FIDES, the bike in Bicycle Thieves

The story is simple. An unemployed man in post-war Italy is lucky enough to get an offer of work but he needs a bicycle. He has one but it sits in a pawn hall because he and his family needed the money. He is desperate and has not idea of how to get around the problem. His wife though is not taken aback. She comes up with a plan...to pawn off the sheets off of their beds and with that money pay off the debt on the bike. Plain enough...this scene is merely a recounting of that brief episode. Not the most important in the film. However, since De Sica loves to set things spinning by attaching events to a small insignificant object by making it the center of a conflict, the bike's insignificance is paramount...as is that of the sheets...in fact both are very important...what I love in this scene is how two insignificant objects cross paths and are found in a container that holds an apparently infinite number of similarly insignificant objects...
by the way...the make of the bike is Fides...a faithful piece of insignificance!?

New Criterion Release of Bicycle Thieves

Criterion is releasing a new copy of Vittorio De Sica's LADRI DI BICICLETTE with a proper translation of its title to BICYCLE THIEVES...

CINEMA PARADISO by Giuseppe Tornatore

I guess everyone thought Italian cinema had died or withered away after neo-realism and the commedia all'italiana period. Well, in fact it kept going,kept producing a lot of good film. It just didn't travel well...or maybe it didn't meet the requirements/expectations of what North American distributors thought American audiences would want to see of Italy. Or, Italians themselves just did not do a great job of promotion. Cinema Paradiso is a film I love and hate...because it serves up a lot of the usual stereotypical imagery (and that's what I believe made it an AA winner) but it also does a great job in doing so...the film is in fact very good in proposing aspects of disfunctional narrativity, such as Italians might have suffered in the post-war period. It puts into question the life of the main protagonist Toto`(a life of escape and success)...and the choices he made by seeing life through a dirty lens of sorts...It is only at the end of the film, after he has reluctantly come to face what he has not wanted to re-view for decades, that he finally opens his eyes. The aid to his newfound vision is nothing less that what had been/has been hidden from the eyes of the population at large...the possibility of love, human relationships, sensuality, laughter. The clip above closes the film...it plays the censored clips that Salvatore is able to view only after his mentor, Alfredo's, death. This short sequence is what defines for me the meaning of the whole film...what brings me to love it after hating it...the clips are representative of what is missing in life, what is censored...what is stored away as a missing memory or residual meaning. It is what appears to be superfluous as sin for the meaning of the movies that were viewed in that little theatre...in fact they are particularly important elements of resistance to what would impose a culture of fear and suspicion... What is recuperated, the gift that Alfredo kept for Salvatore just in case he might not find it out on his own, in his own life, which he did not, when we open our eyes and minds and resume a relationship with the world that is fresh and unhampered by normative and directive aspects of dominant/centralized/consumeristic culture, is the presence of humanity and the opportunity to adjust the narrative of our lives.


p. verdicchio