1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:02,500 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,500 --> 00:00:04,019 Commons license. 3 00:00:04,019 --> 00:00:06,360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 4 00:00:06,360 --> 00:00:10,730 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,730 --> 00:00:13,330 To make a donation or view additional materials 6 00:00:13,330 --> 00:00:17,217 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:17,217 --> 00:00:17,842 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:28,980 --> 00:00:32,990 DAVID THORBURN: Our topic today is the influential movement 9 00:00:32,990 --> 00:00:39,670 called Italian neorealism, a movement of filmmakers that 10 00:00:39,670 --> 00:00:44,300 arose in Italy at the end of the Second World War 11 00:00:44,300 --> 00:00:47,790 and had-- although it was a very short lived movement, 12 00:00:47,790 --> 00:00:53,800 lasted only six or seven years before it kind of dissolved 13 00:00:53,800 --> 00:00:55,360 of its own way. 14 00:00:55,360 --> 00:00:59,120 In part, incidentally, because although the films were 15 00:00:59,120 --> 00:01:03,950 very successful with critics and several of the neorealist films 16 00:01:03,950 --> 00:01:07,790 won Academy Awards as the best foreign film of the year 17 00:01:07,790 --> 00:01:13,030 in 1946 and then again in 1948 when the film 18 00:01:13,030 --> 00:01:15,050 you're going to see tonight, Bicycle Thieves, 19 00:01:15,050 --> 00:01:16,970 won the reward. 20 00:01:16,970 --> 00:01:21,050 Despite that acclaim and even global success, 21 00:01:21,050 --> 00:01:23,950 the movement sort of petered out, 22 00:01:23,950 --> 00:01:26,622 although its influence as I've suggested was very great. 23 00:01:26,622 --> 00:01:28,080 One reason the movement petered out 24 00:01:28,080 --> 00:01:32,760 was that forces in Italian society, 25 00:01:32,760 --> 00:01:35,270 chambers of commerce types, people 26 00:01:35,270 --> 00:01:37,330 who are interested in encouraging 27 00:01:37,330 --> 00:01:42,410 the rebuilding of the devastated cities of Italy, 28 00:01:42,410 --> 00:01:46,310 a function, a consequence of the Second World War, 29 00:01:46,310 --> 00:01:49,570 those folks began to feel that the messages coming 30 00:01:49,570 --> 00:01:52,810 from neorealist films were too negative 31 00:01:52,810 --> 00:01:56,070 and were discouraging foreign investors. 32 00:01:56,070 --> 00:01:58,490 So although it was a very remarkable movement, 33 00:01:58,490 --> 00:02:01,160 it lasted only, as I say, a short time. 34 00:02:01,160 --> 00:02:05,510 But its influence ramified very, very, very broadly. 35 00:02:05,510 --> 00:02:11,100 We can trace its influence to virtually every national cinema 36 00:02:11,100 --> 00:02:14,630 that came after it, and there are certain very particular 37 00:02:14,630 --> 00:02:18,460 influences that one can trace from the neorealist movement 38 00:02:18,460 --> 00:02:22,400 to certain American directors of film noir in the '40s 39 00:02:22,400 --> 00:02:27,870 and early '50s, to certain very interesting and historically 40 00:02:27,870 --> 00:02:30,270 curious forms of television that emerged 41 00:02:30,270 --> 00:02:32,770 in the early years of American television 42 00:02:32,770 --> 00:02:35,610 that were deeply imitative of and influenced 43 00:02:35,610 --> 00:02:37,995 by Italian neorealist movies. 44 00:02:40,710 --> 00:02:42,970 The man that many would identify as the greatest 45 00:02:42,970 --> 00:02:47,060 of all Indian directors, Satyajit Ray, 46 00:02:47,060 --> 00:02:50,500 was directly inspired to make movies by The Bicycle Thief, 47 00:02:50,500 --> 00:02:55,470 and he made a series of three films that are essentially 48 00:02:55,470 --> 00:02:59,005 a form of Italian neorealism moved to India, 49 00:02:59,005 --> 00:03:03,430 a wonderful trilogy of films, some of them 50 00:03:03,430 --> 00:03:07,000 actually about the untouchable classes in India, 51 00:03:07,000 --> 00:03:08,820 called The Apu Trilogy. 52 00:03:08,820 --> 00:03:16,000 And they remain among the most treasured forms of Indian film. 53 00:03:16,000 --> 00:03:19,310 The Italian neorealist had a profound influence 54 00:03:19,310 --> 00:03:22,610 on other European cinemas as well, 55 00:03:22,610 --> 00:03:24,780 and most particularly can be said 56 00:03:24,780 --> 00:03:30,680 to be the originating movement behind the French Nouvelle 57 00:03:30,680 --> 00:03:34,450 Vague, The New Wave movement, that in France that 58 00:03:34,450 --> 00:03:37,670 emerges at the end of the '50s and the early '60s 59 00:03:37,670 --> 00:03:44,470 and it involved such now recognized, 60 00:03:44,470 --> 00:03:47,440 such directors who are now recognized 61 00:03:47,440 --> 00:03:49,750 as major figures in the history of film 62 00:03:49,750 --> 00:03:53,800 as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. 63 00:03:53,800 --> 00:03:56,810 So it was although a short-lived movement, profoundly 64 00:03:56,810 --> 00:04:01,130 influential one, and it produced some enduring, and beautiful, 65 00:04:01,130 --> 00:04:04,150 and I guess I would say immortal films. 66 00:04:04,150 --> 00:04:07,610 The most famous and perhaps in some ways the most perfect 67 00:04:07,610 --> 00:04:10,760 of those films is the one you're going to see tonight, 68 00:04:10,760 --> 00:04:11,840 Bicycle Thieves. 69 00:04:11,840 --> 00:04:14,860 And I'll talk a bit about that film in my introduction 70 00:04:14,860 --> 00:04:16,910 to the lecture this evening. 71 00:04:16,910 --> 00:04:19,110 I want to begin, though, by giving you 72 00:04:19,110 --> 00:04:27,290 a sense of how neorealism feels, a kind of distilled version, 73 00:04:27,290 --> 00:04:29,960 or a distilled embodiment of many of the deepest 74 00:04:29,960 --> 00:04:32,890 principles of neorealism, and in order 75 00:04:32,890 --> 00:04:35,564 to do that, I want to show you a clip from the very beginning 76 00:04:35,564 --> 00:04:37,230 of the film you're going to see tonight. 77 00:04:37,230 --> 00:04:39,060 So you'll see this beginning twice. 78 00:04:39,060 --> 00:04:40,960 Hopefully, the second time you see it, 79 00:04:40,960 --> 00:04:45,420 you'll be alive, more alive to some of its implications. 80 00:04:45,420 --> 00:04:48,370 So here is the very opening of Bicycle Thieves. 81 00:04:48,370 --> 00:04:51,090 And one of the things I want to ask you to watch for 82 00:04:51,090 --> 00:04:55,220 is first how much information, how much visual information, 83 00:04:55,220 --> 00:04:57,780 dramatic information, becomes available to you 84 00:04:57,780 --> 00:05:01,900 under the titles, and then how fluently and fluidly the film 85 00:05:01,900 --> 00:05:05,980 moves out of the title sequence into a kind of continuation 86 00:05:05,980 --> 00:05:09,340 of the drama that's articulated in that title sequence. 87 00:05:09,340 --> 00:05:11,660 On the surface, this little anecdote 88 00:05:11,660 --> 00:05:14,470 at the very beginning of the film seems very modest 89 00:05:14,470 --> 00:05:18,740 and one might even think of it as simply expository, that 90 00:05:18,740 --> 00:05:21,590 is providing information to the audience 91 00:05:21,590 --> 00:05:23,770 so that they can get on with the story. 92 00:05:23,770 --> 00:05:26,530 As I hope you'll recognize, and as I'll try to show you briefly 93 00:05:26,530 --> 00:05:29,080 after I've shown you the clip, much more is going on 94 00:05:29,080 --> 00:05:32,640 than that, and it's a particularly wonderful example 95 00:05:32,640 --> 00:05:37,280 of the way in which the best neorealist films generate 96 00:05:37,280 --> 00:05:41,190 a kind of texture, a kind of density, what I've sometimes 97 00:05:41,190 --> 00:05:45,350 called a multiplicity that we have suggested in this course 98 00:05:45,350 --> 00:05:50,030 is one of the fundamental ways in which you can distinguish 99 00:05:50,030 --> 00:05:52,970 between entertainment and serious entertainment 100 00:05:52,970 --> 00:05:54,890 or between entertainment and art. 101 00:05:54,890 --> 00:05:58,670 When items and objects begin to have this multiplicity, when 102 00:05:58,670 --> 00:06:01,770 they begin to serve multiple functions, not just 103 00:06:01,770 --> 00:06:04,490 a single function, you're in the presence of something 104 00:06:04,490 --> 00:06:06,090 not only complex, but something that 105 00:06:06,090 --> 00:06:09,760 acknowledges the complexity of the world in some respects. 106 00:06:09,760 --> 00:06:12,570 And this opening sequence of Bicycle Thieves 107 00:06:12,570 --> 00:06:14,990 does this with remarkable economy. 108 00:06:14,990 --> 00:06:16,490 So here's the beginning of the film. 109 00:07:32,186 --> 00:07:34,178 [SPEAKING ITALIAN] 110 00:08:08,594 --> 00:08:09,510 DAVID THORBURN: Great. 111 00:08:09,510 --> 00:08:12,875 Can you freeze it for a second? 112 00:08:12,875 --> 00:08:14,500 One thing I should mention while you're 113 00:08:14,500 --> 00:08:17,380 watching this, to interrupt the sequence for a moment. 114 00:08:17,380 --> 00:08:21,950 The activity that you see taking place under the titles 115 00:08:21,950 --> 00:08:24,140 is supposed to be confusing at first. 