De Sica, Vittorio (1901–1974)

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DE SICA, VITTORIO (1901–1974)

Italian actor and film director.

Born in Sora, Italy, on 7 July 1901 into a lower-middle-class family, Vittorio De Sica directed at least 25 films and acted in more than 150. He spent his childhood years in Naples and then moved with his family to Rome in 1912. He began his career as an actor in the early 1920s, when he joined Tatiana Pavlova's theater company. He made his cinema debut in 1918 in a supporting role in Il processo Clémenceau (The Clemenceau affair) by Alfredo De Antoni, but starred only in 1932 in Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! (What Scoundrels Men Are!) by Mario Camerini. Interestingly, that last film was part of a series inspired by the Hollywood model of light comedies, but the scenes were filmed outdoors, rather than on a set. De Sica became famous for playing in elegantly romantic comedies directed by a number of filmmakers including Vittorio Cottafavi (I nostri sogni/Our Dreams, 1943) and Amleto Palermi (from La vecchia signora/The Old Lady, 1932, to La peccatrice, 1940).

In 1939 he decided to become a film director. His first experience behind the camera came with Rose scarlatte (1940; Red Roses), an adaptation of a successful play. Then he improved with Maddalena, zero in condotta (1940; Maddalena, Zero for Conduct), Teresa venerdi (1941; Doctor Beware), and Un Garibaldino al convento (1942; A Garibaldian in the Convent). All these films stand apart from Italy's political situation before and during the war. If De Sica had no sympathy for the fascist regime, he did not use his popularity to argue against Benito Mussolini (1883–1945). However, he claimed that for the last eight months of the war he hid two Jewish families in Rome.

The turning point of De Sica's career was the meeting with Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), a screenwriter and filmmaker. Their first collaboration began with I bambini ci guardano (1944; The Children Are Watching Us). They shared a common interest in the destiny of the Italian cinema in the postwar period and Zavattini, in particular, thought that the taste for reality came not from one side of the belligerents, but from the two of them, the defeated as well as the victors.

Thus, De Sica and Zavattini together wrote four major films: Sciuscià (1946; Shoeshine), Ladri di biciclette (1948; The Bicycle Thieves), Miracolo a Milano (1951; Miracle in Milan) and Umberto D (1952). Together with the films directed by Luchino Visconti (1906–1976), Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977), and Giuseppe De Santis (1917–1997), these masterpieces mark the renewal of a taste for reality, a period of cinema usually called "neorealism." André Bazin, in the most powerful text ever written on De Sica ("De Sica as Director," 1952), claims that there are not so many differences between all these film-makers. They used location shooting, nonprofessional actors, and other techniques to present situations as realistically as possible. It was often by choice but sometimes by necessity. Nevertheless, what makes DeSica different from the others, especially Rossellini, is his sensibility and the way he directed the cast: "It is through poetry that De Sica's realism takes its full meaning," writes Bazin, adding, "The neorealism is an ontologic stance before being aesthetic." Far from Visconti's aesthetics of decadence, De Sica always offered a humanist view of the poor, the outcast people of the Italian society.

Shoeshine, a story of the disintegration of a friendship between two Italian youths who fall victim to the state's juvenile detention system, won a special Academy Award in 1947. The award citation reads: "The high quality of this motion picture, brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war, is proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity." The Bicycle Thieves, which won an Academy Award for best foreign film and is certainly De Sica's highest achievement, tells a simple story: Ricci, an unemployed man, lines up every morning looking for work. One day, an advertisement says that there is a job, but only for a man with a bicycle. "I have a bicycle!" Ricci cries out, but actually he does not, for it has been pawned. Eventually, he finds one, but it happens to be stolen. At the end of the film, Ricci is tempted to steal a bicycle himself, continuing the cycle of theft and poverty. What is striking in the film is not so much the social description as the way the characters are confronted with ethical or moral choices in their personal life.

In Miracle in Milan and Umberto D De Sica continues to explore the plight of the poor and dispossessed. For Bazin, Umberto D is especially interesting in the way De Sica works with time and the narrative and not only on there presentation or interpretation of social issues: "The stakes are to make spectacular and dramatic the very time of life, and the natural duration of a human being to whom nothing particular happens" (p. 326; translated from the French).

See alsoCinema.