Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, Vittorio De Sica's Academy Award-winning Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette)
defined an era in cinema. In postwar, poverty-stricken Rome, a man,
hoping to support his desperate family with a new job, loses his
bicycle, his main means of transportation for work. With his wide-eyed
young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in
construction and dazzlingly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves
embodied all the greatest strengths of the neorealist film movement in
Italy: emotional clarity, social righteousness, and brutal honesty.
Film Info
1948
89 minutes
Black & White
1.33:1
Dolby Digital Mono 1.0
Not Anamorphic
Italian
About the Transfer
Bicycle Thieves is presented in its
original aspect ratio of 1.33:1. On widescreen televisions, black bars
will appear on the left and right of the image to maintain the proper
screen format. This new high-definition digital transfer was created on
a Spirit Datacine from a 35mm duplicate negative. Thousands of
instances of dirt, debris, and scratches were removed using the MTI
Digital Restoration System. To maintain optimal image quality through
the compression process, the picture on this dual-layer DVD-9 was
encoded at the highest-possible bit rate for the quantity of material
included.
The soundtrack was mastered at 24-bit from the 35mm optical
soundtrack, and audio restoration tools were used to reduce clicks,
pops, hiss, and crackle. The Dolby Digital 1.0 signal will be directed
to the center channel on surround sound systems, but some viewers may
prefer to switch to two-channel playback for a wider dispersal of the
mono sound.
|
