From Visual Learner to Visual Teacher and Beyond: Pedagogical Considerations on the Role of Children in Vittorio De Sica's Neorealism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation will examine the role of children in Vittorio De Sica’s films I bambini ci guardano (1944), Sciuscià (1946), and Ladri di biciclette (1948). The strength of their function, as shall be outlined, lies in their expansive field of vision which allows them to take on great responsibilities. Those they come to affect, through what they see, are not limited to the characters with whom they come into contact. They become a source of identification for the neorealist spectator. Thus, the child will be shown as a symbol for the redefinition of what constitutes the male agency - a term which is already on unstable ground during the postwar years. What he lacks in virility and active potency, the child makes up for in insight and intuitiveness until those qualities elevate him to the heights of focal protagonist and moral compass. In support of this stance, the dissertation will employ the teachings of Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, books which champion Neorealism for its ability to suspend the spectator’s need for decisive action to occur in film and for giving prominence to propelling reflection. The impetus to select De Sica over other neorealists was crafted by the weight and presence of young characters in his films who were neither heroic nor crusaders for social change. They were, simply, children. What they represented, what their gazes revealed willingly and instinctively, were the basic facets of human existence: warmth, kindness, regret, guilt, and, above all, love. With the realization that within children there exists great humanity, the adults around them begin to question their own behaviour. Thus, the child, despite his restricted physical action, also takes on the role of teacher. How far the child’s pedagogical abilities can take him are also explored in a different, but relevant setting: the classroom. This dissertation, then, comes full circle when it aims to highlight the influence of the child on yet another spectator: the student-cinephile.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".