Bicycle Thieves and the Scale of Stories.

by Oliver Spicer

Rows of lights from a far off skyscraper, a sheet of cars that covers the motorway, stadiums without a seat free in sight, the swarm of people waiting for the green light. Its a common view in life and film - one that opens a view to how many stories are playing out parallel to your own. There’s probably a word for it in German or Japanese, or any other language that enjoys defining atmospheric feelings. But a word cannot fully represent the paradoxical experience that occurs; at one moment you both release how many lives there are, and yet how impossible it is to understand them all. And when words fail, cinema offers a chance to fill in the gaps.

De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1945) is an accessible introduction to both the movment of Italian Neorealism, but also international cinema as a whole due to its unique simplicity. Antonio, the protagonist, is easy to sympathise with due to universal motivations: a father needs to find a job to support his family. His goal is simple: to recover a stolen bicycle that is neccessary for his new job. And it is this simplicity, the small scale of the story, that combines with the perpousfully unstylistic Neorealist aesthetic to create such a great film for global audiences.

Pawn shop scene in Bicycle Thieves, 1945.

However despite this narrative simplicity, Bicycle Thieves also displays a large sense of scale through shots of visual magnitude. One instance of this is early in the film where Antonio and his wife, Maria, are forced to pawn their bedsheets to afford a bicycle. After the price is haggled and the bedsheets are handed over, we see a point of view shot from Antonio’s perspective of the clerk walking towards tall shelves filled with similar bundles of bedsheets. The camera follows the clerk as he then uses the shelves as a ladder to climb up to even more rows of packed bedsheets above - finally placing the family’s bundle into the masses. This shot implies the existance of many other stories like our protagonist Antonios throughout Rome, the magnitude of narratives that only one of which we are privy to. Repition of this visual magnitude occurs multiple times in this scene, including another similar shot of Antionio’s bike being selected from a row of hundreds or the long line of other families visible from the small window of the pawn shot - but it is also repeated throughout the film.

After Antonio’s bicycle is stolen from him, these images of multipicity are repeated throughout the search. A sequence in the market features a montage of close ups of bells, tires, and frames in rows and piles to depict the overwehlming atmosphere of the search and the minimal chance in finding the stolen bike. Crowds are also depicted throughout the film - such as when Antonio follows one possible criminal into a busy church, the squished que of people waiting for the bus he is forced to use, or the mob of naybours that surround Antionio after he accuses one young man of being the thief. From the crowds are given subtle hints at the kind of social commentary Italian Neorealism is known for, that even with institutions made from masses of people - the individual is still forced to suffer at their own peril.

Rows of bells in the market scene of Bicycle Thieves, 1945.

However, the desire to make symmetrical narratives leads to one of the final scenes sharing the themes of multiplicity the most. After a long search through Rome, Antonio is left without his bicycle and without hope outside of a football stadium. As the crowd leaves, we are shown multiple eyeline matches of Antonio looking at rows of bikes and the crowd of masses. Without a word we know what he is about to do next, the Kuleshov effect at its best. full swing. He steals a strangers bicycle, now viewing the victim just as he has been treated throughout his search: a insignificant point in the massive system. In an act of tragic irony he is quickly caught by the bike’s owner - and unlike his own experience of the original theft, the crowd once again faces against him and helps the owner. But the real heartbreak comes where the small face of Antionio’s son Bruno breaks through the crowd, meeting the gaze of his now criminal father. Bazin describes the sadness of the ending perfectly:

‘It is the admiration the child feels for his father and the father's awareness of it which gives its tragic stature to the ending. The public shame of the worker, exposed and clouted in the open street, is of little account compared with the fact that his son witnessed it’ [1]

It can then be seen that this contrast between magnitude and single-ness occurs throughout the film - in its introduction to the poor background of the protagonists, in the middle searching section of the film, and in its heartbreaking ending. In terms of social commentry, which was often seen as the aim of Italian Neorealism, we must look at the historical context of the time to explore the motivations of this theme of scale.

Bicycles at the end of Bicycle Thieves, 1945.

To label the movement of Italian Neorealism as ‘post-war’ would be unjust due to its close adjacency to WW2 in italy. Rome Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) , which can be seen as the birth of the aesthetic, centres around the population of Rome under Nazi occupation and filmed less than a year after the allies took back the city. The blend of reality and fiction can be seen as a direct result of the war, with not only the prime film studio at the time (Cinecittà built by Mussilini to create propoganda features) being bombed by air raids which caused filmmakers to use real life locations in less controlled environments, but also the very recent occupation beind used as a subject by Rossellini due to his use of real prisoners of war as extras in the film and going as far as to intercut actual ‘documentary footage secretly taken of German troops in the final days of their occupation’.

Bicycle Thieves, like many other post-war films, then can be read as trying to explain the aftermath of the largest war ever witnessed. And it can only do that through an idividual’s perspective, as to contain the collossal amount of lives the war impacted would be impossible to capture on any length of grainy film stock. But by looking at the singular story we are shown, it does achieve this whilst also commenting on equally grand themes of Masculinity through Antionio’s relationship with his son Bruno and hints of Socialism that reflect the ideological desires of the writers. Through focusing on the single we can see the totality of the suffering by multiplying the story by every bicycle seen on-screen.

Crowds of football fans at the end of Bicycle Thieves, 1945.

So many films wish for this kind of scale. Superhero francises have gone from saving the city, to saving the world, to saving the universe, to saving every universe as they have developed - increasing the stakes of the same simplistic myth-like structure we see in Bicycle Thieves. Yet, when it is impossible to fully comprehend the lives of others on a busy street - how are audiences expected to sympathise with every particle in the multi-verse? Here comes the narrative ideology of the main writer Ceasare Zavattini, who belived that stories should be ‘spectacular not through its exceptional, but normal qualities’ and that ‘reality is hugely rich’ in narrative and meaning. [3] Bicycle Thieves is not only a film, but also an experiment in the simplistic which achieves its goal of making the audience think about the scale of lives effected by the war. And as Antonio walks off into the same streets of Rome that hid his goal and faded his hope, holding the hand of his teary-eyed son - he disappears into the crowd…

At its most refined, Bicycle Theives is about how the small and large scale. How small scale problems can turn into large, and even how small scale narratives can have a wonderously complex set of meanings. So stretch your mozerella paninis, lock up your bikes, and try not to get too existential on crowded trains.

by Oliver Spicer, june 2023

Sources

[1]: Andre Bazin, ‘Bicycle Thief’ in Hugh Grey, eds, What Is Cinema? Volume II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) pp. 47-59.

[2]: Noa Steimatsky, ‘The Cinecittà Refugee Camp, 1944-50’ in John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel, Eds, Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) pp. 101-131

[3]: Cesare Zavattini, ‘Some ideas on the cinema’ in Richard Dyer MacCann’s, eds, Film: A Montage of Theories (New York: E.P Dutton, 1966) pp. 216-228