Comparing De Sica's Bicycle Thieves And Saturday Night

With close reference to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and ONE film of your own choice, compare the style, themes and goals of Italian neo-realism to another mode of realism. Please note that you should address fictional narratives that create a strong impression of reality, not documentary.

I have chosen to compare De Sica’s Bicycle Theives to the great British classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Karel Reisz. In some ways the British New wave or “kitchen sink” realism movement was influenced and instigated by the post-war Italian Neo-realist films of the late forties and early fifties especially Bicycle Theives (De Sica, 1948, Italy). They are both great examples of social realism at its best and have shaped and influenced many
of the great minds we watch and admire today.
The poetic beauty of both the Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948, Italy) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960, England) epitomizes linear narrative and also creates a profound spirit through an effortless story.
In the Bicycle Theives (De Sica, 1948, Italy), it starts with the theft of a bicycle and the consequences it has for an ordinary man trying to survive and maintain some sense of moral dignity. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960, England) tells the story of a young factory worker from Nottingham who has a hostile approach to authority, he spends his money at the weekends, drinking at the pubs, fornicating with co-workers wife and charms a young girl, while coming to terms with the times and the decisions ahead of
him.
There are countless characteristics that would come to determine the neo-realist movement. The Bicycle Theives (De Sica, 1948, Italy) came 12 years before Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960, England) and arouse out of post-war Italy. The stylistic techniques used in the Neo-Realist movement would mark as a foothold for social realism. They used such techniques as such natural lighting, the use of location shooting (that exhibits Rome in a time of struggle), improvisation, the non-closure of the narrative, and ideologies that give prominence to the working class and humanism. Its fundamental focus is on the everyday labor of the poor, working class people in arduous socio-political conditions. Stylistically, it immerses itself in its mise-en-scene to achieve objective reality, as opposed to the ritualistic methods of montage, which emphasizes how cinema can orchestrate reality. In the expression of narrative, neorealism deviates from Hollywood filmmaking with the focal point on character, assenting the plot to evolve organically. There is often an obscurity with citation to the outcome of events and no judgments are made as to the morality, or of characters and their actions. All of this allows space to the viewer to interpret the scene or film for him or herself and come to their own conclusions.
The ‘Kitchen Sink’ realism or British New Wave movement came about 10 years after the Neo-Realist movement, it ran from 1958 till 1962 and coincided with the French New Wave.
In a more direct context, these films where a break away from the cinema that was leaking out of Britain, it was seen as a new approach to cinema in its style and artistic nature that was more custom to European Art Cinema, rather than the solemn ritual of British film making prior. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960, England) is an excellent example of ‘Kitchen Sink’ realism and emulates many stylistic attributes that are commonly seen in the Bicycle Theives (De Sica, 1948,
Italy).

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960, England) is characterized by the black and white film reel, almost documentary like, trying to achieve a cinema verite style. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Resize, 1960 England) also filmed on location around Nottingham, the factory scenes, where Arthur works was filmed at the Raleigh Bicycle factory in Radford, Nottingham. It enhances the portrayal of the working class in Nottingham, with its hard labor factory life, we also see Arthur in the pub as a contrast to the factory and also a vehicle for his escapism for his hard working life. Both films show off the working class in both cultures, and the hardships they go through, especially the young, into a heartless post-modern age. The use of real people as actors seen in the factory scenes and also Albert Finney who play Arthur Seaton and his language used in the film adds to the development of social-realism, and the appeal the audiences. Moreover, audiences heard Finney and other actors in the film using the ordinary speech, which they were familiar. Reisz was convinced that audiences “no longer wanted to look up to something different. They wanted stars with whom they could identify”(Major Film Directors of the American and British Cinema, 1999, by Gene D. Phillips Page 212)
The storyline becomes the vehicle for multiple levels of meaning. Unlike this-for-that allegory, however, the literal level is not swallowed up by its figurative significance, but maintains its autonomy as a document of a concrete historical condition. (Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, page 55). The film fabricates such a robust perception of reality by the virtue faced by the central protagonist, that of such crisis, unemployment and poverty, where social misfortunes had agonized the Italian working class in the post-war maelstrom of self ruination. European society had lost consciousness, and nations like Italy had not only been ostracized from the world collective for their complicity with the rise of the fascist belief, but they were trying in vain to intensely discover an eloquent and virtuous means of expression that would permit them to reassemble and recondition the oxidized image of a sharply segregated and unmatched nation.
In a comment, Vittorio De Sica phrases, “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 worn-out materials.” (Citied in ‘De Sica du De Sica’ Bianco e nero 36, 1975, 259) The account is that of Antonio Ricci, an unemployed man in the in the dejected post- world war II providence of Italy, at last aquires a highly commendable job – for which he obligates a bike – hanging up posters around Rome. Nevertheless to Antonio’s anguish in his abutting fortune his bicycle is stolen from him. He and his son ramble the streets of Rome, pursuing the thief and the poached bicycle. Antonio conclusively presides to uncover the thief, however with no proof, Ricci renounces his purpose. He and his son (who trampled the streets of Rome hand in hand) know admirably that without the bicycle, Antonio wont be capable to detain his job. Ricci is then reduced to ridicule as he seizes the opportunity to steal a bicycle – to then be caught by a mass of Italians – as his son watches on in despair.
Yet the simultaneous and parallel meanings it generates on psychological, sociopolitical, and philosophical levels serve to give every cinematic event such complexity that what appears at first glance to be a simple narrative construction upon close critical scrutiny reveals the highest degree of literariness in both films. The illusive simplicity assembles the film for instance, Ricci’s bicycle. The bearer of far heavier and more sophisticated cargo than its fragile exterior that 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 self-concealing art that typifies De Sica’s approach to meaning (Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, page 55).
Antonio is not even present at the call for work as he feels finding work is a futile exercise, and such was the case in Italy at the time. The unemployment crisis seemed to largely affect the working class who De Sica chooses to depict as a mass, and the motif of the crowd as a metaphor for the collective unity of the working class is repeated throughout the film (Omar Ahad, 2008, The accents of Cinema: Bicycle Thieves). For example, when Antonio is searching for the Bicycle thief he stumbles across a culprit who is attending mass at a catholic church, furthermore when looking for his bike down the market, showing the vastness of population in Rome also tantalizing the viewer with a great depiction of the Italian community and culture. Bicycle Thieves is deemed a ‘realist’ film purely on the basis of an aesthetic approach that favoured a documentary look, a rejection of artifice, and a belief that the ideological value of the film had the radical potential to ferment revolution and externalise the marginalised sentiments of the working class people in Rome.