Umberto D

Italian directors of the post-WWII generation, responding to the calamity of facism, to the widespread poverty in both the cities and countryside, and by necessity needing to film inexpensively and to be unencumbered by studio costs, developed a radical realist cinematic aesthetics: neo-realism. Vittorio De Sica became justly famous for his groundbreaking “The Bicycle Thieves”, utilising street locations and performances by non-actors, but it is his unsentimental “Umberto D” that now stands up as the most important film of the Italian neo-realist period. Umberto is a retired civil servant who finds himself unwanted and ignored now that his working days are over. Only his dog gives him affection; humans treat him as already dead, an old man to be shoved aside if they even see him at all. Almost documentary-like in its observation of Umberto (played with sustained brilliance by Carlo Battisti), the film quickly envelops us in the old man’s daily struggles and we find ourselves completely mesmerised by his story, we find ourselves identifying with this tale of a most ordinary “unremarkable” man. As Umberto faces his aching loneliness, and death seemingly becomes his only salvation, we as viewers have to confront our own immersion in the sterility and brutality of our industrialised urban world. The great critic Pauline Kael argued that “Umberto D” is one of those rare films that changes the viewer, that on once seeing the film you can never view the world in the same way again. Critic George Kaufman called it one of “the greatest halfdozen films ever made”. In Italian with English subtitles.