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After a botched attempt, he is being let off easily. As he sits down on the curb and cradles his head in despair, the director taunts him even more by having a group of cyclists cross the frame while the camera dollies in on the unfortunate father.įinally, Antonio comes to the inevitable conclusion: He has to steal a bicycle himself in order to survive. When the fans leave the stadium and mount on hundreds of bikes, it becomes too much for Antonio. The quest for the bicycle has an odyssey structure, whereas the abandonment of his son on the banks of the Tiber reminds us of Romulus and Remus.Īfter a fruitless day, Antonio and Bruno arrive at the soccer stadium where the game is about to end. De Sica clearly explores ancient legends here. Together with his young son Bruno, he starts a frantic search through the streets of Rome to retrieve his prized possession. He realizes that without it he will be out of work again soon, and he has no other option than to try to recover it. When Antonio goes to work the next morning, his bike is stolen. The Ricci family is not the exception they’re just part of a war-ravaged, poor society. And when the bed linen is handed over to the pawnbroker, the camera follows the clerk and reveals thousands of similar packages. When he is offered a job, there is a crowd of unemployed workers. The apartment where Antonio lives is in disrepair and doesn’t have running water. He deems the viewer intelligent enough to take clues from the allegories he provides, and doesn’t take refuge in a voiceover. Remarkably, De Sica doesn’t waste any time on setting the scene or on the family’s backstory in this act.
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For me, viewing this movie marks the start of my career. It broadened my horizons and I started watching movies from a different perspective. Maybe I was just impressionable in those formative years, but the movie’s seeming simplicity appealed to me. Antonio’s bike is pawned, but his wife Maria decides to pawn their bed sheets in order to get the bicycle from the pawnbroker. This story starts in post-war, poverty-stricken Rome, where the unemployed Antonio Ricci (in Neorealist tradition played by a nonprofessional actor) gets a chance at a city job, under the condition that he has a bicycle. Among movies made by Roberto Rossellini and Lucino Visconti, I watched Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) in awe. On one of these occasions, Peter introduced me to Italian Neorealism. Whenever there was a retrospective of a director or a genre, he’d urge me to go see as many movies as possible. But Peter made me go to late-night showings of movies he considered to be masterpieces.
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I earned a living as a sound engineer then, so there was little free time to spare.
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After I found out that it was common in my country to combine the functions of videotape editor and technical director, I made it my quest to become an editor.Ī few years later, I was fortunate enough to find a mentor in Peter Rump, a prominent Dutch videotape editor who taught me everything he knew about television and film, made me read many books (James Monaco’s excellent How to Read a Film comes to mind), and allowed me to shadow him for over two years. The whole process fascinated me and I knew immediately that I wanted to be part of it. I stuck around and watched on a monitor how the images from the cameras were combined into a sequence that told the story of the scene, which unfolded on the set before me.

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Growing up in The Netherlands, I was still in elementary school when I saw a television production truck in full operation.
