Cesare Zavattini Selected Writings Volume 2 9781501317057, 9781501317088, 9781501319921

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Cesare Zavattini Selected Writings Volume 1

ii 

Cesare Zavattini Selected Writings Volume 1 Edited and Translated by David Brancaleone



BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Cover photograph © Archivio Zavattini Reggio in Emilia Texts © Eredi Zavattini Commentary © David Brancaleone Edition © David Brancaleone Translation © David Brancaleone Cover design: Namkwan Cho For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1701-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1992-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-1993-8 Set: 978-1-5013-1718-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction to Volume 1 1 Part one  Pre-war 1 Stories from the Comic Trilogy (1931-41) 2 Chronicles from Hollywood (1927-33) 3 Scenario: The Nervous Tic Clinic (1936) 4 Miss Great Celebrity Signatures: Letter to Giuseppe Amato, 1 July 1938 5 Scenario: Miss Great Celebrity Signatures (1938) 6 Scenario: Everyone Should Have a Rocking Horse (1938) 7 Scenario: Five Poor Men in a Motorcar (1939) 8 Scenario: Totò the Good (1940)

9 21 30 38 40 50 56 64

Part two  Post-war 9 Scenario: Italy 1944 (1944) 10 Scenario: Sciuscià (1945) 11 Sciuscià: Letter to Massimo Ferrara, 6 July 1981 12 Scenario: Bicycle Thieves (1948) 13 ‘What We Want’ (1950) 14 Scenario: The Great Deception (1948) 15 The Great Deception: Letter to Géza von Radváni, 9 March 1950 16 Scenario: First Communion (1949) 17 First Communion: Correspondence 18 Scenario: Bellissima (1950-1) 19 ‘The origins of Umberto D.’ (1951) 20 Umberto D. in Zavattini’s diary (1948-51) 21 Scenario: Umberto D. (1951) 22 Treatment: Umberto D. (1951) 23 Screenplay (extract): Umberto D. Umberto’s Lodgings. The Kitchen. Dawn (1951) 24 Zavattini, Miracle in Milan, La Voce Repubblicana, 7 July 1951 25 Scenario: Miracle in Milan (1950) 26 Scenario: Italia mia (1951-2) 27 Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village (1955)

73 77 89 90 99 101 106 108 123 127 135 136 138 145 165 167 169 177 196

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Contents

28 The Story of Catherine: ansa Press Comuniqué (1952) 29 Scenario: The Story of Catherine (1952) 30 Love in the City: Voice-over and dialogue excerpt (1953) 31 The Story of Catherine: Interview (1962) 32 Scenario: A Child’s Funeral (1954) 33 Scenario: The Roof (1955) 34 Scenario: México mío (1955-8) 35 Scenario: Short Love Story (1958) 36 Correspondence with Carlos Velo (1955-8) 37 Scenario: Diary of a Woman (1959) 38 Scenario: Revolución en Cuba (1960) 39 Scenario: Anti-racist Film (1960) 40 Fernando Birri, Letter to Zavattini, 9 March 1957 41 Scenario: The Little Dictator (1960) 42 Treatment: The Little Dictator (1960) 43 Scenario: Colour versus Colour (1960) 44 Scenario: Censorship 1960 45 Scenario: The Newsreel for Peace (1962) 46 Scenario: The Guinea Pig (1962) 47 Scenario: The Mysteries of Rome (1962) 48 Scenario: Assault on Television (1962) 49 Scenario: Why? (1963) 50 Scenario: Free Newsreels (1967) 51 Scenario: The Seven Cervi Brothers (1968) 52 Scenario: Revolution (1969) 53 Adapting The Children of Sánchez (1971) 54 Scenario: Italia mia tv version (1974-6) 55 Scenario: Aldo Moro, Before, During, After (1978) 56 Scenario: The Truuuuth (1981) 57 Transmission test: Telesubito (1983)

205 207 211 215 217 222 242 256 260 265 268 273 275 285 287 303 306 311 317 326 331 335 340 348 360 364 367 373 384 393

Acknowledgements This two-volume project is indebted to Cesare Zavattini’s eldest son, Arturo, who granted unreserved access to all papers contained in the Zavattini Archive, kept in the Panizzi library of Reggio in Emilia, for his ongoing support, so tangible that it extended to the gift of many rare copies of books from the Zavattini corpus. I am also grateful to Arturo for his advice on considering the total Zavattini, while concentrating on his cinema, leading to the inclusion of significant 1930s stories, not destined for cinema, as well as early satirical fictional stories about the cinema, which did not appear in the three-volume set published by Bompiani in 1979 or the new edition of 2002, or in Orio Caldiron’s new selection of 2006. Film historian and critic Mino Argentieri, the director Francesco Maselli, Zavattini expert Lorenzo Pellizzari and the film director Fernando Birri, all granted interviews. Lorenzo was also one of the first readers of the earliest results of research project in 2012, together with Max Le Cain, editor of Experimental Conversations. Professor Laura Rascaroli has also been encouraging, and drew my attention to the relation between Zavattini’s ideas and Tercero Cine. At the Panizzi, Giorgio Boccolari, head archivist for many years, has been a constant source of encouragement and expert advice on many issues. The keeper of the Zavattini Archive of Reggio Emilia, Roberta Ferri, helped so much over these past few years by facilitating access, including providing long-distance access, through a very prompt digitization of papers and scenarios, which saved me so much time. At the Panizzi, I also benefitted from the help of Antonietta Vigliotti, Annalisa De Carina, Monica Leoni, Elisabetta Pini and the night watchman Peppe, who lent me Emigrantes (1948) directed by Aldo Fabrizi, and turned a blind eye on more than one occasion. I would also like to express my gratitude to Laura Pompei, of the Ufficio Acquisizione e Digitalizzazione materiali bibliografici e archivistici, at the Biblioteca Chiarini in the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia of Rome, for her generous advice and practical help with bibliographic research, and for sending me several indispensable articles and drawing my attention to correspondence that had been so recently received, it was not yet catalogued. The staff of the Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio was also very supportive, especially Paola Scarnati, who collaborated with Zavattini and introduced me to his son Arturo in the first place, and to Letizia Cortini, for drawing my attention to the lack of much needed archival research on Zavattini’s scenarios, correspondence and other unpublished writings, indispensable for this edition, Claudia Brugnoli of the Alma Mater Studiorum, of the University of Bologna, for Ernesto de Martino’s ‘Realismo e folclore nel cinema italiano’

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Acknowledgements

(1952), Marianna Montesano at the Biblioteca delle Arti, Sezione Spettacolo Lino Miccichè, Università di Roma Tre, for sending me a digital copy of Cine Cubano (1960). A word of thanks to the Limerick Institute of Technology, for taking care of the travel costs over eight years and facilitating Erasmus grants, which have allowed me to teach in film schools in Rome and Reggio, while also carrying out research at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and the Zavattini Archive. Dulcis in fundo, the two As.

Introduction to Volume 1 The purpose of this anthology is to fill a gap in film history, by making available in English a representative selection of Zavattini’s scenarios in Volume 1, and film writings, interviews, diary entries and other texts, in Volume 2. This arrangement will offer the reader a head start into Zavattini’s cinema as a whole. Zavattini’s international reputation is based on his scenarios and screenplays, particularly for major post-war European classics, key Neo-realist films: Sciascià, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan and Umberto D. But his earlier film writing is little known. The same is true as regards the subsequent direction of Zavattini’s film writing and activity in general. For equally shrouded in the mists of time are the years that followed historic Italian Neo-realism. Humour informs his 1930s and early 1940s film writing. The war marked a clean cut and new directions, and yet ties with the 1930s also exist. A paradox which has not been addressed to date. There are as many facets to Zavattini as there are areas of his interests which materialize as areas of direct involvement and tangible contributions to a range of fields. For as well as a screenwriter, he was also a film theorist, a publisher, a pioneer of visual culture in Italy, a Modernist author of literary texts, a visual artist, a campaigner for socially engaged cinema, a campaigner for human rights and a campaigner against atomic war, in the years between 1948 and throughout the years of the Cold War. This explains why he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by Moscow in 1955, alongside the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. His was an expanded film practice, consisting in what he did on paper and what he did in the cutting room, his field research, but also all his efforts towards a New Italian Cinema. As he said in an interview: I spent at least fifty percent of my time fighting for Italian cinema. I don’t think anyone devoted as much time as I did towards socially engaged cinema. Years and years given, with all the consequences. I was made to pay for all this, and there is also the fact that they were simply unable to do it, even if they had wanted to. An enormous amount of activity and of all kinds: hundreds and hundreds of meetings, public interventions, conferences, debates, serving to organize Italian cinema. At what risk? The risk you run when you say what you think.1

All these areas of engagement could not fail to inform his film practice. They have been explored, to some extent, to date, but always in isolation. Until now, Zavattini (Interview), Franca Faldini and Goffredo Fofi (eds), L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano raccontata dai suooi protagonisti 1935-1959, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979, 220.

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the Aladdin’s Cave of archival material stored in the Zavattini Archive of Reggio in Emilia at the Panizzi library has been little researched, though this is where to find not only interviews and conference papers, but his entire, gargantuan, correspondence (numbering over one hundred thousand documents), all neatly filed away at the time, in duplicate, in his own research. From the days of his earliest involvement in screenwriting, Zavattini published his scenarios, even before the release of the films. In 1979, he collected a selection of his film scripts in two anthologies. Basta con i soggetti! (1979), published in the latter years of Zavattini’s life, comprises twenty-five scenarios. What is remarkable is that this selection included none of the canonical scenarios or stories. One can only surmise that the reason for these glaring omissions was a choice not to memorialize his whole life’s work, but, instead, to provide a background for those projects he was still keen to get into production. A glaring example is Tu Maggiorani (You Maggiorani). Zavattini chose to include a story, based on real events, about Lamberto Maggiorani, the protagonist of Bicycle Thieves, while he omitted world-famous Bicycle Thieves. The second anthology was edited twenty years after his death. Uomo vieni fuori! (2006) filled those otherwise inexplicable gaps, providing an essential and generous selection, including six major pre-war film scripts. This English anthology offers an equally substantive selection, comprising thirty-nine scenarios, two treatments and a selection of other writings to supplement it. This edition takes into consideration the important fact that Zavattini was also the author of a bestselling pre-war trilogy of short stories, or raccontini and longer stories, fictional accounts from Your Own Correspondent, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, about Hollywood. It therefore includes, on Arturo Zavattini’s suggestion, a representative selection of his father’s pre-war literary writings, including a selection of seven of his raccontini, those short, aphoristic stories, sometimes consisting in no more than a few lines. Also included is a selection of his fictional interviews and stories about Hollywood, published in Italian film magazines of the era. This anthology also contains correspondence relating to key projects, documents that shed light on the creative process, for example, to contextualize a major project, such as Italia mia and the related film book Un paese. This interdisciplinary approach enables the reader to see how certain ideas, which have always been perceived as belonging entirely to the post-war period, not only originated much earlier but also demonstrate how a similar thread of ideas can resurface in a very different context or a different medium. In the best example, one discovers that the whimsicality of Miracle in Milan, and what seems to be a surreal vein, is a major characteristic of his early literary work and the nucleus of ironic, nonsense-based raccontini. Take a famous scene, featuring a mathematics contest. Originally, it appeared as a few lines, a sketch, in the tradition of Italian popular comic nonsense writing, or scemenze (literally ‘stupidities’), but later became a scene in the film, as did others, from the same source. Indeed, Zavattini’s writing career, from its inception in the 1920s, and the reputation he soon established, centred on humour, as the short stories from his

Introduction to Volume 1

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trilogy demonstrate. As for the Hollywood stories, very early on, in 1927, he began to write stories about the Dream Factory, at the end of the Silent Era and on the cusp of the Sound Era. This anthology includes several stories from his Hollywood Chronicles, originally published in the 1930s and collected in 1991. In these, not only does Zavattini lampoon the Star System which was attracting in the same years Siegfried Kracauer’s attention as a social phenomenon (in the wake of Kracauer’s readings of Karl Marx and Georg Simmel). Zavattini also adopts Luigi Pirandello’s distancing techniques, to raise the kind of questions about the relation between reality and illusion and uncertainty, which he addresses after the war, most notably, in his scripts for Bellissima (1951), for The Great Deception (1952), for Colour versus Colour (1960) or The Truuuuth (1982), written, performed and directed by Zavattini himself. As for the translation, it does its best to do justice to, if not match, Zavattini’s linguistic register, which is very often informal, colloquial even. If his writing resembles spoken Italian, it is for two reasons: first, he had a desired audience in mind, and second, because his writing practice consisted in dictating his stories, even his film diaries, and other texts, including his vast correspondence, to a typist. In some instances, for example, in the scenario for a documentary about the assassination of Aldo Moro, Aldo Moro: Before, During, and After (1978), also included in this edition, the linguistic register is far more complex, notable for the lack of short sentences that feature in many of the other stories and for the argumentative, essay-style approach the writer adopted. In translating Zavattini, it is very tempting to resolve his deliberate parataxis in the scenarios; pages of sentences coordinated by and ... and ... and ..., to replace them with apposite ‘buts’, ‘ifs’, ‘althoughs’ and so on. However, a familiarity with his style of film writing discourages that temptation, for example, in the treatment of Umberto D, a prime example of where parataxis is a means to an end and, as in another case, the treatment has also been translated. At first glance, so many of his film scripts seem descriptive. Yet description conceals his phenomenological gaze on reality, one which allows the reader, in the first instance, and the viewer in the second instance, the freedom to interpret situations, by making sense of the ‘social facts’ independently, or, at least, apparently so. Parataxis serves to ensure the continuity of the present moment. It is a signifier pointing to the concatenation of moment-to-moment existence, in which being, or Being, is experienced directly, in the sense of the phenomenological being-in-the-world of sense phenomena, of sense perception, which involves direct experience. Bicycle Thieves, as early as its formulation as a scenario, presents us with what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called ‘the surprise of the self in the world’, in ‘describing the mingling of consciousness with the world, its involvement in a body, and its coexistence with others’.2

2

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, in Sense and Non-Sense, translated, with a Preface, by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966, 48–59; 58.

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Looking at Zavattini’s work as a whole and across disciplines (literary writing, journalism, lobbying, film writing, radio broadcasting, editorship, publishing ventures), one finds that there are some recurring preoccupations that form a pattern of artistic, cultural and social intervention. The most conspicuous is Italia mia, always classified in the specialized secondary literature of Zavattini Studies and, in the Zavattini Archive itself, as progetto non realizzato: a project which never came to fruition, and therefore, it would follow, less significant than the ones which did. Yet, as Gian Piero Brunetta has recently noted, ideas travel in cinema, and projects we had assumed remained on paper were influential nonetheless.3 This cross-fertilization of ideas travels from person to person, in Zavattini’s case, it also informs one project, then another, and another, within the same person. Italia mia is a case in point, as a mapping of Zavattini’s film work in its width and breadth shows. He developed the Italia mia project, though in unexpected ways. While the international versions, México mío, Cuba mía or España mía, never made it into production and release, they were part of an overarching Italia mia project which was a catalyst for a great deal of Zavattini’s developing idea of non-fiction or documentary cinema, theorized as mainstream cinema to come. This is the reason why this anthology, unlike Orio Caldiron’s 2006 Italian selection, includes Un paese, originally a film book, and intended as one of a number of film books to be published within an overarching Italia mia series. Such a framework justifies the inclusion of, for example, the proposed documentary Why? (1963), of the coeval The Mysteries of Rome (1963), which became a film, or the Free Newsreel La rivoluzione (1969), Revolution, buried in a letter to an associate in the Free Newsreels organization, but a useful addition to his corpus of scenarios, be they in translation or in Italian. The same critical path through Zavattini’s thought and work led him to write La veritàaaa (1982) The Truuuuth. There are countless versions of the scenario, so many different screenplays, totalling thousands and thousands of typed pages, and finally resulting in the film which Zavattini himself wrote, acted in, and directed, in some ways, a testament and a final statement. One version of the scenario is included and contextualized by several interviews about the ideas behind the film. From a philological point of view, the text published in the 1979 and 2006 anthologies has been compared to earlier versions, where these exist, including parts which were edited out for these two collections, as in the case of Umberto D. Its original magazine edition includes a vital commentary from the screenwriter, deleted by the book editor whose version was later adopted. Zavattini’s commentary has been translated and published in the accompanying footnotes.

3

Gian Piero Brunetta, L’isola che non c’è. Viaggi nel cinema italiano che non vedremo mai, Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2015.

Introduction to Volume 1

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Any relevant archival, unpublished papers have also been used where useful for the contextual introductions.4 Indeed, every single text is preceded by detailed contextual notes to situate that text within its original frame of reference, thus making it easier for any twenty-first-century reader, whether a student, a researcher or a general reader, to map for herself Zavattini’s film writing, both critically and historically and approach his writing as much as possible on its own terms. A final word about Italian screenwriting and how Zavattini approached it. It must be remembered that he was a writer first and a screenwriter second. He called himself a film writer, scrittore di cinema, to signal how he envisaged writing for the cinema, and suggest that it spanned across various stages of engagement. In Italian, a soggettista is someone who writes the initial outline story, but often no more (though there are many cases of the writer and director being one and the same person, Elio Petri, for example), while a sceneggiatore is the author of the treatment and screenplay and shooting script. Zavattini worked in all these capacities, with a bias towards the outline, the initial script or what is referred to as a ‘scenario’ in this collection. He claimed that if you could sum up a story in a few words, you probably had a story worth telling, as Abbas Kiarostami, among others, often told his students. Kiarostami was a great admirer of Zavattini’s theories and approach to cinema. His film Ten on Ten (2004) devotes an entire ten-minute lesson sequence to Zavattini, citing him extensively. Most of Zavattini’s stories have what he called ‘a spit’, spiedo, a metaphor borrowed from hunting, to indicate a strong internal structure to hold all the constituent pieces together. In his film writing, he pares down the excess to the bare minimum, keeping things very simple, including syntactically, and constantly visualizing situations, as the collection of forty or so texts below amply shows, suggesting a gaze, Zavattini’s gaze. Zavattini was often asked to fix a weak script. This is what happened with Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià, and with Giuseppe De Santis’s Rome, 11 o’Clock. Neither possessed the indispensable ‘spit’. From the 1930s on, it was customary in the Italian film industry for writers to work in collaboration. He often clashed with the directors he wrote for, or the other members of the writing team, not over details, but about the central unifying element, ‘the spit’ of the story and screenplay. He was at loggerheads with Sergio Amidei, one of the writing team for Bicycle Thieves, for example. Amidei eventually stormed out, at a loss as to how such a banal incident could make a film. He resisted Alberto Blasetti’s attempts, when Blasetti wanted to push the personal voice of defeat and confession in First Communion (1951), into piety and didacticism. He clashed with Mario Camerini and his writing team in the 1930s, when Zavattini was outnumbered by the other members of the team and Camerini’s magic formula of sentimental comedy prevailed over Zavattini’s own style of carnivalesque comic. He had a 4

Zavattini kept an extraordinary archive of production papers, correspondence, offprints, press releases and press cuttings, material dating from the 1920s. The archival material has been invaluable to form this and the companion volume.

