Program for session 4.2

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23

10.00 - 18.00

Studiovisits (please sign up online or by email or on the list at the door of the
seminar room!)

19.30

Bicycle thieves double feature
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The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette)
Vittorio de Sica, 1948

Beijing Bicycle (Shi Qi Sui De Dan Che)
Wang Xiaoshuai, 2000

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24

10.00 - 13.00

Imaginary property: Presentation by Florian Schneider
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15.00 - 18.00

Close reading: Andre Bazin "Neorealism and Pure Cinema"
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19.30

Pickpocket double feature
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Pickpocket
Robert Bresson, 1959

Pickpocket (Xiao Wu)
Zhang Ke Jia, 1997

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25

10.00 - 14.00

Studiovisits (please sign up online or by email or on the list at the door of the
seminar room!)

More links and information, as always, available at:
http://kit.kein.org

Bicycle thieves double feature

This weeks first theory movie screening features two extraordinary films: First, "The Bicycle Thieves" from 1948, truly the masterpiece of italian neorealism directed by Vittorio de Sica. Then, "Beijing Bicycle" by Wang Xiaoshuai winner of the 2001 Berlin Film Festival Silver Bears Award.

Casting Shadows on the Visionary City

This is a close reading of "Bicycle thieves" by Millicent Marcus, the Mariano Di Vito Professor of Italian Studies and Director of the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

DeSica's "Bicycle Thief:" Casting Shadows on the Visionary City

Soon after Antonio Ricci reports the theft of his bicycle to the authorities, a journalist, looking for a story, asks an officer at police headquarters if there is any news. When the officer answers, "No, nothing, just a bicycle," the audience is suddenly confronted with a violent clash of perspectives. From the point of view of the police and the press, the bicycle theft lacks any of the sensationalism, squalor, or violence that recommends crime to the public notice. For Antonio, and for the viewers, who have come to see the crucial importance of the bicycle to one family's wellbeing, the police officer's dismissal is the cruelest of understatements. But the clash of perspectives implies far more than the mere disparity between the public and private claims of events it reveals the historical distance that separates "Bicycle Thief" from "Open City", and suggests the challenges faced by DeSica and Zavattini in updating the neorealist aesthetic. Though both "Open City" and "Bicycle Thief" may be considered chronicles in that they document contemporary social circumstances, Rossellini's film was endowed with drama and urgency by the very nature of the history it recorded, while DeSicals story reflected, instead, the banality of the stabilized postwar condition. Where Nazi occupation, torture, underground resistance, and guerrilla warfare gave "Open City" its natural dynamic power, hunger, unemployment and despair provided DeSica and Zavattini with subject matter of far less obvious dramatic potential. But Zavattini made a virtue of necessity, arguing that the dramatically poor subject matter was by definition the richer in truth, devoid of the distractions and fabrications of conventional narrative structure. In DeSicals words, "my purpose, I was saying, is to find the element of drama in daily situations, the marvelous in the news, indeed, in the local news, considered by most people as wornout materials."

Such statements may be helpful in telling us why "Bicycle Thief" is not "Open City", but they do nothing to locate the source of the film's poetic power, nor to explain why it is that we recoil in horror at the police officer's belittling of Antonio's loss. Although the comment "no, nothing, just a bicycle" is on one level a valid assessment of the incident, its unfairness, on other levels, is an insult to our very notions of human justice. What the police officer's reductiveness does is to underscore, by contrast, the filmmaker's strategy of semantic layering, whereby the storyline becomes the vehicle for multiple levels of meaning. Unlike thisforthatallegory, however, the literal level is not swallowed up by its figurative significance, but maintains its autonomy as a document of a concrete historical condition. yet the simultaneous and parallel meanings it generates on psychological, sociopolitical, and philosophical levels serve to give every cinematic event such interpretive complexity that what appears at first glance to be a simple narrative construction upon close critical scrutiny reveals the highest degree of literariness. such deceptive simplicity, or selfconcealing art, makes the film, like Antonio's bicycle, the bearer of far heavier and more sophisticated cargo than its fragile exterior would immediately suggest. But before we examine this literary strategy, we would do well to consider the concrete cinematic vehicle whose technical form reveals the same selfconcealing art that typifies DeSicals approach to meaning.

Here, again, comparisons with "Open City" are in order. Just as historical circumstances gave the events of "Open City" its natural drama, so too did they dictate its technical style. The primitive equipment that Rossellini had at his disposal, the absence of studio facilities, and the impoverished mode of production were all direct correlates of the very historical events that the film records. But by 1948, filmmaking was no longer the obstacleridden process that it was in the immediate aftermath of the Allied liberation. On the contrary, technical possibilities were wide open to DeSica and Zavattini, who made of "Bicycle Thief" a neorealist superspectacle, complete with a big budget, a cast of hundreds, and a meticulously worked out shooting style. The film cost 100 million lire a sizable sum by contemporary Italian production standards, owing in large part to the vast number of extras who had to be kept on retainer until perfect filming conditions were met. DeSica and Zavattini took six months to prepare the script, discussing every image and carefully selecting the best possible locations for the action to unfold. Shooting was done with painstaking care to maximize visual complexity, while concealing the art that went into its making. Rossellini's expedients in "Open City" had come to be stylistic norms for neorealism, generating such a taste for simplicity, location shooting, and authorial nonintervention that subsequent filmmakers were forced into creating, through elaborate technical means, an illusion of technical poverty. "Bicycle Thief" is a prime example of the selfconcealing art that neorealists were required to practice in the pursuit of Rossellinian austerity, where the impression of effortlessness and stylistic transparency were not achieved without calculated effort.

This is not to say that DeSicals careful aesthetic is in bad faith. On the contrary, it reflects a conscious ideological prise de positions against 'the spectacular conventions of the commercial cinema a rejection that is made explicit in two episodes in "Bicycle Thief." When a coworker curses the Sunday rain and complains that there is nothing to do but go to the movies a singularly boring prospect for him he is arguing for the irrelevance of commercial cinema to the common plight. it is significant, too, that Antonio's troubles begin as he is putting up a publicity poster for Rita Hayworth's new film, suggesting the marked contrast between commercial cinematic fantasies and the real survival problems besetting the Italian public. In fact, in the very process of putting up the poster, Antonio suffers the crisis that prevents "Bicycle Thief" from ever becoming a consumable family idyll. Antonio will not be able to rescue himself and his dependents from their desperate poverty by dint of perseverance, hard work, and good luck, as the hypothetical Hollywood equivalent, produced by David O. Selznick and starring Cary Grant, would require.

The literal level of the film could be summarized in two lines on the local page of a Roman newspaper. "Man's bike stolen on first day back to work after two years' unemployment. Bike prerequisite to job." The film tells of an odyssey through Rome by Antonio Ricci, soon joined by his son Bruno, in search of the lost vehicle. Their itinerary includes the police station, trade union headquarters, the open markets of Piazza Vittorio and Porta Portese, a mendicants' church where one of the thief's contacts goes for a free lunch, the apartment of the soothsayer Santona, a brothel, and, finally, Via Panico, where the thief is found but not apprehended. In the final episode, Antonio attempts to steal a bike himself, is caught, but soon released while his astonished and ultimately forgiving son looks on.

Like the deceptively simple visual style of "Bicycle Thief", which conceals a wealth of technical artistry, its banal narrative hides a plenitude of meanings. Most affecting is the psychological relationship that evolves between Antonio and his son Bruno as the search for the bicycle unfolds. It is this level that engages the sympathies of the viewers, for Bruno's witness provides a constant reminder of what is at stake should Antonio fail in his quest. Bruno serves as an internal chorus, mutely commenting on the action from an innocent child's perspective on some occasions, and from a surprisingly adult one on others. His presence in the film is an inspired addition to the literary source, the novel "Ladri di biciclette" by Luigi Bartolini, whose protagonist is a childless loner. Bruno's companionship adds immense richness to the story by providing another surface against which the narrative action rebounds, so that each event is given triple impact as it affects the man's consciousness, the child's and the interaction between the two.