116 00:08:24,140 --> 00:08:26,302 Although, after a while it begins to clarify. 117 00:08:26,302 --> 00:08:27,760 Perhaps you're not fully clear what 118 00:08:27,760 --> 00:08:30,230 is going on until the titles disappear 119 00:08:30,230 --> 00:08:33,390 and you see these men assembling around that staircase there 120 00:08:33,390 --> 00:08:36,380 where a man with a list is speaking to them. 121 00:08:36,380 --> 00:08:40,990 What is going on here is what in the United States in the '40s 122 00:08:40,990 --> 00:08:45,170 and '50s on the docks in New York, they called the shape up. 123 00:08:45,170 --> 00:08:46,730 And a shape up is a place where men 124 00:08:46,730 --> 00:08:49,300 who are eager for work sort of come and hang around and wait 125 00:08:49,300 --> 00:08:53,430 for the boss, the foreman, or the hiring boss 126 00:08:53,430 --> 00:08:55,120 to pick them out of the crowd. 127 00:08:55,120 --> 00:08:58,190 Shape ups are always unpleasant experiences 128 00:08:58,190 --> 00:09:00,352 because there are many people who are excluded, 129 00:09:00,352 --> 00:09:02,060 and the people who are chosen are often-- 130 00:09:02,060 --> 00:09:04,340 this was especially true on the New York waterfront 131 00:09:04,340 --> 00:09:07,570 in the days which I know about because my father was 132 00:09:07,570 --> 00:09:08,854 a longshoreman for a while. 133 00:09:08,854 --> 00:09:11,270 It was a particularly bad thing in the New York waterfront 134 00:09:11,270 --> 00:09:13,760 because you had to know somebody to get work. 135 00:09:13,760 --> 00:09:15,870 I don't know if that's an implication here or not. 136 00:09:15,870 --> 00:09:18,920 Although, you'll see as the men complain that some of them 137 00:09:18,920 --> 00:09:20,010 have that suspicion. 138 00:09:20,010 --> 00:09:21,800 In any case, what's going on here 139 00:09:21,800 --> 00:09:23,050 is what is called a shape up. 140 00:09:23,050 --> 00:09:25,580 Men are gathered around, men who are unemployed, 141 00:09:25,580 --> 00:09:27,414 looking for work. 142 00:09:27,414 --> 00:09:29,342 [SPEAKING ITALIAN] 143 00:12:05,764 --> 00:12:07,930 DAVID THORBURN: I wish I could let the scene run on. 144 00:12:07,930 --> 00:12:10,410 But I hope you, I hope you-- I can tell some of you 145 00:12:10,410 --> 00:12:12,550 are responding to what you saw there. 146 00:12:12,550 --> 00:12:15,080 Make some observations about what you saw there. 147 00:12:15,080 --> 00:12:19,020 What in that introduction what do we learn as an audience? 148 00:12:19,020 --> 00:12:19,960 You have to be fast. 149 00:12:19,960 --> 00:12:21,252 I only have a few minutes here. 150 00:12:21,252 --> 00:12:21,751 Yes? 151 00:12:21,751 --> 00:12:23,500 AUDIENCE: Is there a way for [INAUDIBLE]? 152 00:12:23,500 --> 00:12:23,850 DAVID THORBURN: All right. 153 00:12:23,850 --> 00:12:25,225 One thing we know is that there's 154 00:12:25,225 --> 00:12:27,630 a lot of unemployment in this country, a lot, right? 155 00:12:27,630 --> 00:12:29,230 And there's a lot of discontent. 156 00:12:29,230 --> 00:12:31,771 And then the minute he says, I don't have a bicycle, 157 00:12:31,771 --> 00:12:34,270 virtually everyone else in the crowd says, I have a bicycle. 158 00:12:34,270 --> 00:12:36,340 Everyone is desperate for a job, not just Ricci. 159 00:12:36,340 --> 00:12:37,680 That's right. 160 00:12:37,680 --> 00:12:43,410 So we learn how grateful he is, but also how troubled he is. 161 00:12:43,410 --> 00:12:46,490 What's the evidence in the film that he is really very 162 00:12:46,490 --> 00:12:48,750 unhappy, very, very troubled by the fact 163 00:12:48,750 --> 00:12:51,940 that he doesn't have a bicycle to get this job after so long? 164 00:12:51,940 --> 00:12:53,790 What's the most dramatic piece of evidence 165 00:12:53,790 --> 00:12:56,830 we see that he's distracted by his anxiety? 166 00:12:59,595 --> 00:13:00,549 Help? 167 00:13:00,549 --> 00:13:01,510 AUDIENCE: He doesn't help her with the water. 168 00:13:01,510 --> 00:13:03,030 DAVID THORBURN: He doesn't help his wife with the water. 169 00:13:03,030 --> 00:13:03,530 Yes. 170 00:13:03,530 --> 00:13:06,320 It's a very dramatic scene, isn't it? 171 00:13:06,320 --> 00:13:09,050 She's walking behind him, carrying these two heavy-- 172 00:13:09,050 --> 00:13:13,110 and he doesn't ignore because he's a nasty patriarch who 173 00:13:13,110 --> 00:13:15,530 thinks that women should carry water, 174 00:13:15,530 --> 00:13:18,030 he's so distracted he doesn't notice it. 175 00:13:18,030 --> 00:13:22,430 And, in fact, he walks down that little incline 176 00:13:22,430 --> 00:13:25,070 and looks back and sees her struggling, goes back, 177 00:13:25,070 --> 00:13:27,362 and as soon as he recognizes it, he takes one from her. 178 00:13:27,362 --> 00:13:29,611 And it's significant, isn't it, that he takes only one 179 00:13:29,611 --> 00:13:30,200 from her. 180 00:13:30,200 --> 00:13:31,740 They're really partners. 181 00:13:31,740 --> 00:13:34,070 And what else is significant? 182 00:13:34,070 --> 00:13:35,190 She doesn't yell at him. 183 00:13:35,190 --> 00:13:37,730 She doesn't say, my god, Ricci, what kind of a pig 184 00:13:37,730 --> 00:13:40,470 are you, making me carry all this stuff by myself? 185 00:13:40,470 --> 00:13:47,090 because she shares his anxiety and his concern, doesn't she? 186 00:13:47,090 --> 00:13:52,200 So on the surface, the scenes certainly 187 00:13:52,200 --> 00:13:56,125 dramatizes Ricci's desperate need for a job and the fact 188 00:13:56,125 --> 00:13:59,340 that he's one of many people in a similar situation. 189 00:13:59,340 --> 00:14:01,920 But what does it tell us about his marriage? 190 00:14:01,920 --> 00:14:03,792 On the basis of these details, what you just 191 00:14:03,792 --> 00:14:05,250 saw in this beginning, do you think 192 00:14:05,250 --> 00:14:07,560 he has a good marriage, that he has 193 00:14:07,560 --> 00:14:09,080 a good relationship with his wife, 194 00:14:09,080 --> 00:14:12,170 that it's a mutually trusting relationship? 195 00:14:12,170 --> 00:14:14,320 Of course, of course, right? 196 00:14:14,320 --> 00:14:15,720 And how do we know that? 197 00:14:15,720 --> 00:14:17,280 We know that from that detail. 198 00:14:17,280 --> 00:14:20,150 Now, the detail does not advance the plot 199 00:14:20,150 --> 00:14:22,820 in the sense of telling us anything further 200 00:14:22,820 --> 00:14:25,730 about his need for the bicycle or his unemployment, 201 00:14:25,730 --> 00:14:28,260 but it does reveal to us something about their marriage, 202 00:14:28,260 --> 00:14:32,610 about the kind of man he is, about the kind of woman she is. 203 00:14:32,610 --> 00:14:36,220 So that it's a moment in which his anxiety about his job 204 00:14:36,220 --> 00:14:38,440 is maybe the primary thing we see, 205 00:14:38,440 --> 00:14:40,180 but what is also dramatized for us 206 00:14:40,180 --> 00:14:42,132 is the nature of their relationship. 207 00:14:42,132 --> 00:14:43,840 And it's dramatized for us without anyone 208 00:14:43,840 --> 00:14:45,790 coming out and saying, let me show you 209 00:14:45,790 --> 00:14:48,780 a mutually engaged couple who depend on each other 210 00:14:48,780 --> 00:14:50,500 and who survive in part because they 211 00:14:50,500 --> 00:14:52,130 share each other's troubles. 212 00:14:52,130 --> 00:14:53,610 People whose respect for each other 213 00:14:53,610 --> 00:14:55,880 is so total that even when one of them 214 00:14:55,880 --> 00:15:03,300 commits a really mean or at least an unpleasant act 215 00:15:03,300 --> 00:15:07,450 by ignoring his wife struggles, she doesn't even 216 00:15:07,450 --> 00:15:09,020 think to complain to him about it, 217 00:15:09,020 --> 00:15:12,920 because she shares his anxiety. 218 00:15:12,920 --> 00:15:15,620 It's an example of what I mean by a moment of multiplicity 219 00:15:15,620 --> 00:15:17,920 in which something about their relationship, something 220 00:15:17,920 --> 00:15:21,410 about their marriage emerges even as we are also learning 221 00:15:21,410 --> 00:15:23,730 something about the economic circumstances in which 222 00:15:23,730 --> 00:15:25,090 these characters live. 223 00:15:25,090 --> 00:15:27,530 Say a little bit more about the scene you saw. 224 00:15:27,530 --> 00:15:29,724 How about the place where she's drawing water? 225 00:15:29,724 --> 00:15:30,390 What about that? 226 00:15:30,390 --> 00:15:33,140 Why would-- They're in a city. 227 00:15:33,140 --> 00:15:35,770 They're walking, in fact, to a high rise apartment 228 00:15:35,770 --> 00:15:37,150 house in which they live. 229 00:15:37,150 --> 00:15:39,760 What does it mean that she's carrying two buckets of water 230 00:15:39,760 --> 00:15:41,260 to an apartment and then she's going 231 00:15:41,260 --> 00:15:43,160 to climb up four flights or three flights 232 00:15:43,160 --> 00:15:44,420 to get to their apartment? 233 00:15:44,420 --> 00:15:47,312 What does that tell us about Mussolini's Italy? 234 00:15:47,312 --> 00:15:48,770 AUDIENCE: There's no running water. 