Please help asnwer this questions with three or more clear sentences.On p. 50 of his article, Bazin plainly states that the plot of Bicycle Thieves wouldn’t even warrant mention in a newspaper for the obvious banality of the event. How does the idea of “banality” fit in with Zavattini’s ideation of neorealism? Bazin ultimately brings the idea of shame into this seemingly superfluous story. How does that impact the definition of the film as neorealist or the audience reception of it as such? 0000Cesare Zavattini:The cinema should never turn back. It should accept, unconditionally,what is contemporary. Today, today, today.It must tell reality as if it were a story; there must be no gap betweenlife and what is on the screen. To give an example:A woman goes to a shop to buy a pair of shoes. The shoes cost 7,000lire. The woman tries to bargain. The scene lasts, perhaps, twominutes. I must make a two-hour film. What do I do?I analyse the fact in all its constituent elements, in its 'before,' in its'after,' in its contemporaneity. The fact creates its own fiction, in itsown particular sense.The woman is buying the shoes. What is her son doing at the samemoment? What are people doing in India that could have somerelation to this fact of the shoes? The shoes cost 7,000 lire. How did thewoman happen to have 7,000 lire? How hard did she work for them,what do they represent for her?And the bargaining shopkeeper, who is he? What relationship hasdeveloped between these two human beings? What do they mean,what interests are they defending, as they bargain? The shopkeeperalso has two sons, who eat and speak: do you want to know what theyare saying? Here they are, in front of you.The question is, to be able to fathom the real correspondencesbetween facts and their process of birth, to discover what lies beneaththem....Thus to analyse 'buying a pair of shoes' in such a way opens to us avast and complex world rich in importance and values, in its practical,social, economic, psychological motives. Banality disappears becauseeach moment is really charged with responsibility. Every moment isinfinitely rich. Banality never really existed.Excavate, and every little fact is revealed as a mine. If the gold-diggers come at last to dig in the illimitable mine of reality, the cinemawill become socially important.This can also be done, evidently, with invented characters; but if Iuse living, real characters with which to sound reality, people in whoselife I can directly participate, my emotion becomes more effective,morally stronger, more useful. Art must be expressed through a truename and surname, not a false one.I am bored to death with heroes more or less imaginary. I want tomeet the real protagonist of everyday life, I want to see how he is made,if he has a moustache or not, if he is tall or short, I want to see his eyes,and I want to speak to him.We can look at him on the screen with the same anxiety, the samecuriosity as when, in a square, seeing a crowd of people all hurrying upto the same place, we ask, What is happening? What is happening to areal person? Neorealism has perceived that the most irreplaceableexperience comes from things happening under our own eyes fromnatural necessity.I am against 'exceptional' personages. The time has come to tell theaudience that they are the true protagonists of life. The result will be aconstant appeal to the responsibility and dignity of every humanbeing. Otherwise the frequent habit of identifying oneself withfictional characters will become very dangerous. We must identifyourselves with what we are. The world is composed of millions ofpeople thinking of myths (Zavattini, 1953).62 What Is Cinema?grandiose coincidences common in detective stories which simply trans-fer to a realm of proletarian exoticism the great tragic debates once re-served for the dwellers on Olympus. Truly an insignificant, even a banalincident: a workman spends a whole day looking in vain in the streetsof Rome for the bicycle someone has stolen from him. This bicycle hasbeen the tool of his trade, and if he doesn't find it he will again be unem-ployed. Late in the day, after hours of fruitless wandering, he too tries tosteal a bicycle. Apprehended and then released, he is as poor as ever, butnow he feels the shame of having sunk to the level of the thief.Plainly there is not enough material here even for a news item: thewhole story would not deserve two lines in a stray-dog column. One musttake care not to confuse it with realist tragedy in the Prévert or JamesCain manner, where the initial news item is a diabolic trap placed by thegods amid the cobble stones of the street. In itself the event contains noproper dramatic valence. It takes on meaning only because of the social(and not psychological or aesthetic) position of the victim. Without thehaunting specter of unemployment, which places the event in the Italiansociety of 1948, it would be an utterly banal misadventure. Likewise, thechoice of a bicycle as the key object in the drama is characteristic both ofItalian urban life and of a period when mechanical means of transporta-tion were still rare and expensive. There is no need to insist on the hun-dreds of other meaningful details that multiply the vital links betweenthe scenario and actuality, situating the event in political and social his-tory, in a given place at a given time.The techniques employed in the mise en scène likewise meet the mostexacting specifications of Italian neorealism. Not one scene shot in a studio.Everything was filmed in the streets. As for the actors, none had the slight-est experience in theater or film. The workman came from the Breda fac-tory, the child was found hanging around in the street, the wife was ajournalist.These then are the facts of the case. It is clear that they do not appearto recall in any sense the neorealism of Quattro passi fra le nuvole, Viverein Pace, or Sciuscià. On the face of it then one should have special reasonsfor being wary. The sordid side of the tale tends toward that most de-50Bicycle Thiefbatable aspect of Italian stories: indulgence in the wretched, a systematicsearch for squalid detail.If Ladri di Biciclette is a true masterpiece, comparable in rigor toPaisà, it is for certain precise reasons, none of which emerge either froma simple outline of the scenario or from a superficial disquisition on thetechnique of the mise en scène.The scenario is diabolically clever in its construction; beginning withthe alibi of a current event it makes good use of a number of systems ofdramatic coordinates radiating in all directions. Ladri di Biciclette is cer-tainly the only valid Communist film of the whole past decade preciselybecause it still has meaning even when you have abstracted its social sig-nificance. Its social message is not detached, it remains immanent in theevent, but it is so clear that nobody can overlook it, still less take excep-tion to it, since it is never made explicitly a message. The thesis impliedis wondrously and outrageously simple: in the world where this workmanlives, the poor must steal from each other in order to survive. But thisthesis is never stated as such, it is just that events are so linked togetherthat they have the appearance of a formal truth while retaining an anec-dotal quality. Basically, the workman might have found his bicycle in themiddle of the film; only then there would have been no film. (Sorry to havebothered you, the director might say; we really did think he would neverfind 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 wouldtry to prove that the workman could not find his bicycle, and that he isinevitably trapped in the vicious circle of poverty. De Sica limits himself toshowing that the workman cannot find his bicycle and that as a result hedoubtless will be unemployed again. No one can fail to see that it is theaccidental 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 apropaganda film renders the argument hypothetical.Although on the basis of the workman's misfortune we have no al-ternative but to condemn a certain kind of relation between a man and hiswork, the film never makes the events or the people part of an economicor political Manicheism. It takes care not to cheat on reality, not only by51332

The concept of neorealism in the cinema emerged as a response to the desire for authenticity and a…

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Social Psychology (10th Edition)

10th Edition

ISBN:9780134641287

Author:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers

Publisher:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers

Chapter1: Introducing Social Psychology

Section: Chapter Questions

Problem 1RQ1

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