In an interview in 1968 Pasolini described going especially from Casarsa to Udine to see Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves (1948) which, along with Roberto Rosselini’s Rome, Open City (1945) was “a real trauma that I still remember with emotion”.1 He was critical, however, of the “subjective and lyricising” elements of what he saw as the excessively “melancholy” genre of neorealism.2 Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adrian Jackson’s documentary Here For Life (2019) explores some of the themes and narratives of De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves in contemporary London, presenting a modern view of life at the margins which melds the subjectivising lyricism of the original with a self-reflexive documentary form. The film focuses on ten people brought together by their difficult pasts and their desire to explore, through theatre and performance, the world that has shaped them.
Here For Life opens with two men talking about their life experiences. These are Errol and Jono, two members of Cardboard Citizens, a theatre group made up of members of the homeless community in London. Fishing late at night at a canal, they discuss how they, as marginalised people, are represented, and how they might re-present this narrative in theatrical form. Their discussion sets out one of the film’s central preoccupations: how might we present narratives about ourselves? We watch as the group explore – through monologue, theatre and song – the economic and social factors that have shaped their lives. These performances are directed both to the other members of the group and to the camera. In one scene, facing directly into the lens, a man and a woman, speaking simultaneously, retell the moment they stole their first bike, describing the experience in euphoric terms: “It was there calling to me! Come get me!” The rehearsed, artificial quality of these stories, and their deliberately subjective representations of how events took place, highlight the various motivations – poverty, jealousy, necessity – behind these crimes and complicate our reading of them. One man describes the moment he was arrested by the police for stealing a bike to chase down someone who had shot and killed his father. In De Sica’s film the first theft of a bicycle is presented to the viewer as a cruel injustice, something which destroys the protagonists livelihood. When, out of desperation, he steals a bike to replace it, he is mobbed by an angry crowd. The self-reflexive format of Here For Life looks beyond the moment of theft and examines the society that creates the precarity and despair that lead to it. Crime is defined by the state, but does the state always get it right?
Like its neorealist predecessors, the film firmly locates its subjects within their city, framing the stories of each individual within the environment that shaped them. Billingsgate Fish Market at dawn, Brixton Station high street. But scenes of the city are pushed beyond classic neorealism and its aesthetic naturalism into overt symbolism. One man rides a horse through Brixton Market, a lone figure of resistance against gentrification; another holds up a single dollar, the “sign of poverty in this world”. These formal decisions focus our attention on the people at the centre of the rapid architectural and economic changes to the city. The camera cuts between two members of the group, Patrick and Richard, as they pose in front of the giant billboards that are used to mask construction sites and advertise future developments. They ‘smell’ an image of a dandelion and pretend to drink tea in the kitchen of a luxury flat, a crude green screen placing them momentarily in an imagined, post-gentrified London. This new city is still unrealised, but the billboards predict the inevitable concrete to come, envisioning a society that will exclude them. Later, Patrick and Richard walk along the canal. They shout across to two construction workers – “Are you putting something up or knocking something down?” The construction workers reply that they are building something new. “Will we be able to afford it? Because if we can’t we will ask you to put the old one back up,” Patrick and Richard joke – the economic re-engineering of the city is anything but arbitrary.
John David Rhodes writes that for Pasolini, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves remained “essentially, picturesque”, failing to “extend the formal means by which [the periphery] might be documented”.3 Here For Life dedicates itself to the task of documentation, but also suggests that the picturesque is not without value. It does not refute the lyrical subjectivity of De Sica’s original but actively engages with it. At the film’s end, the group reenacts The Bicycle Thieves, updated for a modern London audience. The play and the post-performance Q&A are intercut with the poetic – actors dancing together as the music plays, coals glowing in a fire, sparks lighting the faces of the performers. The lyrical form reflects the need to recognise, ideologically, the subjective alongside the structural. Politics contains the beautiful and the mundane, the film suggests, and we should value both if we are to effectively communicate an image of the individual and their world.
1. Scrapes From The Loft 2. ibid. 3. John David Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome. (University of Minnesota Press: 2007). p. 72.
Georgie Carr is a writer based in London.
