Rosetta (1999): Dardenne Brothers' Minimalist Portrait of Poverty

Camera movement and image composition are fundamental tools that transform emotions, ideas, and narratives, guiding viewer gaze and constructing meaning. Orson Welles pioneered deep focus in Citizen Kane, enabling horizontal and vertical camera movements. The Dardenne brothers, Belgian filmmakers from Liege, developed a distinctive style through their background in acting and philosophy. They founded their own production company in the 1990s, maintaining total control over casting, filming, and editing with low budgets and small crews. Their films focus on adolescents and working-class people in 21st century Europe, beginning with the question 'What does it mean to be human today?' They maintain specific rules: filming exclusively on location with natural lighting, similar to Italian neorealism. Critics connect them to Robert Bresson's minimalist cinema, though they use handheld camera that stays one step behind protagonists. Their documentary-style approach creates narrative resistance—characters remain in shadows, ambiguous, generating truth. They embrace the paradox that 'the estetization of reality requires a desestetization of art.' Unlike British social realists, they paint protagonists crudely without sentimentality. They adopt character perspectives to tell authentic stories, with endings that are tentative and uncertain rather than typical happy endings. In a globalized world, simple stories seeking humanity remain relatable, but filmmakers must avoid ulterior objectives that reduce characters to propaganda vehicles.

Vittorio De Sica's 1948 film Bicycle Thieves exemplifies Italian Neorealism by presenting a simple, realistic story about a poor father in post-WWII Rome who loses his job and his bicycle, exploring themes of individual struggle against societal poverty, the ethics of survival, and the universal human experience of desperation; the film's power lies in its authentic portrayal of ordinary people, its focus on social and economic problems, and its ability to make viewers empathize with characters representing millions facing similar hardships.

Billy Wilder admired Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) for its honesty and willingness to strip away glamour to focus on ordinary lives. The film, a cornerstone of Italian neorealism, follows Antonio Ricci, an unemployed father in postwar Rome, whose bicycle is stolen and who searches for it with his young son. Wilder saw in it the purest expression of storytelling economy, where you cannot hide behind technique. He believed that if the truth of emotion is there, the audience will follow. Wilder admired De Sica's compassion for human weakness—Antonio's failure isn't treated as shameful but as inevitable in a society built on scarcity. Wilder told a friend that Bicycle Thieves reminded him of Vienna in the 1920s when everyone was hungry but trying to look respectable.

Bicycle Thieves, the most famous work of Italian Neorealism, depicts Antonio's struggle to survive in post-WWII Rome. After losing his bicycle (essential for his job), he experiences profound suffering, humiliation, and despair. The film authentically reflects the lives of millions who faced hardship after an unnecessary war, establishing Italian Neorealism as a powerful cinematic movement.

Bicycle Thieves (1948), directed by Vittorio De Sica, is a cornerstone of Italian Neorealism, a post-WWII movement depicting the lives of the poorest citizens. The film follows Antonio, a desperate father who loses his bicycle (essential for his job) and must find it through Rome's streets with his son Bruno's help. Bruno's character arc represents one of cinema's most powerful portrayals of lost innocence: from a happy child excited about his father's new job to a traumatized witness who transforms into a frightened adult and finally a criminal. The film's brilliance lies in its deliberate aesthetic choices—filming on real locations and casting non-professionals—to break cinematic illusions and reveal authentic poverty. The title shifts meaning from singular to plural as Antonio steals, symbolizing how poverty corrupts all. This approach inspired generations of filmmakers to use cinema for social commentary, making Bicycle Thieves one of history's most impactful works that revealed truths audiences didn't want to see.

According to Walter Benjamin's Marxist analysis, art historically served collective rituals and carried an 'aura' tied to its authentic, unique existence within specific socio-cultural contexts; however, capitalism transforms art through mechanical reproduction (particularly photography and mass media) and commodification, stripping it of its collective meaning and reducing it to exchange value, thereby creating a vacuum of meaning that can only be filled through revolutionary art that resists commodification and recovers the artwork's authentic political and social significance.

Karl Marx's theory of alienation posits that capitalism generates alienation from work, as it becomes an object existing outside the worker—a role imposed only to make money. Soviet filmmakers used editing, focus, and imagery to highlight class conflict. In 'Ryan,' this manifests through the artist's struggle with how his art was valued, monetized, and ripped off. Ryan became disillusioned with the animation industry's bureaucracy requiring productivity, and his cocaine addiction made it impossible to persist with animation—a medium requiring hours of quiet, patient work. The film suggests our identities form through ego's interaction with the environment, suppressing hidden desires while struggling with higher morality. The filmmaker's curiosity about Ryan's inner world reveals how creativity and anxieties are expressed through how one lives.

