Bicycle Thieves

I’m proud to say, first of all, that my book is appearing in one of the most sparklingly brilliant book series ever published in film studies, or indeed in any field: the BFI Film Classics series. This was launched by the British Film Institute back in 1992 and now consists of several hundred volumes. Each one is a short, in-depth and (hopefully) original exploration of a single film and each film lays claim in some way or another to that slippery label ‘classic’. All are films that have changed the shape of what the medium of film can do. Long before I became an author in the series, every few years I would devour clusters of them in one go, getting a regular sugar-high from the best in film creativity and the best in film writing, whether it was Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz (the first entry in the series), Tony Rayns on In the Mood for Love, Amy Taubin on Taxi Driver or many others besides.

My book for the series tackles a film that sits in a strange kind of limbo, a stone-cold classic in the history of film and a mid-20th century cultural icon, but one that has faded somewhat from view in the 21st century, watched and cited respectfully but no longer studied in any depth; a film that had perhaps had its day in the critical conversation. Digging a little deeper, though, I found it still teeming with ideas and energy, the kind of ‘classic’ that is very much still alive and talking to us, if we listen carefully enough; not the kind that is destined to gather dust on forgotten shelves, decaying in celluloid archives. My book is an attempt to convey that energy, to revisit and recover, and also perhaps disturb settled views on a film that everyone seems to think they already know backwards.

The film is Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, sometimes also distributed in English as The Bicycle Thief). It was canonised within a few years of its release, voted the best film ever made in the 1952 Sight and Sound poll and labelled a masterpiece in one of the defining ‘-isms’ of film history, neorealism. It was all too often reduced to its simplest part – a poor man’s bicycle is stolen, and his life unravels as a result – and hailed for the power of that simple premise. But, as I argue in my book, the simplicity is a sleight of hand, a mask that hides a teeming (that word again) complexity that has profound things to say about postwar Europe, about social deprivation and inequality, community and bonds of care, and about the potential of film-storytelling to capture all this and more.

Ongoing thread. More from Robert S. C. Gordon to follow.