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head-on collision with Giuseppe De Santis who wanted the tragic incident at the centre of Rome, 11 o’Clock to become entirely fictionalized. They somehow reached a compromise, leading to a formidable Neo-realist film classic. In sum, from the beginning, Zavattini always resisted the pressure to cramp his style, and refused to be no more than a cog in the wheels, a technician, in an industrialized production process. As far as he was concerned, there were films and there was cinema, which latter interested him more, and he made cinema on- and off-screen. The bigger picture was compelling. As Federica Villa notes in her excellent book on Italian screenwriters: For Zavattini, the screenwriter’s profession, often not given its due weight, and which also presupposed several other issues, influencing and, indeed, dominating it, offered yet another opportunity to express and disseminate that revolutionary idea of cinema he shared, among battles and sacrifices, with his fellow travellers.5

5

Federica Villa, Botteghe di scrittura per il cinema italiano, Rome: Bianco & Nero, 2002, 44.

Part one

Pre-war

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1

Stories from the Comic Trilogy (1931-41)

Context Zavattini’s activity as a writer began when he ventured into publishing, working for the daily press as a content editor. His activity as a writer and as an editor went in parallel, and the inevitable overlap between fiction and non-fiction is a feature of his writing practice from the very beginning. While he worked for the daily La Gazzetta di Parma, as editor of the cultural pages, in the late 1920s, he also began writing whimsical stories. There was already an established readership for such literature, and many magazines vying for its attention. Zavattini’s career as a journalist began when he was appointed a staff editor for this regional daily paper. After his move in 1930 from the provinces, from Parma where he went to university to study law, to Milan, he worked his way up to the position of editorial director in two major publishing houses: first at Rizzoli, then at Mondadori, while also working as a freelance desk editor for a third publisher, Valentino Bompiani, who also published Zavattini’s comic literature. Zavattini collected the stories he had originally brought in a wide range of magazines to form three books, all published by Bompiani: the first was Parliamo tanto di me (1931) (Let’s Talk a Lot about Me), the second, I poveri sono matti (The Poor are Mad) (1937) and the third, Io sono il diavolo (I am the Devil) (1941). In the first, Let’s Talk a Lot about Me (1931), he touches on a wide range of themes: destiny and chance; ghosts; news stories; the relation between individuals and the crowd; the rich and the poor; open-ended stories, words themselves, envy and literary success, melancholy and family. Yet there is a fragile internal structure, in the shape of a Dantesque journey into the Underworld, followed by a fleeting single-page visit to Purgatory and Paradise, where the children residents make such a din that they disturb the peace of all the other souls in the vicinity. Zavattini’s emphasis, though, is on the living and their strange behaviour, as observed from the distance of a supernatural journey. From this perspective, he overturns Dante’s perspective, concentrating on the world of the living and their habits, enabling his fictional narrator and alter ego to express wonder and the absurdity of everyday life, in as many ways as the many situations his very fertile imagination is able to conjure up. His style sets apart his writing from narrative prose and its rules. All three books in the trilogy form a Modernist,

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anti-novel, anti-narrative approach, in which narrative is compressed to the small-scale raccontino, a very short story, sometimes consisting of no more than a few lines. He keeps shifting the reader’s attention, through ellipsis, or a sudden change of register, or even a switch to an entirely different theme, in a montage of sentences which create absurd contrasts. Let’s Talk a Lot about Me was a bestseller of the time, attracting very positive reviews by well-established literary critics, such as Massimo Bontempelli, Guido Piovene and Adriano Tilgher.1 The second collection, The Poor are Mad (1937), features stories about lowermiddle-class clerks; while the third consists in stand-alone stories and characters, except Bat, who appears in most of them. When the second collection came out, one critic picked up its international breadth and Modernism. Giovanni Papini, co-founder of the Futurist review Lacerba and La Voce, and steeped in American philosophical pragmatism, wrote to Zavattini to say that the critics who had interpreted his book as comic prose had misunderstood him: I find a tragic poet in this book. One who employs the seemingly grotesque only to depict more effectively, painful, melancholic, and frightening everyday reality. There’s something remotely Kafkaesque and Joycean but pared down to a most elementary and sombre form, and by so doing, more Italian, more lyrical.2

These stories disrupt the banality of the everyday, by inserting and combining elements which are patently absurd, fable-like – enchanting, even, in their candid nature – with others that are not. There was nothing comparable in Italian literature at the time. So it was difficult for critics to classify them, with the exception of the earlier cited Florentine Futurist, Giovanni Papini, who could appreciate what Zavattini was doing. The Poor are Mad is a collection of stories featuring lower-middle-class employees. The second collection is more cohesive than the first, though the other worldly setting has been replaced by a series of entirely self-contained stories. Gone is any progression, in terms of a plot gradually reaching a conclusion and climax. Bat, the main character and unifying narrative element, is a journalist, like Zavattini. This fictional character must also contend with his boss, his colleagues and the world around him. In The Poor are Mad, the everyday is suspended, as if it were a goldfish bowl of simple, deceptively childlike syntax, which creates an abstract space, like a white cube gallery of everyday objects placed on plinths, such that any observation, reflection or action gives the reader pause for thought. In one story, Bat dreams of his funeral. His boss is in attendance, along with his grieving family and friends who follow the boss, instead of walking behind Bat’s hearse. The grim joke consists in a comic critique of society, in which hierarchy and status may matter more than friendship. The Hours is a non-story about Bat’s struggle with 1 2

Zavattini, Io. Un’autobiografia, edited by Paolo Nuzzi, Turin: Einaudi, 2002, 58. Giovanni Papini, Letter to Zavattini, 23 August 1937, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, edited by Silvana Cirillo, in Zavattini, Opere. Lettere, Milan: Bompiani, 2002, 73–4.

Stories from the Comic Trilogy (1931-41)

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writing.3 Everything conspires against him, not only his colleagues and their gossip, but even his own mind, when he tries to deal with the pressure and the growing awareness, looming larger and larger, of the passing of time. Each moment brings another thought, signifiers jangling in his head, awaiting their place in the sentence, and each thought drawing him further and further away from writing, culminating in the appearance of his wife who tells him it is time to leave. In another non-story, Fra quattro minuti (In Four Minutes’ Time), so negligible an event takes place as to be almost meaningless; almost, but not quite. Bat sets off to work, but he interrupts his journey, to watch his children and their friends at play. He then decides to defy convention and conformist routine, by walking on past his office. As he does so, he experiences something new: nothing more than the distant sound of chairs scraping the floor of the office, as he walks away.4 Habit in everyday life is challenged. The third book, I am the Devil, lacks the amusing humour and gentle irony of the first two which had earned him the label of umorista or comic writer. Zavattini steps away from the comedy of life to gaze at life’s tragedies. In a conference given in 1942 at Imola, he made a clear distinction between the humour of the first book and the humour of the second and third.5 The critics explained such a radical change by referencing Luigi Pirandello, Franz Kafka, Alberto Moravia and a prominent member of the former Solaria literary circle, the poet Eugenio Montale.6 Zavattini’s prose sometimes gets under your skin, whenever he makes you feel indiscrete, as if you are reading someone’s private thoughts, carefully wedged into strange, but telling, stories, each presenting a minimalist plot and barely sketched characters who appear and disappear, never the same ones in later stories. What stands out in each raccontino is the specific situation depicted, a non-event, drawn from an imaginary every day. One always feels that lived experience is only slightly beyond our reach. Yet the illusion that comes with verisimilitude is interrupted by the insertion of the impossible, creating a juxtaposition of abstracted situations, vague descriptions of imaginary places and thoughtful asides, startling the reader, through the discontinuity between thoughts about being in the abstract, and specific descriptions about empirical being in a specific place and time, sharing this trait with the incongruity of Nonsense literature. The Coach bound for Man relates an episode taken from Zavattini’s experience. Antonio, the protagonist, chooses not to get on the coach that would take him to his brother’s funeral.7 No reason is given. By recounting the event as if this

Zavattini, ‘Le Ore’, in Zavattini, I poveri sono matti, in Zavattini, Opere 1931-1986, edited by Silvana Cirillo, Milan: Bompiani, 1986, 82–4. 4 Zavattini, ‘Fra quattro minuti’, in I poveri sono matti, 102. 5 Zavattini, ‘Imola, autunno 1942’, in Cinema, reprinted in Giacomo Gambetti, Cesare Zavattini: Cinema e Vita, Vol. 1, Bologna: Bora 1996, 98–104; 98. 6 Pietro Pancrazi, ‘Io sono il diavolo’, Corriere della Sera, 27 February 1942. Ferrante Azzali, Lorenzo Bocchi, and Luigi Bruno, cited in Gualtiero De Santi, Ritratto di Zavattini scrittore, Reggio Emilia: Aliberti Editore, 2002, 418–19. 7 ‘La corriera di Man’, in Zavattini, Io sono il diavolo, in Zavattini, Opere 1931-1986, 140–1. 3

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were perfectly normal behaviour, the story comes across as absurd. Liver is autobiographical. It is a graphic description of his father’s agony and death. The thin veil of fiction gives way to a distinct memory of a situation, as bizarre as it was real, the unforgettable sight of his suffering father, the conversations, the waiting and the agony of it all.8 In Joy, the nightmarish, first-person narrative opens with a paragraph of nonsense in which words are picked out as signifiers, but are alienated from the signified one would expect and put on display as empty signifiers, and given the status of objects of contemplation. As the story of a non-event progresses, the narrator’s ‘I’ becomes his worst enemy and his fantasy becomes a reality, when he imagines someone called g.m.9 As they struggle and look into each other’s eyes, he realizes that his enemy looks and thinks just like him. Tram is similar. It presents the kind of alienated situation that features in Charlie Kaufmann’s film Anomalisa (2015), compressed, however, into the space of a page. Carlo gets on an empty tram. It fills up with ten people who all look like him. They all realize they have the same features. They stare at one another. They have an altercation which develops into a fight which gives way to shame when they part.10 With minimal details, each bizarre feature is outlined, dwelling on the psychology of the imagined moment. One distinguishing feature of the first collection is that most of the short stories contain even shorter stories within the story, short quips, even the kind of one-liners one might associate with stand-up comedians. One constant source of amusement for Zavattini, ever since his adolescence, was Italian Vaudeville and its comic streak, between the acts or an act itself. This was a further source of comedy, especially for the first book, mostly comprising raccontini.11 In the folds of the comedy lurk sometimes serious asides and sometimes a parody of the sort of pulp fiction Zavattini read to supplement his income in the late 1920s, monkeying its sentence structure or making its flights of fancy dive bomb down to the ground. He seems to be taking his revenge on all the wild exaggerations, shallow prose and cheap sentiment he had endured as a reviewer. In a sense, the raccontini are a simulacrum. Look too closely and you’ll find that you are looking at nothing. But that in itself becomes unsettling too. Zavattini is also his character Cadabra, a wordsmith, a magician of language, fully aware of what language can conjure up a scene, a sensation, a problem, a joke or something more serious. Finally, the reader may be wondering if there is any relation between Zavattini’s pre-war activities as a literary prose writer and his work as a screenwriter. There is. For example, chapter xvi of Let’s Talk a Lot about Me, first published as ‘Fegato’, in Zavattini, I poveri sono matti, 209–10. ‘Allegria’, in Zavattini, ibidem, 205–6. 10 ‘Tram’, in Zavattini, ibidem, 166–7. 11 Most of, if not all, the writer’s early fictional prose was collected in 2002 by Guido Conti, who has contributed a great deal to what is known about Zavattini’s vital early years. Cf. Cesare Zavattini, Dite la vostra. Scritti giovanili, edited by Guido Conti, Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2002. Conti provides detailed tables detailing where variations of the stories appeared, and tracing their subsequent development. A comparison shows that many of the comic dialogues and Nonsense-style conundrums in Zavattini’s first book in the trilogy appeared earlier, as separate raccontini in periodicals, and often in more than one, with slight variants. 8 9

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‘The Math Competition’, became a gag in Miracle in Milan (1950).12 But the association goes further than intertextuality. The early writer of quips, jokes, one-liners, is a conjurer of words who bequeaths to the screenwriter the same vein of humour, but in a very different social context. More about that when we come to discuss the scenario.

Text 1 Let’s Talk a lot about Me. A Portrait of the Author.13 There are only a few objects on my desk: an inkwell, a dip pen, a few sheets of paper, my photograph. What a spacious forehead! What is this attractive young man going to be? A minister? A king? Just look at that severely shaped mouth, those eyes. Oh, those pensive eyes which are gazing at me! Sometimes, I feel really humbled and say: is that really me? I kiss my hands, think that, yes, that young me really is who I am and get back to work with enough enthusiasm to be worthy of him.

2 Let’s Talk a Lot about Me. iv. For a while, we didn’t say a word.14 The things I heard were as interesting as those I said. We both let our thoughts flow freely, as if we were talking to ourselves. (I happened to notice, on the subject of soliloquys, that I was skipping and jumping along to the light-hearted tune of an organ, while thinking about sad things). Can I ask you a question? Do you think sorrows are less serious than illnesses? I wouldn’t say so. I knew an elderly lady who died of personal sorrows. Take a poor person suffering from rheumatism or a tonsillitis. He’s admitted to hospital, fed, kept warm, lavished with maternal affection by the nuns. Is he harbouring a sorrow? They won’t bother to even look at him. A common cold would elicit more interest than a big sorrow.

‘There should be hospitals specializing in sorrows, with dedicated wards to different kinds of sorrow; love sorrow, business sorrow.’ Sorrows and illnesses aside, there’s far more serious stuff. Just take a look at the papers to get an idea. I feel genuine admiration for the old, because I think: how did they manage to get that far unscathed? Not even an orange peel or a length of timber toppling over their heads? And yet, if there was Zavattini, xvi, ibidem, 52–6. Zavattini, ‘Ritratto dell’autore’, ibidem, 3. 14 Zavattini, iv, ibidem, 13–15. 12 13

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an agreement, a mutually acceptable date, you could make a day go by with nothing happening, absolutely nothing. No motorcar accidents, no burglaries, no abuse of power, no falling babies. Regrettably, given all the carelessness of this world, is there a single minute or moment, one single moment, in which a distressing event doesn’t occur, in Manchester, the Sound Islands or Madrid? I can’t even smoke my pipe in peace after lunch, because I think: at this very moment, a woman is being run over by a train or, who knows where; a poor man is being done in or an apartment is being burgled. Enough to make your hair go white. When you open the window in the morning, the breeze carries the smell of all the night’s dead.

We flew for a few kilometres in silence, then we talked about the incredible things that happen to people. ‘This will strike you as strange, though you are living, as I was, bang in the middle of a story. I have never ever witnessed a remarkable event. Why is it that I should be the one not to chance upon the crime scene?’15 I would have settled for a quarrel. On Sundays, I roamed the city, hanging around the taverns, standing by the level crossings and the riverbanks. Nothing, apart from the odd brawl among youngsters in a square. There are some, who are hardly out of the door when they witness an altercation or a car accident. I still envy the people who, come midnight, get out of bed to tighten a dripping tap and lean out of the window for a moment, whispering to their wives: ‘come quickly’. They hide behind the window shutters, watching furtive shadows leave a shop opposite to dissolve into the night: thieves. ‘Do you know what I used to do sometimes at night?’ I’d go out into the streets and ring all the doorbells. I’d hear the distant echo of a violent quarrel wafting through a window. I’d surmise it was a married couple. I’d witness shady goings on. I ring a doorbell in haste. A man leans out of a window. ‘Who is it?’ ‘“Telegram,” I reply.’ ‘Then as soon as someone would come down the stairs in a rush, I would make myself scarce, congratulating myself. “The married couple – I’d say to myself – are going to discuss this strange event for hours on end, then, when it’s nearly dawn, perhaps in a sweet embrace, they’ll fall asleep.”’

3 Let’s Talk a Lot about Me. v. I’m actually more interested in people than in events.16 People are these worlds; as isolated as planets in outer space. Every

It. luogo del delitto. After the war, ‘the scene of the crime’ became a metaphor Zavattini used to signify a real event and the need for artists, writers, filmmakers, to make it a priority in their creative work to embrace real-world events, as and when they happen and treat them as their raw material. 16 Zavattini, v, ibidem, 16–18. 15

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single person walks down the street as if no one else existed. And yet, you might be only this far from the happiest man in the world or the most distinguished. One evening I was walking across the square to get to the bridge. I had made up my mind. I was going to commit suicide. Well, people walked past me, bumped into me, and no one even bothered to turn around. Sometimes I get the urge to scream and shout and break shop windows. At last, everyone would be bound to walk up to me. The carriages and the motorcars would come to a halt; even the beautiful ladies would look out of their balconies. ‘What’s the matter? Who is it?’ Then I’d explain: ‘I’m So and So ...’ Which So and So? Would you have to invent an amazing powder cure against death to draw a crowd? If I invented such a powder, I’d be walking down the street wearing my dowdiest suit, the crowd would pass me by, with as much interest as for someone out of work. Then I’d suddenly yell: ‘I have discovered a powder that prevents death’ ... . Suddenly, they’d be at my feet, in deference. A thousand voices would say ‘Hooray for Mr ... Mr ...’ They don’t even know my name. Then I’d scatter the powder in the wind.

‘And love? I’d like to know your opinion.’ ‘Yes, you who are deceased, are proof that curiosity in itself exists. I’m also very curious and would happily stop people in the street to ask this person or that person at point-bank range: ‘what are you thinking about right now?’ I also like eavesdropping outside people’s front door and follow couples and mysterious taxis. I pick up scraps of paper from the ground, hoping, just this once, to find a piece of writing. I’d gladly be a messenger delivering telegrams, to find out what happens when they receive news of some kind or other. ‘Will they cry?’ I’d also like to stop those people in their tracks who are going to work at a confident, fast pace. ‘Excuse me, what’s life?’ I’d ask. But they wouldn’t reply. They wouldn’t stop for even a moment, for fear of being late for work.’ ‘I’m asking you, please, do answer my question. And love?’ For once, that stolid, unemotional spirit seemed visibly upset. We stopped for a little while under the shade of a tree. On the spirit’s advice, I ate two or three delicious fruits from it, I felt my tongue loosen, and we resumed our flight and our conversation. If you take the time to work it out with a pencil, you’ll find that a woman, in the course of her lifetime, will distribute, on average, three thousand kisses and will receive about two hundred thousand. In my town there are some three hundred thousand women, which adds up to an exchange of several billion kisses. Some are destined to get thousands and thousands, others only a few dozen. These astonishing figures could keep at least half the world happy. No sir, there are some who never get any at all. Notice those demure, haggard, men standing at street corners, who follow all the beautiful women walking by with a keen eye. They’d give a fortune for just

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a single kiss. But alas, they can barely afford a coffee and a croissant. I’d like to be the most beautiful woman in the universe: with a hundred kisses a day, I’d cheer up a hundred of them. They’d come from far and wide and take it in turns, by prior arrangement, to avoid traffic jams, altercations, and irregularities. ‘I want mine on my nose.’ ‘I want mine on my right cheek.’ ‘I want mine behind my ear.’ Come, come, Children! I’m also thinking of ugly women. On their way home, every now and then, they turn around to see if anyone is following them. No one is following them, and when a young man happens to be walking behind, going in the same direction, he’ll take a different route, out of fear that people will mistake him for an admirer. They get home and rush over to spy from the window. No one. Very slowly, they close the shutters, switch on the light, and linger before the mirror. I know all this and am happy to spend my holidays following them one by one. When they notice, they go pale, and, if we were alone, they wouldn’t hesitate to kiss my hands in gratitude. When I reach their window I stop, and when I see the curtain move aside ever so slightly, a hint of the most fetching smile crosses my face.

