Bicycle Thieves Film Analysis

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1) Bicycle Thieves is a film is able to show all the characteristics of Italian Neorealism. Italian Neorealism is different from classical Hollywood cinema because of the style and how the film is produced. A significant difference lies with the casting for an Italian Neo realism film. With these films non-professional actors are usually casted for the all roles, without any famous actors or Hollywood stars playing a part. The director for bicycle thieves chose to use a non-professional actor for the lead role to give this movie more of an authentic feel in comparison to Hollywood cinema films that hire well known trained actors. The lead role for bicycle thieves is played by Lameberto Maggiorani, who was a typical engineer before getting this …show more content…

Daniel Plainview goes from a hardworking honest man to a complete lunatic who only cares about money and oil. With the use of film techniques like composition, setting and camera movement Thomas is able to show this change in character clearly to the audience. The climax of this change in character can be scene in one of the very last scenes of the movie. The setting of the scene is in Plainview’s huge mansion with is in shambles and the lights in the house are off. Making the house look dark and uninhabited, which was just like the first scene of the movie where you see Plainview in a dark hole by himself. The house being dark can be reference to that Plainview is now all alone again since his son H.W has decided to get married and make his own path. In this scene the shots are important because Plainview and H.W aren’t seen in the same shot and the proximity of the camera to Plainview face. As Plainview speaks he completely disowns his son and use very offensive language to disrespect H.W while he is doing this the camera does not switch over to H.W to show his reaction to this. This implies that Plainview in fact does not care about his son or what his son thinks about him, and without his son Plainview is really by himself again like in the first scene of the movie. The composition of the scene also adds to this idea of Mr. Plainview being alone because this …show more content…

With the opening scene spike lee was able to show me something that was different from all the movies we watched this semester. A woman was dancing in the opening scene to diegetic sounds and was moving in rhythm to this sound as the credits for the movie played. Most movies open up with a scene that drops the audience to the movie instead the audience watched an actor dance for almost five minutes. Another technique that was used by spike lee was camera angles. In the scene where a black man was trying to buy batteries for his speakers from an Asian man. Spike lee was able to use camera angles to show each actors view on the other one. When the black man is speaking or yelling the camera is looking down at the Asian man. This shows that the black man looks down on the Asian man. When the Asian man speaks to the black man the camera is pointed up looking towards him. Another scene that caught my eye is when spike lee showed different shots of the people. Each close up of a person was followed by them saying racist remarks about the previous person shown. Once again showing racism or how each culture views the other

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