Psychologically, "Bicycle Thief" traces the evolution of the fatherson relationship from disparity and dependence on external mediations to full selfdefinition and equality. The bicycle is the emblem of all those cultural and material forces that determine the relationship from without. When the vehicle is retrieved from hock at the beginning of the film, it enables Antonio to be a conventional patriarch, requiring obedience and respect now that he is once more the chief provider for his dependents' material wellbeing. And if the direct relationship between the bike and Antonio's power to support the family were not obvious enough, DeSica literalizes it in two scenes where the newly reinstated paterfamilias carries first his wife Maria, and then Bruno, on its handlebars. The political significance of the bike in the family context, and the way it structures the relationship between father and son, is rendered visually in the scene that introduces Bruno to us in the film., He is first shown behind the spokes of the wheel as he polishes the bike in a pointofview shot taken from Antonio's perspective. The boy’s effort to restore the bike's original luster is an obvious projection of his desire to rehabilitate his father's parental authority, as his adoring mimicry of Antonio throughout this scene suggests. Bruno imitates his father's toilet in a way so exaggerated as to suggest parody if it were not for his utter sincerity and delight in seeing his father repossess his former exemplary status within the family. What makes Bruno's filial subordination especially striking is the fact that it involves a forfeit of his own precocious adulthood during Antonio's extended unemployment, Bruno had been the only family breadwinner in his job as gas station attendant. Throughout the film, vestiges of his precocity remain as Bruno intermittently plays the adult to Antonio's childwhen he does the higher mathematics of his father's stipend calculations in the restaurant scene, when he has the prudence to get a policeman to defuse a hostile crowd in Via Panico, and when he solicitously closes the window shutters to protect his baby sibling from the morning sun. It is perhaps with some relief, and certainly without rancor, that Bruno relinquishes his premature adulthood when the bike is retrieved at the film's start and the traditional family hierarchy is reconstituted once more.

There is a further detail in Bruno's introductory scene that merits careful critical attention if we are to establish the terms of the fatherson relationship. "Papa, did you see what they did?" Bruno asks in dismay. "No, what?" "A dent!" "Perhaps it was there before." "No, it wasn't... I'd have complained to them." Referring most obviously to Antonio's paternal dominion predicated on the bike and the earning power it betokens, the dent suggests the permanent, if minor damage, done to his authority by two years on the dole. Were this a conventional commercial film, however, where concrete details are all governed by considerations of plot, we would expect the dent to reappear later on in the story and to play a part in the narrative resolution. We could envision a happy ending, for example, in which Bruno identifies the otherwise disguised frame by this characteristic disfiguration. But the dent looks ahead to no such optimistic turn of events. If anything, it foreshadows the greater damage that Antonio allows his bike to suffer in the theft itself. Bruno's activist rejoinder ("I'd have complained to them") in which he registers an implicit criticism of his father's passivity, anticipates the later scene outside the mendicant's church when the child reprimands his father for letting the thief's contact get away. What the dent reveals, then, is the vast difference between a film esthetic which privileges considerations of plot and one in which metaphoric meanings are given equal dignity and weight.

In developing the psychological dimension of the story, DeSica and Zavattini must solve two problems built into their very material: 1) how to reveal the shifts and subtleties of interpersonal relationships in workingclass characters little given to verbalizing their sentiments; and 2) how to do so in a way that is appropriate to the medium of film. The filmmakers' solutions offer perhaps the greatest evidence of that cinematic poetry for which "Bicycle Thief" has been so rightly acclaimed. Accordingly, DeSica and Zavattini choose two physical analogues to the relational changes going on between father and son. The first is visual cuing, by which Bruno will literally look up to Antonio to observe the paternal reactions on which he should model his own. This visual cuing, as a sign of Bruno's uncritical acceptance of his father's authority, is significantly disrupted at several points in the film. When Antonio takes out his frustrations on his son and slaps him with little apparent cause, Bruno refuses all visual contact with Antonio for some time. This averting of the eyes, as Bruno's retaliation for Antonio's blow, reveals how important the earlier visual cuing had been in defining the father-son hierarchy, and thus reaffirms the hierarchy itself. Only at the end of the film, when Antonio's decision to steal a bike robs him of his paternal authority, does Bruno's gaze at him reveal the radically changed terms of their relationship. His eyes first stare in horror at the spectacle of his father turned thief. But when he emerges at his father's side as the crowd harasses Antonio, Bruno looks up in concern and fear for the wellbeing of his fellow traveler. His upward glance, so reminiscent of the earlier ones throughout the film, is vastly different in the kind of information that Bruno seeks from it. Previously the conduit for behavioral directives, the glance now reveals the fallibility and contingency of the disgraced parental model. With this knowledge, Bruno is deprived of all conventional ways of thinking about Antonio. He cannot condemn him as a common criminal since the man is, after all, his father. Yet Antonio has abdicated any claim to patriarchal respect by violating the legal sanctions on which all authority rests. Thus, when Bruno slips his hand into Antonio's at the end of the film, he is offering his father an entirely new relationship one that no longer needs the mediation of the bicycle, whose physical absence throughout the film has heralded its real emotional irrelevance to this final shared understanding. The financial and political power that the bicycle represented within the family in reestablishing the old hierarchy is no longer the basis of the relationship between Antonio and Bruno. And the quest for the missing bike need no longer be the pretext for the day of important searching and mutual selfdiscovery that Antonio and Bruno spend together.

In addition to visual cuing, DeSica and Zavattini have also used gait to figure the shifts in Antonio's relationship with his son. "Before choosing this particular child," Bazin said of Enzo Staiola who played Bruno in the film, "DeSica did not ask him to perform, just to walk. He wanted to play off the striding gait of the man against the short, trotting steps of the child... It would be no exaggeration to say the "Ladri di biciclette" is the story of a walk through Rome by a father and his son." Where the visual cuing reveals Bruno's side of the relationship, the striding emphasizes Antonio's. He often walks well ahead of Bruno in a revelation of the selfabsorption that at times endangers his son's very wellbeing. Thus Antonio fails to notice that Bruno has fallen in the rain, and as the soaked child brushes himself off, his father distractedly asks why all this flailing of arms. "I fell down" , shouts Bruno, distressed as much but his accident as by his father's apparent obliviousness to it. Toward the film's end, Bruno is twice nearly run over in the traffic of Rome as Antonio heedlessly forges ahead to fulfill his new criminal resolve. Bruno's constant efforts to keep pace with his father are interrupted by the same incident that interfered with his visual cuing. After Antonio reprimands Bruno, the boy walks as far from his father as possible, interposing a row of trees between himself and the source of his undeserved reproof. At the end of the film, as Bruno and Antonio establish their new relationship of equality, their gait reflects this psychological change. They now walk abreast, holding hands; their disparate strides have accommodated themselves to the differing needs of the man and the boy.

Bazin's apt description of "Bicycle Thief" as "a walk through Rome by a father and his son" is not limited to topography, however. The film is also a walk through Rome's social institutions, whose indifference to Antonio's plight forms the basis of DeSicals sociopolitical critique. The law, the Church, and the trade union all fail to alleviate the very problems they were established to correct, forcing Antonio to resort to unconventional, and, finally, selfdefeating modes of redress. His trip to the police station proves that the law is less interested in protecting the property rights of the citizens than in suppressing their civil liberties, as the officers rush out to quell a demonstration while giving no help to Antonio in retrieving his stolen goods. The law becomes an impersonal, pro forma means for registering injustice without doing anything about it, while the attendant human suffering is entirely dismissed as the officers minimize the significance to Antonio's loss.

The trade union proves to be just as indifferent to the individual suffering of its constituents as the legal system is. When Antonio rushes into headquarters in search of his colleague Baiocco, he interrupts a speaker who voices the usual pieties about worker welfare. The utterly abstract and impersonal nature of this commitment is dramatized by the speaker's snarling retort to Antonio. "Hey ... quiet please… If you don't want to listen to this, go somewhere else". Though Baiocco does all that he can to help his friend, he acts not as an ambassador of the union's will to help its members, but as a single individual, empowered by compassion alone, lacking the kind of institutional support that could give his aid the weight to succeed.