4 Let’s Talk a Lot about Me. xvi. My guide and I were travelling along, when a blessed soul shouted: ‘Down with Cadabra.’17 The statement met with everyone’s surprise. He then said: ‘I challenge him, and I shall prove ... . Well, I challenge him.’ The reaction to this extraordinary proposal was a chorus of catcalls. One particular Angel, who commanded respect (you could tell from his appearance), made everyone shut up. He said: ‘Come, come, let’s also listen to what this person has to say, then we’ll organize a real competition. The contenders will tell two short stories each, and then all of us shall reach a decision.’ ‘Hooray, hooray!’, shouted the public – of blessed souls. ‘I agree, of course I do’, grumbled Cadabra, ‘but I fail to understand why the Envious are in Paradise.’ ‘That’s enough chit-chat’, said the authoritative Angel, ‘Let’s get on with it. The first will be Ted MacNamara, the second Cadabra.’ ‘Can I be third?’ asked an embarrassed spirit who was slightly more transparent than the others, and seemed to have appeared from nowhere. ‘You? And what would your name be, pray?’ The challenged spirit lifted his head and replied in a tremulous voice: ‘I used to be an office clerk.’ ‘The Angel insisted: Your name is?’ 17

Zavattini, xvi, ibidem, 52–6. The name Cadabra stood for ‘abracadabra’, in the context of Zavattini’s early prose, suggesting a magical wordsmith who could make words do anything he liked. The character Cadabra stands for his alter ego, like the character Bat in The Poor are Mad.

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The spirit said a very unusual name. ‘I used to be a civil servant, I worked in Deg Town Council, but on and off, I’ve done a bit of writing ... I’ve kept it secret. I’ve never had the courage to read anything to any living being, but in Paradise you’re all good and I don’t lack the courage.’ ‘You’ll be third, then, said the Angel.’ ‘Thank you’, replied the little man. And he sat down in a corner and didn’t move. [...] [MacNamara] The Cossacks were in the trenches, waiting for the order to attack. At ten, lieutenant Ilieff issued the order: ‘Fix bayonets!’ One minute later the giant sons of the river Don lunged forward, yelling at the enemy. The artillery was booming, the fusillade of rifle shots impressive. ‘Time to dance, lads’, exclaimed Major Wossiloff. Meantime, on the Japanese side, soldiers were going over the top in droves, like locusts. Only a few seconds before the two sides made contact. And then lieutenant Ilieff who was leading the charge, tripped and fell. The young man got up in a flash, but he looked pale. The sons of the steppe all came to a standstill and stood in a circle around their commanding officer. – It’s nothing, nothing at all, said Ilieff, smiling. – A few paces away, even the enemy stopped in their tracks. One of them, looking visibly worried, asked: – Are you hurt? – No, but thanks for asking, replied lieutenant Ilieff. – After that, the battle resumed in the midst of artillery fire. The scenes of enthusiasm and the signs of appreciation for MacNamara’s effort were indescribable. By popular demand, MacNamara disobeyed the rules of the celestial contest to relate the following third story: It’s a childhood memory. I was living in Gottingen in December 1870. My father and I arrived at the Academy at the very moment President Maust was about to begin the roll call of participants in the World Mathematics Competition. My father volunteered his name, after leaving me in the care of Mrs Katten, a friend of the family. It was she who told me that Pombo the beadle would fire a cannon to mark the beginning of the momentous contest. Mrs Katten related a littleknown episode concerning Pombo’s activities. For the past thirty years, this man fired a cannon shot to mark twelve noon precisely. Once he forgot. Consequently, the following day, he fired the previous day’s shot, and so on, until that Friday of 1870. Nobody ever noticed that Pombo fired the previous day’s shot. When the preliminaries were over, the contest began in the presence of Prince Otto and a large group of intellectuals. One, two, three, four, five ... . All you could hear in the hall was the sound of the contestants’ voices. ‘By 5pm, they had reached number twenty-thousand. The public was spellbound by the noble contest and their comments kept coming. At 7pm, Alain, from Sorbonne University, was so exhausted that he collapsed.’

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‘By 8pm, there were seven surviving contestants.’ ‘36747, 36748, 36749, 36750’ ‘At 9pm, Pombo lit the lamps. The spectators stopped watching to eat their snacks.’ ‘40719, 40720, 40721’ I was observing my father who was covered in sweat, but still hanging in there. Mrs Katten was stroking my hair and kept repeating: ‘What a clever dad you have’, while for my part I had completely forgotten about food. At 10.00pm on the dot, the first big surprise: the algebra expert Pull stated: – A billion. An Ooh of admiration crowned his unexpected gambit. Everyone sat totally still in expectation. – Binacchi, an Italian, immediately added: – A billion billion billion. Applause erupted in the hall, which was immediately suppressed by the president. My father looked around with an air of superiority, smiled at Mrs Katten and began: – A billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion The crowd was delirious: – Hooray, hooray. ‘Mrs Katten and I were overcome by emotion. We embraced and wept.’ – Billion billion billion billion billion billion. President Maust looking drained; he took my father aside, grabbed him by his lapels and said: ‘Enough, enough; this is not good for you.’ My father bravely persevered: – Billion billion billion billion. His voice became fainter and fainter, the last billion that escaped his lips was no more than a sigh, before he was overcome by exhaustion and fell into a chair. The spectators gave him a standing ovation. Prince Otto approached him to pin a medal on his chest, when Gianni Binacchi shouted: – Plus one! The crowd flocked to the centre of the arena and carried Gianni Binacchi in triumph. When we got home, my mother was anxiously waiting at the door. It was raining. My dad who had just climbed down from the carriage, put his arms around her, sobbing: ‘If I had said plus two, I would have won.’

5 The Poor are Mad. Preface.18 I want to teach the poor a wonderful game. You walk up the stairs adopting a stranger’s gait (you’ll be returning home later than usual on that occasion) and when you get to your front door, you ring the bell. Your wife rushes to open the door, with the children right behind. She’s sullen. It’s late and everyone is hungry. Zavattini, ‘Prefazione’, in I poveri sono matti, 69–70.

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‘How come?’ she asks. ‘Good evening, madam’, you take off your hat and put on a dignified air. ‘Is Mr. Zavattini in?’ ‘Oh please, the boiled stew’s cold by now’ ‘Excuse me, I need to speak to Mr Zavattini.’ ‘Cesare, please, stop playing games.’ You hold your ground and say: ‘There has clearly been a misunderstanding. Please excuse me, madam.’ Your wife will turn around and stare. ‘Why are you behaving like this?’ Remain serious and while you make for the stairs, repeat: ‘I was looking for Mr Zavattini.’ Then nothing but complete silence, except for the sound of your footsteps. Even the children are still. Your wife comes close and hugs you: ‘Cesare, Cesare’ Her eyes are filled with tears. Maybe the children too begin to cry. You discreetly release your body from her embrace and walk away, muttering: ‘It’s a misunderstanding, I was looking for Mr Zavattini.’ After twenty minutes, whistling to yourself, you return home. ‘I’m really late because the office manager’ and tell a lie as if nothing had happened. Do you like it? A friend of mine burst into tears in the middle of the game.

6 The Poor are Mad. In Laoma.19 What do crazy people see? Bat would like to know what ants can see. He wouldn’t dream of making love to Maria in the presence of an ant. Bat begins to read the paper. The back page is about war. One day, he’s going to invent a wonderful daily paper with an immense headline under the masthead: ‘leo has bought a new suit.’ ‘today raul bought a pair of suede shoes for the first time.’ Through the window he sees people in the snow-covered street. The air is sharp, and their breath looks like small clouds. Someone’s following Paolo, breathes in Paolo’s little cloud, someone else crosses Ted’s path and breathes his small cloud. The little clouds go from one person to another, penetrating bodies covered in rich clothes or in rags. No one notices. If that man wearing a fur coat only knew he has breathed in the little cloud from that young man in the short jacket, he’d burst into tears. The newspaper seller is advertising the latest edition. Mad rush. Everyone wants to know what’s going on in Laoma in Tibet.

7 The Poor are Mad. On the tram. While it was raining yesterday morning, Carlo was on a tram and very calm. He didn’t even have the doubt he always gets on the days it snows: ‘Is it going to continue for years and years?’ His eyes would 20

Zavattini, ‘A Laoma’, in I poveri sono matti, 85. Zavattini, ‘In tram’, in Io sono il diavolo, 166–7.

19 20

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reveal a mounting unease, out of fear that we would never again see things clearly, but always through that fluttering light. Empty tram. In the square a laughing man gets on. He looked just like him, at least according to his own recollection of what he looked like (even our voice is different from what it sounds like to us). At the second stop, people got on. In short, the tram filled up. Carlo C. was lost in some of his white thoughts. When he lifted his head, from the sight of his new rubber galoshes which were covered in lumps of snow that vanished into shining rivulets, his jaw dropped: all ten of them resembled Carlo. The others were also surprised and embarrassed. Nobody wanted to be seen to have noticed. ‘They look like me’, each person was saying internally. One was a little weaker, another a little taller, one looked paler. The one with his nose pressed against the steamed-up window was wearing a hat at a rakish angle, might make you laugh. Carlo felt humiliated for him. Nobody spoke. They were bracing their legs to avoid touching accidentally, during the fast, sharp bends. From time to time, they sniffed, as if there was a bad smell. ‘Why are you looking at me?’ ‘Who, me?’ One could sense a mounting, obtuse, irritation. The tram slowed down by the Intendancy Office, in front of an army of labourers digging, amidst clouds of their breath. The sound of a slap resonated. ‘Why did you do that to me?’ ‘You beast.’ A brawl broke out. Even Carlo joined in. The driver stopped the vehicle in a soft, deserted square. The police broke up the tussle and each of the brawlers left in silence under the swirling snow. Carlo kept touching his face. He felt wretched. It seemed to him that his skin wasn’t his.

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Chronicles from Hollywood (1927-33)

Context From the very beginning of his career as a writer, Zavattini also wrote, in addition to his raccontini, a series of sketches which were entirely about cinema, lampooning Hollywood and stardom, and bringing into the frame contemporary issues to do with the shift from the Silent era to ‘the Talkies’. They were mostly published in Cinema Illustrazione, a glossy hot gossip magazine about cinema, one of several Milan-based Rizzoli publications.1 It was in Parma, while he was a law student in Parma, during the 1920s, that Zavattini met professional writers. His main mentors among them were the well-connected literary critic Gino Saviotti and Ugo Betti, an established playwright, who introduced Zavattini to Pirandello’s world of reflexive theatre. Pirandello’s distancing techniques were to have an influence on the screenwriter in later years. But there are traces of the influence early on, in his 1930s cinema lampoons. Futurist debunking was another feature Zavattini picked up from the Parma cultural scene. The two writers also introduced him to a prestigious literary magazine for which they were regular contributors, La Fiera letteraria which began to publish his stories and book reviews in 1928.2 The year before, in August 1927, he was appointed editor of the cultural pages of Parma’s quietly anti-fascist La Gazzetta di Parma. As a result, at the age of twenty-five, Zavattini’s writing began to appear on the cultural pages of nationwide daily papers, and a national weekly literary magazine. What he didn’t learn from his older mentors, he picked up from his younger friends, including his former student Attilio Bertolucci, who was to become a major poet (it was Zavattini who arranged for the publication of his first book of verse, Sirio). As well as developing his skills as a journalist, the writer also became an editor and a commissioning editor. In the same period, he began to read scores of novels, and write reviews which were regularly published. Cesare Zavattini, Cronache da Hollywood, edited by Giovanni Negri, Rome: Lucarini, 1991. This anthology contains all the short stories in Cinema Illustrazione, and ‘Cinelandia’ from La Gazzetta di Parma. 2 This section draws on Guido Conti’s magisterial book, both an exemplar of a good anthology and of primary research. Cf. Cesare Zavattini, Dite la vostra. Scritti giovanili, edited by Guido Conti, Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2002. 1

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Then in Milan he was offered a permanent job at Rizzoli. He went on making fun of Hollywood, while gaining an insight of it through the promotional press releases sent to the glossy film magazines he edited at Rizzoli. Given Zavattini’s friendship or apprenticeship in theatre under Ugo Betti, it is not surprising that Pirandello is sometimes cited in the stories. Indeed, Pirandello’s techniques are set out in Pirandello’s book (a dissertation written as a requirement for a job at La Sapienza, Rome University). This collection of essays, first published in 1909, about the critical potential of humour, sheds some light on how Zavattini combined humour with critique, in a kind of literary détournement using humour as a weapon, ahead of its time.3 There is also Pirandello’s influence on Zavattini for his reflexive mode which anticipates Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, or ‘alienation effect’, as the semiotician Umberto Eco has argued.4 But comedy is a different story. Pirandello aimed to attack ‘rhetoric’, considered by him as society’s code or system of rules.5 Humour can ‘deconstruct’ (scomporre) mainstream thinking, or what Pirandello calls rhetoric, which is something Zavattini also does quite often in his early sketches.6 Both techniques used by Pirandello are forms of distancing the viewer from the events on the stage, by breaking the suspension of disbelief served to undermine stereotypical thinking. This is what Pirandello called the ‘totality of order’. He sought to target everyday life, because that is where conventional thinking and attitudes live, as the playwright states in his book on humour.7 Deconstruction reveals the opposite of established sense. But its opposite must therefore be nonsense. What is hidden from view, for Pirandello, ‘the opposite’ il contrario, of sense, allows us to perceive the dialectical opposition between what he calls idealism (idealtà) and reality (realtà). In this way, specifically, through the practice of humour, societal illusion, or pretence, is brought into the open.8 By the time Zavattini began his career as a writer, fascism was well established in Italy. Comedy, as a weapon for a critique of contemporary society during the two decades of fascist dictatorship, had appealed to Il becco giallo, a humorous magazine. Its equivalent in the United States would be Mad, or in Britain, Private Eye, but Il becco giallo was censored for its satire. A gentle critique of society, through gentle irony and comedy, could survive, and did. For other magazines took its place, such as Il Bertoldo or Il Settebello, and Zavattini wrote for both. Doubtless, from Zavattini’s point of view, Hollywood was a fascinating target for its stereotypical ‘idealism’. In practice, Zavattini appropriates the techniques

Luigi Pirandello, L’umorismo, in Pirandello, Saggi e Interventi, edited by Ferdinando Taviani, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2006, 775–948. His two-part treatise was first published in 1909, then reprinted in 1920. 4 Umberto Eco, ‘Pirandello ridens’, in Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi. Il segno, la rappresentazione, l’illusione, l’immagine, Milan: Bompiani, 2015, 358. 5 Eco, ibidem, 360. 6 Pirandello, ibidem, 945, 947. 7 Pirandello, ibidem, 947. 8 Pirandello, ibidem, 2006, 930. 3

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acquired from journalism, during his crash course in editing the cultural pages of La Gazzetta di Parma, and later developed during his editorship of Cinema Illustrazione, to present and frame a story in a convincing and interesting way, as if his fictional narrator were writing real copy for eyewitness reports about Hollywood lifestyle and customs. This is how his fictional persona challenges the reader’s expectations, by using the same language, to put across different content, in a substitution. In other words, the signifier suggests one thing, and the signified its opposite. The fiction extends to his persona as a foreign correspondent, living and working in Hollywood and reporting news back to Italian readers. He sometimes calls himself Jules Parme, sometimes, Louis Sassoon and sometimes Kaiser Zha – the closest approximation of his name. The fictional reporter files his ‘true’ stories in a real film magazine, Cinema Illustrazione which provides camouflage within a genuine cinema industry publication, its pages dedicated to photographs of Hollywood stars and their reported comings and goings. He invents situations that use humour to subvert the mythical public image of film stars and directors of the era. The joke is the fiction of reality that is Hollywood. Zavattini developed such themes after the war, in Bellissima (1951), in the first establishing episode of We Women (1953), in Bicycle Thieves (1948), the scenario for Tu Maggiorani (1950), Umberto D. (1952), and finally, in The Truuuuth (1982).

Text 1 Hollywood.9 I arrived in Cinema City one freezing cold December morning. Winter, hunger, sleepiness and cold cold cold weather after such a long journey. The hotel where I booked a room was only 500 paces away. Just when I set off in the direction of the hotel, two policemen10 came up to me in a flash: ‘Stop, Sir!’ And they explained to me that I’d have to wait for a couple of hours, since the final scenes of The Deserted City were being filmed, a film of a city devoid of inhabitants. If you happen to pop up in the shot, the film stock will be wasted. Bear in mind that not a single person appears during the whole film. Only the cameraman is at large in Hollywood. Show business and ordinary people are

‘Holliwood’, Cesare Zavattini, Cronache da Hollywood, 3–4, first published in La Gazzetta di Parma, 4 March 1928. 10 Policemen, italics and in English in the Italian story. Other ‘foreign’ words, for example, the girls, also appear in English and in italics. The use of English words in a (fictional) journalist’s report about Hollywood lent authenticity to the story. 9

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holed up in their apartments, and woe betide anybody who comes out into the street before the agreed signal.

A blast from a cannon marked the end of the two hours agreed by the producers and the streets began to fill, as if by magic. I could hardly stand, so cold did I feel. ‘You can go’, a policeman said. I began to move. I’d hardly walked a few paces forward, when an unruly crowd appeared from a side street and overtook me at a fast pace. There were no fewer than one or two hundred people looking exhausted, stripped to the waist, covered in animal skins, and armed with spears and bows and arrows. ‘Run. Run, run! You are destroying my film! Keep up or I’ll sue you.’ The voice belonged to a tall man dressed up as a general or someone of even greater social standing, who screamed that injunction, while running past. Another angry, no, furious, voice, threatened me: ‘A million in damages, if you don’t run faster ... . We’re shooting the super colossal The Escape of the Barbarians. Escape!’ I was so utterly terrified at the prospect of shelling out such an enormous amount that I ran even faster, trying to catch up with the crowd, until I reached the hotel, situated in a seventeenth-century-style square. The crowd went on escaping, followed by the cameraman. I later discovered that the director added the title ‘A Precursor’, at the point where I appear on the screen, to justify the unexpected inclusion of a twentiethcentury man, in the midst of the racing crowd of people. At last, only a few more metres to go and I’d reach the hotel (with my tongue hanging out). But in the same seventeenth-century-style square they were shooting a film: A Revolution. ‘You can’t cross the square’, a policeman warned me. I looked so utterly exhausted that somehow the policeman felt sorry for me and still found a way to get me to the hotel fast. I was lifted onto a stretcher and two stretcher bearers were summoned, to carry me across the square on the double. He and the director agreed to add the caption: ‘Dead man’ to the sequence. But then the two clumsy bearers slipped and fell. And I fell too. So that was how we ruined that shot of the film. But then the editor saved the day, coming up with the caption: ‘A Dead Man?’ And when I was lifted off the ground by my two stretcher bearers, he suggested another caption: ‘No!’ After all these adventures, I made it to the hotel lobby where I attracted the attention of the maitre d’, who immediately came over. ‘Sir, for the love of God, get out, get out! You can come back later. Can’t you see? They’re shooting Single Women.’ True enough, I could see many beautiful and elegant women around. But my presence made them change the title of the drama to Almost Single Women. I thought I was going mad. I summoned the little energy I had left in my body to run to the railway station, ignoring one policeman’s command after another.