235 00:15:48,770 --> 00:15:51,145 DAVID THORBURN: There's no running water in the building, 236 00:15:51,145 --> 00:15:54,170 in the high rise apartments. 237 00:15:54,170 --> 00:15:57,380 And not just that, is the water precious? 238 00:15:57,380 --> 00:15:58,801 How do you know it is? 239 00:15:58,801 --> 00:16:00,447 AUDIENCE: She doesn't leave it there. 240 00:16:00,447 --> 00:16:01,280 DAVID THORBURN: Say? 241 00:16:01,280 --> 00:16:02,980 AUDIENCE: She doesn't leave it there. 242 00:16:02,980 --> 00:16:03,380 DAVID THORBURN: Yes. 243 00:16:03,380 --> 00:16:03,850 But what else? 244 00:16:03,850 --> 00:16:05,016 Where do they get the water? 245 00:16:05,016 --> 00:16:07,680 Is the water-- do they go to a pop in the open square? 246 00:16:07,680 --> 00:16:08,180 No. 247 00:16:08,180 --> 00:16:10,400 It's in a barbed wire compound. 248 00:16:10,400 --> 00:16:13,790 Again, these details may not register instantly as deeply 249 00:16:13,790 --> 00:16:15,620 significant, but think what they tell us 250 00:16:15,620 --> 00:16:20,550 about the conditions of urban life in Rome in 1947 or 1948 251 00:16:20,550 --> 00:16:22,710 when the film is set. 252 00:16:22,710 --> 00:16:24,530 And you can even go further. 253 00:16:24,530 --> 00:16:26,500 Look more closely at the setting. 254 00:16:26,500 --> 00:16:27,880 Did anything grow there? 255 00:16:27,880 --> 00:16:30,530 It looked like they were walking across a wasteland of mud, 256 00:16:30,530 --> 00:16:33,590 except for these high rise tenement buildings. 257 00:16:33,590 --> 00:16:35,590 So we have high rise tenement buildings set down 258 00:16:35,590 --> 00:16:39,660 in a kind of desert, a place in-- buildings that don't even 259 00:16:39,660 --> 00:16:44,150 have running water in which the main water pump has 260 00:16:44,150 --> 00:16:46,290 to be protected by barbed wire. 261 00:16:46,290 --> 00:16:49,640 So that it's almost as if in this brief introduction 262 00:16:49,640 --> 00:16:52,540 to the film, the whole socioeconomic environment 263 00:16:52,540 --> 00:16:55,060 of the story has been established for us 264 00:16:55,060 --> 00:16:56,810 without anyone giving us lectures about it 265 00:16:56,810 --> 00:16:58,340 or calling our attention to it. 266 00:16:58,340 --> 00:17:00,190 That's what I mean by multiplicity, 267 00:17:00,190 --> 00:17:04,069 when the details of the film serve character and serve plot 268 00:17:04,069 --> 00:17:07,680 and serve our sense of the environment. 269 00:17:07,680 --> 00:17:09,240 So it's a rich moment. 270 00:17:09,240 --> 00:17:11,280 It's a moment, it's a moment of art. 271 00:17:11,280 --> 00:17:12,770 It's a moment of complexity. 272 00:17:12,770 --> 00:17:15,910 It's a moment of human truthfulness 273 00:17:15,910 --> 00:17:20,930 that resonates for us as the film goes on. 274 00:17:20,930 --> 00:17:23,619 Well, there are many, many moments like this. 275 00:17:23,619 --> 00:17:26,290 Virtually every moment in Bicycle 276 00:17:26,290 --> 00:17:29,960 Thieves has this kind of density or texture, 277 00:17:29,960 --> 00:17:32,900 has this kind of implication built 278 00:17:32,900 --> 00:17:35,370 into the particular details. 279 00:17:35,370 --> 00:17:37,810 I want to very quickly set the kind of the context 280 00:17:37,810 --> 00:17:40,260 for-- I've already implied the context 281 00:17:40,260 --> 00:17:42,760 for the neorealist movement. 282 00:17:42,760 --> 00:17:46,350 The basic context is the end of World War II. 283 00:17:46,350 --> 00:17:48,460 Most historians trace the beginnings 284 00:17:48,460 --> 00:17:50,740 of the neorealist movement to films 285 00:17:50,740 --> 00:17:55,010 that were made under Mussolini while the war was still 286 00:17:55,010 --> 00:17:57,130 going on, and some people actually 287 00:17:57,130 --> 00:18:01,990 date the very beginning of the movement 288 00:18:01,990 --> 00:18:06,540 to a film made in 1942 by Luchino Visconti called 289 00:18:06,540 --> 00:18:08,100 Obsession. 290 00:18:08,100 --> 00:18:14,380 It's actually an adaptation of a very popular American pulp 291 00:18:14,380 --> 00:18:18,260 novel called The Postman Always Rings Twice. 292 00:18:18,260 --> 00:18:20,880 It's been made twice into an English language 293 00:18:20,880 --> 00:18:26,240 American movie, most recently starring Jack Nicholson. 294 00:18:26,240 --> 00:18:28,840 But the Italian version may be the most 295 00:18:28,840 --> 00:18:33,040 important and interesting of the films made from the book. 296 00:18:33,040 --> 00:18:37,920 The book itself is a rather tawdry noirish 297 00:18:37,920 --> 00:18:45,340 story about the owner of a diner who's 298 00:18:45,340 --> 00:18:48,910 an ugly middle-aged pug who's married to a beautiful 299 00:18:48,910 --> 00:18:53,500 and somewhat younger woman who very unhappy with her husband 300 00:18:53,500 --> 00:18:55,530 begins an affair with a drifter who 301 00:18:55,530 --> 00:19:02,210 comes by, and ultimately encourages the drifter 302 00:19:02,210 --> 00:19:04,510 to kill her husband. 303 00:19:04,510 --> 00:19:10,810 And it's actually a rather heavy-handed male chauvinist 304 00:19:10,810 --> 00:19:17,090 fantasy about, partly about, how cunning and dangerous women 305 00:19:17,090 --> 00:19:17,750 are. 306 00:19:17,750 --> 00:19:20,250 The Italian version is much more interesting, in part 307 00:19:20,250 --> 00:19:23,230 because the working class dimensions of the story 308 00:19:23,230 --> 00:19:26,720 are given much greater emphasis in Luchino Visconti's version. 309 00:19:26,720 --> 00:19:29,850 And the film partly becomes a kind of meditation 310 00:19:29,850 --> 00:19:32,770 on the fate of undocumented workers 311 00:19:32,770 --> 00:19:39,700 and nonunion workers in Italian society. 312 00:19:39,700 --> 00:19:42,370 In any case, the emphasis on ordinary people 313 00:19:42,370 --> 00:19:45,480 and the emphasis on socioeconomic circumstances 314 00:19:45,480 --> 00:19:49,820 in that film by Visconti came to be defining features, 315 00:19:49,820 --> 00:19:54,970 among the defining features of Italian neorealist filmmaking. 316 00:19:54,970 --> 00:19:58,030 But the movement really doesn't get going until after the war. 317 00:19:58,030 --> 00:20:00,930 And the context of the war is very important. 318 00:20:00,930 --> 00:20:03,700 We need to recognize that the film is really 319 00:20:03,700 --> 00:20:08,900 set in a devastated society, a society in which, I'm talking 320 00:20:08,900 --> 00:20:11,350 now about all of Europe after the Second World War, 321 00:20:11,350 --> 00:20:16,980 unemployment reached 25% or 30% higher in some societies. 322 00:20:16,980 --> 00:20:18,920 There was economic turmoil in virtually 323 00:20:18,920 --> 00:20:22,330 every European society, profound terrible pressures 324 00:20:22,330 --> 00:20:27,530 from black market activities of all kinds. 325 00:20:27,530 --> 00:20:29,790 The war was so devastating that something 326 00:20:29,790 --> 00:20:34,680 on the order of 35% of all the permanent dwellings in Western 327 00:20:34,680 --> 00:20:37,630 Europe were destroyed during the war. 328 00:20:37,630 --> 00:20:41,270 25% of the Polish population was killed. 329 00:20:41,270 --> 00:20:44,710 A tremendous proportion, virtually every-- Well, 330 00:20:44,710 --> 00:20:48,099 a very large number of Italian cities were damaged very badly, 331 00:20:48,099 --> 00:20:49,515 including, of course, Rome itself. 332 00:20:52,040 --> 00:20:55,870 And these abject and terrifying economic conditions 333 00:20:55,870 --> 00:21:00,250 were, of course, in Italy doubled by the problem 334 00:21:00,250 --> 00:21:02,340 that Italy was on the losing side of the war 335 00:21:02,340 --> 00:21:09,250 and therefore faced even more difficulties 336 00:21:09,250 --> 00:21:14,280 in the recovery than a culture like the French culture 337 00:21:14,280 --> 00:21:17,420 or English society. 338 00:21:17,420 --> 00:21:20,810 So the devastation of World War II and the turmoil 339 00:21:20,810 --> 00:21:24,330 and the dislocation caused by World War II 340 00:21:24,330 --> 00:21:25,860 is the fundamental fact. 341 00:21:25,860 --> 00:21:29,050 What is still operative in Italian society, what 342 00:21:29,050 --> 00:21:32,460 institutions still work, is one of the implicit questions 343 00:21:32,460 --> 00:21:33,530 that the film explores. 344 00:21:33,530 --> 00:21:36,930 And the film suggests that a lot of the official institutions, 345 00:21:36,930 --> 00:21:41,640 like the police and especially the religious institutions, 346 00:21:41,640 --> 00:21:44,400 have broken down and are not really helping people 347 00:21:44,400 --> 00:21:47,470 very much, as you'll see when you watch tonight's film. 348 00:21:47,470 --> 00:21:52,685 But there are other forms of help and aid 349 00:21:52,685 --> 00:21:55,460 that people get, mostly in some sense from their, 350 00:21:55,460 --> 00:21:59,110 the film suggests, from their local communities 351 00:21:59,110 --> 00:22:01,110 and from their immediate families. 