Bambini in città (Cineteca Milano restoration)

 

Luigi Comencini: Bambini in città (IT 1946). 

IT 1946. Prod.: Gigi Martello per S.A. Cortimetraggi. D.: Luigi Comencini. F.: Plinio Novelli – bn. Int.: Mario Amerio (narrator’s voice). 14 min

    Restored by Cineteca Milano at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from a 35 mm positive nitrate print.

    35 mm print from Cineteca Milano.

    Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna 2025: Life First! The Cinema of Luigi Comencini.

    Introduced by Francesca Comencini e Paola Comencini, hosted by Gian Luca Farinelli.

    Viewed with subtitles in English by Sub-Ti Londra at Modernissimo, 22 June 2025.

Bologna 2025: "Bambini in città is Comencini’s first official film, following a single amateur short in 16 mm, La donzelletta, which was lost during the war. On the surface, this documentary provides a timely dose of neorealism: children amongst the ruins, as in the films of De Sica and Rossellini. Shoeshine and Paisan were produced during the same months; Bicycle Thieves and Germany Year Zero were still to come."

"The narrator’s voice adopts a tone curiously lacking in rhetoric, while the beginning and ending reveal the gaze of an architect and town planner. Ruins are also a place of freedom. Amongst fairs, little theatres, amusement fairs, meadows and clearings, the Lampwicks and Pinocchios of the post-war years go in search of a world between the city and the countryside that the director would never forsake."

AA: Luigi Comencini's first film Bambini in città [Children in the City] is prophetic as the first entry in his unique corpus as the greatest director of childhood in the cinema.

It is Year Zero. The children have nothing, and they conquer everything. Out of the rubble, they make toys. Trams they use for joyrides. Traffic becomes a field of adventure. Anything can become a playground: construction sites, wastelands, garbage heaps, the whole city. We are dancing on the ruins.

The children also discover Buffalo Bill and Black Corsair magazines in the newsstands. At a pop-up theatre, Il Capitan Fracassa is playing. A corpse on the stage frightens the children. A mini circus arrives, complete with a clown, a strongman and an acrobat who can eat a lightbulb.

A story of desolation and solitude, and an invincible life force, in the best tradition of neorealism.

On the soundtrack we hear magnificent Baroque music and themes from Rossini operas. This reminds me of Chaplin's reminiscences of the Fred Karno spectacles of his childhood, in which the extreme poverty of a London slum was set against Baroque music.

Low contrast, no black on the print.