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An express train was just about to depart. I got on and immediately looked out of the window, while the train was moving off, and waved my arm in exasperation. Since the station was the location for: The Immigrant Arrives, it wasn’t too much trouble to place my departure within the general theme, preceding it with the caption: ‘Painful Wrench’.

2 Rodenstack and Co.11 No doubt about it. Buster Keaton certainly could write an ode to cameramen. His latest film is an appreciation of the modern photographer, that heroic reporter with winged feet, who uses his imagination to still moments of the extraordinary and transforms the rien de nouveau12 of the everyday into fictional reality. Thanks to him, even the dark room turns into a source of fables. The most up-to-date camera lens can conjure up [Edgar Allan] Poe’s character, hallucinating that a spider weaving a web and suspended before a window pane is an antediluvian beast, dragging itself across the horizon stretching over the hills, after some sort of trauma affecting his sight produces magical visions, pearls growing out of an ostrich’s wound. The camera can acclimatize to its surroundings, obey the director and abandon beautiful Italian families to head for adventure, chasing bootleggers, Wall Street police, ravished girls, then take time off to indulge in slo-mo holidays; in the hands of a cameraman, it can present us with a Pirandellian investigation into our nature, and give us a taste of the Hollywood screen test.

3 Dethroned. A couple of years ago, Mary Pickford, the queen of The Movies, ‘America’s sweetheart’, as she was called, witnessed the ex-Queen of Portugal bowing her head in deference, saying: ‘You are a ray of light in my dark days of suffering. Your films have been my only pleasure and entertainment.’ Well, now Mary Pickford can no longer find a job, because her film Coquette [1929] her first attempt at spoken cinematography, was a dreadful flop.14 Her voice is no good, as far as that terrible judge, the microphone, is concerned. 13

‘Rodenstack & C.’, Cesare Zavattini, Dite la vostra. Scritti giovanili, edited by Guido Conti, 504–5. First published in L’Illustrazione, 2 March 1929. 12 rien de nouveau: as in the text. It means ‘nothing new’. The switch from Italian to French follows the same logic explained above for the inclusion of other foreign, English, words. 13 ‘Detronizzati’, Cesare Zavattini, Cronache da Hollywood, 5–6, first published in Cinema Illustrazione, 8 October 1929. 14 In point of fact, the opposite is true: Pickford won a Best Actress Academy Award and Coquette was a box office success. But fiction doesn’t have to be true. What is true about the story is that the shift from silent films to sound spelled the end of many careers. However, in Pickford’s case, it is also the case that acting gave way increasingly to her role as a businesswoman, an option to her, since the co-founding of United Artists in 1919, together with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. 11

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And even her husband, Douglas, the handsome Doug with the intriguing smile, is going to have to leave the big screen. Douglas Fairbanks fame was, at least 90 per cent of it, based on his athletic agility, his amazing leaps. The thing is, how can you utter a word, after so much physical exertion? It’s impossible. Goes without saying. The lines – if you manage to utter them at all – will sound distorted. Therefore, either you give up acrobatics or you give up acting. It seems that Douglas is going to give up acting, at least in talkies. It looks like even Greta Garbo is going to lose her crown, because she speaks English, inflected by a strong Swedish accent. The same goes for Wilma Bánky and her sumptuous German accent.15 True enough, she’s been able to make a talkie, because she represented a GermanAmerican girl, but it’s impossible to keep creating such tailor-made roles for her. John Gilbert, the dashing John, the man who makes $15,000 a week, flunked his sound test, because his voice is too delicate to sound like the voice of a man, and then because he has a lisp. This means that for once, actors, genuine actors, come out on top. The hour of triumph has come for them: Marie Dressler and Ruth Chatterton, pave the way. The only silent film actor who can still survive is Charlie Chaplin, but only because talking comedians are far less amusing than mimes.

4 All for a bag of nails!16 This event took place while Al Jolson was rehearsing – he was the first to record a film soundtrack – a scene from The Jazz Singer [1927]. The scene went just fine. His voice was spot on, elocution perfect too, his body language elegant and measured. The director was so pleased he was rubbing his hands together: ‘Hey guys, this scene is going to be a big hit!’ But little did he realize the cruelty of the ‘terrible mike’. When they played back the recording, the scene sounded like a deafening airplane. Somebody looked out of a window to see who was flying so low over the rooftops. Nothing. Not a swallow in sight. In the recording studio, the booming didn’t stop. It was so loud that it drowned the singer’s voice. Impossible to continue. They switched off the recording and the sound stopped too. Then, when total silence was restored, they resumed the filming where they’d left off and that was when the booming began once again. So, then they began to realize the problem was the celluloid. To make a long story short, it took time and effort to figure out that it was a tiny fly that had escaped everyone’s attention and caused all the fuss.

Zavattini is accurate. In This is Heaven (1929) her voice is almost inaudible. She soon gave up acting, after major success in silent movies in the mid-1920s. 16 ‘Tutto per un pacco di chiodi!’, Cesare Zavattini, Cronache da Hollywood, 123. First published in Cinema Illustrazione, 22 October 1930. 15

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On another occasion, at one point, during the screening of a sound film, there was a deafening booming noise. It sounded like the Niagara Falls, all the millions of cubic metres of water cascading down from above or a skyscraper imploding before hitting the ground all at once. What was it? Simple. A member of the studio crew who was creating a new set had opened a pack of nails that had spilled on to the ground this way and that, making a slight noise which was picked up by the microphone and hugely amplified. But times have changed now. It has been reported that a new kind of ‘Terrible Mike’ has been invented that can pick up only the dialogue, while blocking out all the other sounds.17 Ultimately, it has the same function of an astigmatic lens, bringing into sharp focus only the required details you want to photograph, of a landscape, say, or of an environment, and leaving everything else out of focus. Now, if this invention is going to be developed any further, to the point of reaching maximum accuracy, as is generally hoped, then that indispensable instrument of torture, the soundproofed cabin, barely big enough to accommodate cameraman and cine-camera, can at last be scrapped. If that happens, ‘Terrible Mike’ will no longer reproduce, with disastrous consequences, among all the other sounds, what one might mistake for the cracking noise of a light machine gun or the ripping sound of a page of a newspaper which, in the early days, was so amplified that it sounded more like torn canvas. The rougher an actor’s breathing becomes, the more tired he gets. Once it used to be so distorted by the mike that amplification made it sound like a gust of wind. And while we’re on the subject of heavy breathing, here is the latest good news that contradicts the news you were told, during the first of these chats, on the impossibility of Douglas Fairbanks producing Talkies. It seems that he’s just made one, and a good one at that. The title in English is Reaching for the Moon, which in Italian, would roughly be rendered as Attempting to Catch the Moon. I’ve also heard that he’s managed to overcome his heavy breathing problem or, at the very least, succeeded in blocking out the sound of his breathing. His companion in this new film is that other creature, Bebe Daniels, equally as dizzy as him.

5 Eric Von Stroheim hasn’t changed.18 If Erich Von Stroheim weren’t famous for being an actor or a director, he’d be famous for being odd. Not a month goes by without the echoes of his extraordinary behaviour criss-crossing Hollywood. A few days ago, he leaned out of his hotel window and began to throw dollar notes down into the street, just when the traffic was at its worst. This attracted only a little attention, based on the assumption that it was yet another publicity launch, A directional mic. ‘Eric Von Stroheim è sempre quello’, Cesare Zavattini, Cronache da Hollywood, 12–13. First published in Cinema Illustrazione, 7 December 1932.

17 18

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but when it became clear that it wasn’t, it created quite a stir among passers-by. There were even three or four casualties as a result, not serious ones, fortunately. ‘A scene like this one’, Stroheim later told someone who was asking for an explanation, ‘I should include in one of my films. Only reality could teach such a lesson.’ ‘But couldn’t you have used the example of Freedom here I come, where there’s a scene like that?’ a friend of his objected. ‘No, no, in René Clair the truth is always distorted, albeit in such a winsome way. What I want to do, instead, is stick to the crudest realism.’ Stroheim is the kind of man who will go as far as risking his life for the sake of research. There’s another example, no less surprising than this one. Erich Stroheim in a Los Angeles bar, shooting three blanks into the air and causing such a panic that you can well imagine. ‘I had never seeing people who were terrified out of their minds, except in the theatre or the cinema, and, therefore, the terror was produced artificially. Now I have, and I’m going to make use of the experience. Life is no less marvellous than art. You just have to know how to be selective and create emotions.’

6 Wynne Gibson says you have to live, to be an artist.19 Wynne Gibson has spent ten days in the most unusual way. In an interview, the star said: Generally speaking, we artists have limited experience, and a restricted set of emotions. When we embark on a career in cinema, we’re too young. It’s the stage, but at a time when our concept of life is hardly unique. What’s more, the film industry undoubtedly makes us view reality and events according to frames of reference that have little to do with the real world. True enough, on the big screen we behave like human beings, but our humanity is conventional. If everyone accepts and admires it, this is because the public’s opinions have been affected, after thirty years of cinema.

* In light of such statements, it comes as no surprise that Wynne Gibson wanted to live the way she felt was her way; no longer as a star, but as a woman, letting chance dictate which unexpected situations she would encounter; ones that might reveal deeper aspects of life, beyond the surface of experience, or, at the very least, ones that she hadn’t come across before. The experiment was carried out incognito. She spent three days in a bar in the most dubious dive of Los Angeles, two working as a typist in a Chinese recruitment agency, four as a shop

‘Bisogna vivere, dice Wynne Gibson per essere artiste’, Cesare Zavattini, Cronache da Hollywood, 145–6. First published in Cinema Illustrazione, 6 June 1933.

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assistant in a large department store selling clothes, and one – the most exciting – in the company of gangsters.20 In her wake, she has left love, friendship and hostility. She has seen hundreds of new faces and hundreds of new stories in each person’s life. She has cried, she has laughed. It’s almost a miracle that the panorama of life has broadened out before her. And all this is going to benefit her future acting interpretations. Her colleagues should also follow her example. Then they’d come to understand that it’s better to approach the art of life, rather than be moulded by Hollywood, where artists are grown as if they were greenhouse flowers, under the artificial light of studio spotlights. Ten days are not that many. But for a sensitive and attentive temperament they’ll do, long enough to get the idea that the world isn’t limited to what is set out in Eleonore Glyn’s short stories, that dear lady who makes millions of dollars writing standard scripts for Cinema City producers.

7 In Praise of Scissors.21 ‘The camera lens’, says King Vidor, ‘is like a pestle for painters to crush their colours in, or better, like a printing press for writers. But while the writer first writes things down on paper, which is to say, creating, editing, cutting and adding, correcting, moving things around, and only then hands over to the linotype compositor, in the cinema, the artist first prints what he wants to say, following a very rough scenario, then creates by cutting, moving, adding, correcting. Therefore, scissors are the cinema’s pen. And when the director composes with his pen, he really is alone, just like any other artist faced with a blank page or an empty canvas, or a lump of clay. He must be alone! And if he isn’t alone and lets someone else carry out this task – and indeed such a practice is the norm in North American studios where a cutter exists, in other words, il tagliatore22 – it means that he is no artist. He is just a hack. Chaplin, Griffith, Sternberg, Stroheim, and I myself, carry out this work and woe betide anyone who tries to interfere!’

Zavattini’s emphasis. In English in the Italian text. Zavattini, ‘Elogio delle forbici’, in Pierluigi Ercole (ed.), ‘Diviso in due’: Cesare Zavattini. Cinema e cultura popolare, Parma: Diabasis and Comune di Reggio Emilia, 1999, 227–30. First published in Cinema Illustrazione, 2 August 1933. 22 il tagliatore: editor at the moviola, the cutter.

20 21

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Scenario The Nervous Tic Clinic (1936)1

Context In 1936, Zavattini wrote about this script to Attilio Bertolucci, his former student. ‘I’ve written a new script. It’s all set in a mental clinic. I like it. Rather Chaplinesque, that’s for sure. But who is going to direct it?’2 Zavattini liked Chaplin’s silent films, especially their fast pace, irony and type of humour.3 In the 1930s, Zavattini considered Chaplin’s type of comedy in his silent films the best remedy to combat mainstream Italian romantic comedy that the director Mario Camerini championed. He mentions The Nervous Tic Clinic in his Imola Conference.4 The Escape, subsequently lost, was Zavattini’s first film script. It prefigures the fast pace, madcap chasing that characterizes this one. The Anglosaxon-sounding, single-syllable names also feature in Zavattini’s comic stories, for example, ‘Bat’, the protagonist of The Poor are Mad. It serves as a means to create an abstract space, far removed from contemporary Italy and its Fascist dictatorship.

Text Tot is thirty or so. He dresses like a down-at-heel office worker, but ever so dignified, even in his ways. He spends his spare time in city parks. He’s well known among the regulars. Children like his dreamy air so much that their mothers compete for his company to play with their children. And Tot has a soft spot for maternal love.

Zavattini, ‘La clinica dei tic nervosi’, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori! Soggetti editi e inediti, edited by Orio Caldiron, Rome: Bulzoni, 2002, 32–9. 2 Zavattini, Letter to Attilio Bertolucci, 27 September 1936, cited by Caldiron, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 39. 3 Zavattini, Dite la vostra. Scritti giovanili. 4 ‘Imola, autunno 1942’, in Gambetti, Cesare Zavattini: Cinema e Vita, Vol. 1, 95–104; 101. 1

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Tot loves a girl who sits on a park bench next to her mother every day, near the big fountain. She is fair-haired, very good-looking with sadness in her eyes. It’s rare to see her smile and since Tot knows that she is the victim of an illness attacking the nervous system which causes constant sadness, he bends over backwards to entertain her. He goes to the extremes of tripping up people walking past his idol. He really does cause confusion in the park. No one is spared: not even policemen or people higher up in authority: Tot will use anything or anyone to cheer up the girl. But Minnie, that’s the girl’s name, hardly notices him, whereas her mother becomes friends with Tot who gradually passes himself off for a medical doctor. He has gone as far as prescribing specific remedies; he mentions a clinic of his; systems he uses; gradually becoming more and more convincing to Minnie’s naïve mother. To what extremes would Tot not go in order to become intimate with these unhappy creatures? He has a sketchy idea of medical science and knows the name of some surgical tools. But in point of fact Tot is only a cleaner in a big modern psychiatric clinic, the famous K clinic. * Counsellor Baum is well known for his sound, ethical, principles. Soon he is going to be elected president. His dangerous and wild competitor Red is as good as beaten. He spouts his rhetorical outpourings between the four walls of the K clinic, dreaming Baum’s failure day and night. If only he could get hold of Baum’s letters, which are in the hands of Marica, his ex-lover, and out of harm’s way. From time to time, Marica extorts some cash from her ex-lover, threatening to sell these letters to World, a scandal-mongering rag. * Marica is now Feld’s friend. He is a pretty good boxer and a nasty piece of work. One day he notices how Marica blackmails Baum. Whatever can there be in those letters? Nothing sensational, but if the voters only knew that Mr Baum lets himself be called ‘Picci-Picci’ and that he signs his name as ‘Your blue little piggy’, and other such licentious adjectives, the Puritan Mr Baum wouldn’t get a single vote. This is the reason why, on the eve of the election, he calls Thomas. (Thomas is Thomas. There is no one else by that name: there really was a Thomas in Chicago, but he forced him to change his name. Thomas is the ‘official’ gangster, the man whose exclusive services are called upon only by the urban world of politics, high finance and aristocracy.) ‘Thomas, I need that batch of letters within forty-eight hours.’ * One day, Minnie and her mother turn up at the clinic asking for Tot. He is going to take in the girl and restore her health. That is what he promised in the park

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in the throes of his make-believe passion. But now Tot is in an embarrassing position. It is both a comic and tragic predicament. The two women turn up completely out of the blue, and just when he is sweeping the corridors. But his infinite love gives him the strength to be very daring. He doesn’t want to be unmasked, so he plays the role of medical doctor and jack of all trades of the clinic, heading for some very complicated situations. Which room is Minnie going to stay in? In Tot’s. There is no other solution. To take her there, Tot must overcome all kinds of obstacles. ‘This is your room’, Tot tells her. He has managed to transform it into a delightful shelter, furnishing it with objects stolen from several other guests’ rooms. The mother feels very hopeful, as she leaves. She will come and visit from time to time, to see her daughter whose full recovery, she senses, is imminent, thanks to Tot, or better still, ‘Dr Tot’, as she calls him. Tot is both overjoyed and terrified, since his happiness is assured by the constant presence of his beloved, but to achieve his end, he lives in a constant state of full alert, of danger. Will Dr K and his minions find out about the girl sooner or later? Among other things, Tot no longer has a room to sleep in. He sleeps in the oddest of places and of snatched moments, and creeps around the clinic at night, like a ghost, and washes as best he can. His hairbrush is in patient number twelve’s bedside table. His bar of soap is in patient number fifteen’s wardrobe. His nightshirt is stored under patient number three’s pillow. He finds a thousand excuses to use other people’s rooms. He goes as far as suggesting certain cures which force them to leave their rooms, just when he needs to use them, even at night, for a nap, or some other reason. Tot’s antics take place in a bizarre environment that is straight out of a novel: a clinic for nervous diseases attracts the strangest patients in the world, such as the Singer at all costs; the man who detests noises; the person who sees everything through the eyes of a fan of detective stories and so on and so forth. It’s a whole assortment of weird characters, all maniacs of one sort or another; all human, nonetheless. And when they are all together in the dining room or the reading room, they make an extraordinary sight. K, the important doctor, looms larger than all of them put together; K, who has turned his clinic into an army-style institution. No wonder the patients are afraid of him, as if they were children. * The Thomas Gang has searched Marica’s bedroom in vain. Thomas even went as far as having it dismantled and brought to his home, to search it with greater ease. The letters are missing. Will Feld, the boxer and Marica’s lover know anything? And so they kidnap Feld, torture him, they are going to tickle him until he talks. This is one of the typical methods used by the Thomas Gang. That same evening, at the Astor coffee bar, Feld, who is in a state of drunken stupor, tells one of the punters about Marica’s letters. But there are others sitting at nearby tables also listening in, each one pretending he isn’t. They understand that getting their hands on that collection of letters, so dear to Mr Baum, will

