1. Shoulder-carrying cameras, news clips, and amateur actors constitute the main features of Italian neorealist films, forming a completely different aesthetic style, film language, and narrative style. From here it started a continuous movement of film art towards society, towards life and towards the bottom.
2. The film "The Bicycle Stealer" shows us the documentary features of real-life care and the continuous movement of the camera, with the plot and emotion, in a perfect blend.
"Bicycle Thief" can be called a miracle in the history of cinema in a way, because it is so simple. The script is said to have originated in two lines, an unemployed worker gets a job, the job requires a bike, but the bike is stolen on the first day of work, then he and his son try to get their bike back within 24 hours , and finally not found. It's such a simple story. Its film language is so simple and so skilled, and the film language that seems coherent, skilled, and simple today was groundbreaking and extremely original at the time.
In "Rome, Undefended City", I briefly introduced the rise of Italian neorealism. After World War II, Italy was in a situation of war disaster, war ruins, and war reconstruction. Italian society experienced an economic collapse. period of the Great Depression. Therefore, in the representative works of Italian neorealism that we enjoy together with you, we can all see the daily life of ordinary Italians at that time, and the survival of people in a state of barrenness and hardship.
At this time, a group of young people full of enthusiasm and social responsibility entered the film industry. They can't raise the expensive funds needed for film production under the Italian film studio system represented by "white phone films" at this time. In other words, their production funds are simply not enough to allow them to enter the studio. Shooting, so these young people carry the camera on their shoulders to shoot. The camera at that time was very heavy, not the easy hand-held photography that was possible with later small cameras, and the Steadicam shoulder shock absorber had not been invented at that time, which was for cinematographers at that time. A huge challenge is a challenge to their professional quality and technical ability. At the same time, this is another opportunity. The camera has therefore broken through the four walls of the studio, broken through the space setting of high-class indoor dramas, and turned towards an open society, open streets and ordinary people and people living in the streets. .
In this film, Italian neorealism established the basic creative method using amateur actors. The extremely charming father and son in the film, I myself am shocked and moved by their acting skills every time I see them, but both of them are amateur actors. screen. The father in the film is an unemployed worker recruited from the streets by De Sica, and the son Bruno, a timeless film character, is a street child. The use of amateur actors is to reduce the cost of production. At this time, movie stars are extremely expensive, and they probably don't bother to accept this kind of production method, and they don't bother to accept such characters and stories.
Shoulder-carrying cameras, news clips, and amateur actors constitute the main features of Italian neorealist films, forming a completely different aesthetic style, film language and narrative style of neorealist films. Ongoing cinematic art movement towards the ground floor.
In this film, the long takes have a very clear and very different way of expressing them from previous or contemporaneous Hollywood films. Later, the French film theorist Andre Bazin developed it into a set of film theory, a set of film aesthetic principles. So long-shot aesthetics or documentary aesthetics has become a Hollywood-style editing method, together with Hollywood's stitching system narrative method, forming two parallel and contrasting world film systems.
When the art of film faces a comprehensive turning point in society and the aesthetics of film usher in a period of comprehensive renewal, there will always be a peculiar burst of cinematic genius. It often manifests itself as turning limitations into strengths, deficiencies and dilemmas into a very unique way of telling a story, structuring a cinematic image, and applying cinematic sound.
This film uses the "shot segment" narrative method. In the original scene where it was extremely urgent to retrieve the bicycle before it was modified and the stolen goods were destroyed, the film uses a very long paragraph about the poor house in the church, where the father and son are desperately trying to catch the old man. , hoping to lead them to bike thieves through him. The director looked extremely calm and the camera seemed aimless. Zhang Huang's father and son tried to find the old man in the church and wanted to catch him, but they were constantly beaten by various clergymen and volunteers. break.
This aimless camera is actually carefully set up, and it is obvious that in the live shooting, the camera must be limited by the actual space of the church poor house. This is different from a studio. Every scene in the studio is built. Every wall, every door, and every window can be dismantled and moved, allowing the camera to move unimpeded. In the real scene, it must be limited to the real space.
The most captivating scenes in the film are done in this restricted reality. There is a sequence at the beginning of the film: the husband and wife enter the door together, the wife is carrying water, she enters the inner room, puts down the bucket in her hand, the camera follows her out into the bedroom, the husband enters the painting, and the wife follows and rudely pulls it from the bed. The sheets were taken away, and she was going to sell all the sheets in the house, and we know from the dialogue that it was her entire dowry and the entire property of this extremely poor family.
The relationship between husband and wife in such a scene, the emotions in the bottom family, the absolute poverty and despair behind the wife's resolute and resolute, are through the crampedness of the real scene, through the camera, it is like a constant in this cramped real scene. It is the same as the characters that people pass by to create this sense of reality and space, to create the emotional content in this sense of space.