352 00:22:01,110 --> 00:22:03,400 Well, to this basic sort of setting 353 00:22:03,400 --> 00:22:07,770 of devastation and turmoil and economic uncertainty, 354 00:22:07,770 --> 00:22:11,710 we need to add two other contextual factors, 355 00:22:11,710 --> 00:22:13,580 both of them having to do with the film 356 00:22:13,580 --> 00:22:16,890 traditions against which neorealism set itself, 357 00:22:16,890 --> 00:22:21,200 against which it understood itself to be 358 00:22:21,200 --> 00:22:24,140 in a kind of profound argument. 359 00:22:24,140 --> 00:22:27,720 The first tradition was the tradition of fascist film 360 00:22:27,720 --> 00:22:29,360 under Mussolini. 361 00:22:29,360 --> 00:22:31,800 These were almost all studio films. 362 00:22:31,800 --> 00:22:33,570 They were shot inside studios. 363 00:22:33,570 --> 00:22:36,280 Neorealist films are shot outdoors. 364 00:22:36,280 --> 00:22:42,750 And they were largely escapist fare 365 00:22:42,750 --> 00:22:46,650 focusing more often than not on the upper social orders. 366 00:22:46,650 --> 00:22:49,900 In fact, there was a genre of films so devoted 367 00:22:49,900 --> 00:22:52,740 to the romantic entanglements of aristocrats 368 00:22:52,740 --> 00:22:56,650 that they came to be known as white telephone films. 369 00:22:56,650 --> 00:23:01,000 The reason for this is that in the old days before cellphones 370 00:23:01,000 --> 00:23:05,970 and before multicolored phones, all telephones were black. 371 00:23:05,970 --> 00:23:11,470 And it was a mark of astonishing aristocratic privilege 372 00:23:11,470 --> 00:23:14,540 that the people in some of these films had white telephones. 373 00:23:14,540 --> 00:23:16,762 They were such unusual objects for the time 374 00:23:16,762 --> 00:23:18,970 that the film's came to be labeled as white telephone 375 00:23:18,970 --> 00:23:19,470 films. 376 00:23:19,470 --> 00:23:21,030 And they were largely, as I said, 377 00:23:21,030 --> 00:23:26,960 escapist movies with beautifully made up actors and actresses 378 00:23:26,960 --> 00:23:29,790 in artificial light, performing what were essentially 379 00:23:29,790 --> 00:23:31,270 artificial stories. 380 00:23:31,270 --> 00:23:34,800 The second tradition against which the neorealists are 381 00:23:34,800 --> 00:23:37,280 responding, against which they are reacting, 382 00:23:37,280 --> 00:23:40,020 is the tradition of Hollywood glamor. 383 00:23:40,020 --> 00:23:42,430 There's a wonderful moment in The Bicycle Thief 384 00:23:42,430 --> 00:23:45,120 as you'll see tonight when Ricci finally 385 00:23:45,120 --> 00:23:46,520 goes off to get his job. 386 00:23:46,520 --> 00:23:48,890 He recovers his bicycle from hock. 387 00:23:48,890 --> 00:23:50,859 He's pawned it. 388 00:23:50,859 --> 00:23:52,150 And that's why he's so nervous. 389 00:23:52,150 --> 00:23:53,691 He knows where the bicycle is, but he 390 00:23:53,691 --> 00:23:55,944 doesn't know how they're going to get out of pawn. 391 00:23:55,944 --> 00:23:57,360 And you'll see how his wife solves 392 00:23:57,360 --> 00:24:01,520 that problem in the very next sequence beyond the one I've 393 00:24:01,520 --> 00:24:03,730 just shown to you. 394 00:24:03,730 --> 00:24:05,931 When Ricci finally goes to work for the first time, 395 00:24:05,931 --> 00:24:07,930 he has someone with him giving him instructions, 396 00:24:07,930 --> 00:24:09,760 and what he is a bill sticker. 397 00:24:09,760 --> 00:24:11,744 He puts up posters, great pos-- In fact, 398 00:24:11,744 --> 00:24:13,160 the poster that he's putting up is 399 00:24:13,160 --> 00:24:15,050 a poster for an American movie. 400 00:24:15,050 --> 00:24:17,240 And it has a great American, a famous American movie 401 00:24:17,240 --> 00:24:20,560 star of the '40s and '50s, Rita Hayworth, on it. 402 00:24:20,560 --> 00:24:23,437 And as he's putting the picture up-- 403 00:24:23,437 --> 00:24:25,020 you put paste on the board, then you-- 404 00:24:25,020 --> 00:24:27,200 he's given these stupid instructions. 405 00:24:27,200 --> 00:24:30,110 Anyone could do this job, but the man giving him instructions 406 00:24:30,110 --> 00:24:35,460 acts as if he's explaining something really difficult 407 00:24:35,460 --> 00:24:38,240 like rocket science, when all he's doing 408 00:24:38,240 --> 00:24:42,650 is telling him how to paste a poster up on a board. 409 00:24:42,650 --> 00:24:46,680 But his instructions include systematic remarks 410 00:24:46,680 --> 00:24:49,780 about being sure not to leave any wrinkles in it. 411 00:24:49,780 --> 00:24:52,710 And I've taken that myself to be a kind of implicit complaint 412 00:24:52,710 --> 00:24:54,295 against Hollywood. 413 00:24:54,295 --> 00:24:58,530 They'll say the Hollywood female has no wrinkles. 414 00:24:58,530 --> 00:25:01,710 The Hollywood female, the Hollywood star, the Hollywood 415 00:25:01,710 --> 00:25:06,330 movie is so glamorized that you never see wrinkles or defects. 416 00:25:06,330 --> 00:25:08,800 And this couldn't contrast more shortly 417 00:25:08,800 --> 00:25:11,030 with the ordinary faces of the actors 418 00:25:11,030 --> 00:25:13,260 that we see in neorealist films. 419 00:25:13,260 --> 00:25:18,180 So two traditions of glamor and escapism 420 00:25:18,180 --> 00:25:23,750 are essentially the antagonist that 421 00:25:23,750 --> 00:25:29,530 help to explain how neorealism defines itself and understands 422 00:25:29,530 --> 00:25:30,470 itself. 423 00:25:30,470 --> 00:25:33,470 It's worth briefly mentioning that neorealism 424 00:25:33,470 --> 00:25:36,950 has distinguished origins in at least three 425 00:25:36,950 --> 00:25:38,880 different national cinemas. 426 00:25:38,880 --> 00:25:43,130 The first is in Italian cinema itself. 427 00:25:43,130 --> 00:25:45,490 There was a movement during the silent era, 428 00:25:45,490 --> 00:25:48,920 a kind of documentary movement, that wanted to talk-- 429 00:25:48,920 --> 00:25:50,740 a quasi-documentary movement. 430 00:25:50,740 --> 00:25:52,430 They were still fiction films. 431 00:25:52,430 --> 00:25:55,370 But they wanted to talk more openly and honestly 432 00:25:55,370 --> 00:25:58,370 about contemporary events in contemporary society. 433 00:25:58,370 --> 00:26:01,320 And the movement was called the verismo movement, the truth 434 00:26:01,320 --> 00:26:02,580 movement. 435 00:26:02,580 --> 00:26:05,590 And it occurred between 1914 and 1916 in Italy. 436 00:26:05,590 --> 00:26:06,360 And this-- 437 00:26:06,360 --> 00:26:12,660 When the neorealists began to articulate their own manifestos 438 00:26:12,660 --> 00:26:15,560 and to explain theoretically what they were up to, 439 00:26:15,560 --> 00:26:18,730 they sometimes reached back to the verismo movement, 440 00:26:18,730 --> 00:26:20,590 as a way of saying we're actually 441 00:26:20,590 --> 00:26:22,070 traditional as well as new. 442 00:26:22,070 --> 00:26:25,870 A second fundamental influence on neorealism, 443 00:26:25,870 --> 00:26:27,960 a kind of earlier version of neorealism, 444 00:26:27,960 --> 00:26:31,890 occurred in the German tradition at the end of the silent era 445 00:26:31,890 --> 00:26:36,720 in a series of films made in the 1920s by the director GW Pabst, 446 00:26:36,720 --> 00:26:41,200 P-A-B-S-T. The most famous of these films is a film produced 447 00:26:41,200 --> 00:26:43,970 in 1925 called The Joyless Street. 448 00:26:43,970 --> 00:26:47,560 It partly deals with prostitutes, and it talks, 449 00:26:47,560 --> 00:26:50,250 it tries to dramatize in realistic ways 450 00:26:50,250 --> 00:26:53,310 the conditions of the lower social orders. 451 00:26:53,310 --> 00:26:57,760 And of course the final originating source, 452 00:26:57,760 --> 00:27:00,150 this also explains the richness of neorealism 453 00:27:00,150 --> 00:27:03,400 that there are other film traditions that 454 00:27:03,400 --> 00:27:06,470 are feeding in to it and enriching it, is French, 455 00:27:06,470 --> 00:27:09,240 and it's the kind of French film that we 456 00:27:09,240 --> 00:27:12,040 associate with Jean Renoir and with the traditions 457 00:27:12,040 --> 00:27:14,970 of poetic realism. 458 00:27:14,970 --> 00:27:18,290 Some of the neorealist, at least one of the neorealist directors 459 00:27:18,290 --> 00:27:20,790 Visconti, had worked as an assistant director 460 00:27:20,790 --> 00:27:23,600 for Jean Renoir at one point in his career. 461 00:27:23,600 --> 00:27:26,630 And I believe, I'm not sure this is accurate, 462 00:27:26,630 --> 00:27:28,250 so don't take this as absolute fact, 463 00:27:28,250 --> 00:27:31,400 but I believe that it was Renoir himself 464 00:27:31,400 --> 00:27:33,630 who gave a copy of The Postman Always Rings 465 00:27:33,630 --> 00:27:38,640 Twice to Visconti, which led to the creation of what 466 00:27:38,640 --> 00:27:43,770 many people would identify as the very first neorealist film. 467 00:27:43,770 --> 00:27:48,040 The basic practices and traditions of poetic realism 468 00:27:48,040 --> 00:27:50,270 are carried over in neorealism. 469 00:27:50,270 --> 00:27:52,200 And in one sense, one can see neorealism 470 00:27:52,200 --> 00:27:54,510 as an extension of poetic realism. 