When Antonio's bicycle is stolen, he loses more than a bike. The brand name of the bicycle "Fides" (Faith in Latin) suggest it has symbolic value. What is the significance of that symbol? What does Antonio lose? Are there other symbols in this film?
The film Bicycle Thieves begins with Antonio, among other men in Italy, desperate to find a job. When it is announced that a job I available Antonio jumps at the opportunity before hearing what the job even entails. Once finding out that this job requires a bicycle, something Antonio does not have, Antonio insists on taking the job and claims that he has a bicycle and is ready to work. After purchasing the bicycle, Antonio’s whole perspective of life changes. He is clearly much happier and has a much more positive outlook on the world. His life is starting to look positive from his eyes. He is confident that this job will change his and his family’s life for the better. However, as the title reveals, his bicycle is stolen on the first day of work. Once again, Antonio’s whole outlook on life changes. Instead of being driven by the new found happiness from his job, he is driven by anger and despair from the loss of his bike. This bicycle clearly meant something more to Antonio than it would to any other person. This bicycle represented a better life and future for him and his family. Once that image is taken from him, he does not know how to act and loses sight of the bigger picture. While he lives in a tough world, one filled with poverty and loss, he fails to see the bigger picture of his life. He fails to understand that this is just a bicycle and there will be more jobs in the future.
In Bicycle Thieves, Antonio, who is the protagonist of the film, has several instances of loss of faith in the film. These losses are not strictly related to the bicycle alone, but rather the bicycle is an example of one way Antonio "loses faith." These symbols are examples of how important loss of faith is to Antonio's character arc. Once he gains the bicycle, he is obtaining new faith that he will be able to make money and maintain a job that provides for his family. Antonio first loses faith in his ability to maintain a job when he loses his "Fides" bicycle. This "Fides" bicycle determines whether or not he is able to bring food and money to his family. Because jobs are so hard to come by in Italy at this time, this easy job presents itself to Antonio is a blessing. However, that blessing is taken away from him when his bicycle is stolen and he begins to question his ability to provide for his family. Losing the bicycle causes a chain of events that eventually depletes Antonio of his faith. Another instance of loss of faith is where Antonio loses his faith in religion and a "higher power" based of his experiences with the seer. When he discovers that his wife is visiting a seer, he is concerned by her new beliefs. However, after his bicycle is stolen, he goes to the same seer as a last resort in order to get some final guidance on where to find his bicycle. When Antonio leaves her apartment, he is not satisfied by what she told him.
In the film Bicycle Thieves, there are several situations where Antonio loses his faith. For starters, he happens to lose faith in people when his bike is stolen from him. There are only a couple of bystanders when is bike is stolen, and while they happen to do what they can to help out, nobody else seems to care and the rest of the bystanders go about their lives as if nothing happened. Little do they know that Antonio’s life could be resting in the hands of that bike, because his new job is dependent on having that bike. As Antonio had been recently hired for that job just so that he could support his family, he was willing to do anything to get that bike back. But when Antonio goes to the local authorities to see what they will do for his problem, they do not seem very concerned or empathetic at all, as they are focused on other issues. Antonio is completely hopeless when the police do not want to help him, because he wanted them to conduct an investigation. Antonio also happens to lose faith in religion, because when he is trying to get answers out of a possible accomplice for the thief, he fails to recognize that he is also interrupting a religious service. He doesn’t care that other people are trying to practice their religion, and he is more concerned with being selfish. It is Antonio’s lack of respect that shows he believes his problems are more important than anyone’s religion.
Bicycle Thieves is an Italian film by Vittorio De Sica displaying the economic downfall in Italy during the mid-1900s. In the beginning of the film, the main character, Antonio Ricci, as well as many other men are shown looking for jobs. Antonio is assigned a job to hang up posters, but one of the requirements was to have a bike. Through the selling of bed sheets, and scrounging around for money, he was able to buy back his bike to perform the job. Once he had the bike, the mood of the movie shifts from depressing to uplifting, making it seem as though all is well in his life. Within the first few deployments to hang up posters, his bike is stolen and his dreams are crushed. At first, he attempts to find his bike, recruiting his son Bruno, and a few of his friends to go around town looking. As the film progresses, his faith lessens, and the perfect fantasy life he had in mind slowly diminishes. This is evident when Bruno and Antonio go out to dinner. Antonio is counting the money he could have had from the salary of his job, and then ends up splurging impulsively on a meal. The loss of this bike allowed Antonio to make several stupid decisions, such as hitting his son, and ultimately stealing someone else’s bike, which illustrates the fact that the bike is symbolic for something much greater than a means of transportation. The bike signified a better life for Antonio and his family, but it also represented his manhood and his ability to provide for his family. With this bike, he was able to be employed, and support his family through the difficult situation, and without this bike he felt worthless. In the ending scene, where Antonio is being escorted to prison, his true loss in faith for himself and a better life is shown through not only his emotions, but also Bruno’s.