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mean five or ten or twenty thousand dollars. Councillor Baum is rich, and therefore ‘Room no. 17’, each one makes a note of it; one on his cuff, one on a notepad, and another on the rim of his hat. * Gradually, Tot begins to identify with his character. Minnie’s full recovery becomes an obsessive task, while his life in the clinic becomes increasingly dramatic. Apart from the fear they will find out about the girl, there’s his fear that the girl will discover his true identity. Tot takes Minnie for a stroll round the clinic at the most outlandish hours, resorting to last-minute subterfuges, to avoid unfortunate encounters, especially with the director, or the male nurses. Whenever something unexpected happens, he justifies his strange behaviour, telling Minnie this is his cure. Minnie’s good health is his paramount concern. Minnie must be cured. In his own way, Tot carries out research of a kind. All the patients become his guinea pigs. He carries out clandestine tests on all of them in the hope of finding something that will shed light on Minnie’s illness. Though Minnie is still not getting any better, he manages to generate happiness and health all around him. All the people involved in his risky experiments are healed. He has, willy-nilly, become a healer and when he visits the wards he is treated like a saviour. Tot doesn’t notice what is happening. He doesn’t realize what he is doing all around him, wrapped up as he is in his dream of healing Minnie. Dr K and the real doctors detest him, claiming all the merit for the miraculous recoveries, and being more unfriendly towards Tot. * Some of the new arrivals at the clinic are totally unique. There are about twenty or so new admissions, all on the same day, and each claiming to suffer from nervous maladies that are so mysterious that even Dr K has no idea what to make of them. They all have very disturbing faces. Some of them belong to the Thomas Gang and some are the punters from the bar, where Feld the boxer said more than he should have. * Red, Baum’s ruthless adversary, has passed away. He it was who, on the eve of his death, managed to gain possession of Baum’s notorious letters. Or rather, Feld sold them to him, Feld who had stolen them from Marica. Where are they now, these letters? Undoubtedly, they were stored in Red’s room until the day he died, room number seventeen in the K clinic. Peeping through the keyhole, after the business with Red, Feld watched him hiding them on the floor of his room, on the left-hand side, if he remembered correctly. Based on such statements, the Thomas Gang and some of the punters from the Astor coffee bar began their search. With this objective in mind, each of

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them had nonchalantly asked Dr K for room number seventeen, coming up with the most plausible reasons. But room number seventeen had been turned into a closet and, what is more, a young cleaner by the name of Tot slept there. * Councillor Baum pressurizes Thomas to hurry up. The election is imminent and at the least desirable moment, some other Feld type might suddenly pop up and break all the eggs in his basket. The electorate is all on Baum’s side. Soon, he will be the recipient of the crowning glory: the presidency. An endless mass marches past his home, so he is forced to interrupt his conversation with Thomas to make an appearance at his balcony and respond to the crowd’s greetings. Two groups vie for room number seventeen: while the Thomas Gang and all the others are working miracles day and night, to get in; Tot is vigorously defending it, but for very different reasons from the ones the letter hunters might ever suspect. Tot puts up an even greater resistance when he thinks that those new guests in the K clinic are hovering around the room because they have fallen for Minnie. There is also Cyclone, a boxing champion who fancies Minnie, after briefly crossing her path in the corridors. But when Tot sees that Minnie has no feelings for the champion, he provokes his jealousy, to make him his ally in defending Minnie from the not so reassuring individuals we know. The reason Cyclone is a guest of the clinic is that during a famous boxing match he was hit by a bucket and he has been in a permanent state of nervous shock ever since. He should take absolute rest. However, because he’s all set to fight in a decisive match, his manager, who has also feigned illness, as a ruse to gain admission to the clinic, trains him in secret, taking advantage of whichever favourable situations present themselves and using countless subterfuges to foil doctor K’s exacting demands. K expects total dedication from his patients. The manager wants the champion to skip the forthcoming match, but Tot, who is painfully aware that room number seventeen and his idol are under siege, does all he can to disrupt the manager’s plans, that is, to slow down the champion’s recovery, so that he will always have him by his side as his defender. * Baum is living these pre-election days in suspense. His life is hell; even in his dreams, he has visions of the notorious letters. It would be easy to have Tot and the boxer bumped off, but Baum wants to avoid causing a scandal. What is more, Thomas wouldn’t receive the full amount that was stipulated, if there are any victims or casualties. Everything needs to be done with extreme subtlety, in a gentlemanly manner, and any interference by the police, no matter how small, must be avoided at all costs. And anyway, this is precisely how the Thomas Gang operates.

Scenario: The Nervous Tic Clinic (1936)

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Consequently, the Thomas Gang heavies are forced to act even more discreetly than usual, using special techniques. The most they can do is give Tot a wellaimed kick in the pants from time to time. They try everything to get him out of the clinic: dozens of telegrams telling him to go to the nearby town for the strangest of reasons: emergency calls, hired prostitutes, sleeping pills. All in vain! * Living in a constant state of alarm has taken its toll on Baum: he has developed an extraordinary nervous tic. A loyal friend of his suggests that he use the services of someone by the name of Tot who is nothing less than a miracle worker. Tot is summoned. Tot only agrees to leave the clinic when he has been given the assurance that the boxer will keep guard in his place. He visits Baum in his campaign headquarters and is about to perform as a doctor, though he really doesn’t feel like it, when Thomas turns up with two of the gang. Tot recognizes them and they recognize Tot. But they are surrounded by voters, so they have to contain themselves. To avoid them, Tot involves the voters. He gives them such a rallying speech that they become passionate and carry Thomas and his mates in triumph, so that he can slip away without delay. * The girl is beginning to relax. Little by little, her youth and joy shine through her gaze. But it wasn’t Tot who worked the miracle, though he thinks so, which makes him feel ecstatic, even heroic. He wouldn’t be quite so happy if he had remembered that Minnie’s window looks out on to a courtyard often used by a few gymnasts to do their training. One day, she saw one of them reaching the height of her window, while performing the high jump. To her eyes, he looked just like an angel. * The manager finally succeeds in getting the boxer to check out of the clinic, leaving Tot in a tragic situation, after driving the dodgy characters to exasperation, with the confidence of someone who can always rely on the boxer’s unfailing defence. But now Tot daren’t let Minnie walk the corridors, even at unsocial hours. Who can he turn to for help? * Love has blossomed between the two young people, silently at first, then put into words. And it is precisely while Tot is valiantly defending room number seventeen – the target of increasing attentions from the others – that love blossoms between the two.

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Sometimes, Tot is defending an empty chamber, because Minnie has joined her young love, by means of the window and their idyll grows in the thick of the gym equipment: even Minnie is becoming a gymnast. She is fearless and the two of them chase each other – not among the trees, like Tarzan and his companion, but among ropes, poles and bars. Other young gymnasts sometimes make a circle around them, friends of Minnie’s sweetheart, and then the scene turns into a musical hymn to youth, with a triumph of virginal bodies. * One day, one of the thugs gets into the room. The door is ajar, and he is holding a bouquet of flowers, an excuse, in case he bumps into Tot. But the others, who are constantly on the lookout (all the interested parties do nothing but mutual surveillance, especially since each party realized it wasn’t the only one) follow him into the room; some with a bunch of flowers, others with a bottle of bubbly, as if they were on their way to a party. And they end up throwing a real party: dancing, singing, but each of them is waiting for the chance to search the place. As soon as one of them bends down, the others dive in. But when they find it is only a false alarm, they turn on their indifferent look and go back to partying. Meantime, Minnie is making love and Tot is walking around the clinic. At the very moment Tot returns, a violent scuffle has broken out among all those present, caused by random sheets of paper, or by letters, perhaps. Tot is astonished and keeps looking for his Minnie among the legs of the opposing parties. While their struggle reaches Homeric proportions and the contenders grab hold of all the medical equipment to hand, at their disposal in a large corridor cabinet, from syringes to cotton wool, Tot, hearing the noise coming from the window, sees his Minnie and the youth appear in the garden below. The two lovers are happily chasing one another heading for Tot, to the sound of the girl’s joyful laughter. He finally puts two and two together. * Meanwhile, the police turn up. Those responsible for the riot, are taken away in a police van. The van comes across the marching crowd singing Baum’s praises. Even Baum is there, looking solemn and proud. Thomas has informed him that the letters have been destroyed at the very moment Baum is making a speech and when the van goes by, he improvises, launching into an attack on vices and crimes and points to it with rabble rousing words, for the benefit of his voters. * In the clinic, the patients are all in a worrying state of over excitement, after these sensational events. Doctor K fails to calm his patients, using all the means available, including violence.

Scenario: The Nervous Tic Clinic (1936)

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Tot has gone. And the atmosphere he had managed to create has vanished into thin air. Doctor K, the doctors, the male nurses, and even a few of the patients, are desperately seeking him. Everyone is calling out his name. It’s a chorus of voices: ‘Tot! ... Tot! ... Tot!’ Tot is in the park. The last scene takes him by surprise as he trots along the path, majestic and sad, holding the reins of a group of children, calling out happily: ‘Tot! ... Tot! ... Tot!’ They all vanish at the far end of the pathway, raising a cloud of dust.

4

Miss Great Celebrity Signatures Letter to Giuseppe Amato, 1 July 19381

Context In 1937, Zavattini persuaded his publishers, Mondadori, to purchase the ailing Le Grandi Firme, a magazine edited by Pittigrilli (a pseudonym for Dino Segre). The magazine gave editorial space to well-known writers, but had little visual impact. The big difference, when it changed hands, was the cover, its new design was part of the plan to expand its readership. At the publisher’s behest, the cover design now featured an illustration of an imaginary sexy woman’s long legs drawn by Gino Boccasile.2 The masthead changed accordingly to Signorina Grandi Firme. The lure worked. The content still revolved around the original concept, but it used popular visual culture, and was laid out in a livelier way. Its circulation rocketed, but in October 1938 fascist censorship clamped down on the publication. Zavattini devised a carefully orchestrated plan for the relaunch, with a competition, demonstrating a confident use of mass media. His detailed plan is set out in the letter further.

Text Dear Amato, In a nutshell, here are the promotional strategies we have devised for the occasion, and what we plan to do, in terms of marketing, for Signorina Grandi Firme [Miss Celebrity Signatures]. a) Firstly, all the publicity on the Grandi Firme that we plan to release in the magazine, up until the end of September.

Zavattini, Letter to Giuseppe Amato, 1 July 1938, in Zavattini, Opere. Lettere, edited by Silvana Cirillo, Milan: Bompiani, 2005, 428–31. 2 Zavattini, ‘Soggetto, sceneggiatura e film’, Cine Illustrato, xiv, no. 40, 27 December 1939. 1

Great Celebrity Signatures: Letter to Giuseppe (1938)

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b) Our other magazines, that is, Settebello, Giornale delle Meraviglie, Grandi Firme Estive 1938, will also carry regular advertisements to promote this competition. c) We have emphasized the Signorina Grandi Firme dance numbers and have the support of major holiday hotels. d) We have produced the Signorina Grandi Firme song, written by the wellknown Bracchi and d’Anzi which is already doing a tour of Italy and has been broadcast several times on radio, followed by frequent repeat broadcasts. The Cetra recordings of the song are given away by our publishers to all the dance halls, just as we are giving away the song sheet to all the dance musicians’ confederation. The last two points c) and d) should be enough to prove to you the scale of this marketing strategy. If you then consider the sum total of api publications promoting the competition, reaching a readership of two million, I hope you will be duly impressed. e) What is more, there is also a sound truck departing from Milan on 6 July, which will do the rounds of all the beaches on the Mediterranean coast, extending to the Adriatic and the Dolomites, totalling 3,000–4,000 kilometres, and stopping off at all the most important seaside resorts, while playing the record of the song and the recording of the competition rules, with free distribution of records and publicity materials. f) Zavattini will liaise with the press to cover the project. I have already given an interview to Stelle and I hope Sacchi, Gromo and Rossi will find this exceptional film worth reporting on in their three high-profile publications. g) The Triennale has published a catalogue in which there was an empty space reserved for Signorina Grandi Firme. Rip and Bel Ami have asked our permission to call one of their magazines La Signorina Grandi Firme. Nizza and Morbelli are writing a parody of the La Signorina della quinta strada and Signorina Grandi Firme which will go on air on the radio. h) We are investigating a Signorina Grandi Firme wooden cut-out, which would be perfect for women’s accessories. We have had proposals for statuettes, calendars, postcards and so on, all of which have advertising potential. My company is looking into all these ideas, but primarily, its efforts demonstrate how timely and contemporary this character has become. i) And now for the Grandi Firme train that will require your assistance for it to happen. This will entail train departing from two or three cities, and bound for Cinecittà, the day Signorina Grandi Firme shooting is scheduled to begin. Two-hour journey, sizeable meal offered at Cinecittà, major stars on hand and so on and so forth. The event is bound to attract the press. The travel agency I Grandi Viaggi would be very interested. But before we can launch, I need an assurance from you that everything can proceed at Cinecittà, and I need a firm date when we can go into production, which would, in any case, have to be set for a Sunday.

5

Scenario Miss Great Celebrity Signatures (1938)1

Context The magazine takeover and successful relaunch of Miss Great Celebrity Signatures also inspired a scenario, written in 1938, centred on the magazine’s editorial office, where Zavattini and his team were based. This spatial and time-based context accounts for the switch to mostly Italian names, including his own, for his characters, with the exception of ‘Pic’, ‘Tom’ and ‘Flemming’. Surprisingly, they are named in the script, which weaves together the lively account of a competition, actually devised by Zavattini, the editorial director, with a fictional story about a man who realizes his wife is the closest resemblance to the representation of the ideal Signorina Grandi Firme cover girl in the fictional competition. The task was to identify the young woman most closely resembling the magazine cover illustration. Fiction views with non-fiction in this script, conveying the real sense of what it was like to work in a major vibrant magazine publisher in 1930s Milan. Zavattini’s scenario subsequently made it into production as Bionda sotto chiave (1939), directed by Camillo Mastrocinque, but Zavattini’s ambitious launch plans were foiled by fascist censorship. When the screenplay by Mastrocinque and Eduardo Anton considerably changed Zavattini’s idea and script, Zavattini, writing in the third person, said that ‘Zavattini will have nothing to do with it. He says that the scenario is one thing, totalling only ten typewritten pages, the film something quite different.’2 Not that Zavattini ever thought highly of his scenario, acknowledging its very commercial origin.

1 2

Zavattini, Signorina Grandi Firme, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 55–66. Zavattini, ‘Soggetto, sceneggiatura e film’.

Scenario: Miss Great Celebrity Signatures (1938)

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Text We are in the editorial office of a daily newspaper. The editor-in-chief is barricaded in his office and everywhere there is a sense of expectation. The editor-in-chief is looking for an idea. When the editor-in-chief wants an idea, there’s a lot of confusion, no less than when a son is born: what with people scurrying around, phones ringing, lights being switched on and glasses of water wafting across the office as if they were flying in the air. * The editor-in-chief has summoned all his reporters. They have twenty-four hours to come up with an idea. Journalism to add value to the front page of their publication. It’s not a happy time for the reporters, because anyone who fails to come up with an idea handed in no later than the editor-in-chief’s deadline will be punished with a drop in salary or some weird penance: making a confession you wouldn’t want to make or doing a good deed within the hour. * During those twenty-four hours, the reporters have been racking their brains for an idea, each following his own character and brand of creativity. Tom curls up in a corner to think, but every time he does so, he falls asleep. Paoloni claims that ideas are born by observing the real world and provokes scenes in the street which he then stands back from to calmly observe and draw inspiration from them. Whereas Bazzi gets his whole family to lend a hand, grandma, wife and kids, in a nightmarish situation, always checking to see how he is doing for time. And Pic rushes to check back issues and again and again picks out ideas that have already been produced. * In the meantime, let’s have a look at what’s going on in the paper’s lobby, where we find a strange assortment of characters. There’s the despotic and absent secretary, who only announces those who guess the right word for her crossword. You see Vittorio, an enthusiastic young author, saying a word he thinks is the correct one to the telephonist, but getting it wrong again and again, and having to retreat to his seat in the corner, while others who guessed the right word go first. There’s a young hopeful from the country among the characters, carrying a pile of references attesting to her value. She writes short stories. There’s the famous author who refuses to wait his turn in the lobby. There’s the gaunt, earnest-looking gentleman who claims he represents the general public and has come to make some suggestions about typos or something similar. ‘I am the public’, he states with conviction, while his presence is being announced.

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The idea is born. Everyone is crowding around the editor-in-chief as if he has had a baby. He says how it came to him: ‘I was thinking about a carnation, when’ He dramatizes the birth of this idea of his. The reporters who have failed to come up with an idea leave the office to do a good deed within an hour. What is the editor-in-chief’s idea? We see it already in print, already launched: a big prize will be awarded to whichever girl most resembles the drawing of the girl on the magazine’s cover. Does Miss Celebrity Signatures exist? She does, she does, and must be found. And a generous prize will be given to whoever discovers her. The first person to send in the photograph of the woman will be declared the winner. * The city is teeming with cameras: small ultramodern cameras; cameras on tripods; ancient cameras. It’s a bedlam of photographs, poses, dreams. From the army of housemaids on the ramparts, who have nabbed all the street photographers, to the bar cashiers, to the regiment of nannies and their prams in a line, not to mention the students. And the men are on the lookout for images. In the street, the lens becomes the obsessive ruler. * Pale and elderly women are ready to lay an ambush, anxiously hoping to be captured on film. Small and not so small arguments flare up. Every woman is walking in sweet trepidation and sweet hope that she will be waylaid by a camera. Little scenes and misunderstandings: an amateur photographer is on the verge of taking a photograph when he suddenly realizes the lady in front of the lens is his wife. * Since then, there’s been a change of rhythm in the life of the magazine lobby. As well as the usual budding authors, groups of aspiring writers turn up. On the first morning, we see an actual queue of hopefuls from all walks of life. In the waiting room, everyone would like to show their talents. Dancers dance; singers sing; tragic actresses act out a tragic scene; comic actresses perform a comic scene. Even the telephonist is inundated with calls. It becomes obvious that many hopefuls are asking her if they stand a chance to win, if they look like this or like that. The telephonist always replies: ‘Yes, you are going to win.’ It’s total chaos. It only stops when an author reads one of his sentimental short stories. We see him when he begins to read and later, when he is finishing it and everyone is weeping and then, in another shot, as he dances out of the newsroom, after his short story has been accepted for the comedy page.