Just as the union fails to address Antonio's material plight, the Church offers no spiritual sustenance in his despair. The Quaker dogooders, as Bazin calls them, not only enable the old man who is the thief's contact to get away, but they degrade Antonio along with the other mendicants whom they process through their church in an assemblyline operation of shaving, soulsaving, and lunch. Despite Antonio's attempts to distinguish himself from the beggars who must be shorn and shriven before they can be fed, he is constantly mistaken for one of them, responding with an emphatic "no" when asked if he wants to be shaved before being herded with the others into Mass. The Church's charitable efforts are portrayed as not only inadequate to the task of rehabilitating a warravaged population, but down right dehumanizing in its wholesale approach to processing bodies and souls.

In order for the film's social criticisms to work, however, Antonio's plight must not be seen as unique. Accordingly, DeSica and Zavattini offer a series of visual essays on the commonality of Ricci's condition. Any tendency to see the protagonists as exceptions to the impoverished masses is discouraged early in the film when Antonio and Maria pawn their wedding sheets in order to redeem their bicycle from hock. If we think that this difficult sacrifice will be enough to set them apart from the crowd and to rescue them from destitution, we are wrong, as the dizzying tilt-shot reveals when it follows the pawnshop attendant up to the top of a mountain of shelves filled with similarly pawned trousseau linens. In a later visual essay, Antonio's story is universalized by the multitudes of used bicycles shown at the open markets on the day after the theft. The evidence that these bicycles are being dismantled, painted, reassembled, and generally disguised suggests that most of them arrived at Piazza Vittorio and Porta Portese by dishonest means. One vendor's sneering comment, "well, we all know that in Piazza Vittorio there's nothing but honest people" suggests a strong presumption to the contrary. A further visual essay on the plurality of Antonio's plight occurs in the police station as the constable stands before a background of cubbyholes in which scores of similar theft reports are filed. The fact that none of the characters in the film acts surprised when Antonio tells of the crime further testifies to the frequency of such mishaps.

There is, however, another Rome, set against the masses of Antonio's fellow sufferers. This is the middleclass city of churchgoers, restaurant patrons, and soccer fans who are engaged in the leisure activities of a typical Roman Sunday. What this suggests is that recent history has afflicted only the lower classes and that the bougeousie enjoys a kind of a historical status, that their lives are exempt from the devastations of war and its aftermath and are obedient only to the regular rhythms of the work week, with its ritual Sabbath rewards. The exclusivity of this caste is, of course, the theme of the entire film, which argues, in Catch 22 fashion, that one must be rich enough to own a bike in order to get the job that will provide the means to buy the very vehicle on which the job is predicated. Put more simply, one must already have a foot in the door of capitalism in order to enter that privileged domain. It is as if an invisible barrier separated the Riccis from the middleclass exemplars in the film, and indeed that barrier becomes almost palpable in the restaurant scene where Antonio and Bruno are seated next to an affluent family of conspicuous consumers. While Antonio mentally compares his earning power to that of the paterfamilias at the next table, the smug son makes his judgement of Bruno explicit in contemptuous glances and table manners exaggerated to the point of buffoonery. It is the waiter, however, who makes the definitive class distinction between the Riccis and their neighbors, denying Antonio and Bruno a tablecloth and failing to lay out the silverware, in marked contrast to the amenities heaped on the more prosperous customers. Visually, DeSica need say no more about the impenetrability of the middle class to Antonio's aspirations.

The foregoing considerations have by no means exhausted the interpretive richness of DeSicals film, which abounds in metaphysical as well as psychological and sociopolitical truths. Now that social institutions have failed Antonio, he must seek alternative ways to understand and control his fate. Once the law is discredited by the impotence of its enforcers, Antonio avails himself of the occult, which he had once viewed with such contempt when Maria had paid off her debt to the soothsayer, La Santona. "As if these witches had any control ver people's lives. It's just idiotic," sneers Antonio "and who found this job then? Her or me?" In a rather artful transition, Antonio reverts to the soothsayer later in the film when events have so humbled him that he can admit "we wont' find it, even with the aid of the saints". A cut to the scene in the soothsayer's apartment makes explicit Antonio's implied association of La Santona with santi (saints) in an anticlerical maneuver by DeSica and Zavattini to show how easily belief in one kind of supernatural power can be transferred to less orthodox objects of faith. This time, Antonio finds himself a suppliant among the other desperate followers of La Santona, rather than a cynical observer convinced of his own unaided power to succeed. Though the fortuneteller must interpret her oracular utterances to her other clients, informing the ugly man with the unresponsive fiancee, for example, that he must sow his seeds in another field and then applying the metaphor to the problem of unrequited love, she speaks unambiguously to Antonio, telling him "either you will find it immediately or you will never find it". This reply, like that of the officers at the police station, throws Antonio back on his own resources, and fails to offer either the specific practical advice or the moralebuilding support that he requires in this moment of crisis. Broadly interpreted, both parts of La Santona's prophesy come true, since Antonio immediately finds the thief, and at the same time, loses forever the possibility of recuperating the bike. Indeed, no sooner do father and son leave La Santona's than they spot their prey and chase him to his neighborhood in Via Panico, where the hostility of the community and Antonio's inability to marshal allies makes it impossible for him to pursue his course of justice.

Although DeSica and Zavattinni borrow the name of the neighborhood directly from Bartolini's novel, they take full advantage of its poetic implications. Via Panico is indeed the place where Antonio is thrown into the emotional turmoil which the god Pan inspired in unwary travelers of antiquity. But Antonio's turmoil is more than psychological it affects his moral and cognitive faculties as well. The events in Via Panico destroy all the principles on which Antonio predicates his quest, making the distinctions between victim and victimizer, prey and predator, right and wrong, meaningless in a world undone by confusion and doubt. The occurrence most subversive to Antonio's moral order is the confrontation with the thief in a context that gives the criminal an identity and a background as tragic as the protagonist's own. Up to this point the thief has been a nameless, faceless villain, devoid of any humanity and target of our unmitigated hate. In Via Panico, we learn the thief's name from the lips of his mother, whose poverty and despair cannot help but soften our judgement of her son's misdeeds. DeSica does not sentimentalize the thief and his family, however, for this is no fantasy world where victim and victimizer embrace in ultimate recognition of universal brotherhood, nor does he prettify the picture with quaint poverty and cherubic urchins to elicit our sympathies and make us ashamed of our oversimplified impulses to love or to hate. The thief remains unattractive, as do the snarling mother and the contemptuous sister in the squalid apartment whose dank atmosphere we can almost feel and whose pitiful story we probably already know. DeSica evokes less sympathy for the thief's plight than understanding this is a cold, hard fact which the film presents to us as a material part of the equation that will determine Antonio's next move. our awareness that the thief has himself been long unemployed and is responsible for supporting a destitute family further diminishes the distance between Alfredo and Antonio, between criminal and victim of crime.

The second, and more decisive blow to Antonio's moral order is what he discovers about the nature of justice in Via Panico. When the police officer asks Antonio, "Do you have a witness?" and Antonio replies, "I am a witness", the officer says "look down there … All those people are witnesses for him". Antonio learns that justice is by no means an absolute, but that it is a function of the crowd- an entirely relative, situational concept that favors those already blessed with power, wealth, friends, or good luck. This devastating lesson enables Antonio to shed the morality which had previously distinguished him from the criminal object of his manhunt, making the Italian plural title of the film, "Bicycle Thieves", (as opposed to the misleading singular in English) a commentary on the sociopathic effects of life in the postwar era. Though Bartolini's novel has the same title, its plural is a far less momentous one, reflecting the narrator's condescending opinion of the Roman rabble, rather than a disturbing indictment of a society whose most fundamental principles are called into question.