In the limited interior, the director very creatively uses the narrative power that the language of the film and the modeling language may generate. In the film, he uses the closed window three times very naturally and freely as the rhythm of the film's narrative, and at the same time as the rhythm of the characters' destiny. A window is a space setting that allows light to penetrate into the interior space. The director uses such a modeling element to herald the blocked future of the protagonist. When the window first appeared, it was the husband showing off to his wife that he had a job, which actually had a storage room, then he picked up his wife and wanted her to look out of the window, and then, seemingly inadvertently, inside. Just one person closed the window, blocking his wife's vision.
The real space elements in the real scene are very naturally, freely and calmly used as modeling means and narrative means, and as a metronome of narrative beats.
Another important factor in the film, the way in which the hand-held camera followed the amateur actors, was later written into his monograph by Andre Bazin, forming the logic of documentary aesthetics. The street-following approach naturally results in long takes—very long in length. In this addition, there is a wrong understanding later that only a long shot is understood as a long shot, but a long shot is not equal to an empty shot, and a long shot also means the requirements of rich scene scheduling factors. In continuous time and space, through the relative displacement between characters, the relative displacement between characters and props, the conversion of the camera movement mode, and the combination of different movement modes of the camera, a kind of time maintained by the long shot is formed. Rich expression with spaces, characters and environments.
The scenes of the two fathers and sons looking for bicycles on the street are represented by this kind of coherent follow-up long shot, and it is in this long shot that the characters are placed in a real social space. And other characters in the real social space, those who are busy in order to survive, completely ignoring what you are doing, people who struggled to survive in that era are also included in the film.
In the scene where the protagonist goes to the street for the first time to put up a poster, a child who is clearly begging with an accordion keeps approaching them, and then is kicked away by the "master" who leads him into the line. The characters' dialogue turns into voiceover and follows the child playing the accordion and another child begging after the pedestrians. In the absence of words, it did not deliberately show the difficult state of survival at the bottom after the war.
We would have thought today that Bruno was sitting on his father's bike and being taken to a special place by his father would be to go to school, but the camera deliberately continues to stop after his father walks away, Bruno opens a storage room, pulls out a suitcase and A sign that he apparently also set up a stall or hawked on the street. Everyone is struggling to survive, for the most basic necessities of life.
As a representative work of Italian neorealism, the film is also a very unique one in the Italian neorealism film sequence. This film has a peculiar history in film history. The film received rave reviews when it first came out, and soon it was on the list of the greatest films in the history of world cinema and at the top of the list. Then people began to underestimate it, depreciate it, forget it, and by 1999, when the film was re-released, later generations of moviegoers were moved by this simple, direct, unpretentious, yet so rich film that it Once again recognized as one of the greatest films in the history of world cinema.
The long takes created by the Italian neorealist film and the mise-en-scène within the long takes are integrated with its realist social stance and the way it is shot. On the way to find the bicycle, the father was extremely tired and desperate, so he strode, and in the continuous footage, the child Bruno ran with difficulty, quickly switching legs and chasing his father on tiptoe. The sense of comedy it forms and the sense of social tragedy in the sense of comedy are very rich.
The father strode across the road, and the son was almost hit by two cars when he tried to chase. This scene is not scheduling and arrangement at all, it happened in the real space of shooting, which is exactly the production method and production style of this film. the power shown.
The film is a looping story structure, from a bicycle being stolen to an attempt to steal a bicycle, ending in the attempted bicycle-stealing ending. A recurring story structure completes the basic theme of the story. This is not a story of stealing and crime, but a story of poverty and despair. This is a story about the helplessness and despair of ordinary people, small people, and people at the bottom of the world in such a catastrophic historical and social era.
From another angle, it can also be said that this is a story about a father and son, and the most fascinating and touching scenes in the film all take place between the father and son.
The whole story is like a sub-line theme in Yang Dechang's "Guling Street Teenage Murder Case" that we will talk about later. It actually represents a tragic moment, which is even more than a social tragedy. The sadness is even more sad because the father cannot be the father, but the son cannot be the son. "
One of the most comical and heart-wrenching scenes in the movie is when father and son have realized that it is very difficult for them to retrieve their bikes at the market, and they seem completely hopeless, when the father suddenly bursts with pride and tells his son. We go into restaurants, we have a big meal, and there is always a way but to die.
Almost all the scenes in the film were shot in real locations, many of which were accidentally discovered during the selection process, and then directly incorporated into the film, such as the brothel on the first floor of Rome - Richie broke in to ask for it. The space where the bicycle thief was caught, the scene of the poor house, and the space of the seance were all discovered by chance during the selection process, and then became an important paragraph and an important spatial element in the plot.
