Week 8 reflection

Bicycle Thieves reflect several characteristics of the Italian Neorealism filmmaking. Throughout
the portray of the working-class man Ricci, viewers are shown the everyday environment
surrounding him and his peers – the rundown streets, crowded apartments they live in, and the
appearances of his fellow workers. The storytelling does not adopt common editing such as
flashback to “structure a narrative in terms of standard causal logic” (just as there is no
flashbacks in reality). It is a series of events, or fragments of reality, that are unique and
ambiguous in nature. The end of the film does not provide a ‘solution’ or any sort of insights
into the conflict, only the protagonist’s hopeless resort to transgression which fails and leaves
both him and his son in confusion and agony. To further build a perfect illusion of reality, the
director uses amateur actors (both actors who played Ricci and his son are ordinary people
instead of professional actors) and shoots in a real-life environment instead of studio sets. The
characters themselves are also shaped in a way that their moralities are ambiguous, thus
incredibly realistic. For example, the church workers who provide actual charity of food in
exchange for people’s loyalty and exclusion of the ‘outsiders’ such as Ricci, a man indeed in
need of God’s help. He is aggressively ejected from the mass by the workers who claim that he
is being aggressive and disturbing, and during which they have to stop and make signs of a cross
before chasing him down again. In the most astute final moments of the film, Ricci transforms
into a bicycle thief himself but only because it is in a juxtaposition with the series of failure of
attempts to find his lost bike. The viewers may see him as not perfectly moral but deeply
relatable beyond the simple binary of the good-evil human nature.