son relationship.

Like the deceptively simple narrative of Bi-cycle thief which conceals the wealth of technical artistry, its banal
narrative hides the plentitude of meaning; most affecting is the psychological relation between the father and the
son, the search of the bi-cycle unfolds.

Bruno’s presence in the film provides it with a constant sympathy of the viewers. His presence also provides a
constant reminder as to what is t stake If Antonio fails at his quest.

The bike made Antonio a real father as the breadwinner of the family. The bike structures the relationship
between the father and the son. This is visually rendered in the scene that introduces Bruno to us. The boys
effort to restore the bike‘s lusture was n obvious projection of hi desire to re-hebetate his father’s parental
authority. During Antonio’s extended unemployment Bruno was the only breadwinner of the family working as
a gas station attendant.

Through out the film we see Bruno as an adult

a. When he does the higher mathematics in the restaurant scene.

b. When he gets the police officer to diffuse the hostile crowd in Via Pinaco
c. When he closes the window shutter to protect his baby brother from the morning wind.

When the bike is restrained at the beginning of the film the traditional family hierarchy is reconstructed
once more. The political significance of the bike in the family context and it structures the relationship
between the father and the son.

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 We see the visual cuing between father and son throughout the film. Every time Bruno looks up to Antonio,
to observe the parental reaction on which he should model his own. This is the visual cue of Bruno’s
uncritical acceptance of his father’s authority. The clue reaffirms the father son authority.

Bruno refuses all eye contacts with father when Antonio slaps him.

Only at the end of the film when Antonio decides to steal the bike that robs him of his parental authority,
Bruno’s gaze at this point reveals the radically changed terms of their relationship.

But when Bruno slips his hand into Antonio’s at the end of the film, he is offering his father an entirely new
relationship, one that no longer needs meditation of a Bi-cycle. The financial and the political power that Bi-
cycle represented within the family, re-establishing the old hierarchy is no longer the basis of their
relationship. And the search no longer remained the pre-requisite for the self discovery.

Bi-Cycle thief is a walk through Rome by the father and his son.

The film is also a walk through Rome’s social institution that is completely indifferent to Antonio’s social
plight.

The law, the Church, the trade union, all fails to help Antonio, so much so that at the end Antonio had to
resort to breaking laws and stealing himself.

In his trip to police station, the law seemed least interested in protecting the property rights of citizen than to
suppress their civil liberties, as the officer rushes out to suppress a demonstration while giving no help to
Antonio to retrieve his stolen good.

The trade union too seemed indifferent.

In a similar manner the church not only enabled the old man who is the thief contact to get away but also
degraded Antonio to a beggar.

In-order for the films social criticism to work ,Antonio’s plight must not be seen as unique .Accordingly Di-
Sica and Zavattini offers us a series of visual essay on the commonality of Ricci’s condition .

a. When Antonio and Maria pawned there wedding sheet a tilt shot following the pawn shop attended to
the roof top shows us shelves filled with similar lines of sheets.

b. Multitude of used Bi-Cycle at the open market the day after the theft. The evidence that these Bicycles
are all being dismantled concludes that most of them are being stolen.

c. In police station the constable stands behind numerous files in which scores of such theft report are
there.

In Via Panico Antonio came in confrontation with the thief in a context that gives the criminal an identity and
background as tragic as the protagonists own. The incident in Via Panico makes the distinction between the

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victim and the victimizer , prey and the predator , right and wrong absolutely blurred . Until this point there was
a nameless villain but at Via Panico we learn his name ,his poverty and despair and can’t help but sympathize
with him. Our awareness that he himself was long unemployed and is responsible for his family reduces the
distinction between Alfredo and Antonio. The criminal and the victim.

Di-Sica also suggests in his films that recent history has affected only lower classes , the bourgeois enjoys a
kind of a-historical status ,that their lives are exempted from the devastation of war and it’s aftermath.
Ex-Restaurant sequence

By 1948 it was already clear that Rossellini’s visionary city would never be founded and that his hopeful
synthesis of Marxist and catholic ideals was a fantast dream.
Rossellini’s Rome was united , a fellow feeling culminated in the heroics of the partisan struggle. But when the
war got over people forgot the solidarity of the war years and started competing and fighting for the scanty
resources of the un-reconstructed city.

The film is full of crowd from the people who resent Antonio’s sole acquisition of job at the opening of the
film, to the mobs of people boarding the bus or waiting in the line to get water. In other words the film is full of
conglomerates of isolated soul who are all divided because of the mutual competition for the scant resources.