Because it was a live-action shooting, the cramped space in the restaurant formed a very interesting situation: the camera was positioned in the cramped space to shoot the opposite shots of the father and son, thus forming a very limited picture frame to limit the characters. Create a feeling of visual and psychological captivity. On the other hand, the cut shots between father and son in this cramped space themselves form a sense of intimacy in the space, forming a sense of closeness between father and son in the same space, which is the closeness of fate and the affection itself. close. When the camera shoots the father from the son's point of view, it must bring the comedy and cheerful performance of the band in the restaurant. The band's antics and the tragic situation of the father and son form a montage inside the camera.
In the dialogue between the father and the son, the emotional level or the psychological level of sadness is fully expressed. First, the father's pride, and then the son sees in the corner of the eye that the next table is obviously a wealthy family eating something. The rich children are careless. To show off, the father seemed to be very forthright in ordering the same brushed bread for his son. Then the main dish came up, and my father could only admit that he would have to earn 1 million lire to eat such a meal, which is obviously a class that is out of reach.
When the brushed bread of the father and son came up, the cute Bruno wanted to eat it in the same way as the rich kid, pulling out long strands, while he showed off, his eyes turned to the adjacent table, this time the camera After clearly extending Bruno's arms, the extremely worn, almost broken clothes are clearly presented to the audience in the close-up shot. The film expresses to us the documentary features of live-action shooting, realistic care and continuous motion of the camera, as well as the plot and emotion.
The use of scenes, the most basic film language, to present the fate of the characters is an extremely genius, extremely calm and straightforward way of De Sica in this film. Through the changes of scenes, the audience can deeply experience The personal fate and social situation of the characters. In the first half of the film, when the protagonist still believes that he can find his bicycle, save his job opportunities, and continue or improve his real life, the film uses medium and close-up shots and close-up follow-up shots to shoot the father and son.
When they finally run into the thief and seem to have caught him, they are besieged by that Italian type of siege; After the family became poorer and more desperate, the father and son were completely helpless. They walked out of the crowded alley. At this time, the camera suddenly switched to a large panorama. The audience watched the father and son in the huge urban space of Rome. They were in this space. so small.
The structural change of the camera position, when the medium and close-up shots are changed to the panorama and the big panorama, also conveys the character’s sense of control over their own environment. Helplessness in space. The feeling of wandering in a city or a lonely and insignificant individual exiled into the city is accomplished through the contrast of this spatial environment. In the second half of the film, the protagonist is always in a larger scene than the first half, and is always in the process of despair and helplessness.
The film was heatedly discussed during the screening. The so-called left-wing critical forces with great social influence in Italy at that time once criticized the ending of the film, saying that it seemed too warm for those people to let the Richie father and son go. Much harsher, not only did Rich lose his bike, he lost his job, he could end up as a criminal and go to jail.
There is also a saying that this film obviously has a very distinct intertextual relationship with Chaplin's "The Gold Rush", another business card in film history, and De Sica has been telling "The Gold Rush" and Chaplin. Lin's tribute, such as the scene of the desperate father and son sitting side by side on the street, clearly reminds us of the father and son in "The Gold Rush". The two passages are in the same scene, and the composition and picture are very close.
I still really liked the ending when I watched the movie again myself. This is not a moment of tender reconciliation, it just tells us that this is the common destiny of a society, and that all people are struggling to survive in poverty and despair, whether it is the bicycle thief in front, or Rich who eventually degenerates into a thief People with bicycles, people with stolen bicycles, let Richie go because they clearly saw that they were people of the same fate, so it's not a personal sad story, it's a group portrait of a society, a A miniature version of the social picture.
The film can be regarded as a story about a father-son relationship. Richie plans to steal a bicycle. Before that, he wants to take his son away. The director is also very accurate and precise in asking the young actor to chase the bus. When the bus started in front of the door, he missed the car, so that a dramatic and tragic scene occurred in front of him: his father fell into a burglar. It was precisely because of this dramatic miss that he finally became his father's savior. He first picked up his father's knocked-off hat, instinctively dusted it off, held it to his chest cherishingly and then cried helplessly, Then he bravely broke into the crowd, holding his father's hand and still crying. When his father was let go by the surrounding crowd, the scene of the father and son side by side on the street in the small panoramic shot appeared again.
After the big parting of the segment, the director uses the small parting again to switch between the three objects in parallel, first a close-up shot of the crying son, then a close-up shot of the father, when the son wipes his tears and stops crying At that time, my father began to cry helplessly. The third shot is the hands of the father and son. The child tentatively pulled the father's hand. The father held the child's hand and tightly wrapped the child's small hand in his big hand. At this time, the weepers have changed, and the spiritual supporters and strong people have changed positions. Therefore, this is a moment when a father loses his last dignity and cannot be a father, and it is also a supporter for the child who bravely completes the incompetence but tries to bear it. A moment for the role of a supporter, stronger person.
The moving power in the film, the power that directly touches our hearts, is accomplished through the emotions of the father and son, and the father-son relationship is displayed through the camera, through the lens, and through the picture. Therefore, this film produced in a specific historical moment and in a specific historical situation will forever remain in our memory and film history.
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