29th August 2010; De Sica's The Children Are Watching Us

The Children Are
Watching Us

A film by Vittorio De Sica
Year:1944
Country : Italy
Italian with English subtitles
Run time: 84 minutes
29th August 2010; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater, Perks School
Off Trichy Road
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The child knows. Although just a diminutive four-year-old, utterly naive about the world around him, he senses--he knows--that something is not right with his parents.
Vittorio De Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us (I bambini ci guardano), a precursor to Italian neorealism that relates the heart-breaking account of a family’s dissolution and the destructive effect it has on the child perpetually caught in the middle.

Telling the story almost entirely from the point of view of the child (note how low the camera always is), De Sica exposes how the failings, hypocrisies, and selfishness of parents can render them not only useless in protecting and guiding their children, but actively hurtful.The child in question is Pricò, who is played with absolute conviction and tenderness by Luciano De Ambrosis.

There's always a sense of harsh movement in the film, lines of action isolating objects and characters into different stratums of the frame. A geometric, spider-like pattern emerges throughout, with little Pico caught in the center, gasping for breath like an ensnared animal, threatened from either side by all sorts of twin pressures.

No one feels this pressure more than Pico. In the film's single greatest scene, father and son lock eyes like hunter and prey, one asking the other for the information he already knows, the other resisting because he knows submission will completely devastate the family.

There is an elevator in the film that only goes up, a symbol of Andrea's lack of foresight. Similarly, De Sica's camera often travels forcefully in one direction away from his characters. During a wonderfully hypnotic beach scene, an effete gentleman with a little dog tries to seduce Nina with his eyes and the movement of the camera suggests the woman is being torn apart like a piece of taffy—on one side by her pleasure-seekingness, on the other by her dedication to her son, whom she holds in her hands trying to teach how to swim.

It is in the final scene that The Children Are Watching Us builds to its powerfully emotional climax. It is a heart-rending moment in which you feel a human connection being literally ripped away, making the film one of a handful that treats the difficulties of childhood with such a deft, tender hand as to avoid all sense of cloying sentimentality.

The Children Are Watching Us is a marvel of complex visual and emotional scope -this is the first neorealist gesture, a sign that the Italian film was about to grow up.

VITTORIO DE SICA

Vittoria De Sica, was one of the great directors of the postwar Italian neorealist movement, which represented a large, loud break with Hollywood tradition and dealt with life as it might exist outside sound stages.

As one of the world's most influential filmmakers, and as an actor who starred in some 150 movies, Vittorio De Sica built a remarkable film career that spanned half a century.
De Sica directed 34 feature films, for which he won numerous international prizes. He was honored with four Academy Awards: two Special Awards, preceding the creation of the Best Foreign Film category, for "Shoeshine" in 1947, and "The Bicycle Thief" in 1949, and Best Foreign Film Awards for "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" in 1964, and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in 1971.

De Sica was born in 1902 in Sora, near Rome, and grew up in Naples in a middle-class family. His father, Umberto De Sica, a bank clerk with a penchant for show business, encouraged his good-looking son to pursue a stage career. At 16, he appeared in the film "The Clemenceau Affair." His career took off in the 1920s when he joined a local theater company and became a matinee idol. He later formed his own company, producing plays and co-starring with his first wife, Giuditta Rissone. At the same time, he made a name for himself as a suave leading man in Italian films, and became immensely popular with female audiences.

During World War II, De Sica turned to directing. His first four films were routine light productions in the tradition of the Italian cinema of the day. But his fifth, "The Children Are Watching Us," was a mature, perceptive, and deeply human work about the impact of adult folly on a child's innocent mind. The film marked the beginning of De Sica's collaboration with author and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, a creative relationship that was to give the world two of the most significant films of the Italian neorealism movement, "Shoeshine" and "The Bicycle Thief."

To finance his directorial efforts, De Sica worked as an actor throughout his career. He turned almost exclusively to acting in the late 1950s, enjoying great popularity in the role of the rural police officer in Comencini's "Bread Love and Dreams" (1954), and in a subsequent comedy series of the same name co-starring Gina Lollobrigida.

He made a dramatic comeback with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , produced by Arthur Cohn. The director's next movie was "A Brief Vacation" (1973), a moving film, also produced by Arthur Cohn, about a working-class Italian woman's first taste of freedom in a society dominated by males. His last film, "The Voyage" (1974), was based on a novella by Pirandello.Vittorio De Sica died in 1974 at the age of 72.