Anveshi - Research Centre for Women's Studies

This edition carries a review by Abhirup Dham on Umberto D, an Italian neo-realist film by Vittorio De Sica.

UMBERTO D: THE CINEMA OF ENCOUNTERS

- ABHIRUP DAM

Italian neo-realist cinema, as Zavattini termed it, is an "art of encounters", where, the sequence which is shot, saunters over the montage of representations. It constitutes of what Bazin calls "fact-images", images which are self constitutive and precipitates no reaction laden performance on screen. Considered one of the high points of Italian neo-realist cinema, Umberto D (1952) by Vittorio De Sica, dispenses the elemental example of the movement's guileless, experiential style, which accentuates the "to be deciphered real" without evoking any assiduity to the emotional or dramatic impact. The callow, natural performances also contribute to the film's plausibility, decidedly the lead performance by non-actor Carlo Battisti.

Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti) is an august, retired civil servant combating to eke out an exiguous existence on his government pension. The film opens one morning to a group of pensioners, including the frail Umberto, taking their case for evened compensation to the streets of Rome, only for their demonstration to be extirpated by the local police for failing to file a permit. Umberto's rent is in arrears, and despite his twenty year residence at the house, his landlady (Lina Gennari) has threatened to evict him if he is unable to settle his debt by the end of the month. His only sources of comfort are his allegiant and well-behaved dog, Flag, and the landlady's cheerful, attentive maid, Maria (Maria-Pia Casilio), who is equally in danger of losing her employment and lodging after the discover of her pregnancy. Umberto's one chance at human contact, through brief conversations with the pregnant maid, proves sadly disappointing.  In order to raise a portion of the rent money as a sign of good faith until his pension arrives, he visits a cafeteria and passes his pocket watch around the table to other diners in an attempt to find a buyer. He ventures out in the evening in ill health to sell his cherished books to a street merchant. He visits old friends in an attempt to gain sympathy and request a loan. Yet, despite his exhaustive efforts, the landlady is unwilling to accept partial payment, and Umberto is faced with the agonizing decision to humble himself, or to accept the unthinkable prospect of losing his home.

Another distinctive feature of the movement, the camera in the film remains highly objective, capturing exactly what is demanded. Characteristically, sometimes the foreground cannot be discerned from the background and hence it is hard to locate actual subjects. The psychology of the frame, as encountered in the movie, is astounding. The maid always looks out of the window in Umberto's room, looking for her boyfriends, and hence the window constitutes the frame to look into the outside world for her. Then again, in the sequence where the maid goes into the kitchen and begins her daily chores, which I will take up in more detail shortly, the camera zooms in on her from the outside through a window, and hence the composition of the frame is remarkably conceived. This famous sequence by De Sica is discussed in great detail by Bazin, which Deleuze and Guattari restate in Cinema 2. The maid is seen doing different mechanical and weary gestures like cleaning, driving away ants, grinding coffee, when suddenly her gaze gets fixed on her pregnant venter. This anticipates a profound exodus of misery and destitution but is rendered as a pure optical situation for which the maid has no reactions. This is exactly the cinema of encounters which Zavattini points out. Little sequences like Umberto's reluctance at begging and the mental strife he undergoes, shown by the spreading of his palm and eventfully retracting it, when actually one tries to offer alms, renders this simple case study as a highly poignant human drama. Interestingly, Umberto's checkered existence is interspersed with moments of impassioned joie de vivre and hence the film never takes up a depressive comportment. For example in the last sequence of the film, when Umberto tries to commit suicide with his dog, after repeated  and failed attempts at parting  with it, he fails again, but this time at dying. The dog runs away from him and the movie ends with Umberto reestablishing the severed trust and bond with his dog, the joy of companionship overriding every distress.

Umberto D completes a cycle of neo-realist masterpieces that was the fruit of a remarkable collaboration between film director Vittorio De Sica and the legendary screenwriter Cesare Zavattini.   This series of films, which includes Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), paints a sobering picture of society in post-war Italy, where economic hardship appears to have made individuals indifferent to the plight of orphans, the poor, the unemployed and the old.  Every one of the films has a remarkably simple story to tell, but it is told in an overtly gritty and searing manner, not only putting cachet on the socio-political context of contemporary Italy, but also representing a radical break from film making conventions.