Throughout the movie having faith or losing faith is a reoccurring subject. The significance of the bike is that he puts his faith in it to feed his family multiple times. First is when he pawns it he is putting faith in his bike being valuable enough to give him money to last until he gets a job. The second example of this is when he puts faith in his bike to allow him to be the poster guy until the bike is stolen. Although having the bike taken initially depresses him he is able to regain his faith by visiting the fortune teller. This is one of the organizations that is able to increase his faith in society because it gives him hope that he will be successful on his mission. A place where Antonio loses some of his faith is when he goes to the police and is unable to find real help. The police have bigger concerns than him. This is part of the bigger theme of losing faith in the governmental organizations. Because at the beginning of the movie the government is unable to provide enough jobs to people living in the slum. This shows how people’s faith in the postwar Italian government was almost nonexistent and there were very few ways for people to get help. Overall in the film, Antonio loses his faith in his society because he realizes that he will never be able to feed his child or recover his bike. Another symbol in the film would be the sheets stacked many meters high in the pawn shop. This shows how the depression is affecting the people in Italy. They are giving up some of their most basic possessions because they do not have enough money. It shows that the story happening to Antonio may often be repeated and he is not the only to experience this suffering. Antonio is just one person out of many who have been left behind by the government and is left to fend for himself.
Before the bicycle is stolen, it is clear that Antonio trusts others. However after his bike is stolen he loses faith in other people hence the bicycle name of “Fides”. After his bike is stolen, he shows no trust for anyone but himself. It is obvious that Antonio trusts strangers before the robbery when he goes to check on his wife. When he does this, he leaves his bicycle outside and tells a group of kids to watch it. In this case, it would be incredibly easy for someone to steal the bike, either one of the kids, who were similar in age to the actual bicycle thief later on or any adult walking down the street. Later during the theft, Antonio is shown running down the street screaming for help to the strangers around him. During this experience, the vast majority of people do nothing to help Antonio; this lack of intervention is certainly the source of Antonio’s distrust for society, as it seems that they are all against him. After this experience, Antonio is distrustful of the strangers that make up society; this mindset is most clearly visible when he confronts the man painting the bicycle frame. He walks up to the man and at the first amount of push back to his request to inspect the frame, he becomes incredibly suspicious of the man. Even after a police officer is called over to verify, he is still distrustful. Overall, when Antonio loses his bike it seems to him that society is made up of criminals and nothing can change his mind.
In the film Bicycle Thieves, the protagonist, Antonio, gets his bicycle stolen from him. The bicycle was a beacon of hope in the difficult times Antonio and his family were facing at the time. He finally got a job and it required a bike, so naturally, the bike was the hope that he had for the family’s future. The bike was the path to a stable and comfortable life for his family, so it meant an awfully lot to him. When the bike is taken from him, it essentially represents his faith being stolen from him. He follows a trail to his bike like a clueless child in a grocery store trying to find its mother, he follows every lead he can to get his bike back. Antonio chases an old man through the streets of Rome and follows him into a church, disrespecting the service going on at that time. When the bike was stolen his faith in many things went with it, including god. He goes to the police to file a report and they usher him away like a fly. The police not taking Antonio seriously really bothers him and diminishes his faith in the government aid as well. This helplessness leads him to do a crazy thing, and try to steal a bike himself. He immediately gets caught by people and the movie closes in sullen despair, his face was stricken with anguish. The bike represented his faith, and when it left him, his faith went with it.