Scenario: Miss Great Celebrity Signatures (1938)

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* The editor-in-chief’s idea has had an impact in the small towns too, where luxury mirrors, worn out little mirrors, mirrors of all shapes and sizes are reflecting the images of young girls in their prime comparing themselves to the mysterious girl in the magazine. Four couples are having a picnic on the grass. Then one of them reads the competition notice and the Arcadian atmosphere turns into hell. Each of the four young men champions his girlfriend. Near the end, we’ll get a chance to meet these four young men, each of whom will have valiantly competed to support his candidate. * But what does the painter who created the cover do? What does he have to say? He’s a very absent-minded kind of guy, very loopy and we rarely see him. Everyone knows that he aspires to create a model who can be defined the woman of his dreams, one who really exists, whom he saw in some part or other of Italy, but he simply can’t remember where. And yet, he can’t forget her. She’s the anonymous inspiration for Miss Great Celebrity Signatures. There’s one reporter, Pic, who keeps following the painter day and night, begging him to remember where he saw the girl, because, if the painter can remember, then Pic can rush to the spot, find the girl and claim the prize. They’re a double act: the painter and Pic coaxing the painter to recall the place. And since an important doctor says that in order for the memory to recall something, all you need to do is dwell on the things you half remember, we see Pic dancing in the costume of an exotic dancer, because the painter told him he saw the girl dressed up in an exotic costume in a variety show. We see Pic scampering around the room on all fours and barking like a dog, when the painter seems to think he saw a dog near the girl and so on and so forth. The journalists are swept away by what is going on. But one of them is very unhappy: Tom, the shyest of them all. His nightmare is that his wife wants to be a candidate for the Miss Great Celebrity Signatures competition. His wife resembles Billie Burke. She pleads with him to put her name forward to his editor. She wants him to steal the photographs of all the other candidates. Tom’s life is a nightmare, because he fears his wife more than he fears any of the others. Tom goes home every evening, encouraging his wife, after an act of deception at the expense of the others, to believe in the illusion that she will be the winner. * In the newsroom lobby, among the regular visitors, we have already seen the young short story writer, waiting for the editor-in-chief to see him, doomed as he is, because he never comes up with the right word for the crossword. His name is Vittorio. Over time, he has got to know the other regulars. One day,

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after talking a little bit about himself and his aspirations, he shows them his girlfriend’s portrait. One of them has a shock the minute he sees it. ‘This girl looks incredibly like Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’, he says. As they pass her portrait round, the immediate impression is that it really is her. * The news spreads like a flash: ‘We’ve found Miss Great Celebrity Signatures.’ Even the painter, influenced by the others, admits that perhaps she is the woman he saw. The photograph is quickly passed around from hand to hand and Vittorio suddenly gets agitated. He is determined to see it. His shyness gives way to despair. At that very moment, the film producer, the one who is going to launch the winner in cinema, appears in the newsroom. He too exclaims they have found the star, after seeing the photograph. Her type is what contemporary woman looks like. ‘Young man, young man’, says the film producer, ‘I’ll turn this creature into a star, give me her address this very minute.’ In the editorial office, a ceremony is organized in Vittorio’s honour. There is even a speech and a toast. Vittorio is in a dream state. Everyone is patting him on the back. One of the editors tells him in no uncertain terms that he has a wonderful future ahead in literature. Almost unwittingly, Vittorio capitalizes on this, taking the opportunity, long last, of handing him his short story. But Anna’s name is on everyone’s lips: ‘Anna, Anna, Anna. Her name is Anna.’ So suddenly the penny drops: he is about to lose his woman. If Anna is going to be a star, he will lose her for ever. They are all crowding him, asking him where he lives and where does the girl live. They now have a vested interest. Too many of them are just waiting for the chance to be first and win the prize awarded to whoever hands in a photograph of Miss Great Celebrity Signatures. He is then overcome by panic and escapes, followed by everyone else. Anna’s photograph is in tiny pieces in a corner on the floor. It’s in Tom’s hands, of course, the editor who is a victim of his own wife. Vittorio has managed to escape and to cover his tracks. Now he feels better, because ultimately no one knows anything about him, nor do they know where to find Anna. One thing is for sure: he shan’t show his face in the office until the storm has blown over. Pity his short story had finally been accepted on spec. Vittorio is waiting for Anna to leave the high street store. He is very anxious. As the minutes goes by, he begins to realize that he will have to defend Anna, that is, his love, against a 100,000, against the entire city, which means that he’ll have to keep her in the dark about the deadline for the competition, which is nearly up. Anna is coming out in ten minutes, but it seems an eternity and he keeps looking anxiously at the store windows, and at the people going into the store with suspicion. Now he’s getting the feeling that he saw that man standing outside the doors of the editorial office. He’s worried the man is going to identify Anna! He must get him to leave at any cost, for that man is Pic, the desk editor

Scenario: Miss Great Celebrity Signatures (1938)

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who is stalking the streets like a hound. Pic has two days left to pay off a debt and only the prize for spotting Miss Great Celebrity Signatures is going to save him. This explains why all his attempts, including the crazy ones to make the painter’s memory come back, share a comic determination that smacks of a last ditched attempt. Now and then, we see his creditor in pursuit, whom he reassures that the debt will be settled, as soon as he finds Miss Great Celebrity Signatures. Vittorio’s stratagem to get rid of Pic is to roll a small coin in Pic’s direction from a distance. The coin crosses Pic’s path. Pic’s surprise. Pic picks it up. Second coin. Even the painter notices these coins that appear out of nowhere. Third coin. Fourth coin. Fifth coin. A very distinguished looking very wealthy gentleman asks: ‘What coins are these? They’re worthless.’ He makes a haughty gesture with his hand, takes out a coin worth half a lira, shows it, rolls it away and leaves, after rubbing his hands, as if to say: ‘I’d want more than that.’ The coins land at Pic’s feet. They were thrown some 20 metres away and Vittorio is almost invisible. Pic is sorely tempted to pick them up. After a while, there are ten or twenty coins. The public is looking at this mysterious event of rolling coins landing at the feet of this astonished gentleman standing outside the big store. Then another gentleman walks by, sees the coins on the ground and drops a couple himself, then another, then yet another does the same. Pic is amazed. He daren’t move anymore. A policeman arrives on the scene and leads Pic away, saying: ‘Begging is forbidden.’ * In the meantime, we meet Anna and get to know her living environment. A hundred shop assistants, a crowd of people. But we notice something extremely unusual going on among the employees. The amateur theatre company is preparing no less than a review. Anna has a part, but she hasn’t told Vittorio who has always vetoed her acting ambition. It’s the eve of the show and the whole store is in a state of trepidation. The personnel manager, who is also the manager of the amateur theatre company, is still worrying that this or that female shop assistant hasn’t learned her lines, or that this or that male assistant won’t remember the aria for the chorus or the dance, and so, from time to time, he does rehearsals with them, while the public is milling around several departments. And you suddenly hear a chorus coming from the right, accompanied by a command given by a gesture in the distance. You see a shop assistant trying out her dance steps, then automatically resuming her conversation with her astonished client, as if nothing had happened. The large hall has turned into a secret theatre for the final rehearsal. * The editor-in-chief has a second idea. Another mad rush. Lights. Phones ringing. Wet towels. We need a popular song called: ‘Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’.

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The editors are tasked with writing the lines and suddenly the editorial office is a hurricane of verses. And the song is the work of six, seven, ten people and everything piles up on the chief editor’s desk and he monitors the progress, like the figures coming in from the Stock Exchange via cable; one line coming from the east, another from the south, another still from the north. He has even requested that a piano be wheeled into the editorial office. And he has invited Bormioli and Semprini, Nizza and Morbelli, Zavattini, Marchesi and Campanile to lend him a hand. The birth of the song is a scene from the biblical Flood. First, all the people in the office are concentrating and thoughtful, as in the famous painting of people listening to Beethoven, then one of them moves and wants to finish his line, Bormioli and Semprini put it to music, obedient and emotionless, working on it awhile, trying it out, looking amazingly solid, as they stand there. And Zavattini agrees, then Campanile, Nizza and Morbelli. Then Marchesi flops into a corner out of exhaustion, having pushed and pushed for his line in the song to be accepted. Meanwhile, Bormioli and Semprini keep working on it, but softly until suddenly they shift to the piano and sounds burst out. They look demented. Clearly, they couldn’t contain them any longer. Then, just as abruptly, they begin to play softly to themselves. Their actions are measured, they’re calm again. ‘Excuse us’ they say. In the midst of all this chaos, from time to time the editor-in-chief phones home, sings the jingle to his wife, note by note (la, la la, tra la, la, la), and suggests the variations his wife proposes (li li, tri li li li). The catchy song is born and a fade out switches the scene to the view of the street below from the office window where a long line of pianos on wheels are on their way to spread the new jingle into all the streets. And the receptionist has changed her policy: now she only puts through the people who know the new jingle from the song. New posters appear in the streets, advertising the stage performance and Anna is included in the list of actors. There are also posters announcing the imminent deadline of the ‘Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’ competition. So today Vittorio and Anna are walking down the street, hiding something from one another. They’re both making efforts to distract one another from looking at the posters and from bumping into people who might mention up-andcoming events. There is even a sandwich man who falls in love with Anna the moment he sets eyes on her and stalks her like a genuine admirer, forgetting all about the big poster he is carrying on his shoulders. It so happens that the poster is advertising the ‘Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’ competition. Vittorio is more irritated by this than by anything else and drags the girl away. The sandwich man follows the two of them and chases after them in hot pursuit. The couple’s stroll turns into anguish, into fear, into small untruths and big lies; in short, into a neurotic experience. By the end of it, it is as if they had been chased by the police. And yet, both go to great lengths to justify their strange behaviour, while completely oblivious of the other’s equally odd behaviour. They reach the threshold of separation, that is, of beginning an argument, but just

Scenario: Miss Great Celebrity Signatures (1938)

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when they’re on the verge of going their separate ways, they don’t, each fearful of the other finding out what information was being withheld. During their stroll, so full of little incidents, there’s one of grander proportions, when Vittorio, to avoid meeting the editor-in-chief, walks into a variety show with Anna where Flemming, the black dancer, is doing his number. Oh no! On the stage they’re doing a sketch called ‘Miss Great Celebrities’. Some of those wonderful girls imitate the drawings of the ‘Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’ cover girl, in the pick of the magazine’s most famous back issues. Vittorio hasn’t sat down yet; now he’d really wish to leave immediately, but he has to cross a long line of seats and with Anna still in tow, he changes direction, creating even more havoc among the public, while Flemming looks on with a steady gaze, fixed on Anna’s face, while he sings his song. But the chief hasn’t forgotten the girl, Anna. He’s desperate. He must find her, because now the painter is refusing to work. He says that without a live model he simply cannot paint. Everyone’s making a fuss over him to get him back to work. They’ve filled his studio with live models. He paints a finger, an eye, then he gives up. Then he gets back to work. At one point, he gets enthusiastic about painting Pic as his model. The chief is at his wits’ end. He calls a meeting. The editors must find Anna at all costs. If they don’t, their punishment will be to tell him what they think of him. The editors are terrified. The search begins. * Anna is back home and Vittorio is on his way out. But he notices that the billposter is putting up a poster on the wall opposite their home and it’s the one about the deadline for the competition. Vittorio asks him to do it further down the street. Otherwise, if it stays where it is, Anna is going to see it, the minute she leaves the apartment. His polite requests gradually turn into threats. One of them is affixing the poster, while the other is peeling it off. Vittorio comes to blows with him and he knocks over the tin of glue that goes flying. People appear out of nowhere. Anna looks out of the window, just in time to see Vittorio being dragged away by two policemen. * Vittorio is furious. He doesn’t care if he has to spend one day, two, or twenty in prison, the point is that there are only twenty-four hours left, before the ‘Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’ competition deadline, and during these twenty-four hours Anna, left to her own devices, is bound to be spotted. She’ll win and he will lose her. He’s beside himself. He screams at the police chief inspector that he wants to be released; that he must defend his happiness, his future. The chief inspector delays questioning him, letting him cool off in a cell first. Vittorio takes it out on his cell mates.

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The clock strikes the hours all night long. It’s now the break of day. Time for daylight to brighten up the city and Anna’s beautiful face, which will be seen by thousands, hundreds of thousands, of men. She’s the most beautiful. She is the dearest. In his sleep, he imagines a procession led by a brass band making a beeline for Anna in the street, paying her homage and taking her away. One of his cell mates is whistling the tune of ‘Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’ which wakes him up. The prison guard is playing the xylophone on the iron bars, using a steel rod to accompany the musical arrangement. The men under arrest dance, taking advantage of the guard’s musical mania. They do a line up, just like the girls, after one of them opens the door (only Vittorio is sitting quietly and disconsolately in the corner) and exit in single file, dancing like the girls leaving the stage. The guard stands still. For a moment, he is confused. Then he chases after them. The chief inspector summons Vittorio and questions him. The chief inspector informs him that he will be free the following day. But Vittorio has gone to see the chief with a plan. He makes a confession. He tells him that the spat with the billposter was only a pretext. The truth is that he stole a wristwatch that he is carrying on him. He was about to be found out by the victim of the theft which is why he created a diversion. The chief inspector is taken by surprise. Vittorio spins him a long yarn. ‘Yes’, he says, ‘my girlfriend was an accomplice. She distracted the victim by making conversation, while I stole from him and now I’m repentant.’ * Vittorio is delighted. The chief inspector has given the order that the woman be brought in to see him. Confrontation between Anna and Vittorio. Dramatic exchange, funny and pathetic at the same time. Only the chief inspector doesn’t understand what is going on. Vittorio doesn’t let on. With all the sweetness he can possibly muster, he tries to persuade Anna that, look, it will be better to come clean and confess. Anna implores him, faints and weeps. Vittorio is almost on the verge of tears too, but keeps his resolve when the chief inspector, during a pause in the interrogation, while he is waiting for Vittorio to reply, hums the ‘Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’ jingle. In the end, the fiancés are led into two adjacent cells. Vittorio is positive that Anna is not going to be nominated ‘Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’. The deadline is the same evening, and one hour later Vittorio will confess the whole story to the chief inspector. * Meantime, an editor is prowling around the city with Anna’s photograph glued back together. It’s Bazzi, who has an idea: go to the police; only they can help. He sets off towards the police station. ‘This woman is dangerous. She slapped me; she should be arrested.’ ‘Genius!’, Bazzi says to himself.

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Bazzi; chief inspector; Anna; scene. Total chaos. Bazzi alerts the editorial office. The editor-in-chief and his minions come on the scene. A short while later, all the drama crowd turns up, anxiously looking for Anna. The police station echoes with Anna’s name. Anna, Anna, Anna is on everyone’s lips. The amateur actors are the most agitated. They are due to go on stage in an hour, imagine. And even in this place they begin to rehearse, in that same strange, bitty way which we saw in the department store, preparing for the imminent performance. Vittorio is summoned. Goodbye, Anna. He sees her surrounded by admiration and joy. Suddenly, he feels beaten. When he finds out that Anna was due to act a part without telling him, his bitterness is endless. And so he owns up to everything, in a few sharp words. But Anna can see such despair in his face that she refuses to abandon Vittorio. Anna doesn’t want to leave. She wants to stay put, but she can’t: ‘What, what should I do?’ she says. ‘Slap the Chief Inspector’, Tom, one of the editors, whispers in her ear. Tom has been warned several times by the chief inspector to shut up. Anna takes her revenge on the chief inspector and is immediately taken into custody. Vittorio is happy, and what makes him happier still is that Tom has secretly handed him the latest edition of the magazine, containing his published story at last. And Vittorio reads it in his cell. Everyone is there. He reads it as if it were a fairy story. The camera closes in to the magazine cover that fades to stars and comets. The cover is animated in colour for fifteen seconds in which the ‘Miss Great Celebrity Signatures’ leaves the cover where Anna and Vittorio now appear in a kiss.

6

Scenario Everyone Should Have a Rocking Horse (1938)1

Context That same year, Zavattini also wrote Everyone Should Have a Rocking Horse. The following year, in 1939, De Sica purchased the script for 15,000 liras. Several articles in the Italian press announced that De Sica would be directing the film. The scenario was vetted by the fascist censorship authorities at the Direzione generale dello spettacolo who objected to the ending which, in their opinion, was an incitation to the class struggle. Zavattini submitted a second version in which the two antagonists, the worker and the factory owner, made peace. In 1948, Alessandro Blasetti considered taking it on, but chose First Communion, also a script by Zavattini, instead. He wrote two very similar versions, except for the ending.2 Despite the fate of his script, his original kind of humour, drawing inspiration from his pithy short stories, his raccontini, was not wasted, since it reappears in Totò the Good which eventually became the classic film Miracle in Milan. As in the raccontini, the named characters, with the exception of Marco, have Anglo-Saxon sounding, single-syllable names: Gec, Bot and Stoc. In 1955, Zavattini sold the script to the Mexican producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce, on the understanding that the Mexican Jomí García Ascot would develop his story into a full-blown screenplay. However, the Mexicans expected him not only to adapt the story for a Mexican audience, but also to develop the treatment and build it up into a fully fledged screenplay. Eventually, in 1957, Barbachano Ponce wrote to say that after ‘months of intense work, many meetings, conferences, agreements, and so on, we have reached a satisfactory conclusion and have already sent it to Rome’. But he added: ‘We

1 2

Zavattini, Diamo a tutti un cavallo a dondolo, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 67–73. Cf. Roberta Mazzoni, in Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti, Milan: Bompiani, 1979, 307 and Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 72–3.

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think the master’s finishing touches are missing, your stroke of genius that will turn it into the work we so want it to be.’3 In reality, the production house expected him to come up with the screenplay too. Their error of judgement at the outset was to think that any other writer could develop it, under Zavattini’s supervision, and to expect him to agree to include some of his gags for Miracle in Milan, as well as resolve their internal conflicts. Be that as it may, the scenario was another interim adaptation for the screen of the kind of delicate humour contained in his short stories. Ultimately, the lightness of touch in Miracle in Milan developed from this scenario, which is also a vehicle for Zavattini’s magic realism, in an imaginary world governed by a parallel set of ethics in which kindness is not absurd and unreal, in which redundant workers made redundant fly off carried by the balloons of their balloon factory as punishment, and in which childhood has many lessons for adults. It includes many trovate or gags, which have no equivalent in the cinema of the period, being transpositions, following the same nonsense logic, mistakenly taken for Surrealism, to be found in his original and unique short story writing.

Text Gec lives in a rather foggy city with his wife and son, Marco. He’s thirty and works at the Bot factory. Mr Bot also has a wife and son. Gec is a very good man who believes we would all be good if only we carried around some toys. ‘Everyone should have a rocking horse’, he claims, ‘then the world would be a better place.’ It could be that Gec is wrong, but he is honest and would like to say to Mr Bot: ‘Give away toys to people and people will embrace one another.’ When people quarrel, Gec gets involved and blows his whistle at the two, shouting: ‘Whistle!’ and they do and then they don’t feel like throwing insults at one another anymore. Not even his debts distract our Gec from his intention. For Gec is full of debts; he has instalments to pay. Everything he buys is bought in instalments, and when the money collectors turn up in the housing block where he lives to collect their dues, he isn’t always able to pay up, which is why he puts on a carnival mask. His wife and son put one on too, so that the collector is faced with a masked family and the Gecs can blush as much as they like, while saying they haven’t got the money to pay. But let’s say a little more about Mr Bot. His factory makes flying balloons and, wherever you go, his balloons are well known. Some 1,000 workers blow into long tubes and inflate loads of balloons every day, sometimes a worker 3

Manuel Barbachano Ponce, Letter to Zavattini, 18 January 1957, in Gabriel Rodríguez Álvarez, Cartas a México, Correspondencia de Cesare Zavattini 1954-1988, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007, 115.

