May Fourth Meets Italian Neorealism: Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and the Literary Quest for “Life” in the Early People's Republic

The 1954 release of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) in the People's Republic sent shockwaves across the nascent state's cultural establishment. Amongst the Italian neorealist film's commentators were three powerful cultural bureaucrats: Ding Ling, Hu Feng, and Ba Ren — all influential writers of the Republican era. This article uses the three writers’ comments on Bicycle Thieves as a vantage point into how May Fourth realists were experimenting with literary form in the early PRC period, particularly through the notions of “life” and “typicality.” Their reviews demonstrate how the 1930s debates on how real life should be transformed into art continued to divide writers and critics in the early socialist period. Using Hu Feng and Ding Ling's comments on De Sica's film as a framework, the article investigates how both writers’ literary-documentarist prose from the 1950s can be seen as attempts to reinvigorate the realist literary style.