Having abandoned any naive belief in social justice, and having exhausted the possibilities of the occult, Antonio casts about for other ways to take charge of his faltering destiny. If the universe is as arbitrary and as random as the events in Via Panico suggest, then Antonio could try to comply with the forces of chance and anticipate the next throw of the dice, according to the game of hazard which he had refereed at the entrance to La Santona's in the first part of the film. The game of chance merges with another kind of game that of agility and speed to form the final, catastrophic course of action which will end Antonio's quest. A sports subplot has developed in the second half of the film around the soccer match between Modena and Rome to be played that Sunday afternoon. Heralded by the truckload of Modena supporters who pass them by on a bridge, the game provides Antonio with a pretext for humoring Bruno after their recent quarrel by deferring to the boy's superior knowledge of sports. "Is Modena a good team?" Antonio asks his son, to which Bruno shakes his head in the negative, only mildly appeased. Later, the subject recurs when a radio broadcast announcing the day's soccer scores is overheard on the way to La Santona's. And indeed, it is no accident that the final act of Antonio's drama is played out against the backdrop of the soccer game, for this provides the analogue to the protagonist's choice of tactics. The setting offers multiple incentives to action in the rows of bicycles parked outside the stadium, the mounting volume of audience excitement within, and, finally, the spectacle of bicycle racers whizzing past the desperate man and boy on the curb. In a universe where human justice and the supernatural are of no avail, Antonio decides to align himself with the forces of luck and brute strength that govern the world of games. But like the Modena team, whose hopeful fans we saw on the way to the stadium and whose dejected followers we see leaving it, Antonio is not favored by Lady Fortune when he attempts to steal a bicycle himself, nor is his physical prowess any match for the many runners who converge on him in answer to the owner's cries for aid. Unlike the incident of his own bike's theft, this time help for the victim is forthcoming, and witnesses to the crime are numerous, including, most tragically the new thief's own son.

Though the events of Via Panico and the collapse of Antonio's hierarchy of values give his fall a tragic necessity, we still view it through the horrified and disbelieving eyes of Bruno. The crisis is doubly shocking, both in its violation of our own ethical standards and in its subversion of our need to identify with the protagonist and to see his actions in morally absolute terms. When Simon Hartog compares Antonio to "the lone, Western hero, or the tough detective... searching for justice," he forgets that the Hollywood genre heroes not only require audience identification, but take great pains to justify its vote of confidence through happy, or at least cathartic and consoling, plot resolutions. By violently shocking us out of our unexamined identification with the protagonist, DeSica is challenging not only our native assumptions about poetic justice, but our most intimate film viewing needs. our sympathies were similarly violated by Rossellini when he removed Pina from the stage midway into "Open City" and disappointed our expectationsfor a conventional comic outcome, but Rossellini's generic revolution left the audience's moral sensibilities intact, whereas DeSica challenges even these, leaving us a vision whose only certainty is a son's miraculous love of a father stripped of all mystifications and cant.

The three years that intervened between "Open City" and "Bicycle Thief" took its toll on the optimism which typified the inaugural film of the neorealist season. By 1948, it was clear the Rossellini's visionary city would never be founded and that his hopeful synthesis of Marxist and Catholic ideals was a fantast's dream. DeSica's and Zavattini's pessimism is as much a reflection of this historic disappointment as of their more somber poetic temperaments, and in their image of the city of Rome, they make explicit the vast distance separating Rossellini's vision from their own. As a physical setting, Rossellini's city is a familiar one, consisting of wellknown monuments St. Peter's, the Spanish Steps- and areas that we visit time and again in the film The Prenestino neighborhood of the Resistance fighters, and the rooms of the Gestapo in via Tasso. Rossellini's city is a centered, coherent space whose overview we get in the two maps which show Nazi and partisan Rome. We always have a sense of where we are and how this location relates to the city as a whole and to its historical progression from past, to present, to future.

DeSica's Rome, instead, is a fragmented, decentered space with few familiar landmarks and no sense of cohesion. With the exception of La Santona's apartment and Antonio's tenement, we never return to the same place twice, nor does DeSica ever give us any establishing shots to tell us where we are. Rome is presented as a maze, full of endlessly twisting and turning streets that deadend or lead into yet more labyrinthine byways, and Antonio's movements are as aimless and as random as the streets themselves. In the scene following the downpour at Porta Portese, Rome becomes a setting worthy of Ariosto, where hidden secrets and dangers seems to lurk around every corner and shadowy presences materialize in the raincleansed air. This is also a Rome of thick walls with few windows which either shut in Antonio's face, or open onto yet other windows and walls, suggesting the impenetrability of the city to his quest. DeSicals camera takes great advantage of Rome's predominant architectural motif, its arches, to convey the heaviness and inevitability of Antonio's fate. The union headquarters, the poster office, the restaurant, the tunnel through which Antonio chases the thief's decoy, and the bridge under which he runs to see the boy dragged from the Tiber, are built on the principle of the Roman arch with all its implications of solidity and stasis. The inhabitants of this city are the logical extensions of so oppressive and fragmented a space. They are uniformly irritable, from the priest who knocks Bruno over the head in the confessional of the mendicant's church, to the performers who cannot seem to hit the right note in the vaudeville rehearsal. It is no accident that the word on which they constantly stumble is gente (people) and that Baiocco must continually remind them to end the lyric on a downbeat. Two tobacco salesmen in Piazza Vittorio, who have nothing to do with the plot, argue for unknown reasons while Bruno's employer at the gasoline pump refuses to acknowledge the boy's cheerful "good morning." The film is full of iracible crowds, from the throng of unemployed who resent Antonio's sole acquisition of a job at the opening of the film, to the mobs of people boarding the bus, or waiting in line to get water from the tenement well. Antonio is never part of these crowds, for they are conglomerates of isolated selves whose predicament divides rather than unites them in mutual competition for the scant resources of the unreconstructed city.

Nothing could be more distant from Rossellini's popular Rome whose solidarity and fellow feeling culminated in the heroics of the partisan struggle. The demise of postwar idealism and the egocentricity of a population beset with shortages have changed Rossellini's collectivity into an angry, unwelcoming mob. But perhaps the most striking measure of the distance separating "Open City" and "Bicycle Thief" is DeSicals rejection of Rossellini's synthesizing conclusion. Where narrative events pointed ahead to the political and spiritual fulfillments of Rossellini's Christian-Marxist typology, DeSicals various semantic levels sharply diverge at his film's termination. The narrative remains inconclusive while the sociopolitical and philosophical levels reach the dead end to which the film's pessimism invariably leads. The filmmaker's modicum of hope is reserved for one level alone, as the personal relationship between father and son reaches its sublime conclusion. But the very isolation of this happy ending amid the profusion of negative ones on other levels serves to polarize Desica's final view. Bruno's ultimate acceptance of his fallen father, despite the social and even cosmic conspiracy against him, makes the boy's generosity remarkable to the point of heroism. Conversely, the world's utter imperviousness to Bruno's humanizing example shows how unbridgeable is the gap between personal ideals and the larger world order. In the closing shot of the film, as Bruno and Antonio merge with the crowd, the ignorance and indifference of the masses to the crisis just experienced by father and son constitute DeSicals final denunciation. As Bruno walks back into the city, he can entertain none of the hope for social justice and spiritual rebirth that characterized the young activists' triumphal march home in "Open City". All that remains for Bruno is his own miraculous capacity for love a gift that will have no impact beyond the immediate private domain.

Imaginary property

What does it mean to own an image? Beyond mere possession it seems to be a matter of imagination: an act of determining space and time, a rule of production. From invention, creation and distribution to recognition, exhibition and conservation, images are subject to an infinite variety of operations that are not only characterized by ongoing conflicts about the power of producing, possessing and processing them. In fact, images are the products of struggles for imagination. Images manage their violations rather than obviating them or preventing them from happening.