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blows up too big a bunch of them by mistake and the balloons carry him off never to be heard of again. Bot has a lover whose place is packed with statues of Mr Bot to keep him happy and sometimes the two of them unveil a few new ones. Bot is also cunning and he has a room in his factory for workers to go when they are tired and launch insults against Mr Bot, shouting that he is a thief, a profiteer, and so, after letting off steam, they go back to work and their productivity increases. Once Bot purchased a piece of land on the outskirts of the city, in the hope that there would be precious minerals below ground, and since he failed to find any, he told his workers a lie. He told them that he’d bought it for them, so that each one of them would have his metre of soil for his grave. They could pay for it in instalments, and he would ensure that a sum was detracted from their wages every week. Instead of reacting with blows, the workers were content with not giving him a round of applause, when he made the graves speech. So Mr Bot left saying that those miserable men must think they are immortal. One New Year’s Eve, he gave them some good news: instead of receiving the usual bonus, they would participate in the company dividends, but in balloons. And all the workers took home twenty or so balloons. There is no doubt that Mr Bot would have been happy, if there was any way that he could grow 10 centimetres taller. Sometimes he woke up at night and thought: ‘Oh, if only I could reach the end of the bed with my feet!’ But he only reached halfway down the length of the bed. This is why his secretary was so short and all the workers were short, and the reason he fired one of them, they claim, was because he wore high heels. Even Mr Bot’s wife was short, but she didn’t know. She was really convinced that God creates wheat as naturally as he makes her rich. She took her son to school to tell him every single morning: ‘If you don’t study, you’ll become like that one over there.’ She was referring to Marco, Gec’s son, who sells the Bot balloons in the street. Marco is very badly dressed, to be honest, just like all the children selling Mr Bot’s balloons. He wants them to be badly dressed so that his son will detest poverty to the point of following his wife’s wise counsel. We should honestly say that Marco’s mother, in turn, used to tell Marco, pointing at Mr Bot’s son: ‘If you study, you’ll become like him.’ Gec couldn’t even afford to pay for Marco to go to school. He dreamed of his rocking horses. You could accuse him of being stupid, but that would be mistaken, because he was a bit like Mrs Bot, believing that God created him to be poor for all his life, in the same way that he made wheat grow. Gec tried to speak with Mr Bot about his wonderful project, but he failed because he didn’t have a business card. ‘You need a business card’, Mr Bot’s secretary told him. And Bot saved up and cut back, in order to afford business cards printed with the words: gec – of bot’s factory

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They nearly fired him when they saw the cards and he swore that he really did work at Bot’s factory and had been working there for several years and once Mr Bot in person told his workers: ‘You are the pilasters of my factory.’ But time is getting on and we must tell you the story of the small ring. There was a distinguished-looking man who like to amuse himself, by getting close to Marco and making one of his balloons pop with his cigarette. When Christmas came, Gec erected a Christmas tree for his son, and decorated it with lots of cotton wool that looked like snow and two or three cheap things and his watch. Marco wasn’t interested in any of this. He wanted his father to give the man who burst his balloons a kick in the pants and he wanted him to do it on Christmas Day. Now that would have been a good present from his father. Gec said no and Marco burst out crying, so Gec had to give in. They walked into the snow behind that gentleman, shadowing him for a good while and Marco kept egging him on. ‘Don’t stop!’, and when the time came to kick him in the backside, the snow was so thick that it landed on someone else. The other man shouted, and the police turned up and arrested Gec and the other gentleman. Back home, his mother told Marco: ‘You and your tantrums! Now you’ve really done it!’ Marco was holding a small lead ring in his hand which he found on the Christmas tree, inside a scroll. It said: ‘If you wear this ring on your finger, you can get what you want, when you express a wish, just one.’ You know that miraculous little rings don’t exist, but Marco said: ‘I wish daddy would come home right away.’ And lo and behold, the door opens and Gec appears. And that’s not all. Gec’s wife puts on the ring for fun and says: ‘What we need now is some cash.’ And Gec suddenly finds a wallet in his pocket with loads of cash inside. Then Gec and his wife and Marco begin to think the little ring really does have magic powers, as it says in the scroll, despite the fact that the man who got the kick in his bottom turned up to claim his wallet which the police had returned to Gec by mistake. The reason might be that it’s Christmas. The gentleman lets Gec keep the money, but only on one condition: that should he burst his son’s balloons again, he won’t get angry, he just can’t help it, he fears. It doesn’t take much for the Gecs to grow disappointed, which is why they hide the little ring. Gec decides to think over carefully what his wish is going to be. He doesn’t want to rush and later on, as often happens, end up regretting it. They never noticed that the next door neighbours, the Stocs, who are street beggars, have seen everything through the keyhole and are equally convinced that the small ring has divine powers. The next day, when they see the Gecs all dressed up in smart new clothes and paying off their debts, the Stocs are ready to swear that the little ring is the cause and decide to steal it. But the ring is on Marco’s finger. Fortunately, he wanted to put it on. But now his finger has swollen, and they’d have to steal Marco to steal the little ring. On the housing estate, Gec’s ring is all anyone ever talks about, and it’s understandable that all those poor people should forge an alliance with the Stocs who broke the news in the first place and make the others promise that

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none of them will use the ring to make as many wishes as them. If they ask for a million, then the others will have to settle for a little less than a million, and certainly not demand more. Even Bot hears the gossip about this amazing news. He discusses it with his wife and says he doesn’t believe in miracles, but in the current climate, you never know your luck. The thought comes to him like a flash: if only he could wear the small ring, his wish would be to grow by 10 centimetres. Then nothing would stop him from being the happiest man in the world. So, don’t be surprised that he should summon a hitman and whisper in his ear: ‘Kidnap Gec’s child.’ We’ve forgotten to mention that Gec’s son has just been fired from the Bot factory, because he’s well dressed and Mrs Bot can no longer tell her son that, if he stops studying, he’ll end up like Marco. Not only is it true to say that Bot’s son doesn’t do any work at school, he also plays truant and wanders around with the tramps’ kids to go begging. He enjoys begging so much that he does it even when he is out for a stroll with his mother, who never notices that from time to time her son stretches out his hand, so busy is she looking forward, like a general. Mr Bot’s hitman heads for the park where Marco goes to play and waits for quite a while before attempting to kidnap him. Mr Bot is watching the scene from afar. But so are the Stocs and the poor from the housing estate. We can see the hitman, whom Mr Bot has chosen for his exceptional height and strength, sidle up to Marco and do cartwheels to gain his friendship. His father, our Gec, is only a few paces away, but guess who is distracting him? Do you know who is making him forget all about Marco and the endangered small ring? Mr Bot’s lover. He met her once, and never forgot about her since. Even factory workers fancy beautiful women. She’s by the pond, playing with the white swans and Gec approaches her and would like to say: ‘Good day, Madam’, all the more reason to, since he’s wearing his new shoes. Meantime, the hitman manages to get Marco to climb on his back. Marco strikes him again and again over the head with a whip and the hitman lets him, claiming that he is a horse. Swaying this way and that, he exits the park with Marco on his back. As soon as they reach the gates, he breaks into a gallop, heading for the Bot factory. Thanks to his motorcar, Mr Bot can reach the factory before anyone else and there he waits for the hitman in an anxious state of mind. There’s also Mrs Bot, who, like the loyal wife she is, wants to assist her husband. So that when the kidnapper arrives with Marco and his swollen finger, as you know, they resort to all kinds of harmless methods they can think of to remove the ringlet from his finger. On no condition are they going to let the kidnapper cut Marco’s finger off, so as to get the job done quickly. Marco is rather tearful, because he is a bit afraid of what’s going on, which is why Mr Bot pretends to be a cat to get him to smile. Mrs Bot puts Marco’s hand in warm water, and this is how she succeeds in prising the much-coveted ringlet off his finger. Not a moment too soon, since now you can hear shouting coming from Gec, from the Stocs, and from the crowd tagging along behind. Mr Bot is smiling

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triumphantly, as he slips the ring on his finger and, says, squawking like a rooster making a cockle doodle doo sound: ‘I want to grow ten centimetres taller.’ And he gives his wife the ring who shouts something we can’t quite catch. But the impression is that it has something to do with her breasts. The small ring begins its journey, going from hand to hand. Everyone wants to express their desires, all kinds of wishes, even somewhat unexpected ones, like Mr Bot’s personal secretary who screams: ‘I wish Mr Bot would drop dead.’ Then there’s a man who stutters so much he can’t even say his wish. He says: ‘Ta Ta Ta Ta, Ta Ta Ta Ta’ and nothing else. ‘What is our Gec up to?’ you will be wondering. He would also like to slip the ring on his finger and say his wish at last. After all, he’s entitled to. But it’s far from easy to get hold of the ring, the bone of contention of the savage crowd, dispensing kicks and punches left, right and centre. When he finally grasps it in his hand and is about to say: ‘I wish ...’ – and who knows what he wants – a terrified scream rings out. That daredevil of Mr Bot’s son who is having the time of his life in the thick of all the chaos, has ended up on a conveyor belt that will take him into the cogs of a big machine in a matter of seconds. And so, as in a fable, instead of shouting: ‘I want this’ or ‘I want that’, he shouts: ‘I want Mr Bot’s son to be saved.’ As if by magic, the machinery comes to a halt and Mr Bot’s son is safe and sound. They all exclaim: ‘Oooh!’ Even Mr Bot who is so moved that he is willing to hug Gec and nominate him his partner in the factory on the spot. But the Stocs arrive and all the others too. They’re disappointed, because the ringlet can’t work miracles, not even small ones, and they take it out on Gec. Mr Bot must admit to himself that he hasn’t grown a single centimetre, and while he looks at himself and measures his height, the engineer comes to the scene, saying that he was the one who stopped the machine, when he saw such an invasion of people screaming and shouting. What a miracle indeed! So Mr Bot tells Gec to go away with that ring of his. No, he fires him, and he might even give him a kick in the backside.

7

Scenario Five Poor Men in a Motorcar (1939)1

Context Five Poor Men in a Motorcar is an unpublished script which was eventually developed after the war into a film. The story takes humour in a different direction from the nonsense strain of the raccontini, finding it in everyday life situations. The story, written in collaboration with Andrea Rizzoli, was along the lines of Ernst Lubitsch’s If I had a Million (1932).2 Rizzoli purchased the scenario, but his chosen director, Mario Camerini, turned it down, because it didn’t fit into his kind of sentimental humour. He thought it lacked a story. It was made into a film directed by Mario Mattòli in 1952. Five men win a lottery. The prize is an expensive motorcar. They decide to sell it, but not before sharing the experience of driving it for a day each. Five poor men and five episodes for a feature film which was made after the war. The story is about different kinds of love, from the passionate love of adultery, to fatherly love and compassion. It ends with an accident that puts paid to their dreams. The point is not that the poor are destined to remain poor, as one critic concluded.3 For Zavattini, judging from his writing, the underlying moral revolves around the clash between the real world and the dream world of their illusions, the five (three of whom can’t drive) are forced to sober up and face their deluded selves. The shiny car dreamed up in 1934, is a signifier for material wealth, just as the gleaming white horse was for the street kids of Sciuscià, Shoeshine. As often happened, the screenplay and the film had a different ending. In the 1952 film, the poor share the proceeds of the car sale, conforming to the typical ‘they lived happily ever after’ outcome. But Zavattini’s gaze, from the

Zavattini, Cinque poveri in automobile, acz Sog R19/1, 1939, fols 6–19. Unpublished. Lorenzo Pellizzari, ‘Za soggettista e sceneggiatore’, in Paolo Nuzzi (ed.), Cesare Zavattini. Una vita in mostra, Bologna: Edizioni Bora, 1997, 157. 3 Pellizzari, ibidem. 1 2

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beginning, both in his literary writing, his journalism and his cinema, expresses the subaltern’s view, with no hint of condescension, and the writer’s gentle irony.

Text We’re in a big city, in a heavily built-up neighbourhood at a lottery carrying expensive prizes. The square is thronging with people from all walks of life. While the numbers are being extracted and chalked up on a board several metres high, we witness scenes of joy and despair. In those few minutes, the rosiest dreams are born, to then fade away. We see it in everyone’s faces, we hear it in the laconic remarks. The first prize is a gleaming motorcar. It goes to a ticket belonging to five poor men. Victory exhilarates them; they’re beside themselves with contentment. A crush of strangers is eager to carry them in triumph. Who are our five heroes? Stef or Stefano is a messenger boy at a milk bar, very lively and full of himself, twenty-five or so; Antonio, the second waiter in a beer tavern in town, about thirty-five; Fabio, a door-to-door salesman selling ties, he’s in his mid-thirties; Artemio is a family man with five children, and his in-laws, a newspaper vendor, fortyish; Vittorio, thirty or so, is a doorman at Torazzi’s manufacturing factory. * Where they stand in the social pecking order is obvious: they had to form a syndicate, just to be able to afford the price of a single, cheap ticket. After their initial exhilaration, the five decide to sell the car. There is no way the car can become an integral part of their lives, for obvious reasons. They get offers left, right and centre, there and then. There’s talk of 20,000 liras. But the five poor devils have a secret desire, though none of them dares tell the others. They walk around the car, touching it, admiring it lovingly, with a growing feeling of regret at the same time. Such an opportunity – a car exclusively theirs, such luxury, so shiny – will never repeat itself, let’s face it, when you consider what their lives are like, destined to monotony and poverty as they are. The car is right there, within arm’s reach. They really can do whatever they like with it. They look each other in the eye for a moment, before signing the contract to sell the car at a fair price. Then Stefano, in a somewhat tentative voice, speaks up on behalf of all five: ‘Could we not keep the car for a day or two?’ The die is cast; following Stefano’s example, the others also summon up the courage and decide to sign the contract, but they stipulate one condition: the car will be at their complete disposal for five days, so that every one of them can use the car for twenty-four hours. The buyer gives in to the pressure of the five who are already lost in their dreams. As you might expect, he only gives them 5,000 liras down payment, on

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the understanding that the balance will be paid when the car is handed over in pristine condition. Each of the five chooses his day. They’re obviously working to a plan. Now that they all have 1,000 liras in their pocket, they really feel like the masters of the world. The car will be parked in a garage whence, in turn, each of them will be able to take it out and use it for a single day, as we just said. * Stefano, the milk bar messenger boy, wants to be first. He and Vittorio are the only ones out of the five who know how to drive the car. He drives out of the garage at dawn with a tank brimming with fuel. First, he’ll have to deliver milk bottles, as he always does, but then the boss agreed to let him take the rest of the day off. Stefano goes about his work as quickly as he can, using his deluxe means of transport, instead of his usual tricycle. He delivers the last bottle of milk, then speeds off to pick up his girlfriend who is anxiously waiting for him, holding a bunch of flowers for their idyllic tour in a motorcar. The roads are still deserted, and Stef is singing like a bird. But he is forced to stop suddenly at a crossing, when he hears alarming gunshots. He’s taken by surprise by what is going on and still trying to make sense of it, when a man appears out of nowhere, sees the stationary car and jumps in, drawing his revolver and forcing him to drive off at top speed. A police car that is right behind chases after them. The revolver is pointed at Stefano who somehow manages to outdistance the police car and get away. Stef is looking pale. His forehead is covered in sweat. His girlfriend watches him whizz past at high speed with a passenger, never turning his head to acknowledge her presence. The two have now left the city and the thief explains that he could easily do him in. All he wants is to be driven to the outskirts of the next town. The thief needs cash, which means that Stefano has to give him what he has and become an accomplice in such an exceptional enterprise. ‘Have no fear, nothing serious is going to happen.’ He’s an old hand, the thief assures him. The man is fortyish and very confident. It will all be over in no time, provided he keeps his calm and can make a speedy getaway. There is hardly anyone in the street. The thief is waiting for a lucrative victim. Sometimes he even asks Stefano his opinion. ‘How much do you think this guy has in his pocket? And what about this one?’ Poor Stefano has almost lost his voice. Under such pressure, the most he can do is stutter some sort of impression. The thief makes fun of him, because he thinks he doesn’t understand people. And so, the thief gives him a peculiar lesson on how to judge people’s financial situation, on the grounds of their appearance. At last, a small man about fifty or so cycles past, wearing a bowler hat. The thief stops him and forces him to hand over his wallet. The detainee is an affable, quiet type who is quite unflustered by this aggression. A very peaceable exchange ensues between the man and the thief. The small man only has a few liras in his pocket and, furthermore, he’s heavily in debt. He says it

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would be a terrible shame if the few liras in his pocket were taken. The thief is almost apologetic and invites the small man to join them in the car. But Stefano has taken advantage of the thief’s momentary distraction, put the engine into gear and powered off as fast as the wind, swaying this way and that for the first few metres, so dangerously close to the road markers that it looks likely that he is going to crash into all of them. The look in his eyes is fearful, as he roars into town at dizzying speed. You can see the traffic police checking the registration number and making urgent signals and phone calls. It is obvious that they know the dawn getaway car’s registration number, which must have been taken down earlier that morning and circulated among the traffic police. Stefano is back in his neighbourhood. He has calmed down and feeling happy once again; his girlfriend is still standing there, holding a bunch of flowers and looking dreamy. Stef opens the door for her and at last their romantic outing can begin. After just a few metres, several squad cars home in on Stef and revolvers are pointing at him, while his girlfriend looks on in utter bewilderment. * We’re in the garage again the following morning and Fabio, the door-to-door ties salesman, is walking up and down, waiting for the car. He’s wearing garish clothes and a top hat. Walking by his side is a man wearing livery, who looks like a butler in the service of the aristocracy. We realize from the excited exchange that Fabio is worried, because Stefano has not turned up yet. Surely something’s happened. The car should have been returned several hours ago. Then Stef appears out of the blue, looking utterly disconsolate. Fabio can’t wait to hear Stefano’s explanations, so keen is he to drive off. Stefano’s swearing tells us he’s spent the night in gaol. Before he can explain why, Fabio has driven off. The man in livery is at the wheel. Fabio is sitting in the back seat, with the airs and graces of a lord. Where are they going? For a long journey. On the way, we find out that the liveried servant is someone by the name of Carletto, a friend of Fabio’s who has agreed to play the part of the butler for the day. We also discover that they are going to Fabio’s village which is several hours away. He has been away for years. Not that he was ever popular in that village, where the general opinion was that he is a lazy fellow. Perhaps they were right, but one could hardly expect Fabio to agree with them. The reason he is going is because he is eager to extract his revenge. They will now see him in a grandiose chauffeur-driven motorcar. He’ll race up and down the high street, and then, when he feels he has elicited enough of an envious response, he’ll go back into the city to resume the unremarkable life of a tie salesman. He has one person in mind, in particular: Antonio. Antonio, known as Antonio the Squint-Eyed, is a childhood friend of his whom he has detested for all the years he has been away. He was his nightmare, the one who made fun of him, saying he would never make anything of himself in his life. During the drive, there have been a few funny exchanges between the two. Now and again, Fabio takes his role seriously as master and Carletto responds by

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reminding him of their agreement: he was only supposed to act stiff and haughty when they reached the village. But sometimes their roles are reversed, Carletto embarrassing Fabio, by slipping out of the role he is supposed to play in the village. From the moment they get to the village, Fabio notices that something has changed. In the intervening fifteen years, apart from the new houses and the disappearance of a few old ones, he can hardly recognize the faces: the children have become adults and adults have become old. What a change. No one knows anything about him and hardly remembers him. As for Antonio the Squint-Eyed, he died several years ago. All that hatred nursed for so long now seems utterly pointless. He understands that he has aged and that what’s past is past. Walking slowly, followed by Carletto who is complaining, he heads for the cemetery and when they get there, he pays his respects at the graves of the people he loved and hated when he was young. On the return journey to the big city, sadness pervades him. It will accompany him for the rest of his life. * The next day it is the turn of Antonio, the waiter. He is without a doubt the best driver out of the five. Well, truth be told, he’s not. But he has spent a fortune to look the part, wearing a chequered suit, thick socks, goggles and carrying a camera. He can’t drive and doesn’t have the guts to ask the others for help. He has taken a crash course. After two days of hard work, he believes he has become a first-rate driver. He climbs into the cockpit, enjoying every little detail before his departure, from starting up the ignition to gazing at the people around. At last, he’s off, after a triumphal circular wave from his hand and a cloud of smoke from the exhaust. But we soon see how poor his driving is. At the first obstacle, barely a few metres from the garage, he doesn’t know what to do. He slams on the brakes in front of a car. He should be going into reverse, then shift to the right-hand side of the other car, but he can’t. His car twists and turns and crashes into the facing car. The traffic has stopped, and pedestrians are complaining. The other motorists are swearing at him. Instead of admitting that he doesn’t know how to drive, he begins to raise his voice, then an uppercut slams into his chin. He faints and drops back into his seat. The mechanics from the garage try, but fail, to make him come to, and then wheel the car back to where it was parked with our hero still sitting in it. In the meantime, he’s in a dream, in the beer tavern where he works, same as usual, but he’s laughing to himself at other people’s expense, anticipating what the effect of a few tricks he’d rather like to play on them would be. Here are a few examples. The attitude he decides to adopt is to be respectful and willing to please, even more than usual. A customer summons him. −− ‘What would you like?’ −− ‘A beer.’