471 00:27:54,510 --> 00:27:56,630 The difference is that neorealism 472 00:27:56,630 --> 00:28:00,990 has a more political and social orientation. 473 00:28:00,990 --> 00:28:04,280 It's more conscious of having a political and social ambition. 474 00:28:04,280 --> 00:28:09,770 It wants to-- And sometimes neorealist films 475 00:28:09,770 --> 00:28:13,130 can seem a bit preachy because of that. 476 00:28:13,130 --> 00:28:17,980 There's clearly a kind of sentiment 477 00:28:17,980 --> 00:28:20,700 deeply sympathetic to the lower social orders, deeply 478 00:28:20,700 --> 00:28:23,990 suspicious of the hierarchies of capitalism. 479 00:28:23,990 --> 00:28:26,440 Some of the neorealists were Marxists 480 00:28:26,440 --> 00:28:29,090 or Marxist sympathizers, and that 481 00:28:29,090 --> 00:28:31,300 helps to explain the political orientation 482 00:28:31,300 --> 00:28:33,130 of neorealist films. 483 00:28:33,130 --> 00:28:35,230 But the basic features of poetic realism, 484 00:28:35,230 --> 00:28:38,887 the use of an outdoor camera, the interest in a mise en scene 485 00:28:38,887 --> 00:28:43,930 style, and in a film made by, which I mentioned I think last 486 00:28:43,930 --> 00:28:49,000 time, made by Renoir in 1935, a film called Toni T-O-N-I. 487 00:28:49,000 --> 00:28:52,340 We have a French version of neorealism, because that film, 488 00:28:52,340 --> 00:28:55,870 as I mentioned last time, is about Italian quarry workers 489 00:28:55,870 --> 00:28:59,680 in the south of France, and it has a lot of nonprofessional 490 00:28:59,680 --> 00:29:02,770 actors in it, something that became a key feature 491 00:29:02,770 --> 00:29:03,840 of neorealism. 492 00:29:03,840 --> 00:29:08,570 So the neorealist movement then has this powerful context 493 00:29:08,570 --> 00:29:13,140 which creates a kind of moral and aesthetic energy 494 00:29:13,140 --> 00:29:15,930 that helps to explain the power and the excitement 495 00:29:15,930 --> 00:29:17,350 of these films. 496 00:29:17,350 --> 00:29:20,720 It has two very clear antagonists, 497 00:29:20,720 --> 00:29:25,540 the glamor of Hollywood and the false and aristocratic glamor 498 00:29:25,540 --> 00:29:27,620 of the film under Mussolini. 499 00:29:27,620 --> 00:29:32,250 And it also draws as well on older traditions 500 00:29:32,250 --> 00:29:35,620 of film in Italian, in German, and in French 501 00:29:35,620 --> 00:29:38,360 that set earlier examples for the kind of thing 502 00:29:38,360 --> 00:29:40,420 that the neorealists wanted to do. 503 00:29:40,420 --> 00:29:44,850 I've already talked about the key features of neorealism 504 00:29:44,850 --> 00:29:48,590 just a second ago when I spoke about poetic realism. 505 00:29:48,590 --> 00:29:51,730 But let me mention some of those key features in a little bit 506 00:29:51,730 --> 00:29:52,900 more detail. 507 00:29:52,900 --> 00:29:55,120 One way to think about neorealist films 508 00:29:55,120 --> 00:29:58,080 is to recognize that their emphasis on reality 509 00:29:58,080 --> 00:30:02,480 is one which insists on trying to create 510 00:30:02,480 --> 00:30:06,590 an illusion of a plausible actuality. 511 00:30:06,590 --> 00:30:08,700 And what this meant to them was, listen, 512 00:30:08,700 --> 00:30:10,740 people have warts on their noses. 513 00:30:10,740 --> 00:30:13,400 People are not beautiful the way they are in Hollywood. 514 00:30:13,400 --> 00:30:15,910 So one thing we need to do is we need to roughen up 515 00:30:15,910 --> 00:30:17,260 the look of our performers. 516 00:30:17,260 --> 00:30:20,200 And in fact, professional actors, it was felt, 517 00:30:20,200 --> 00:30:23,000 often bring a kind of smoothness or a fluidity 518 00:30:23,000 --> 00:30:26,250 to their performance that is inherently artificial. 519 00:30:26,250 --> 00:30:28,940 So many neorealist films have no or virtually 520 00:30:28,940 --> 00:30:31,890 no professional actors in them, or sometimes only 521 00:30:31,890 --> 00:30:34,164 professional actors in the major roles. 522 00:30:34,164 --> 00:30:35,830 In the film you're going to see tonight, 523 00:30:35,830 --> 00:30:38,080 the star is a nonprofessional actor. 524 00:30:38,080 --> 00:30:40,670 He actually ended up having a tragic life. 525 00:30:40,670 --> 00:30:43,040 The film won the Academy Award as the best foreign film 526 00:30:43,040 --> 00:30:47,130 of the year in America in 1948, and the man who 527 00:30:47,130 --> 00:30:49,790 played Ricci became an international star, 528 00:30:49,790 --> 00:30:56,380 but he fell into hard times and ended up not really making 529 00:30:56,380 --> 00:31:02,400 much money from his very brief stardom, 530 00:31:02,400 --> 00:31:08,050 and my understanding is that he never again 531 00:31:08,050 --> 00:31:10,764 made a film as remarkable as The Bicycle Thief. 532 00:31:10,764 --> 00:31:12,430 But one of the things that is absolutely 533 00:31:12,430 --> 00:31:13,805 astonishing about the performance 534 00:31:13,805 --> 00:31:15,339 is that this man is not an actor. 535 00:31:15,339 --> 00:31:16,380 You would never guess it. 536 00:31:16,380 --> 00:31:18,700 I mean, it's an absolute-- or maybe you would, 537 00:31:18,700 --> 00:31:22,620 but you would guess it only after having been told that. 538 00:31:22,620 --> 00:31:26,480 Because he performs with such naturalness and such grace. 539 00:31:26,480 --> 00:31:28,920 So the use of nonprofessional actors 540 00:31:28,920 --> 00:31:31,280 is one of the key features of neorealism. 541 00:31:31,280 --> 00:31:34,970 A second key feature is a rejection of studio filming. 542 00:31:34,970 --> 00:31:36,780 All neorealist films, like almost 543 00:31:36,780 --> 00:31:41,600 all poetic realist films, were shot outdoors in natural light. 544 00:31:41,600 --> 00:31:43,570 Partly because they wanted natural light, 545 00:31:43,570 --> 00:31:46,990 and partly because studios lie about the texture of the world. 546 00:31:46,990 --> 00:31:49,250 We want the texture of the world in our films, 547 00:31:49,250 --> 00:31:51,550 the neo-- Our films are really about reality, 548 00:31:51,550 --> 00:31:54,990 so we can't shoot indoors. 549 00:31:54,990 --> 00:31:57,280 A third-- nonprofessional actors, 550 00:31:57,280 --> 00:31:59,600 outdoor camera, a third feature would 551 00:31:59,600 --> 00:32:01,860 be what we might call a fundamental mise en scene 552 00:32:01,860 --> 00:32:07,280 style, taken directly from the stylistic habits established 553 00:32:07,280 --> 00:32:10,010 by Jean Renoir and other French directors who 554 00:32:10,010 --> 00:32:12,580 worked in the same style. 555 00:32:12,580 --> 00:32:15,060 Relatively modest forms of editing. 556 00:32:15,060 --> 00:32:19,090 The forms of montage that you see are not disruptive. 557 00:32:19,090 --> 00:32:23,060 You won't get jump cuts or disorienting moments. 558 00:32:23,060 --> 00:32:27,040 The camera, the camera is, as with Renoir, constantly 559 00:32:27,040 --> 00:32:30,300 restless and in motion, but often in very gentle ways. 560 00:32:30,300 --> 00:32:32,570 There's a wonderful moment in the scene 561 00:32:32,570 --> 00:32:36,430 I mentioned a moment ago where we see Ricci putting up 562 00:32:36,430 --> 00:32:39,460 his first poster when the camera is watching them, 563 00:32:39,460 --> 00:32:40,962 and he's getting these instructions 564 00:32:40,962 --> 00:32:42,920 from his comrade about how to put the thing up, 565 00:32:42,920 --> 00:32:44,690 and it's really boring. 566 00:32:44,690 --> 00:32:48,100 Well, one reason that you know it's boring-- well, obviously 567 00:32:48,100 --> 00:32:50,849 as a viewer, you begin to probably feel it 568 00:32:50,849 --> 00:32:52,390 without registering that it's boring, 569 00:32:52,390 --> 00:32:53,885 but the reason that you know it is 570 00:32:53,885 --> 00:32:55,810 is that the camera suddenly looks away. 571 00:32:55,810 --> 00:32:58,480 What happens is the camera discovers something interesting 572 00:32:58,480 --> 00:33:00,750 happening on the street and while the conversation 573 00:33:00,750 --> 00:33:02,800 continues on the soundtrack, the camera 574 00:33:02,800 --> 00:33:05,330 shifts away from Ricci and his instructor, 575 00:33:05,330 --> 00:33:08,390 and follows a wealthy man and two children 576 00:33:08,390 --> 00:33:09,940 who are walking behind him. 577 00:33:09,940 --> 00:33:12,310 And they're really beggars trying to get money from him. 578 00:33:12,310 --> 00:33:14,610 And the camera just found it interesting, 579 00:33:14,610 --> 00:33:17,480 so it looked at it, a very Jean Renoir-ish move. 580 00:33:17,480 --> 00:33:20,140 There are other moves like this in the film, 581 00:33:20,140 --> 00:33:22,960 as if the camera, like Jean Renoir's camera, 582 00:33:22,960 --> 00:33:25,370 is so interested in the world that it's 583 00:33:25,370 --> 00:33:27,330 capable of being distracted. 