The Servant

Authentic Bicycle Thieves

Charles Burnett described the story of Bicycle Thieves as "diabolically simple". I think you'd be hard pressed to elaborate on "Man gets bike. Man looses bike. Will man ever find bike again." Simplicity is what make this film so ethically complex and dramatically heartbreaking, although it explicit about neither. The images we see are just a guy and his son trying to find a bike. 

It the viewer who connect these images with radical social commentary. We are plunged into a moral grey zone, in much the same way as a Graham Green novel, where we identify the criminal a victim, the right as wrong, and the bad as necessary: our moral absolutes fail to stand the test. The workers in this film are forced to the thieving trade because they live in a state that fails to provide for the poor. In order to survive they have to renounce social duty for individual gain. 

Again, it is the simplicity of this film which makes it such a sophisticated interrogation of post-war Italy. The documentary style (although highly manufactured) is what Godfrey Cheshire describes as an 'ethical stance' which 'continues to represent a struggle for authenticity'. Here is where I think the film becomes involved with contemporary America. The entire nation is gasping for any last grain of authenticity they can believe in politics. McCain's slogan 'The Original Maverick', implies the Republican ticket provide some kind of root source, a primary, unfettered, unfiltered character, to it's voters. 

Obama's campaign is centred around 'change', which is the clearest demand of 'Bicycle Thieves'. After watching that film it's impossible to think that the status quo of its characters should be permitted to continue. The Democratic ticket's compact slogan – one verb 'to change', seems in complete alignment with the socialist principals of Italian neorealist emerging from fascist rule with a fractured cultural identity and complicit guilt in the atrocities committed by the Nazis, being unearthed at the time the film was made in 1948. 

Yet the Obama slogan is still extraordinarily vague. It doesn't pin down precisely what is going to change, in the way that the Republican ticket identifies 'original' expressly with 'Maverick'. This American election seems more like political theatre than ever before. Yet we seem to be sliding further and further away from the 'total cinema' of the neorealist social conscious message for change, to a vague and non-committal rallying cry. It's function is to rouse rather than deliver. 

Angry In Brooklyn

Thursday morning I went to Brooklyn. On  on 3rd Street I took this photograph. The hand painted slogan reads: 'NO MORE CORPORATE BULLSHIT!FUK WALL ST. !' Although it seems a little trite writing it out in compute text, the scale of this graffiti is so big that its statement completely dominated the skyline. It was in a trendy part of Brooklyn, but on a derelict site. Without Manhattan sky scrapers to blot out the phrase, it really screamed out. The tone of the work was particularly jarring because the day I visited this part of town happened to be incredibly beautiful 9.11 weather. 

'My Lost City'

A fairly old article (2003) by Luc Sante in the New York Review of Books is spot on about the city's extraordinary buildings and why they haunt the imagination. The depiction of New York as an elderly metropolis connects with Wall Street's crumbling (demolished) fiscal might. Every day the press is full of photographs that depict 'the suits' in abject despair. Their expressions seem to portray Sante's meditations word for word.  

New York is neither the Wonder City nor a half-populated ruin but a vulnerable, overcrowded, anxious, half-deluded, all-too-human town, shaken by a cataclysm nobody could have foreseen.

(the photograph is from the 'front page' of the New Yorker website on October 8, 2008 in conjunction with an article entitled 'The Rationality of Panic' by Steve Coll.)