Writing Assignment Italian Film 1. Consider both Roma città aperta and Ladri di biciclette. Compare and contrast the two films based on the tenets of neorealism that appear in both. Use specific scenes to support your argument. Bicycle Thieves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVw2ctnL22M Rome, Open City (1945) | Roberto Rossellini https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMTbTcOJZ00

Italian Neorealism is directly referred to as the “new reality” during the 1940s. It focuses to represent the fascist influence, and disorder in social status, and it represents the extreme poverty during the period. The essay will make an attempt to understand the movie by comparing and contrasting Roma città aperta and Ladri di biciclette. Both movies talk about the reality of the period. Ladri di biciclette depicts the father and son duo searching for the lost bicycle. It does not showcase any extraordinary events but it just talks about a father and a son who is looking for a bicycle that was stolen from them. The movie can be understood as a communist film because of its social message. The idea is that the poor steal from each other to survive but this understanding is not explicitly shown rather the chain of events makes us understand. In the film, he never finds the bicycle and that shows the propaganda that he is caught in the vicious cycle of poverty. It is clearly depicting the poverty of the period (Vittorio De Sica, 2021). On the other hand, the film Roma città aperta talks about the Rossellini's depiction of life in Nazi-occupied Rome during September 1943 and the following year. It represents wartime hardship and reflects the social class. The movie can be understood with respect to the characters, Pina is a working class, Giorgio is a communist and Don Pietro has a Catholic impulse (Rossellini, 2021). Marina and Laura want to increase their social ladder and in order to do so they are willing to work for the Nazis. It is an anti-fascist film. As said by Millicent Marcus in “Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism”, the visibility of children playing behind the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica implies the state after the post-fascist foundation of the city. The scene where the father gives the food to the son and watches him eat depicts poverty. This clearly talks about war and fascism. They both are similar in representing the events of the period but they have considered different historical events. Both have taken a pessimistic approach to the events. To sum up, the narratives of both these movies are slower and they have depicted the honest emotions of the characters by just depicting their experience. References Roberto Rossellini. (n.d.). Publishing.cdlib.org. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft709nb48d&chunk.id=d0e1349&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e1343&brand=ucpress Rossellini, R. (2021). Rome, Open City (1945). In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMTbTcOJZo0 Vittorio De Sica. (2021). Bicycle Thieves. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVw2ctnL22M