584 00:33:27,330 --> 00:33:30,020 There's a sense that the world's complexity is always 585 00:33:30,020 --> 00:33:35,530 threatening the coherences and meanings that the film is 586 00:33:35,530 --> 00:33:36,700 releasing for us. 587 00:33:36,700 --> 00:33:40,540 So nonprofessional actors, outdoor filming, 588 00:33:40,540 --> 00:33:44,150 a mise en scene, a profound serious mise en scene style 589 00:33:44,150 --> 00:33:46,650 influenced deeply by Jean Renoir, 590 00:33:46,650 --> 00:33:50,690 and finally, we might maybe another-- not finally, 591 00:33:50,690 --> 00:33:53,210 one more, a fourth feature, we might say 592 00:33:53,210 --> 00:33:55,420 is what I was trying to indicate when 593 00:33:55,420 --> 00:33:58,672 I talked about the social or political bias of these films. 594 00:33:58,672 --> 00:34:00,880 One might say that these films have a more profoundly 595 00:34:00,880 --> 00:34:02,470 documentary flavor. 596 00:34:02,470 --> 00:34:04,990 I don't mean that we feel we're watching documentaries. 597 00:34:04,990 --> 00:34:08,330 But we do feel we're watching a slice of life, 598 00:34:08,330 --> 00:34:12,150 that the economic and moral and social and personal 599 00:34:12,150 --> 00:34:15,199 circumstances of the characters we see in neorealist films 600 00:34:15,199 --> 00:34:18,279 are a version of what we would find if we walked into Rome not 601 00:34:18,279 --> 00:34:19,820 in a movie and just looked for people 602 00:34:19,820 --> 00:34:22,050 of this class, a documentary flavor. 603 00:34:22,050 --> 00:34:23,380 So that's four features. 604 00:34:23,380 --> 00:34:27,409 And a final feature, I suppose I would want to add, 605 00:34:27,409 --> 00:34:30,080 has to do with the relation between plot and character. 606 00:34:30,080 --> 00:34:33,139 It's not quite true to say that these films are plotless, 607 00:34:33,139 --> 00:34:35,500 they're not, and one of the most magnificent things 608 00:34:35,500 --> 00:34:38,580 about The Bicycle Thief is the economy of its plot, 609 00:34:38,580 --> 00:34:40,260 and I'll talk a bit about that tonight, 610 00:34:40,260 --> 00:34:42,510 but it's nonetheless true that in neorealist films, 611 00:34:42,510 --> 00:34:45,179 you do not feel that action drives events. 612 00:34:45,179 --> 00:34:47,130 What you feel is that character drives 613 00:34:47,130 --> 00:34:50,900 events in some sense, what the plot aims 614 00:34:50,900 --> 00:34:53,409 for is a natural unfolding. 615 00:34:53,409 --> 00:34:57,350 You're never supposed to feel in a neorealist film 616 00:34:57,350 --> 00:35:02,102 that some event in the plot has been introduced arbitrarily. 617 00:35:02,102 --> 00:35:04,060 You're never supposed to step back and say, oh, 618 00:35:04,060 --> 00:35:06,640 that could never happen, or how implausible is that, 619 00:35:06,640 --> 00:35:10,030 or I guess they did that because they wanted to show x. 620 00:35:10,030 --> 00:35:12,110 The kind of response you often have 621 00:35:12,110 --> 00:35:16,990 watching certain forms of Hollywood entertainment 622 00:35:16,990 --> 00:35:22,700 and other forms of merely escapist entertainment fare. 623 00:35:22,700 --> 00:35:25,860 But you don't ever have that feeling in a good neorealist 624 00:35:25,860 --> 00:35:26,360 film. 625 00:35:26,360 --> 00:35:28,680 What you feel is that the events of the plot 626 00:35:28,680 --> 00:35:32,420 unfold naturally out of the economic and social realities 627 00:35:32,420 --> 00:35:34,750 the characters live in and out of their characters. 628 00:35:34,750 --> 00:35:37,090 And you can test this generalization 629 00:35:37,090 --> 00:35:39,090 against tonight's film, and I'm sure that you'll 630 00:35:39,090 --> 00:35:42,620 find that it's a compelling one, that it really describes 631 00:35:42,620 --> 00:35:48,080 this movement's respect for the complexity of character 632 00:35:48,080 --> 00:35:50,630 over plot, for the complexity of character 633 00:35:50,630 --> 00:35:53,880 and therefore for its commitment to a kind of movie 634 00:35:53,880 --> 00:35:55,870 that is more interested in character 635 00:35:55,870 --> 00:35:59,715 than it is in story or event in a narrow sense. 636 00:36:02,710 --> 00:36:04,340 The central figures of neorealism 637 00:36:04,340 --> 00:36:06,150 are important to mention. 638 00:36:06,150 --> 00:36:09,560 And maybe especially the fellow that I have first on my list 639 00:36:09,560 --> 00:36:15,170 here, Cesare Zavattini, because he's the least well-known 640 00:36:15,170 --> 00:36:17,130 of the names I've listed there. 641 00:36:17,130 --> 00:36:19,910 The other three names are all famous directors. 642 00:36:19,910 --> 00:36:22,620 And of course De Sica is the director of Bicycle Thieves, 643 00:36:22,620 --> 00:36:24,950 and I'll talk about his career this evening. 644 00:36:24,950 --> 00:36:27,970 But Zavattini was the theoretical genius 645 00:36:27,970 --> 00:36:32,210 behind neorealism and a figure for whom I still 646 00:36:32,210 --> 00:36:36,520 retain a tremendous sympathy and affection. 647 00:36:36,520 --> 00:36:42,280 He was a novelist and an essay writer 648 00:36:42,280 --> 00:36:45,750 as well as a screenwriter. 649 00:36:45,750 --> 00:36:51,910 He collaborated with Vittorio De Sica on almost every one 650 00:36:51,910 --> 00:36:54,640 of De Sica's significant films. 651 00:36:54,640 --> 00:36:57,660 Not on every one, but on virtually every one 652 00:36:57,660 --> 00:37:01,370 that is truly outstanding, and there are a number of them. 653 00:37:01,370 --> 00:37:03,560 He's the scriptwriter on. 654 00:37:03,560 --> 00:37:07,530 And he had a particularly symbiotic relation to De Sica. 655 00:37:07,530 --> 00:37:10,140 Zavattini also articulated what came 656 00:37:10,140 --> 00:37:14,420 to be understood as the manifesto of neorealism. 657 00:37:14,420 --> 00:37:16,020 And in one such essay, I don't know 658 00:37:16,020 --> 00:37:18,100 if it was titled Manifesto of Neorealism, 659 00:37:18,100 --> 00:37:19,680 but that was its effect. 660 00:37:19,680 --> 00:37:22,100 He said this to try to summarize what 661 00:37:22,100 --> 00:37:24,360 he thought the ambitions of neorealism were. 662 00:37:24,360 --> 00:37:28,110 He said, a good film ought to be focused 663 00:37:28,110 --> 00:37:35,210 on the life of an ordinary man to whom nothing happens. 664 00:37:35,210 --> 00:37:39,010 Now, he didn't really that nothing would happen. 665 00:37:39,010 --> 00:37:43,240 It's not an early version of the Seinfeld program. 666 00:37:43,240 --> 00:37:46,980 What he's trying to get at is this idea 667 00:37:46,980 --> 00:37:49,920 that plot does not dominate, that character dominates, 668 00:37:49,920 --> 00:37:52,260 that the events of the story grow organically 669 00:37:52,260 --> 00:37:54,480 out of the materials of the text, 670 00:37:54,480 --> 00:38:00,810 both out of character, and out of social realities. 671 00:38:00,810 --> 00:38:10,010 So Zavattini was in many ways a visionary figure, 672 00:38:10,010 --> 00:38:12,890 an overt Marxist for a good part of his life, 673 00:38:12,890 --> 00:38:16,770 and probably the central intellectual influence 674 00:38:16,770 --> 00:38:19,010 on the neorealist movement. 675 00:38:19,010 --> 00:38:21,870 Visconti, the director whose dates 676 00:38:21,870 --> 00:38:27,330 I've put there is sometimes suggested-- it is often 677 00:38:27,330 --> 00:38:30,720 said that not all of Visconti's work fits neatly, 678 00:38:30,720 --> 00:38:33,130 maybe none of it fits neatly into the category 679 00:38:33,130 --> 00:38:34,830 of neorealism. 680 00:38:34,830 --> 00:38:39,230 And this partly has to do with a kind of flamboyance 681 00:38:39,230 --> 00:38:43,570 in Visconti's visual style, and maybe also a fondness 682 00:38:43,570 --> 00:38:49,870 for decadence, and for elaboration that does not 683 00:38:49,870 --> 00:38:51,740 comport with the social meanings that 684 00:38:51,740 --> 00:38:54,720 are implicit in neorealism. 685 00:38:54,720 --> 00:38:57,890 Of the main neorealists, he's the one who fits least well, 686 00:38:57,890 --> 00:39:00,160 but he's often said to be the best of them. 687 00:39:00,160 --> 00:39:04,130 And there are many historians of film and scholars 688 00:39:04,130 --> 00:39:07,160 of film, including David Cook, who 689 00:39:07,160 --> 00:39:11,450 believe that The Earth Trembles, the film he made in 1948, 690 00:39:11,450 --> 00:39:14,480 La Terra Trema, The Earth Trembles, 691 00:39:14,480 --> 00:39:17,150 is the greatest of all neorealist movies. 692 00:39:17,150 --> 00:39:19,320 I have sometimes been tempted to show it, 693 00:39:19,320 --> 00:39:23,170 but it's less characteristic of neorealism, so I don't show it. 694 00:39:23,170 --> 00:39:24,950 But it is a very remarkable film, 695 00:39:24,950 --> 00:39:28,870 and Visconti is a very important figure in this movement, 696 00:39:28,870 --> 00:39:32,190 even though he probably could be said in his later films 697 00:39:32,190 --> 00:39:35,920 to move beyond neorealist concerns. 698 00:39:35,920 --> 00:39:39,160 Roberto Rossellini who also had a very rich long career 699 00:39:39,160 --> 00:39:45,430 as a filmmaker, and I've only listed one film there, 700 00:39:45,430 --> 00:39:47,390 because I want to show you a clip from it. 701 00:39:47,390 --> 00:39:49,050 Part of a trilogy of films he made 702 00:39:49,050 --> 00:39:51,940 at the very end of the war called, 703 00:39:51,940 --> 00:39:54,740 it was called his Roman Trilogy or his Rome Trilogy, 704 00:39:54,740 --> 00:39:57,180 and the first one was-- or his World War II 705 00:39:57,180 --> 00:40:00,500 Trilogy-- the first one was called Rome, Open City, 706 00:40:00,500 --> 00:40:02,600 and then there were two other. 