A few notes regarding BICYCLE THIEVES

Lamberto Maggiorani as Antonio Ricci (left) and Enzo Staiola as his son, Bruno, in Vittorio De Sica’s BICYCLE THIEVES.

I recently picked up the Criterion Collection DVD release of Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (better known here in the States as Bicycle Thieves), and I’ve been poring over the supplements, which include a 76-page book about the movie. It’s a wealth of information, amongst which this handful of quotes shone especially brightly, at least to my eye. The first three come from screenwriter Cesare Zavattini’s essay “Some Ideas on the Cinema”:

“The true neorealist cinema is, of course, less expensive than the cinema at present. Its subjects can be expressed cheaply, and it can dispense with capitalist resources on the present scale. The cinema has not yet found its morality, its necessity, its quality, precisely because it costs too much; being so conditioned, it is much less an art than it could be.”

“Technique and capitalist method, however, have imposed collaboration on the cinema. It is one thing to adapt ourselves to the imposed exigencies of the cinema’s present structure, another to imagine that they are indispensable and necessary. It is obvious that when films cost sixpence and everybody can have a camera, the cinema will become a creative medium as flexible and as free as any other.”

“I am quite aware that it is possible to make wonderful films, like Charlie Chaplin’s, and they are not neorealist. I am quite aware that there are Americans, Russians, Frenchmen, and others who have made masterpieces that honor humanity and, of course, they have not wasted film. I wonder, too, how many more great works they will again give us, according to their particular genius, with actors and studios and novels. But Italian filmmakers, I think, if they are to sustain and deepen their cause and their style, after having courageously half opened their doors to reality, must (in the sense I have mentioned) open them wide.”

And here’s one more quote, this from André Bazin’s essay on the film from 1949:

“De Sica’s supreme achievement, which others have so far only approached with a varying degree of success or failure, is to have succeeded in discovering the cinematographic dialectic capable of transcending the contradiction between the action of a ‘spectacle’ and of an event. For this reason, BICYCLE THIEVES is one of the first examples of pure cinema. No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.”