Karl Marx's theory of alienation of labor, which describes four aspects of worker separation in capitalism (from product, activity, humanity, and society), can be applied to analyze children in entertainment industry. The video presents this as a critical analysis where children in reality shows become media products, separated from their authentic selves and transformed into commodities for audience consumption. This demonstrates how Marxist economic theory provides analytical frameworks for understanding power dynamics in media and entertainment industries.

Alienation in Marxist theory is not a psychological or consciousness problem but a real material process. It refers to the process where the product of labor becomes alien to the worker - it becomes something external, strange, and hostile to the producer. This is a fundamental process of capitalist society where workers lose control over what they produce and the products become commodities that dominate them.

The video explains the Marxist concept of alienation as a multi-faceted phenomenon including alienation from society, from people, from objects, from science and technology, and from culture and morality. The speaker argues that all these forms of alienation are based on a fundamental disconnect between humans and their existence, preventing individuals from controlling their own existence. The video explains how alienation manifests in creative labor, where creative workers are alienated from their work and its results because they do not own the products they create. The speaker describes how directors, actors, and crew members are alienated from the films they create because large studios and corporations own these works. The video explains how economic constraints limit creative freedom, arguing that in the capitalist system, individuals cannot afford to create without commercial success. The speaker distinguishes between formal freedom and economic reality, using the analogy that a person is formally free to live as they wish, but economic constraints make this freedom illusory.

The difference between crude (honest, real representation) and crudeza (exploitative spectacle) lies not in the subject matter but in how the camera positions viewers relative to the content. When filmmakers show dark or shocking content from inside the character's experience, viewers become accomplices to their suffering; when filmed from outside, the same content becomes voyeuristic entertainment. This distinction explains why Euphoria's first two seasons, which used empathetic camera work and collaborative visual direction from Petra Collins, were critically acclaimed, while Season 3's external, exploitative approach transformed the same dark themes into spectacle, demonstrating that the question is not whether to show difficult content but how to show it ethically.

Theoretically, the ethical gaze differs from the voyeuristic gaze described in Mulvey's essay. Rather than voyeuristic close-ups, Sciamma's camera lingers on gestures, fingers brushing, eyes meeting. Feminist scholar Kaja Silverman describes this as 'a gaze of care, co-presence and slow burning intimacy.' The gaze is not about consumption but witnessing.

Regardless of what is being photographed—whether a child fleeing bombs, a dying person, a landscape, or a woman's face—the photographer bears ethical responsibility for how they look at their subject. The photographer's approach and relationship with the subject are inseparable from the resulting image.

The film critiques the so-called objectivity of reporting by using the very methods it criticizes, pushing the logic of objectivity to its limits to show how far it can go. The presence of the camera and potential spectator has an impact on behavior even before its presence. The camera acts as a real entity that affects our behaviors when it looks at us and what we are willing to do to satisfy it and the appetite of the spectator behind it. Unlike a classic film, the camera and spectator do not identify with either the killer or the victim but remain in the position of the camera as voyeur. This creates a particularly fine and porous boundary between a journalistic team conducting a reportage and its impact on the subject filmed. The first type of impact occurs when journalists provoke Ben by telling him that if he doesn't attack residents of wealthy neighborhoods, it's because he's afraid. Ben, whose ego is immediately offended, decides to show them he is capable of it, despite the absence of financial gain, which tragically leads to the death of a child. This demonstrates the perversity of this type of behavior and the blurry limit of journalists who can influence subjects to perform acts they might not have performed themselves. A second type of impact is related to the subject itself. Ben necessarily behaves differently when under the gaze of an entire team, even if they don't intervene. The question is raised of how far we are willing to go to satisfy our ego and obtain a little notoriety. The character Ben accepts being filmed despite his numerous murders because he has an overdimensioned ego and is happy to put himself in front of the camera. His fanfaronnades, small jokes, poems, and improbable digressions are staged in front of the camera, and he would not act this way without the camera. When the journalists run out of money to pay for their film stock to continue their reportage, Ben, inflated by his ego and narcissistic desire, is willing to give money to the team to continue their reportage on him, completely blurring the roles and removing all boundaries between journalist and subject. Once this role of producer is occupied by Ben, the team becomes indebted to him and will help him in his murders to obtain more money, including participating in disposing of bodies.

Documentaries are a record of the filmmaker's regard for the subject. The observational mode is not just putting a camera down but concentrating on particular social actors and how they are framed. The camera's gaze communicates the filmmaker's political intentions and moral values. Give Me Shelter leaves viewers troubled by its moral evasiveness—it penetrates the world of the murder and then lets it bleed without providing summatory explanations for the violence. The film is criticized for not being ethical and truthful to the social actors it represents, with Meredith Hunter at the center but not fairly represented, while the Stones are exonerated and the audience is asked to empathize with them.