In the beginning of the film, we see how hard it is for people to get a job. Antonio, out of all the people, is offered a well-supported job that pays a fair amount. Antonio purchasing the bike represents him beating one of life’s difficult moments of finding a job. This gives him hope for a better future with his growing family. However, when the bike is stolen it signifies that his hope has been taken away. His future of a better life, a more successful life, have disappeared. Another interesting symbol that I noticed was the character Antonio himself. This movie focuses on one personal experience during this time in Italy but in reality during that time, Antonio represents every poverty level man’s struggle. Antonio’s struggles of finding a job, not having sheets, paying for food, getting a bike, having things stolen, was a part of everyday life of every low class citizen in Italy. We see that Antonio’s hope is the same as all other citizens in Italy, the hope of life to become easier and enjoyable. Another symbol that I observed in the film that related to all poverty level people in Italy was the bed sheets. We see this employee climb up a twenty-foot shelf of just sheets that goes all the way up to the ceiling. This image in the film represents how bad poverty was for people in Italy. In order to live people had to sell their day-to-day life possessions. We see how Maria and Antonio are negatively affected by this because he soon has his bike stolen and they have nothing else to sell in order to buy another bike.
The name suggests a loss of faith that Antonio has not only in the world itself but also religion. It is possible that after getting the job, the bike could have been seen as him regaining his faith. On the other hand, the bike could have been to show that the job was gained based off of faith from the wife going to the soothsayer who said Antonio would get a job soon. Not only could the soothsayer be a negative reflection on the church praying on the desperation of the impoverished people of post-war Italy, but also Antonio disregarding the soothsayer as a fraud may have actually shown a loss or lack of faith and therefore he literally lost his “Fides”, his faith. In the movie, Antonio barges into a packed church in search of an old man. Whilst in the church he causes a bit of a ruckus trying to get the answers he needs to get his bike back. Sadly for Antonio, the church scene did not help get is bike back, which means the church failed to give him faith. The church was more focused on attendance and keeping people inside the church rather than actually caring for and helping those most in need. Because of this reason instead of listening to Antonio and helping him find his “Fides” the church was more concerned with the disturbance he was causing and was trying everything to get rid of him. The church had a perceived responsibility to help those in need and provide faith as a form of comfort to the struggling people of Italy, yet instead they are focused on the profit that they can make off of said comfort leaving Antonio, “Fides”-less.
In the Italian Neo-Realism film Bicycle Thieves, Antonio, a working-class member of society who has socio-economic difficulties, loses his bicycle, which is absolutely necessary for his prospects of gaining employment and income. Notably, the brand name of the bicycle is “Fides”, which means “Faith” in Latin. Therefore, the bicycle can be seen as a symbol for Antonio’s faith in society; as the bicycle is stolen and his quest to find it results in failure, Antonio quickly loses faith in society’s ability to provide opportunities for the common citizen to climb the social ladder. At the start of the film, Antonio pawns his sheets in order to acquire his bicycle which he believes, in good faith, is the path to earning the money needed to provide for his family. In other words, he purchases a perceived sense of faith in society by buying the bicycle back from the pawn shop. Once his bicycle is stolen, however, he symbolically loses his faith in society, as he feels cheated and disillusioned by both the thieves and society. When Antonio spots a man painting a Fides bicycle to make it more marketable and falsely suspects him of stealing his bicycle, the audience can interpret the action of painting over the Fides bicycle to be a separate symbol that represents 1940 Italian society’s tendency to smother the commoner’s faith in society’s ability to provide for the masses and replace it with capitalistic characteristics of materialism and self-centeredness. Capitalism seems to be the overall antagonist in the film while communism is seen as one of the only forces that attempts to help Antonio in his plight. When Antonio ultimately turns to theft in an attempt to possess another bicycle, it is a representation of how society deprives people of hope and instead converts them into a cynical member of the dog-eat-dog environment – a dysfunctional, bureaucratic society deprives people of their faith in social success and turns the victim into the criminal.
Throughout the film, Bicycle Thieves, faith takes on a crucial meaning in understanding the film. The motif of faith first occurs when Antonio is offered a Job. This job requires him to own a bicycle; which he of course does not possess. After this moment in the film, things begin to look up for Antonio. He purchases the bicycle, and although it is a huge expense for his family, it seems as though the rare opportunity to work in Italy at the time is worth it. This is an example of when he initially gains faith. Throughout the rest of the film Antonio’s amount of faith fluctuates. There are times, such as when his bike is stolen, when he loses a large amount of faith. That said, there are also positive times such as when he finds the thief. Unfortunately times like these are few, far between, and usually result in a larger loss of faith soon afterwards. Strangely, the message about faith becomes more complicated. During the scene in the church, it seems as though the film is making fun of people that have faith in the church. Therefore, is the message simply to not have faith in anything? That may be the case. As the reoccurring symbol of faith in this film is the bicycle, named “Fides” which is faith in Latin, it could be assumed that he never even had faith. Instead, he only had a false sense of faith. This is because when he first gains faith, the job offer, he doesn’t truly have “faith” as we have yet to see his bike.