Neorealism and Pure Cinema: The Bicycle Thieves

"Neorealism and Pure Cinema: The Bicycle Thief" is an essay by Andre Bazin on Vittorio de Sica's "The Bicycle Thieves" (Ladri di biciclette) from 1948. Bazin calls the movie "pure cinema"; that is, it tells a simple story composed of "real" events involving "real" people in "real" places. The truth of its extraordinary emotional impact is another element of the story's purity. Bazin is commonly regarded as one of the most important or influential writer on cinema. He was a co-founder of the French film review "Cahiers du cinéma"

Neorealism and Pure Cinema: The Bicycle Thief

What seems to me most astonishing about the Italian cinema is that it appears to tool it should escape from the aesthetic impasse to which neorealism is said to have led. The dazzling effects of 1946 and 1947 having faded away, one could reasonable fear that this useful and intelligent reaction against the Italian aesthetic of the superspectacle and, for that matter, more generally, against the technical aestheticism from which cinema suffered all over the world would never get beyond an interest in a kind of superdocumentary, or romanticized reportage. One began to realize that the success of Roma Citta Aperta, Paisa, or Sciuscia was inseparable from a special conjunction of historical circumstances that took its meaning from the Liberation, and that the technique of the films was in some way magnified by the revolutionary value of the subject. Just as some books by Malraux or Hemingway find in a crystallization of journalistic style the beat narrative form for a tragedy of current events, so the films of Rossellini or De Sica owed the fact that they were major works masterpieces simply to a fortuitous combination of form and subject matter. But when the novelty and above all the flavor of their technical crudity have exhausted their surprise effect, what remains of Italian "neorealism" when by force of circumstances it must revert to traditional subjects: crime stories, psychological dramas, social customs? The camera in the street we still accept, but doesn't that admirable nonprofessional acting stand selfcondemned in proportion as its discoveries swell the ranks of international stars? And, by way of generalizing about this aesthetic pessimism: "realism" can only occupy in art a dialectical position it is more a reaction than a truth. It remains then to make it part of the aesthetic it came to existence to verify, in any case, the Italians were not the last to downgrade their "neorealism." I think there is not a single Italian director, including the most neorealist, who does not insist that they must get away from it.

With Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) De Sica has managed to escape from the impasse, to reaffirm anew the entire aesthetic of neorealism.

Ladri di Biciclette is certainly is neorealist, by all the principles one can deduce from the best Italian films since 1946. The story is from the lower classes, almost populist: an incident in the daily life of a worker. But the films show no extraordinary events such as those which befall the fated workers in Gabin films. There are no crimes of passion, none of those grandiose coincidences common in detective stories which simply transfer to a realm of proletarian exoticism the great tragic debates once reserved for the dwellers on Olympus. Truly an insignificant even a banal incident: a workman spends a whole day looking in vain in the streets of Rome for the bicycle someone has stolen from him. This bicycle has been the tool of his trade, and if he doesn't find it he will be again unemployed. Late in the day, after hours of fruitless wandering, he too tries to steal a bicycle. Apprehended and then released, he is as poor as ever, but now he fools the shame of having sunk to the level of the thief.

Plainly there is not enough material here even for a news items the whole story would not deserve two lines in a straydog column. One must take care not to confuse it with realist tragedy in the Prevert or James Cain manner, where the initial news item is diabolic trap placed by the gods *amid the cobble stones of the street. In itself the event contains no proper dramatic valence. It takes on meaning only because of the social proper dramatic valence. It takes on meaning only because of the social (and not psychological or aesthetic) position of the victim. Without the haunting specter of unemployment, which places the event in the Italian society of 1948, it would be an utterly banal misadventure. Likewise, the choice of a bicycle as the key object in the drama is characteristic both of Italian urban life and of a period when mechanical means of transportation were still rare and expensive. There is no need to insist on the hundreds of other meaningful details that multiply the vital links between the scenario and actuality, situating the event in political and social history in a given place at a given time.

The techniques employed in the mise en scene likewise meet the most exacting specification of Italian neorealism. Not one scene shot in a studio. Everything was filmed in the streets. As for the actors, none had the slightest experience in theater or film. The workman came from the Breda factory, the child was found hanging around in the street, the wife was a journalist.

These then are the facts of the case. It is clear that they do not appear to recall in any sense the neorealism of Quattro passi fra le nuvole, Vivere in Pace, or Sciuscia. On the face of it then one should have special reasons for being wary. The sordid side of the tale tends toward that most debatable aspect of Italian stories: indulgence in the wretched, a systematic search for squalid detail.

If Ladri di Biciclette is a true masterpiece, comparable in rigor to Paisa, it is for certain precise reasons, none of which emerge from a simple outline of the scenario or from a superficial disquisition on the technique of the mise en scene.

The scenario is diabolically clever in its construction; beginning with the alibi of a current event, it makes good use of a number of systems of dramatic coordinate radiating in all directions. Ladri di Biciclette is certainly the only valid Communist film of the whole past decade precisely because it still has meaning even when you have abstracted its social significance. Its social message is not detached, it remains immanent in the event, but it is so clear that nobody can overlook it, still less take exception to it, since it is never made explicitly a message. The thesis implied is wondrously and outrageously simple: in the world where this workman lives, the poor must steal from each other in order to survive. But this thesis is never stated as such, it is just that events are so linked together that they have the appearance of a formal truth while retaining an anecdotal quality. Basically, the workman might have found his bicycle in the middle of the film; only then there would have been no film. (Sorry to have bothered you, the director might say; we really did think he would never find it, but since he has, all is well, good for him, the performance is over, you can turn up the lights). In other words, a propaganda film would try to prove that the workman could not find his bicycle, and that he is inevitably trapped in the vicious circle of poverty, De Sica limits himself to showing that the workman cannot find his bicycle and that as a result be doubtless will be unemployed again. No one can fail to see that it is the accidental nature of the script that gives the thesis its quality of necessity; the slightest doubt cast on the necessity of the events in the scenario of a propaganda film renders the argument hypothetical.

Although on the basis of the workman's misfortune we have no alternative but to condemn a certain kind of relation between a man and his work, the film never makes the events or the people part of an economic or political Manichelem. It takes care not to cheat on reality not only by contriving to give the succession of events the appearance of an accidental and as it were anecdotal chronology out in treating each of them according to its phenomenological integrity. In the middle of the chase, the little boy suddenly needs to piss. So he does. A downpour forces the father and bon to shelter in a carriageway, so like them we have to forego the chase and wait till the storm is over. The events are not necessarily signs of something, of a truth of which we are to be convinced, they all carry their own weight, their complete uniqueness, that ambiguity that characterizes any fact. So, if you do not have the eyes to see, you are free to attribute whatever happens to bad luck or to chance. The same applies to the people in the film. The worker is just as deprived and isolated among follow trade unionists as he is walking along the street or even in that ineffable scene of the Catholic "Quakers" into whose company he will shortly stray, because the trade union does not exist to find lost bikes but to transform a world in which losing his bike condemns a man to poverty. Nor does the worker come to lodge a complaint with the trade union but to find comrades who will be able to help him discover the stolen object. So here you have a collection of proletarian members of a union who behave no differently from a group of paternalistic bourgeois toward an unfortunate workman. In his private misfortune, the poster hanger is just as alone in his union as in church (buddies apart, that is but then who your buddies are is your own affair.) But this parallel is extremely useful because it points up a striking contrast. The indifference of the trade union is normal and justified because a trade union is striving for justice not for charity. But the cumbersome paternalism of the Catholic "Quakers" is unbearable, because their eyes are closed to his personal tragedy while they in fact actually do nothing to change the world that is the cause of it. On the most successful scene is that in the storm under the porch when a flock of Austrian seminarians crowd around the worker and his son. We have no valid reason to blame them for chattering so much and still less for talking German. But it would be difficult to create a more objectively anticlerical scene.

Clearly, and I could find twenty more examples: events and people are never introduced in support of a social thesis but the thesis emerges fully armed and all the more irrefutable because it is presented to us as something thrown in into the bargain. It is our intelligence that discerns and shapes it, not the film. De Sica wins every play on the board without ever having made a bet.