707 00:40:02,600 --> 00:40:05,150 The third one was called Germany, Year Zero. 708 00:40:05,150 --> 00:40:08,840 And they all had sort of a political and social ambitions. 709 00:40:08,840 --> 00:40:11,950 They wanted to dramatize the postwar conditions 710 00:40:11,950 --> 00:40:15,040 and show the devastation that followed 711 00:40:15,040 --> 00:40:18,000 aftermath, that was the aftermath of the Second World 712 00:40:18,000 --> 00:40:19,510 War. 713 00:40:19,510 --> 00:40:23,410 Open City had a tremendous impact 714 00:40:23,410 --> 00:40:27,560 what it was first released, especially in Italy, 715 00:40:27,560 --> 00:40:31,370 because it told an anti-fascist story. 716 00:40:31,370 --> 00:40:33,500 It's a somewhat melodramatic film 717 00:40:33,500 --> 00:40:37,370 that ends in a very melodramatic death, 718 00:40:37,370 --> 00:40:43,850 in a very melodramatic murder, or an accidental murder. 719 00:40:43,850 --> 00:40:49,830 And partly for that reason, it's a less powerful and less 720 00:40:49,830 --> 00:40:54,310 compelling film totally than something like Bicycle Thieves. 721 00:40:54,310 --> 00:40:57,830 But its importance can't be overestimated. 722 00:40:57,830 --> 00:40:59,562 It established the basic principles 723 00:40:59,562 --> 00:41:00,770 that I've been talking about. 724 00:41:00,770 --> 00:41:02,810 It was actually begun before the war 725 00:41:02,810 --> 00:41:05,920 was over when it was illegal to-- when 726 00:41:05,920 --> 00:41:08,600 the German authorities, the fascist authorities 727 00:41:08,600 --> 00:41:11,850 were still controlling Rome and Italian society. 728 00:41:11,850 --> 00:41:14,030 And you weren't supposed to-- you couldn't 729 00:41:14,030 --> 00:41:17,860 film without a license, and some of the early scenes from Rome, 730 00:41:17,860 --> 00:41:19,770 Open City were actually shot illicitly 731 00:41:19,770 --> 00:41:24,140 on very bad film stock from behind doorways and around 732 00:41:24,140 --> 00:41:27,020 corners, so the people behind the camera 733 00:41:27,020 --> 00:41:28,780 wouldn't be caught by the authorities. 734 00:41:28,780 --> 00:41:31,490 And then the film was completed after peace came, 735 00:41:31,490 --> 00:41:38,160 after the defeat of the Axis forces. 736 00:41:38,160 --> 00:41:40,160 I'm going to show you a clip from that sequence, 737 00:41:40,160 --> 00:41:42,430 from that film, from the very beginning of that film 738 00:41:42,430 --> 00:41:44,690 to give you a feel for what the film was like as well. 739 00:41:44,690 --> 00:41:47,380 And I think that that clip will also show you 740 00:41:47,380 --> 00:41:49,010 why the film was so successful. 741 00:41:49,010 --> 00:41:51,250 But I'll partly explain it now. 742 00:41:51,250 --> 00:41:53,230 I think the Italians love this movie 743 00:41:53,230 --> 00:41:54,880 because it told a useful myth. 744 00:41:54,880 --> 00:41:59,000 It made it appear that very few Italians collaborated 745 00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:02,220 with the Nazis and that most Italians were really 746 00:42:02,220 --> 00:42:04,170 on the side of the saboteurs who were trying 747 00:42:04,170 --> 00:42:07,310 to blow up fascist waterworks. 748 00:42:07,310 --> 00:42:10,620 This is probably not entirely historically accurate 749 00:42:10,620 --> 00:42:14,000 since Mussolini was during much of his career 750 00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:16,760 a very popular figure in Italy, but you can certainly 751 00:42:16,760 --> 00:42:20,920 understand why it would have hit a sympathetic chord 752 00:42:20,920 --> 00:42:23,390 among Italians, many of whom, I'm sure, 753 00:42:23,390 --> 00:42:27,000 felt terrible ambivalence and shame over the events 754 00:42:27,000 --> 00:42:28,620 of the Second World War. 755 00:42:28,620 --> 00:42:32,740 The Italians were always much more reluctant anti-Semites 756 00:42:32,740 --> 00:42:35,550 than the Hitler fascists were, and the story 757 00:42:35,550 --> 00:42:40,360 of Italian anti-Semitism is much more complicated 758 00:42:40,360 --> 00:42:45,690 than the story of German anti-Semitism in this period 759 00:42:45,690 --> 00:42:48,470 especially. 760 00:42:48,470 --> 00:42:51,740 So I think that one reason for the success of the film 761 00:42:51,740 --> 00:42:55,620 had to do with the way it told a kind of anti-fascist fable 762 00:42:55,620 --> 00:42:58,450 that worked particularly well for this postwar society that 763 00:42:58,450 --> 00:43:00,480 wanted to put fascism behind it, that 764 00:43:00,480 --> 00:43:02,260 wanted to repudiate that past. 765 00:43:02,260 --> 00:43:04,760 that felt-- There were certainly segments of the population 766 00:43:04,760 --> 00:43:07,180 that had never gone along with that past anyway, 767 00:43:07,180 --> 00:43:10,630 so the film sort of mobilized a new kind 768 00:43:10,630 --> 00:43:12,760 of feeling of Italian patriotism, 769 00:43:12,760 --> 00:43:17,362 and maybe even in some sense a kind of, 770 00:43:17,362 --> 00:43:18,820 despite the catastrophe in which it 771 00:43:18,820 --> 00:43:20,320 ends, a kind of hope for the future, 772 00:43:20,320 --> 00:43:24,610 because the film takes place entirely within the period when 773 00:43:24,610 --> 00:43:27,670 the fascists were still in control of Italy. 774 00:43:27,670 --> 00:43:30,130 And the catastrophe that occurs at the end 775 00:43:30,130 --> 00:43:34,930 is an act of fascist murder, an assassination, 776 00:43:34,930 --> 00:43:36,330 an indifference to humanity. 777 00:43:39,270 --> 00:43:45,210 So Rosselini went on to make many, many films, 778 00:43:45,210 --> 00:43:50,190 and I feel a little guilty only mentioning this one not totally 779 00:43:50,190 --> 00:43:51,720 characteristic film of his, but it's 780 00:43:51,720 --> 00:43:53,670 important in the history of neorealism. 781 00:43:53,670 --> 00:43:56,490 Rosselini is a director I much admire, 782 00:43:56,490 --> 00:43:58,720 partly because he moved away from fiction. 783 00:43:58,720 --> 00:44:00,490 And at the end of his career, he was 784 00:44:00,490 --> 00:44:03,270 making what he thought of as educational or instructional 785 00:44:03,270 --> 00:44:05,420 films. 786 00:44:05,420 --> 00:44:08,780 But with the dazzling technique of a great fiction filmmaker. 787 00:44:08,780 --> 00:44:11,610 So he's a very interesting figure to study, 788 00:44:11,610 --> 00:44:15,100 and I hope some of you will look at more neorealist films 789 00:44:15,100 --> 00:44:18,640 and consider looking at Rosselini. 790 00:44:18,640 --> 00:44:20,780 De Sica is the final figure that I 791 00:44:20,780 --> 00:44:25,830 want to mention as a fundamental energy in neorealism, 792 00:44:25,830 --> 00:44:29,620 and I'll only say about him that he's probably 793 00:44:29,620 --> 00:44:34,140 the most various and gifted of all the neorealist figures, 794 00:44:34,140 --> 00:44:37,400 partly because he had been a very successful actor before he 795 00:44:37,400 --> 00:44:38,600 became a director. 796 00:44:38,600 --> 00:44:41,870 And I'll talk a bit more about De Sica this evening. 797 00:44:41,870 --> 00:44:44,990 What I want to illustrate now in the time we have left 798 00:44:44,990 --> 00:44:50,120 is an aspect of the neorealist aesthetic, 799 00:44:50,120 --> 00:44:54,040 if we could use that term, that I've talked about 800 00:44:54,040 --> 00:44:58,440 before when we discussed Renoir and that I 801 00:44:58,440 --> 00:45:01,860 implied in earlier comments that I made this afternoon. 802 00:45:01,860 --> 00:45:06,020 It's what I call the neorealist counter plot. 803 00:45:06,020 --> 00:45:08,120 And by counter plot, what I really 804 00:45:08,120 --> 00:45:11,110 want to call attention to are all those elements 805 00:45:11,110 --> 00:45:15,490 in the film that seem not to take part 806 00:45:15,490 --> 00:45:18,580 in the forward momentum of the story. 807 00:45:18,580 --> 00:45:20,660 We might even think of them as retarding 808 00:45:20,660 --> 00:45:25,160 elements in which these films sort of pause 809 00:45:25,160 --> 00:45:27,690 to smell the roses. 810 00:45:27,690 --> 00:45:29,380 A version of what I mean, of what 811 00:45:29,380 --> 00:45:31,780 I mean by this neorealist counter plot, 812 00:45:31,780 --> 00:45:37,140 might be said to be embodied in that astonishing camera 813 00:45:37,140 --> 00:45:39,330 move we studied at the end of Boudu Saved 814 00:45:39,330 --> 00:45:41,930 from Drowning last week where the camera makes 815 00:45:41,930 --> 00:45:44,650 180 degree swerve, becomes interested 816 00:45:44,650 --> 00:45:46,930 in the beauty of the river, becomes interested 817 00:45:46,930 --> 00:45:50,990 in the scenery, almost as if it's forgotten its character. 