The film Bicycle Thieves begins with Antonio, among other men in Italy, desperate to find a job. When it is announced that a job I available Antonio jumps at the opportunity before hearing what the job even entails. Once finding out that this job requires a bicycle, something Antonio does not have, Antonio insists on taking the job and claims that he has a bicycle and is ready to work. After purchasing the bicycle, Antonio’s whole perspective of life changes. He is clearly much happier and has a much more positive outlook on the world. His life is starting to look positive from his eyes. He is confident that this job will change his and his family’s life for the better. However, as the title reveals, his bicycle is stolen on the first day of work. Once again, Antonio’s whole outlook on life changes. Instead of being driven by the new found happiness from his job, he is driven by anger and despair from the loss of his bike. This bicycle clearly meant something more to Antonio than it would to any other person. This bicycle represented a better life and future for him and his family. Once that image is taken from him, he does not know how to act and loses sight of the bigger picture. While he lives in a tough world, one filled with poverty and loss, he fails to see the bigger picture of his life. He fails to understand that this is just a bicycle and there will be more jobs in the future.
ReplyDeleteIn Bicycle Thieves, Antonio, who is the protagonist of the film, has several instances of loss of faith in the film. These losses are not strictly related to the bicycle alone, but rather the bicycle is an example of one way Antonio "loses faith." These symbols are examples of how important loss of faith is to Antonio's character arc. Once he gains the bicycle, he is obtaining new faith that he will be able to make money and maintain a job that provides for his family. Antonio first loses faith in his ability to maintain a job when he loses his "Fides" bicycle. This "Fides" bicycle determines whether or not he is able to bring food and money to his family. Because jobs are so hard to come by in Italy at this time, this easy job presents itself to Antonio is a blessing. However, that blessing is taken away from him when his bicycle is stolen and he begins to question his ability to provide for his family. Losing the bicycle causes a chain of events that eventually depletes Antonio of his faith.
ReplyDeleteAnother instance of loss of faith is where Antonio loses his faith in religion and a "higher power" based of his experiences with the seer. When he discovers that his wife is visiting a seer, he is concerned by her new beliefs. However, after his bicycle is stolen, he goes to the same seer as a last resort in order to get some final guidance on where to find his bicycle. When Antonio leaves her apartment, he is not satisfied by what she told him.
In the film Bicycle Thieves, there are several situations where Antonio loses his faith. For starters, he happens to lose faith in people when his bike is stolen from him. There are only a couple of bystanders when is bike is stolen, and while they happen to do what they can to help out, nobody else seems to care and the rest of the bystanders go about their lives as if nothing happened. Little do they know that Antonio’s life could be resting in the hands of that bike, because his new job is dependent on having that bike. As Antonio had been recently hired for that job just so that he could support his family, he was willing to do anything to get that bike back. But when Antonio goes to the local authorities to see what they will do for his problem, they do not seem very concerned or empathetic at all, as they are focused on other issues. Antonio is completely hopeless when the police do not want to help him, because he wanted them to conduct an investigation. Antonio also happens to lose faith in religion, because when he is trying to get answers out of a possible accomplice for the thief, he fails to recognize that he is also interrupting a religious service. He doesn’t care that other people are trying to practice their religion, and he is more concerned with being selfish. It is Antonio’s lack of respect that shows he believes his problems are more important than anyone’s religion.
