San Diego Italian Film Festival

The 2010 Italian Film Festival in San Diego runs from October 22nd to Nov. 5 ... check films etc. at www.sandiegoitalianfilmfestival.com

LADRI DI BICICLETTE Vittorio De Sica

HERE IS THE STILL THAT I WILL ASK YOU TO WRITE ABOUT FOR TUESDAY'S QUIZ...
HAVE A GOOD LOOK...THINK ABOUT WHAT IT REPRESENTS AND MEANS...SHORT QUIZ 15 MIN. BE CLEAR, CONCISE, DIRECT...ADDRESS THE PHOTO AND THE FILM IT IS TAKEN FROM...GIVE THE CONTEXT WITHIN NEOREALISM AND MAYBE RELATE IT TO WHAT DE SICA AND ZAVATTINI HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE ROLE OF CINEMA (see Bondanella)...

Rocco and his Brothers: 3 Moments

Nadia tells Rocco that she has spent time in prison and he tells her that back home he has friends who have stood up for themselves, people who have occupied land and have been imprisoned for it. Rocco tells the story in a very matter-of-fact way, as if it were an everyday occurrence, a simple fact of life in the South...a hint of the situation that has come to be known as The Southern Question (See translation of Antonio Gramsci's The Southern Question, Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2006)

After winning a big fight, Rocco celebrates with his family...they now live up a few stories...they started out in a basement and have moved up in the world. The brothers take turns in toasting their success...however Vincenzo can only come up with some lame rhyme...Ciro demontrates that he has forgotten his language, the language of their land and so it is left up to Rocco, again, to make a meaninful statement. Again, his references are to their land, their traditions, the struggle of their people in the South...and he makes a reference to Luca's future visit to the South where he will act as a bridge between the old ways and the new, tradition and innovation, subservience and freedom...Luca is, in terms of the Southern Question, the intellectual who embodies the progress of the workers and the integrations of a proletarian body with the soul of a peasant...

Luca and Ciro meet to talk about Simone having been taken away by the police...and the rest of the family...Ciro now represents the working class, the industrial worker...a step up on the social evolutionary scale...he will impart the politicized lessons onto Luca...Luca will in turn integrate those lessons and the others learned from his life in the North to the lessons regarding the South that he hears mostly around the house. Luca will possibly be the Gramscian "organic intellectual" who will go back South at some point and organize his constituency into a viable bloc of "active" individuals (intellectuals).