The Taviani brothers on Bicycle Thieves: “It was like a course in directing”

Getting to know cinema turned us into traitors. We betrayed any art form that wasn’t cinema. It projected us beyond humanist culture, which in spite of our love and respect we felt was now downgraded to a trite, pedantic bourgeois legacy. New horizons would now open up. The technical aspect of film art, its instruments – film camera, film stock, lenses, light – represented a revolutionary novelty too. The new generations are still now enthralled by the most advanced technologies. They become excited, even too much. But imagination, if there is some, will manage to dominate them.

We lived on cinema and only on it. In those days, Pisa and its terse architecture – so much present in our films’ style, according to some critics – became confused with an irreverent idea of the city: the squares, the streets were connected for us to the location of its movie theatres. The Arno quays, to the Supercinema; San Paolo square, to the Odeon; corso Vittorio, to the cinema Italia; Carrara square, to the Teatro Rossi – right here, just a short walk from the University. It is there that we saw Bicycle Thieves. It was raining that afternoon. Our faces were wet with raindrops, but also tears. “Aesthetic tears,” our friends teased, just as moved as we were.

De Sica fascinated us for his fresh language, halfway between document and fiction, and the raw tenderness with which he depicted the tragedy of the bicycle thief, mediated by spurts of innocent comicality (the child) and the hustle and bustle of characters: a humankind never before represented on screen, a chorus walking by the side of the two heroes that comments, lampoons, and weeps with them. These were new forms to represent tragedy not on the boards of a theatre stage but those of daily reality, suggesting in its own way and unemphatically that some social renewal was urgent.

Orson Welles, a Shakespearean genius with a violent cinematic expressivity, terribly distant from the Italian director, was asked who his favourite European film director was. Without hesitation, he replied, “De Sica.” Years later, Woody Allen was to follow up with him: “My most cherished movie? Bicycle Thieves.”

We watched and rewatched De Sica’s movie. We went in search for it, on our bicycles, in the cinemas of the small villages around Pisa. We wanted to appropriate its hidden truth. In those years, DVDs didn’t exist. We decided to rewrite the dialogues and camera movements based on memory: it was the only way to belong in the work of De Sica and Zavattini, to share their insights. 

When we compared our research with a new viewing of the film, we were taken aback by its poetically simple solutions, in contrast with the exaggeration of our attempts to reproduce some notable emotional sequence. Let’s go back on one of these. Bruno, the son, but more than a son, the sweet and grumpy friend of the father in search of the bicycle, is exhausted. It was a long, unsuccessful day. The father has walked away. The child’s eyes are suddenly attracted by something that is happening, something unbearable. What are they seeing? A thief stealing a bicycle, the passers-by running after him, getting ahold of him, beating him. That thief is his father. A long, very long tracking shot runs around Bruno’s close-up, with the camera thus emphasizing the torn-apart child’s bewilderment… 

We said a long tracking shot. This we wrote down. But no, the tracking shot is short, very short: our emotion, in our memory, had dilated the duration of the shot. It was like a course in directing: we studied the sequence more carefully, the succession of the shots, the internal rhyming, the string of emotions, how they were edited, up to the explosion of the tracking shot, of that close-up with which De Sica reached at the hearts of viewers from all over the world without resorting to any virtuoso camerawork. Or rather he did, but to a tracking shot, and just a few metres.

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani were speaking at a masterclass at Pisa University on 11 March 2008, translated from Italian by Carla Scura and published by Cinecittà in the monograph Paolo & Vittorio Taviani.

A season of Taviani brothers films runs at BFI Southbank until 13 March.

Bicycle Thieves will screen as part of the Italian neorealism season at BFI Southbank from May to June.