ReplyDeleteBicycle Thieves is an Italian film by Vittorio De Sica displaying the economic downfall in Italy during the mid-1900s. In the beginning of the film, the main character, Antonio Ricci, as well as many other men are shown looking for jobs. Antonio is assigned a job to hang up posters, but one of the requirements was to have a bike. Through the selling of bed sheets, and scrounging around for money, he was able to buy back his bike to perform the job. Once he had the bike, the mood of the movie shifts from depressing to uplifting, making it seem as though all is well in his life. Within the first few deployments to hang up posters, his bike is stolen and his dreams are crushed. At first, he attempts to find his bike, recruiting his son Bruno, and a few of his friends to go around town looking. As the film progresses, his faith lessens, and the perfect fantasy life he had in mind slowly diminishes. This is evident when Bruno and Antonio go out to dinner. Antonio is counting the money he could have had from the salary of his job, and then ends up splurging impulsively on a meal. The loss of this bike allowed Antonio to make several stupid decisions, such as hitting his son, and ultimately stealing someone else’s bike, which illustrates the fact that the bike is symbolic for something much greater than a means of transportation. The bike signified a better life for Antonio and his family, but it also represented his manhood and his ability to provide for his family. With this bike, he was able to be employed, and support his family through the difficult situation, and without this bike he felt worthless. In the ending scene, where Antonio is being escorted to prison, his true loss in faith for himself and a better life is shown through not only his emotions, but also Bruno’s.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the movie having faith or losing faith is a reoccurring subject. The significance of the bike is that he puts his faith in it to feed his family multiple times. First is when he pawns it he is putting faith in his bike being valuable enough to give him money to last until he gets a job. The second example of this is when he puts faith in his bike to allow him to be the poster guy until the bike is stolen. Although having the bike taken initially depresses him he is able to regain his faith by visiting the fortune teller. This is one of the organizations that is able to increase his faith in society because it gives him hope that he will be successful on his mission. A place where Antonio loses some of his faith is when he goes to the police and is unable to find real help. The police have bigger concerns than him. This is part of the bigger theme of losing faith in the governmental organizations. Because at the beginning of the movie the government is unable to provide enough jobs to people living in the slum. This shows how people’s faith in the postwar Italian government was almost nonexistent and there were very few ways for people to get help. Overall in the film, Antonio loses his faith in his society because he realizes that he will never be able to feed his child or recover his bike. Another symbol in the film would be the sheets stacked many meters high in the pawn shop. This shows how the depression is affecting the people in Italy. They are giving up some of their most basic possessions because they do not have enough money. It shows that the story happening to Antonio may often be repeated and he is not the only to experience this suffering. Antonio is just one person out of many who have been left behind by the government and is left to fend for himself.
ReplyDeleteBefore the bicycle is stolen, it is clear that Antonio trusts others. However after his bike is stolen he loses faith in other people hence the bicycle name of “Fides”. After his bike is stolen, he shows no trust for anyone but himself. It is obvious that Antonio trusts strangers before the robbery when he goes to check on his wife. When he does this, he leaves his bicycle outside and tells a group of kids to watch it. In this case, it would be incredibly easy for someone to steal the bike, either one of the kids, who were similar in age to the actual bicycle thief later on or any adult walking down the street. Later during the theft, Antonio is shown running down the street screaming for help to the strangers around him. During this experience, the vast majority of people do nothing to help Antonio; this lack of intervention is certainly the source of Antonio’s distrust for society, as it seems that they are all against him. After this experience, Antonio is distrustful of the strangers that make up society; this mindset is most clearly visible when he confronts the man painting the bicycle frame. He walks up to the man and at the first amount of push back to his request to inspect the frame, he becomes incredibly suspicious of the man. Even after a police officer is called over to verify, he is still distrustful. Overall, when Antonio loses his bike it seems to him that society is made up of criminals and nothing can change his mind.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteIn the film Bicycle Thieves, the protagonist, Antonio, gets his bicycle stolen from him. The bicycle was a beacon of hope in the difficult times Antonio and his family were facing at the time. He finally got a job and it required a bike, so naturally, the bike was the hope that he had for the family’s future. The bike was the path to a stable and comfortable life for his family, so it meant an awfully lot to him. When the bike is taken from him, it essentially represents his faith being stolen from him. He follows a trail to his bike like a clueless child in a grocery store trying to find its mother, he follows every lead he can to get his bike back. Antonio chases an old man through the streets of Rome and follows him into a church, disrespecting the service going on at that time. When the bike was stolen his faith in many things went with it, including god. He goes to the police to file a report and they usher him away like a fly. The police not taking Antonio seriously really bothers him and diminishes his faith in the government aid as well. This helplessness leads him to do a crazy thing, and try to steal a bike himself. He immediately gets caught by people and the movie closes in sullen despair, his face was stricken with anguish. The bike represented his faith, and when it left him, his faith went with it.
