Thursday, January 24, 2008

MYOFNF #2-3: The Bicycle Thief (dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948) Stray Dog (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

These two landmarks of post-war world cinema have a lot in common. They both offer up textured sociological examinations of two defeated nations in the aftermath of World War Two. They both feature desperate young protagonists searching hostile city streets for items that have been stolen from them. Um, they're both in black and white?

Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief is a ground-level portrait of desperation and powerlessness in post-war Rome. The plot, a newly hired poster-hanger has his bike stolen, and tries to find it, serves mainly to give the viewer a glimpse of life on the edges of survival in the shadow of the Second World War. Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog also spends some time in the gutters and flophouses of post-war Tokyo, but the story of a young homicide detective trying to recover his stolen sidearm is put in the service of a surprisingly western rumination on fate. Kurosawa's film is essentially a film noir commentary on the social displacement and anxiety caused by the war, coupled with a strongly existentialist worldview. De Sica, on the other hand, is more interested in documenting the corrosive effect that poverty has on the human spirit. They're both interesting glimpses into the traumatic hellbroth of the post-war world and the radically altered social and spiritual climate that people found themselves navigating.

Next Up: Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend.

1 comment:

Jesse Gant said...

Congratulations on the reviews of No Country and There Will Be Blood making it into print. It's encouraging to see your hard work making some ground.

I will try to be less off-the-cuff in comments now that there may be a crop of new readers heading in this direction. In fact, I might suggest you post something to that effect on your main page? Not that I really see a need for self-censoring--I just think a more readable blog all around would benefit the bigger project here.