This technique is not entirely new in Italian films and we have elsewhere stressed its value at length both apropos of Paisa and of Allemania Anno Zero, but these two films were based on themes from either the Resistance or the war. Ladri di Biciclette is the first decisive example of the possibility of the conversion of this kind of objectivity to other, similar subjects. De Sica and Zavattini have transferred neorealism from the Resistance to the Revolution.

Thus the thesis of the film is hidden behind an objective social reality which in turn moves into the background of the moral and psychological drama which could of itself justify the film. The idea of the boy is a stroke of genius, and one does not know whether it came from the script or in the process of directing so little does this distinction mean here any more. It is the child who gives to the workman's adventure its ethical dimension and fashions, from an individual moral standpoint, a drama that might well have been only social. Remove the boy, and the story remains much the same. The proof: a resume of it would not differ in details. In fact, the boy's part is confined to trotting along beside his father. But he is the intimate witness of the tragedy, its private chorus. It is supremely clever to have virtually eliminated the role of the wife in order to give flesh and blood the private character of the tragedy in the person of the child. The complicity between father and son is so subtle that it reaches down to the foundations of the moral life. 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. When he feels tempted to steal the bike, the silent presence of the little child, who guesses what his rather is thinking, is cruel to the verge of obscenity. Trying to get rid of him by sending him to take the streetcar is like telling a child in some cramped apartment to go wait on the landing, outside for an hour. Only in the best Chaplin films are there situations of an equally overwhelming conciseness.

In this connection, the final gesture of the little toy in giving his hand to his father has been frequently misinterpreted. It would be unworthy of the film to see here a concession to the feelings of the audience. If De Sica gives them this satisfaction, it is because it is a logical part of the drama. This experience marks henceforth a definite stage in the relations between father and son, rather like reaching puberty. Up to that moment the man has been like a god to his son; their relations come under the heading of admiration. By his action the father has now compromised them. The tears they shed as they walk side by side arms swinging, signify their despair over a lost paradise lost. But the son returns to a father who has fallen from grace. He will love him henceforth as a human being, shame and all. The hands that slips into his is neither a symbol of forgiveness nor of a childish act of consolation. It is rather the most solemn gesture that could ever mark the relations between a father and his son: one that makes them equals.

It would take too long to enumerate the multiple secondary functions of the boy in the film, both as to the story structure and as the mise en scene itself. However, one should at least pay attention to the change of tone (almost in the musical sense of the term) that his presence introduces into the middle of the film. As we slowly wander back and forth between the little boy and the workman we are taken from the social and economic plane to thatof their private lives, and the supposed death by drowning of the child, in making the father suddenly realize the relative insignificance of his misfortune, creates a dramatic oasis (the restaurant scene) at the heart of the story. It is, however, an illusory one, because the reality of this intimate happiness in the long run depends on the precious bike. Thus the child provides a dramatic reserve which, as the occasion arises, serves as a counterpoint, as an accompaniment, or moves on the contrary into the foreground, clearly observable in the orchestration of the steps of the child and of the grownup. Before choosing this particular child, De Sica did not ask him to perform just to walk. He wanted to play off the striding gait of the man against the short trotting steps of the child, the harmony of this discord being for him of capital importance for the understanding of the film as a whole. It would be no exaggeration to say that Ladri di Biciclette is the story of a walk through Rome by a father and son. Whether the child is ahead, behind, alongside or when, even sulking after having had his ears boxed, he is dawdling behind, in a gesture of revenge what he is doing is never without meaning. On the contrary, it is the phenomenology of the script.

It is difficult after the success of this pairing of a workman and his son, to imagine De Sica having to recourse to established actors. The absence of professional actors is nothing new. But here again Ladri di Biciclette goes further than previous films. Henceforth the cinematic purity of the actors does not derive from skill, luck, or a happy combination of a subject, a period, and people. Probably too much importance has been attached to the ethnic factor. Admittedly the Italians, like the Russians, are the most naturally theatrical of people. In Italy any little street urchin is the equal of a Jackie Coogan and life is a perpetual commedia dell arte. However, it seems to me unlikely that these acting talents are shared equally by the Millanese, the Neapolitans, the peasants of the Po, or the fishermen of Sicily. Radical difference apart, the contrasts in their history language, and economic and social condition would suffice to cast doubt on a thesis that sought to attribute the natural acting ability of the Italian people simply to an ethnic quality. It is inconceivable that films as different as Paisa, Ladri di Biciclette, and even Il Cielo sulla Palude could share in common such a superbly high level of acting. One could conceive that the urban Italian has a special gift for spontaneous histrionics, but the peasants Il Cielo sulla Palude are absolute cavemen beside the farmers of Farrebique. Merely to recall Rouquier's film in connection with Genina's is enough at least in this respect to relegate the experiment of the French director to the level of a touchingly patronizing effort. Half the dialogue in Farrebique is spoken offstage because Rouquier could never get the peasants not to laugh during a speech of any length. Genina Il Cielo sulla, Falude, Visconti in La Terra Trema, both handling peasants or fishermen by the dozen, gave them complicated roles and got them to recite long speeches in scenes in which the camera concentrated on their faces as pitilessly as in an American studio. It is an understatement to say that these temporary actors are good or even perfect. In these films the very concept of actor, performance, character has no longer any meaning. An actorless cinema? Undoubtedly. But the original meaning of the formula is now outdated, we should talk today of a cinema without acting, of a cinema of which we no longer ask whether the character gives a good performance or not, since here man and the character he portrays are so completely one.

We have not strayed as far as it might seem from Ladri di De Sica hunted for his cast for a long time and selected them for specific characteristics. Natural nobility, that purity of countenance and bearing that the common people have… He hesitated for months between this person and that, took a hundred tests only to decide finally, in a flash and by intuition on the basis of a silhouette suddenly come upon at the bend of a road. But there is nothing miraculous about that. It is not excellence of this workman and this child that guarantees the quality of their performance, but the whole aesthetic scheme into which they are fitted. When De Sica was looking for a producer to finance his film, he finally found one, but on condition that the workman was played by Cary Grant. The mere statement of the problem in these terms shows the absurdity of it. Actually, Cary Grant plays the kind of part extremely well, but it is obvious that the question here is not one of playing of a part but of getting away from the very notion of doing any such thing, The worker had to be at once as perfect and as anonymous and as objective as his bicycle.

This concept of the actor is no less "artistic" than the other. The performance of this workman implies as many gifts of body and of mind and as much capacity to take direction as any established actor has at his command. Hitherto films that have been made either totally or in part without actors, such as Tabu Thunder over Mexico, Mother, have seemingly been successes that are either out of theordinary or limited to a certain genre. There is nothing on the other hand, unless it be sound prudence, to prevent De Sica from making fifty films like Ladri di Biciclette, From now on we know that the absence of professional actors in no way limits the choice of subject. The film without names has finally established its own aesthetic existence. This in no sense means that the cinema of the future will no longer use actors: De Sica who is one of the world's finest actors would be the first to deny this. All it means is that some subjects handled in a certain style can no longer be made with professional actors and that the Italian cinema has definitely imposed these working conditions, just as naturally as it imposed authentic settings. It is this transition from an admirable tour de forge, precarious as this may be, into an exact and infallible technique that marks a decisive stage in the growth of Italian neorealism.

With the disappearance of the concept of the actor into a transparency seemingly as natural as life itself, comes the disappearance of the set. Let us understand one another, however. De Sica's film took a long time to prepare, and everythingwas as minutely planned as for astudio superproduction, which, as a matter of fact, allows for lastminute improvisations, but I cannot remember a, single shot in which a dramatic effect is born of the shooting script properly so called, which seems as neutral as in a Chaplin film. All the same, the numbering and titling of shots do not noticeable distinguish Ladri di Biciclette from any ordinary film. But their selection has been made with a view to raising the limpidity of the event to a maximum, while keeping the index of refraction from the style to a minimum.