In the beginning of the film, we see how hard it is for people to get a job. Antonio, out of all the people, is offered a well-supported job that pays a fair amount. Antonio purchasing the bike represents him beating one of life’s difficult moments of finding a job. This gives him hope for a better future with his growing family. However, when the bike is stolen it signifies that his hope has been taken away. His future of a better life, a more successful life, have disappeared. Another interesting symbol that I noticed was the character Antonio himself. This movie focuses on one personal experience during this time in Italy but in reality during that time, Antonio represents every poverty level man’s struggle. Antonio’s struggles of finding a job, not having sheets, paying for food, getting a bike, having things stolen, was a part of everyday life of every low class citizen in Italy. We see that Antonio’s hope is the same as all other citizens in Italy, the hope of life to become easier and enjoyable. Another symbol that I observed in the film that related to all poverty level people in Italy was the bed sheets. We see this employee climb up a twenty-foot shelf of just sheets that goes all the way up to the ceiling. This image in the film represents how bad poverty was for people in Italy. In order to live people had to sell their day-to-day life possessions. We see how Maria and Antonio are negatively affected by this because he soon has his bike stolen and they have nothing else to sell in order to buy another bike.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteThe name suggests a loss of faith that Antonio has not only in the world itself but also religion. It is possible that after getting the job, the bike could have been seen as him regaining his faith. On the other hand, the bike could have been to show that the job was gained based off of faith from the wife going to the soothsayer who said Antonio would get a job soon. Not only could the soothsayer be a negative reflection on the church praying on the desperation of the impoverished people of post-war Italy, but also Antonio disregarding the soothsayer as a fraud may have actually shown a loss or lack of faith and therefore he literally lost his “Fides”, his faith. In the movie, Antonio barges into a packed church in search of an old man. Whilst in the church he causes a bit of a ruckus trying to get the answers he needs to get his bike back. Sadly for Antonio, the church scene did not help get is bike back, which means the church failed to give him faith. The church was more focused on attendance and keeping people inside the church rather than actually caring for and helping those most in need. Because of this reason instead of listening to Antonio and helping him find his “Fides” the church was more concerned with the disturbance he was causing and was trying everything to get rid of him. The church had a perceived responsibility to help those in need and provide faith as a form of comfort to the struggling people of Italy, yet instead they are focused on the profit that they can make off of said comfort leaving Antonio, “Fides”-less.
In the Italian Neo-Realism film Bicycle Thieves, Antonio, a working-class member of society who has socio-economic difficulties, loses his bicycle, which is absolutely necessary for his prospects of gaining employment and income. Notably, the brand name of the bicycle is “Fides”, which means “Faith” in Latin. Therefore, the bicycle can be seen as a symbol for Antonio’s faith in society; as the bicycle is stolen and his quest to find it results in failure, Antonio quickly loses faith in society’s ability to provide opportunities for the common citizen to climb the social ladder. At the start of the film, Antonio pawns his sheets in order to acquire his bicycle which he believes, in good faith, is the path to earning the money needed to provide for his family. In other words, he purchases a perceived sense of faith in society by buying the bicycle back from the pawn shop. Once his bicycle is stolen, however, he symbolically loses his faith in society, as he feels cheated and disillusioned by both the thieves and society. When Antonio spots a man painting a Fides bicycle to make it more marketable and falsely suspects him of stealing his bicycle, the audience can interpret the action of painting over the Fides bicycle to be a separate symbol that represents 1940 Italian society’s tendency to smother the commoner’s faith in society’s ability to provide for the masses and replace it with capitalistic characteristics of materialism and self-centeredness. Capitalism seems to be the overall antagonist in the film while communism is seen as one of the only forces that attempts to help Antonio in his plight. When Antonio ultimately turns to theft in an attempt to possess another bicycle, it is a representation of how society deprives people of hope and instead converts them into a cynical member of the dog-eat-dog environment – a dysfunctional, bureaucratic society deprives people of their faith in social success and turns the victim into the criminal.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the film, Bicycle Thieves, faith takes on a crucial meaning in understanding the film. The motif of faith first occurs when Antonio is offered a Job. This job requires him to own a bicycle; which he of course does not possess. After this moment in the film, things begin to look up for Antonio. He purchases the bicycle, and although it is a huge expense for his family, it seems as though the rare opportunity to work in Italy at the time is worth it. This is an example of when he initially gains faith. Throughout the rest of the film Antonio’s amount of faith fluctuates. There are times, such as when his bike is stolen, when he loses a large amount of faith. That said, there are also positive times such as when he finds the thief. Unfortunately times like these are few, far between, and usually result in a larger loss of faith soon afterwards. Strangely, the message about faith becomes more complicated. During the scene in the church, it seems as though the film is making fun of people that have faith in the church. Therefore, is the message simply to not have faith in anything? That may be the case. As the reoccurring symbol of faith in this film is the bicycle, named “Fides” which is faith in Latin, it could be assumed that he never even had faith. Instead, he only had a false sense of faith. This is because when he first gains faith, the job offer, he doesn’t truly have “faith” as we have yet to see his bike.
ReplyDelete