Italian Neorealism in The Bicycle Thieves and Germany: Year Zero

Film theorist Andre Bazin distinguished between pseudorealism, that which is concerned with the aesthetic niceties associated with the conventionally 'realistic', and what he saw as actual realism. His formulation of such a realism concerns film's nature as reactionary and Italian neorealism was a movement that reacted to not only to the American film studio releases but to the world around it. The films of directors, such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, explored the renegotiations of class and societal roles in a Europe wracked by political upheaval and economic crises. They did so in such a style that reacted to material conditions and often invoked the documentary form, disinterested in the Hollywood theatrics like sets and movie stars. Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Rossellini's Germany: Year Zero were two films born out of the neorealist movement, released in 1945 and 1948 respectively. Notably concerning two of the Axis forces most enthralled to fascism during WWII, it is in the post-war renegotiation of societal roles and values that the worlds of both The Bicycle Thieves and Germany: Year Zero manifest.

In the tradition of Italian neorealism, Rossellini shot Germany: Year Zero on the streets of Berlin itself. Like in Bicycle Thieves's Italy, the post-war/post-fascist Germany is more than an aesthetic deployed for the film: it is a snapshot of reality. This perception of a true reality, one which absconds from theatrical, character examinations in favour of characters who cannot be detached from the worlds they inhabit and are only footnotes of the wider reality, is definitional of neorealism in Bazin's thinking. He wrote that "…neorealism by definition rejects analysis, whether political, moral, psychological, logical, or social, of the characters and their actions. It looks on reality as a whole, not incomprehensible, certainly, but inseparably one" (Bazin, 1967b: 97). The neorealist films, to this end, forewent actor-personalities driven by star power. The film's are instead populated by non-actors who detach the films further away from any kind of preconceived notion around character-actors and theatrics in cinema. The characters are very literally the products of the world around them, as the world around them is where their actors were found. That a film can be unrealistic, yet wholly realist, would seem to have been Bazin's point. Cinema then possesses a mummifying effect, where, if used in the neorealist way, it can produce an archival history in and of itself; a means of "the preservation of life by a representation of life" (Bazin, 1967a: 10).

Many of the Italian neorealist films focused in on the disruption of societal roles in the emerging post-war and post-fascist context of post-1945 Europe. Germany: Year Zero transplants the Italian style to the German locale, but it doesn't stop there. It also transplants the post-war/post-fascist concerns of neorealism to a new nationality; that the film was directed and written by Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini suggests that there is not only the shadow of Hitler cast over the film, but the shadow of Mussolini as well. That the film is almost entirely in Germany's native tongue doesn't negate its Italian-ness. In light of this, I want to briefly talk about how these two films, set in two different countries and produced by two different directors, come together to provide a congruous, neorealist world.

One may be tempted to compare the characters Bruno and Edmund, who provide dual perspectives of the child in this movement of cinema, however, I think it would be more pertinent to compare Antonio to Edmund. Each are the closest each film has to a main character; the moral degradation and loss of innocence associated with living in an impoverished world hits these characters the hardest. Both Rome in Bicycle Thieves and Berlin in Germany: Year Zero are presented as cities that have more workers than work itself. The opening moments of these films are actually startlingly similar, in so far that they are both concerned with the possession (or lack thereof) of work permits. The 'truth' of Bicycle Thieves, that "in the world where this workman lives, the poor must steal from each other in order to survive" (Bazin, 1967b: 51), is the point of similarity between De Sica's Italy and Rossellini's Berlin. Like Antonio, Edmund has viable work taken from him (he is discovered to be too young and is fired). The loss of work, of a respectable way of navigating their impoverished cities and lives, precludes directly the moral compromises that will make both these characters social aberrations; Antonio the thief and Edmund the parricidal murderer.

Antonio and his son, Bruno, in Bicycle Thieves (1945).

That Antonio, on his mission to reclaim his bicycle, is let down by the supposed institutions of the working class- the police, the church and, finally, his own community- is preface to the isolation felt by Edmund before he is taken from proletariat to lumpenproletariat and experiences all the shame and social stigma attached therein. The exploration of post-fascist societies that is explored in Germany: Year Zero, but not in Bicycle Thieves, concerns how the supposedly defeated forces of fascism survive in downtrodden spaces. There's something prescient and valuable in this perspective. Edmund's socioeconomic miseries push him into a destructive relationship with a Nazi-sympathising ex-teacher and, when he sells an old record to some soldiers, Adolf Hitler's thunderous voice once again echoes throughout the ruins of Berlin.

Edmund walks through the ruins of Berlin in the conclusion of Germany: Year Zero (1948).

Germany: Year Zero may have been the final part of Rossellini's trilogy of neorealist war films, but I think the concerns of its characters, despite time and space, when placed alongside De Sica's Bicycle Thieves still can provide insight into the world the neorealist movement was reacting to.


Works Cited:
Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Films Cited:
Germania anno zero (1948) [film] Directed by R. Rossellini. Italy: Produzione Salvo D'Angelo and Tevere Film.

Ladri di biciclette (1945) [film] Directed by V. De Sica. Italy: Produzioni De Sica.