This objectivity is rather different from Rossellini's Paisa, but it belongs to the same school of aesthetics. One may criticize. It on the same grounds that Gide and Martin du Garde criticized romantic prose that it must tend in the direction of the most neutral kind of transparency. Just as the disappearance of the actor is the result of transcending style or performance, the disappearance of the mise enscene is likewise the fruit of a dialectical progress in the style of the narrative. If the event is sufficient unto itself without the direction having to shad any further light on it by means of camera angles, purposely chosen camera positions, it is because it has reached that stage of perfect luminosity which makes it possible for an art to unmask a nature which in the end resembles it. That is why the impression, made on us by Ladri di Biciclette is unfailingly that of truth.

If this supreme naturalness, the sense of events observed haphazardly as the hours roll by, is the result of an everpresent although invisible system of aesthetics, it is definitely the prior conception of the scenario which allows this to happen. Disappearance of the actor, disappearance of mise en scene? Unquestionably, but because the very principle of Ladri di Biciclette is the disappearance of a story.

The term is equivocal. I know of course that there is a story but of a different kind from those we ordinarily see on the screen. This is even the reason why De Sica could not find a producer to back him. When Roger Leenhardt in a prophetic critical statement asked years ago "if the cinema is a spectacle," he was contrasting the dramatic cinema with the novellike structure of the cinematic narratives. The former borrows from the theater its hidden springs. Its plot conceived as it may be specifically for the screen, is still the alibi for an action identical in essence with the action or the classical theater. On this score the film is a spectacle like a play. But on the other hand, because of its realism and the equal treatment it gives to man and to nature the cinema is related, aesthetically speaking, to the novel.

Without going too far into the theory of the novel a debatable subject lot us say that the narrative form of the novel or that which derives from it differs by and large from the theater in the primacy given to events over action, to succession over causality, to mind over will. The conjunction belonging to the theater is "therefore" particle belonging to the novel is "then." This scandalously rough definition is correct to the extent that it characterizes the two different movements of the mind in thinking, namely that of the reader and that of the onlooker. Proust can lose us in a madeleine, but a playwright fails in his task if every reply does not link our interest to the reply that is to follow. That is why a novel may be laid down and then picked up again, A play cannot be cut into pieces. The total unity of a spectacle is of its essence. To the extent that it can realize the physical requirements of a spectacle, but the cinema cannot apparently escape the spectacle's psychological laws, but it has also at its disposal all the resources of the novel. For that reason, doubtless, the cinema is congenitally a hybrid. It conceals a contradiction, besides, clearly, the progression of the cinema is toward increasing its novellike potential. Not that we are againstfilmed theater, but if the screen can in some conditions develop and give a now dimension to the theater, it is of necessity at the expense of certain scenic values the first of which is the physical presence of the actor. Contrariwise, the novel at least ideally need surrender nothing to the cinema. One may think of the film, as a supernovel of which the written form is a feeble and provisional version.

This much briefly said, how much of it can be found in the present condition of the cinematographic spectacle? It is impossible to overlook the spectacular and theatrical needs demanded of the screen. What remains to be decided is how to reconcile the contradiction.

The Italian cinema of today is the first anywhere in the world to have enough courage to cast aside the imperatives of the spectacular. La Terra Trema and Cielo sulla Falude are films without "action," in the unfolding of which, somewhat after the style of the epic novel, no concession is made to dramatic tension. Things happen in them each at its appointed hour, one after the other, but each carries an equal weight. If some are fuller, of meaning than others, it is only in retrospect. We are free to useeither "therefore or "then." La Terra Troma, especially, is a film destined to be virtually a commercial failure unexploitable without cuts that would leave it unrecognizable.

That is the virtue of De Sica and Zavattini. Their Ladri di, Biciclette to solidly structured in the mold of a tragedy. There is not one frame that to not charged with an intense dramatic power, yet there is not one either which we cannot fall to find interesting its dramatic continuity apart.

The film unfolds on the level of pure accident: the rain, the seminarians, the Catholic Quakers, the restaurant - all these are seemingly interchangeable, no one seems to have arranged them in order on a dramatic spectrum. The scene in the thieves' quarter is significant. We are not sure that the man who was chased by the workman is actually the bicycle thief, and we shall never know if the epileptic fit was a pretence or genuine. As an "action" this episode would be meaningless had not its novel like interest, its value as a fact, given it a dramatic meaning to boot.

It is in fact on its reverse sides and by parallel that the action is assembled less in terms of "tension" than of a "summation" of the events. Yes, it is a spectacle! Ladri di Biciclette, however, does not depend on the mathematical elements of drama, the action does not exist beforehand as if it were an "essence." It follows from the preexistence of the narrative, it is the "integral" of reality. De Sica's supreme achievement which others have so faronly approached with a varying degree of success or failure, in tohave succeeded in the discovering the cinematographic dialectic capable of transcending the contradiction between the action of a "spectacle" and of an event. For this reason Ladri di Biciclette is one of the first examples of pure cinema, no more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.

ANDRE BAZIN

Pickpockets double feature

The second double feature is again a matter of thievery: "Pickpockets", from 1959 directed by Robert Bresson, followed by "Xiao Wu" (Pickpocket, 1997) directed by Jia Zhang Ke who is considered a leading figure of the "Sixth Generation" of Chinese directors.

"Pickpockets" starts with a a crawl title: "The style of this film is not that of a thriller. The author attempts to explain, in pictures and sounds the nightmare of a young man, forced by his weakness into an adventure in theft for which he was not made. Yet this adventure, by strange paths, brings together two souls, which otherwise might never have been united."
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/33/hou_hsiao_hsien_bresson.htm...

Jia Zhangke is a leading figure of what is known as the “Sixth Generation” of film directors in the People's Republic of China, following the “Fifth Generation,” whose members include Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. The Fifth Generation directors occupy themselves mostly with spectacle-driven mythic histories laden with pointed social criticisms that jeopardize their standing with the government censors. In contrast, the Sixth Generation filmmakers largely produce their gritty, contemporary realist films well outside of the state system, relying instead on personal or private funding, often through sources outside China. Filmed without government approval, the work of filmmakers such as Jia, Zhang Yuan (East Palace West Palace, 1997) and Wang Xiaoshuai (So Close to Paradise [1998], Beijing Bicycle [2001]) remain mostly undistributed within China, save for the illegal circulation of pirated video copies.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/jia.html

Riding Towards the Future

Riding Towards the Future is a text on Wang Xiaoshuai's movie "Beijing Bicycle" written by Elizabeth Wright for Senses of Cinema, "an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema". She recently completed her honours year in film studies at Monash University (Melbourne). Her thesis focused on the film aesthetic of Wong Kar-wai.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/18/beijing_bicycle.html

Far from home - Chinese art in Berlin

Berlin has in recent years become a particular focal point for contemporary Chinese art. The journalist and writer Annett Busch has talked to some of the major galleries and art critics to find out why, and uncovered interesting trends in a fast changing scene.

Naked figures run, in „East-West“, amidst a vast urban space, towards the Brandenburger Tor -- the tiny, fuzzy digital assembled bodies beneath a significant historic symbol of neo-classical architecture. The metaphor of the long-distance runner couldn’t be more effective. Chi Peng is one of the youngest (b.1981) and most impressively productive shooting stars of the Chinese art scene and with his "Sprinting Forward" photo composition series in 2004 he captured the incoherence of the sense of both alienation and attraction towards a rapidly changing country. In particular, "Sprinting Forward II", with its multiplied naked silhouettes of the artist running alongside flashy red buses and hunted by red planes, became an icon of sexual vulnerability and imaginary nightmares, of stillness and speed. "East-West" appears like a final spurt, mirrored by "West-East" where the bodies become like weightless dragonflies, bird-people on their way towards East.