818 00:45:50,990 --> 00:45:52,960 Now, what I mean by the counter plot 819 00:45:52,960 --> 00:45:55,960 is this impulse in these films and especially 820 00:45:55,960 --> 00:46:01,840 in these Italian films to complicate 821 00:46:01,840 --> 00:46:03,510 the social and political and even 822 00:46:03,510 --> 00:46:07,420 the psychological processes of the story simply 823 00:46:07,420 --> 00:46:09,300 in order to give us a sense of what 824 00:46:09,300 --> 00:46:12,710 the experience it's describing is like, as if it's 825 00:46:12,710 --> 00:46:15,790 a version of what I'm interested in when I talk about how 826 00:46:15,790 --> 00:46:18,580 the camera can distract itself. 827 00:46:18,580 --> 00:46:22,160 One way I can illustrate-- So what I mean by counter plot 828 00:46:22,160 --> 00:46:27,820 then are energies that retard or slow down the basic story 829 00:46:27,820 --> 00:46:32,660 or that seem not to directly contribute to the basic story, 830 00:46:32,660 --> 00:46:37,910 but remain part of the film's desire to represent the world, 831 00:46:37,910 --> 00:46:40,760 to represent reality and something of its complexity 832 00:46:40,760 --> 00:46:42,500 and something of its nuance, even 833 00:46:42,500 --> 00:46:45,542 in something of its contradictory incoherence. 834 00:46:45,542 --> 00:46:47,000 In other words, I don't really want 835 00:46:47,000 --> 00:46:49,710 to call these moments incoherent moments, they're not, 836 00:46:49,710 --> 00:46:52,350 because they build a much larger and more complete 837 00:46:52,350 --> 00:46:54,490 picture of the whole world you're looking at. 838 00:46:54,490 --> 00:46:56,590 And in that sense, they're not incoherent. 839 00:46:56,590 --> 00:47:01,030 But they are a kind of counter to the ongoing pressure 840 00:47:01,030 --> 00:47:02,870 to find out what happens next, what happens 841 00:47:02,870 --> 00:47:04,510 next, what happens next. 842 00:47:04,510 --> 00:47:06,390 Well there are many, many examples 843 00:47:06,390 --> 00:47:11,240 of this principle in The Bicycle Thief 844 00:47:11,240 --> 00:47:12,660 and in other neorealist films. 845 00:47:12,660 --> 00:47:14,920 But I want to show you one very dramatic one, also 846 00:47:14,920 --> 00:47:18,300 to give you a flavor for an earlier 847 00:47:18,300 --> 00:47:20,156 neorealist film other than the one you're 848 00:47:20,156 --> 00:47:21,030 going to see tonight. 849 00:47:21,030 --> 00:47:24,196 This is from the very beginning of Open City. 850 00:47:24,196 --> 00:47:26,148 [SPEAKING ITALIAN] 851 00:47:49,688 --> 00:47:51,354 DAVID THORBURN: These residents of Rome. 852 00:47:51,354 --> 00:47:53,338 They've heard an explosion. 853 00:47:53,338 --> 00:47:55,818 There's sabotage going on in Rome now. 854 00:47:55,818 --> 00:47:58,794 It's near the end of war, and the war's not over. 855 00:47:58,794 --> 00:48:02,266 And now the saboteurs return home, 856 00:48:02,266 --> 00:48:04,250 and look who they turn out to be. 857 00:48:10,698 --> 00:48:14,170 And of course, that's why, Anna Magnani was the actress, 858 00:48:14,170 --> 00:48:16,278 was worried about where the children were, 859 00:48:16,278 --> 00:48:17,236 because they suspected. 860 00:48:17,236 --> 00:48:18,634 [SPEAKING ITALIAN] 861 00:48:23,325 --> 00:48:25,908 DAVID THORBURN: There's already a counter plot operating here. 862 00:48:25,908 --> 00:48:27,066 I hope you see. 863 00:48:27,066 --> 00:48:29,330 Look at these little chil-- innocent faces. 864 00:48:33,780 --> 00:48:35,540 So these saboteurs have now come home. 865 00:48:35,540 --> 00:48:36,040 Watch. 866 00:48:39,272 --> 00:48:41,256 [SPEAKING ITALIAN] 867 00:50:41,891 --> 00:50:42,974 DAVID THORBURN: All right. 868 00:50:42,974 --> 00:50:44,080 Stop. 869 00:50:44,080 --> 00:50:45,460 I'm stopping it a little early. 870 00:50:45,460 --> 00:50:46,600 This scene continues. 871 00:50:46,600 --> 00:50:48,920 You actually go into another room in a moment, 872 00:50:48,920 --> 00:50:50,870 and you see children in a kind of dormitory 873 00:50:50,870 --> 00:50:53,400 like room in which there's one little child sitting 874 00:50:53,400 --> 00:50:54,680 on a potty. 875 00:50:54,680 --> 00:50:57,987 I think it's the first potty scene in Western film. 876 00:50:57,987 --> 00:50:59,570 They do something very disturbing too. 877 00:50:59,570 --> 00:51:01,695 They pick him off the potty and put him back in bed 878 00:51:01,695 --> 00:51:02,490 without wiping him. 879 00:51:02,490 --> 00:51:04,530 But leave it. 880 00:51:04,530 --> 00:51:07,040 Maybe there was no toilet paper in postwar Italy. 881 00:51:07,040 --> 00:51:10,220 But your laughter indicated to me 882 00:51:10,220 --> 00:51:11,800 that you sort of got the point. 883 00:51:11,800 --> 00:51:14,970 But talk to me a little bit about what you see there. 884 00:51:14,970 --> 00:51:16,447 It's a wonderful example of what I 885 00:51:16,447 --> 00:51:18,530 was trying to illustrate at the beginning as well, 886 00:51:18,530 --> 00:51:19,990 this principle of multiplicity. 887 00:51:19,990 --> 00:51:22,330 What's happening in this sequence? 888 00:51:22,330 --> 00:51:25,270 What do we learn? 889 00:51:25,270 --> 00:51:28,030 What about living conditions in Rome, what do we learn? 890 00:51:28,030 --> 00:51:31,070 Nobody gives a lecture about it. 891 00:51:31,070 --> 00:51:34,110 You think there is a housing crisis in Rome? 892 00:51:34,110 --> 00:51:37,080 Seven families living together in the same room, an old man 893 00:51:37,080 --> 00:51:41,450 in bed, lying in a bed, in the parlor, in the space, 894 00:51:41,450 --> 00:51:43,910 in the living space of the place. 895 00:51:43,910 --> 00:51:45,160 That's clearly where he stays. 896 00:51:45,160 --> 00:51:46,320 He's very ill. 897 00:51:46,320 --> 00:51:49,090 What else? 898 00:51:49,090 --> 00:51:52,880 The deviation into comedy. 899 00:51:52,880 --> 00:51:56,590 The extent to which a kind of a series of comic encounters 900 00:51:56,590 --> 00:52:01,050 occur after what, after a moment of political sabotage. 901 00:52:01,050 --> 00:52:03,350 And the incongruity of these little children 902 00:52:03,350 --> 00:52:04,950 who are the ones who are the saboteurs 903 00:52:04,950 --> 00:52:08,780 is also part of the comedy even before we see them fully return 904 00:52:08,780 --> 00:52:11,750 to the condition of children when their parents start 905 00:52:11,750 --> 00:52:13,540 slapping them in the face and say, 906 00:52:13,540 --> 00:52:15,070 how dare you stay out so late. 907 00:52:15,070 --> 00:52:17,380 I didn't mean to suggest that the parents actually 908 00:52:17,380 --> 00:52:22,650 know that the children are saboteurs, although, some may. 909 00:52:22,650 --> 00:52:25,120 But I think the point is that being outside at night 910 00:52:25,120 --> 00:52:27,910 is very dangerous for little children in this environment, 911 00:52:27,910 --> 00:52:30,080 and that's why they're so concerned 912 00:52:30,080 --> 00:52:31,790 But the fact that even the children are 913 00:52:31,790 --> 00:52:34,630 partisan anti-fascist fighters becomes a part 914 00:52:34,630 --> 00:52:37,180 of what the film is about. 915 00:52:37,180 --> 00:52:39,260 Now, you can't tell from the very beginning, 916 00:52:39,260 --> 00:52:43,420 from this beginning, what the real sort of plot energy 917 00:52:43,420 --> 00:52:45,240 of the film is yet, can you? 918 00:52:45,240 --> 00:52:48,130 And it will take a bit longer before it finally turns out. 919 00:52:48,130 --> 00:52:53,330 The man that she's about to marry is a secret agent, 920 00:52:53,330 --> 00:52:57,040 and he's under-- he's being hunted 921 00:52:57,040 --> 00:52:59,090 by the fascist authorities, and the film is 922 00:52:59,090 --> 00:53:03,450 about how the good Italians try to hide him. 923 00:53:03,450 --> 00:53:05,270 But we don't learn that yet. 924 00:53:05,270 --> 00:53:08,040 What I want to suggest to you is something of life's variety, 925 00:53:08,040 --> 00:53:13,030 something of life's comedy, something of life's incongruity 926 00:53:13,030 --> 00:53:15,190 emerges for us in those moments. 927 00:53:15,190 --> 00:53:16,942 It's what I want to call a counter plot, 928 00:53:16,942 --> 00:53:18,650 because we take delight in those moments. 929 00:53:18,650 --> 00:53:20,890 We don't get impatient and say, come on, film, 930 00:53:20,890 --> 00:53:22,200 tell me where you're going. 931 00:53:22,200 --> 00:53:24,120 Because what the film teaches us is 932 00:53:24,120 --> 00:53:27,030 that it's not in that narrow sense about plot at all, 933 00:53:27,030 --> 00:53:30,860 but it's about life in its infinite complexity. 934 00:53:30,860 --> 00:53:34,860 The greatest neorealist films embrace this principle as well 935 00:53:34,860 --> 00:53:37,870 as any films I've ever known, and, in addition, they 936 00:53:37,870 --> 00:53:41,180 have a kind of moral authority that's very rare. 937 00:53:41,180 --> 00:53:44,750 I'm very jealous of those of you in this course who have never 938 00:53:44,750 --> 00:53:47,960 seen The Bicycle Thief, because it is a remarkable film 939 00:53:47,960 --> 00:53:50,360 and I'm sure you'll remember for the rest of your lives. 940 00:53:50,360 --> 00:53:52,250 I'll see you tonight.