In his latest series of works around the "monkey king", Chi Peng deepens and adapts the image of the east-west relationship by taking up a classical novel, written in the 16th century by Wu Cheng’en. The story got quite famous outside of China as "Journey to the West" through pop-culture, comics and a Chinese TV-series. It's the fantastic journey of the monk Xuan Zang to India, whose aim is to bring Buddhist sutras back to China. The actual hero of the narration, however, is the smart and rebellious monkey king Sun Wukong who is endowed with magical skills. Among other things he is able to transform himself into 72 different shapes and creatures – a character almost predestined to serve as an ‘alter ego’ for Chi Peng. The artist has assembled a condensed narrative where the vertical timeline of tradition, ancient myths and modern lifestyle disappears and seems to unite both in productive but scary contradictions. The monkey series has recently been shown at Alexander Ochs Galleries in Berlin and will travel afterwards to his "White Space" in Beijing.

The Berlin-Beijing relationship

Alexander Ochs has been something of a pioneer in showcasing Chinese art in Germany. Ten years ago he opened the Alexander Ochs Galleries in a former factory building on Sophienstrasse in Berlin-Mitte with an exhibition called "No Chinese Art" exhibiting artists from China nobody had heard of before. Recently he has been celebrating the gallery’s first successful decade with an exhibition titled "Inferno in Paradise" and curated by Reinhard Spieler. It promises to be a show of potential connections with and beyond the artists Ochs already represents rather than a retrospective. As he explained: "There will be thrilling bi- and multilateral structures, ideas and dialogues – a kind of a criss-cross just as our world appears [i.e. just like the world itself – Ed]. That’s how Marlene Dumas and Wolfgang Leib will meet with Qiu Shihua and Yoo Junghyun, Yang Shaobin with Heribert C. Ottersbach or Qin Qin with Franz Gertsch."

Whereas the special Berlin-Beijing relationship may prove to be a long and legendary one, Alexander Ochs refers to it more as a matter of course: "I was always only interested in quality and the attitude towards art, not in ethnics…For me it didn’t matter at all if one lived in Bejing, Berlin or New York" adds Alexander Ochs. In the early 1990s before running a gallery, Ochs already curated exhibitions with Fang Lijun and Xu Bing who became central figures in the international art scene and are still represented by Ochs Galleries. "The first piece I sold was Xu Bing’s installation “The Book from the Sky”, that was in Spring 2000 to Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Today we're selling all over the world. Sure, 60% of the sales we do are in Asia but I'm still very grateful to collectors like Erika Hoffmann who bought the first group of Fang Lijuns xylography and who continues even now when MoMA is continuously collecting his work." "If Magritte was a cool Chinese guy, his work may have looked something like Fang Lijun’s", writes art critic Ben Davidson in the lifestyle Magazin "Beijing Scene".

Having written about Chinese art since 1997, after she came back from a trip to Beijing as a young, impressed and refined exchange student, art critic Ulrike Münter who recently did some groundbreaking research with a focus on Chinese women artists, takes up the Berlin-Bejing relation from a slightly other perspective. "After the crackdown of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 many of the artists moved to Berlin. Many of them preferred Germany to France or Great Britain and Berlin to Munich or Hamburg. Germany somehow had a better image and no colonial background in Asia, and also because of the Germany’s need to deal with their past. In China people are astonished but also fascinated by that. Some of the younger artists can get almost aggressive when I ask them about the impact of the Cultural Revolution or even the Tiananmen Square protests. That’s the history of their parents -- the younger [generation] reclaim their own.”

House of World Cultures

During the 1990s Berlin also played an important role regarding the presentation of contemporary art from China. In particular, House of World Cultures made a first step by showing "China Avantgarde", later in 2001 there was "Living in Time" in Hamburger Bahnhof, "About Beauty", 2005, and "China in between post and future" in 2006 again in House of World Cultures. Recently the brand new lifestyle magazine "Ilook" in Beijing commissioned an article by Ulrike Münter to write about the connections of Berlin and Beijing and there she concentrates on the impact of architecture and rapid large scale political and social change on the art scene – with a special emphasis on space. In Beijing as well as in Berlin huge, empty and former factory areas were transformed to art spaces and opened up new opportunities. In the area of the legendary Factory 798 in Beijing, a huge passage with bookshops, galleries and ateliers, initiated by the architect, artist and curator Ai Weiwei, one can also find Alexander Ochs "White Space". And again last year in Berlin new and young curators initiated, without any funding, a festival ambiguously titled "Made in China" (http://made-in-cn.de) and connected provocative art with specific public spaces. Their next step was to open a virtual gallery at www.johnnyjudgegallery.com a move consistent with their understanding of art as something that is about real and imaginary connections rather than representation.

Within the last two years, the scene has changed completely and the artists are "floating back to china". "And you shouldn't forget the aspect of food" Alexander Ochs adds with a notion of irony. "Democracy might be a good thing, but real chinese food...!" There is also an economic side to this move: "If you're thinking about from where you can [as an artist] (re-)launch a career, that will be Beijing and not Berlin. Curators and collectors from abroad are coming to Beijing and from there you can get international."

Besides Alexander Ochs in Berlin there is also Lothar Albrecht in Frankfurt/Main with "L.A. Galleries". "I brought Lothar to China" Ochs mentions fatherly and Lothar Albrecht likes to mention his passion for discovery. Albrecht started in the early 1990s with the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, nowadays mostly known as a winner of the Turner Prize, followed by artists like Tracy Moffatt, Oliver Boberg, Ken Lum, Naoya Hatakeyama, Peter Bialobrezski, Taiji Matsue or Javier Vallhonrat and Joan Fontcuberta who also became part of his program. And regarding his recent exhibition with Ma Jun and Huang Min and particularly last year "Samples from the Transition" with the work of Liu Ding, Albrecht’s approach to Chinese art is obviously different, operating on a conceptual level with a focus on themes like (art) production, exploring notions of copying and originality.

“Ma Jun und Huang Min are part of a generation which already takes the effects of China’s reforms and rapprochement with the West for granted. They face other questions than the generation before them...the small TV sets, cassette recorders, cars, cola bottles and cans, and other model products of Western affluent society, are made in Jindezhen. A centre of Chinese porcelain production for more than 1000 years, Jindezhen is itself a symbol of Chinese art and culture. The glazes in the traditional colours, the floral patterns, the folkloristic subjects and the characteristic surfaces that make the objects appear like very valuable arts and crafts, therefore, are all familiar even to the Western viewer" art-critic Bettina Schmitt has written commenting on L.A.Galleries.

Painting Factory

With his performance-installation "products" Liu Ding also works alongside the interface of cheap piecework production, (self) critical discourse and the capitalist patterns of the art market. Originally commissioned for the Second Guangzhou Triennial, "Products" invited a group of thirteen professional artists from the nearby city of Dafancun – China’s famed “painting factory” village, where workers produce thousands of paintings daily, fuelling a giant export business – to perform their assembly-line painting process during the opening of what is arguably China’s most important international art exhibition. In the L.A. Gallery "Products" became itself a product, encased in custom Plexiglas vitrine and ensconced in a nimbus of Flavinesque fluorescence.

Speaking of criticality, tendencies and perspectives, Alexander Ochs once again has some comments and ideas in mind which concentrate more on sustainability. "It is difficult to speak about tendencies and perspectives in a society which is so rapidly changing like the Chinese one. What counts for the whole country is also obvious in art. I think we should leave the decision up to the Chinese how to proceed - the only thing we could do is to initiate structures which could give some space to create and reflect common experiences. Therefore as a present to celebrate our tenth jubilee, together with the 'EurAsian Culture Exchange' Foundation, we’re building an art-hall in Beijing understood as a space for discours3 - which I think is more than necessary."

Meanwhile Ulrike Münter is preparing her book about female Chinese artists. "Most of their works don't have this 'Chinese factor' and the West is therefore responding with lower prices. You never see them drawing a Mao-portrait, but anyhow, who is still painting Mao, that's only for export business." She likes the challenge of her job. "The art-scene develops in such a tremendous speed that all you write is immediately historic." The monkey has already prepared a new, unexpected image.

by Annett Busch