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−− ‘Cuckoo!’ −− ‘Cuckoo? What do you mean?’ −− ‘Today I have decided not to serve beer. Ask me for something else, but I’m

not giving you any beer.’ The customer is furious and storms off while another customer begins to scream. He has sat on a nail. Then a third customer calls Antonio who rushes to bring him a beer, places it before him and then puts a finger into it. The customer is seething. He calls the owner. But our hero is unflappable. He teases the customer jokingly, in the full knowledge that the powerful car parked outside belongs to him and he is already anticipating the surprise it is bound to make on all the others. When the owner arrives and tells him off, our hero responds looking dejected and the owner leaves, looking as if he is carrying the burden of an unbearable pain. The customer is satisfied, and the owner continues apologizing. Our hero walks away, climbs into the car and turns to face the two with a peal of laughter, while he turns on the ignition. The engine roars into life, just as some fireworks go off with a bang under the chairs of several clients, wreaking havoc all around the place. This is when he comes to, opens his eyes to a scene of people fussing over him and spraying soda water in his face. In all of five minutes, his adventure, so carefully prepared, is already over. * It’s Artemio’s turn, the eldest of the five. We saw him while the numbers were being called out; actually, during those jubilant moments of victory, he was playing the part of a lovesick man with a cheap tart who immediately took an interest. A lottery prize winner with a car to his name could become a good client. We watch him driving around the city with a full carload of people; they’re all family: four or five children, wife and in-laws. All delighted to be going on such an extraordinary trip. Artemio, a good family man, didn’t want to deny them such a pleasure. We do notice, however, that he’s in a hurry. He lies to his family, saying that he must return the car to the garage. But the family members won’t have it. They insist, the children are screaming and Artemio is compelled to take them for yet another spin, but he’s getting more and more agitated, because of the time. There’s a dog too. At a crossing, the dog jumps out of the car and Artemio is forced to chase after it. At last he can drop off his family outside the front door and he is eager to be on his way. They’re noisy and he hurries them up. Artemio is clearly on edge and drives off fast. All the family are standing there, shouting something, but it isn’t clear what they’re saying. They look agitated. But Artemio can’t hear and heads for his appointment. We see him pull up in another part of the city. A girl is waiting for him on the edge of the pavement. She’s the same one he was flirting with on the day of the lottery, promising her the earth and, above all, a nice drive in his car. It

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escapes Artemio’s attention that his smallest son, who is only three, is still in the car, lying comfortably on the floor, and playing with his little feet. A partition divides the child in the back of the car from the front and the driver’s seat, so that Artemio and the girl can’t see the child. Soon the two lovebirds arrive at a fancy restaurant. The two get out and head for one of the tables outside. Artemio wants to seduce her. He makes more and more unrealistic promises, hiding the fact that he is a married man. Then the child’s little head pokes out of the window. Artemio is horrified, confused. He interrupts his courting, at a loss now as to what to say. The child laughs at him from afar, making gestures which his father chooses to ignore, pretending he can’t see him. Then he waves his arms at him to make him crouch and get out of sight. But the child manages somehow to step out of the car, and it looks like he wants to cross the road to join his dad. Artemio’s drama is at its apex. On the one hand, he doesn’t want the prostitute to notice what’s going on, on the other, he’s getting frantic, because of the bicycles and cars in the street and the grave danger the child is in. The child walks forward, and his father is breaking out into a cold sweat and the prostitute is asking him has he gone mad, because he’s abandoned any semblance of conversation and making weird gestures, she thinks. His signals to the child to stop don’t work. The child has started to cry because his father’s face looks angry. A car suddenly appears at the very moment when the child is crossing the road. The car swerves around the child, the father instinctively leaps out and grabs his son. Artemio picks up his crying son in his arms, then sets him on the ground and walks off into town, totally oblivious of the prostitute or the car. He walks gingerly alongside the child whom he’d brought to tears earlier. At last, the child begins to laugh and so does Artemio. The child reminds him of the car and Artemio slaps his face, puts his son on his shoulders and runs back to the car. They get in. He tells him the two of them will go for a wonderful spin in the car and drives past a small crowd gathered round the prostitute who is insulting Artemio. * The fifth is Vittorio, who is very shy and says little. He loves a girl whom he’s never dared approach; she’s a typist. Now that he’s got the car, he feels as brave as a lion. And, sure enough, we see him in the post office, where the girl works. At last, she leaves the office and Vittorio follows her. She’s a very uninhibited blonde, quite frivolous. Vittorio is curb crawling and swerving to avoid running over some pedestrians, trying not to lose sight of his love. He invites her for a spin. The blonde agrees immediately and climbs into car. But just then, we hear a voice, exclaiming: ‘Vittorio!’ Vittorio turns around and who should it be but his boss, Torazzi, a fiftyish, rather vulgar, peasant sort of manufacturer. Torazzi’s surprise at the sight of his doorman at the wheel of a car and in the company of an attractive girl is as great as Vittorio’s embarrassment. He takes his hat off and stands there, not too sure how to behave towards his boss, who has always

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terrified him. Torazzi makes eyes at the girl who reciprocates with a smile for this new guy on the scene who looks rich and important. ‘I won ... I won a lottery’, Vittorio mumbles apologetically. Torazzi pats him on the back with this huge hand of his, offering his congratulations through sneers and allusions about poor Vittorio’s social status and the reality of his situation, aimed at his love. ‘Ha, ha, I’ll have to increase your salary. A doorman with a car ... . That’s a good one! ... . Ha, ha!’ Torazzi goes on laughing and patting Vittorio’s delicate shoulder. He finds this mortifying. Meantime, Torazzi climbs into the car, sits himself next to the girl and talks to her as if he knows her really well. All the while, our Vittorio is alone, sitting in the front seat, like a chauffeur. ‘Come on, there’s a good man, take us for a drive. Hurry up!’ And Vittorio doesn’t breathe one more word. He’s driving this way and that, but he has no idea where he’s going, looking in the rear-view mirror now and then at the two behind him, who are flirting away. As his mood changes gradually so does his speed; he puts his foot down and the drive turns into a mad race. The two sitting behind look on in alarm and Torazzi threatens to sack him if he doesn’t slow down. But shy Vittorio is now furious: he feels crestfallen, humiliated and disappointed. He needs to go and go, nowhere special, but faster and faster. He feels compelled to drag the man and the woman with him. Racing through built-up areas is causing panic among pedestrians who are trying to escape. At one point, Vittorio brakes sharply to avoid a bus. The breaks squeal and the car rolls over. * We’re in Accident and Emergency. Vittorio and Torazzi are lying on two adjacent beds. They’re covered in cuts, one has a bandaged arm, the other a bandaged leg. Torazzi wants to protest and take it out on Vittorio. ‘You’re fired’, he shouts, but he’s still lying down and complaining, whereas Vittorio is in a good mood, whistling away, not feeling especially fit, but still whistling. ‘I’m happy’, he exclaims, ‘I’m happy!’ Vittorio’s four friends dash into the room like racing cars. The latest news is that the car is a write-off and they won’t get much for it. They blame Torazzi who is fuming at their onslaught of insults. Only Vittorio is happy because he has overcome his shyness. He doesn’t find Commendator Torazzi intimidating anymore, not in the slightest.4 ‘Hooray!’ he shouts. But then he too succumbs to a pain in his arm, while his four friends go on insulting Torazzi, hardly restrained by a doctor.

4

Commendatore: an honorary title of sorts.

8

Scenario Totò the Good (1940)1

Context The first version of the scenario for Totò the Good was published in Cinema, on 25 September 1940, and co-signed by the comedian and actor Antonio De Curtis, whose stage name was Totò, for whom Zavattini wrote it, hence the title. The whimsical tale follows on from Everyone Should Have a Rocking Horse (1938) and, in many ways, is its natural development, as Zavattini himself observed in an interview.2 Totò was, by this time, already a famous stand-up comedian, whose shows Zavattini attended frequently. Totò changed his mind, although he agreed with Zavattini that the story could herald a new type of humour for the screen.3 The story is full of a series of trovate or gags. Even in this embryonic first version, it is clearly closely related to the quip-style humour of his early short story writing, made up of a tight succession of funny lines, as bizarre as they are surprising, often with an ironic twist where a point about the real world is being made. In 1942, Zavattini expanded his fairy tale about tramps living on squatted land on the outskirts of the city of HaHaHa. Under the leadership of do-gooder Totò, they group together to form a happy village, but have to fight for their occupied land. They are evicted, but escape, on broomsticks. He resorts to gags that had appeared in his raccontini in print over ten years, and worked it up into a series, in Tempo magazine and the following year, in 1943, published it in book form, as a children’s book. After the war, he reworked it into the scenario for Miracle in Milan. As he said the previous year at a conference in Imola:

Zavattini, Totò il buono, Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 74–83. Zavattini, in Franca Faldini and Goffredo Fofi (eds) L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano raccontata dai suoi protagonisti 1935–1959, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979, 38. Cf. Totò il buono, Cinema, no. 102, 25 September 1940, 228–30. 3 Totò, Letter of 23 January 1941, in Zavattini, Totò il buono, Milan: Bompiani, 1994, xv–xvi. 1 2

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This text is also informed by the humour of my first book [Parliamo tanto di me (1931)], and definitely not of the second [The Poor Are Mad], let alone of the third [Io sono il diavolo (I am the Devil)]. The first fifty metres of this text and the last fifty metres will be in colour, declaring itself in no uncertain terms as a fairy tale.4

Text It’s dawn. Dawn chorus. The sun highlights a small cabbage patch with rose bushes. Legs of a man and a woman walking down a path. The sound of a crying baby. Exclamations of joy coming from the man and woman. We see them leaning over a large cabbage that unfurls to expose a beautiful, newborn baby. Their faces are glowing. The newborn baby is already in the woman’s arms. She is already smiling, while she lovingly peels off the last leaf. ‘What shall we call him?’ the woman asks. ‘What will become of him?’ asks the man. ‘He will be as good as fruit and flowers’, says the woman. * This is how our hero was born. We find ourselves in a modern city in the state of HaHaHa. A thin, modest man of thirty or so walks past a summer fizzy drinks bar. The bartender accidentally squirts some selz all over his suit. The shopkeeper rushes up to him, scolds the boy, though the man insists that it is nothing. ‘Nothing, see?’ says the man, with a forgiving smile. And when he notices that the shopkeeper is getting even angrier with the boy, he takes the selz siphon, as if it were the most natural thing in the world and squirts it all over his suit. Then he leaves, dripping with water, calmly saying to the shopkeeper: ‘It’s hardly something to get angry about. As you can see, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.’ The shop keeper swears at him for wasting a whole siphon of selz, while our hero cannot make sense of the shopkeeper’s change of mood. * We mustn’t be surprised that this kind of man should stop strangers to ask after their health. ‘How are you?’ They all reply: ‘But I don’t know you.’ And he retorts ‘I know, but I really do want to know how you are.’ They all leave in a huff.

4

Zavattini, ‘Conferenza di Imola, autunno 1942’, in Gambetti (ed.), Cesare Zavattini. Cinema e Vita, 95–104.

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One day Totò – for that is our man’s name – is drinking thirstily at a public fountain and soon begins to yell: ‘Up with water! Up with water.’ Some passers-by stop, out of curiosity, and he proposes a demonstration in honour of water, accompanied by songs and procession. He fails to convince the guards who have arrived on the scene that his sentiments towards water express uncomplicated and genuine gratitude and that the fluid deserves homage from public figures. In the end, the guards take him away and lock him up. Neither should we be surprised if he pins a paper fish to his jacket.5 After all, he knows that this makes people laugh, even those burdened with problems, and this is his way of distracting them. But good people are a nuisance and his noble actions always end up in ridicule. It’s a pure coincidence that Totò has ended up working for a stone mason whose shop is full of very boring looking statues. But Totò sets his eyes on a particular statue. It’s the shiniest, the most beautiful of all, a nymph, who is looking at her reflection in the water. We wouldn’t be exaggerating if we said that love is born between the two. * Where does Totò live? Out of town, in a large field full of shacks on the furthest edge of town. Hundreds of people have been living there for years, as if in a strange country, all of their own making. It’s tidy and orderly and, above all, there is the kind of solidarity that results from collective suffering and privation. What it lacks in means it has gained in inventiveness. There is even a policeman, appointed by the inhabitants. The fines consist in slaps in the face and a kick or two in the pants. And since the children have no choice but to live in the street, the streets have very special names: 8 × 9 = 72 Street. Napoleone died at Saint Helena on 5 May 1821 Street. This is how children are taught. Totò is completely misunderstood in the city, but he rules supreme here. Everyone defers to his judgement. He has invented a theatre where, from time to time, the spectators are admitted for free to watch people eat chicken or they can sit on their benches to watch sunset through a frame made of wooden poles. Totò puts up a monument to the best of them. But these are demolished, as soon as they misbehave. There is even a funfair reserved for senior citizens and a park featuring a single park bench where all the inhabitants sit in turn. They all wear what look like freshly laundered clothes. How come? We see one of them make a hole in the ground with his finger making crude oil squirt out. All you need do is make a hole in the ground for crude oil to come out here, there, and everywhere. But crude oil means nothing to Totò and the others. They just like the sight of the oil fountains surrounding their huts. It so happens that they have placed some celluloid balls on top, just as in the shooting range in the funfair.

5

In Italy, on 1 April, April Fools’ Day, children pin a drawing of a fish on each other’s backs for an innocent joke.

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Sometimes, strangers turn up among the shacks and leave, taking one of the inhabitants with them. What’s going on? It’s one of the businesses invented by Totò. For five liras, the well-offs can hire a local whose job it is to praise the person who has hired him for a whole hour. They can also hire them to listen patiently to their personal issues, good or bad fortune equally. * Our meek Totò is some sort of Zorro or Red Primula. But far more inventive! He orchestrates small-scale pickpocketing or chicken thievery, but exclusively to the detriment of proven baddies and as a final resort. Everyone obeys him. He has his assistants, a certain Gec is one of them, the only one who is serious about stealing. The majority keeps him in check, so that his plans are foiled every single time. This makes him dislike Totò and the others more and more. This loose assembly of people is tolerated by the authorities, because it can harm no one. No incident has ever clouded over that simple life. But one day it is none other than Gec who spreads the news there is crude oil in the field. He is the Judas of the situation. In exchange, he is simply given an old top hat that he rather fancied. The Plutocrat he has told immediately steps in to buy up the land for a song, together with a group of other financiers. He sends out men and machines to drill the soil (the technicians have no interest in the celluloid balls floating on top of the oil fountains). The drilling produces marvellous results. And now all the paperwork must begin, and the comings and goings of bailiffs who give twenty-four hours’ notice to leave. Easier said than done. Nobody takes the eviction seriously, and least of all Totò who cannot believe that anyone would wish to disrupt the tranquillity of a hundred or so people, especially because they would have nowhere else to go. The bailiffs were quickly dispensed with. But after the bailiffs come the police, ten in all, and even these are repulsed. These early victories are encouraging. Everyone is united around Totò and determined to resist. At first, Totò uses peaceful tactics. He meets the Plutocrat in the street and says to him outright: ‘Sir, your wife is dead.’ The Plutocrat is alarmed and asks him if he has gone mad. Totò adds: ‘And your son.’ The man wobbles on his feet, and goes pale: ‘For the love of God, explain yourself!’ Totò says: ‘I can confirm that. Cheer up. But tell me what you’d pay for this news not to be true?’ The Plutocrat tries to speak, hampered by his sighs and tears: ‘Any sum, all my happiness comes from them.’ At this, Totò changes his tune and with great jollity tells him: ‘It’s not true, it’s not true. I lied. But now you’re happy and I must ask you to relinquish the oil from Hahaha.’ The exasperated Plutocrat yells: ‘To hell with you!’, and walks away. He takes a couple of steps, then stops to ask Totò for his change (we have forgotten to mention that Totò had disguised himself as a paper vendor, to get close to the Plutocrat). As far as Totò can tell, there is only one way forward: resistance. The shantytown votes unanimously to resist. And this is where the film’s Iliad begins.

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Totò prepares the defence with renewed energy and all those expedients his resourcefulness can conjure up; traps, trenches, pails of water ready to tip over from on high, bags filled with dust, catapults for throwing mice. He has appointed his generals and allocated tasks to the women and children. Even during the battles, Totò maintains his good nature. We are pleased to provide an objective account of an episode that takes place during the conflict. Totò leaps out of the trenches to lead his men. An enemy officer and twelve of his men charge. The officer slips and falls. Totò and his men come to a halt. ‘Have you injured yourself?’, Totò asks him. ‘Thanks, but no’, the officer replies. At that, they begin to fight.6 Meanwhile, the other side, all the city lot, have come to the conclusion that forty or fifty soldiers can achieve nothing. They even risk making fools of themselves. At the same time, the Plutocrat, for fear of the competition, doesn’t want to waste any more time and screams and shouts, egging them on to step up their efforts against that bunch of vagabonds in rags. The charges begin and they are rivalled by Totò’s brilliant strategy. The order to avoid casualties leads Totò and his men to underestimate the true strength of their resistance. The press begins to mock the Plutocrat and the whole city arrives to enjoy the battle of the Back of Beyond. To manipulate public opinion, the Plutocrat has invented a new victim, a martyr, a policeman who had to go to bed after catching a cold from Totò’s pails of water. But all it takes in the end is a few smoke bombs to dispel any illusion our general might have had. In a few hours’ time, or perhaps in a few minutes, Totò and his people will be forced to leave with all their belongings on their backs. * At this stage, when reality is about to triumph over fantasy, an extraordinary thing happens. Two angels visit Totò in his shack. In an instant, the hut glows with inner light and two genuine angels speak to him. (We can only see their shadows and hear the sweetness of their voices). They grant him an extraordinary faculty, to work any miracle, provided he is good and nothing but; there is nobody in the whole world as utterly good as he is. But the divine boon will only last twenty-four hours. After that, life will take on its normal course, including exclusively human relations. Totò is in a dream state. He has no idea how to respond. He is still standing on the same spot, in astonishment, as we watch the two angels dissolve into the shadows to the sound of silver trumpets. A thought suddenly crosses Totò’s mind: win the war. You can already hear the screaming invaders. His frightened friends are already crowding his hut, to announce their defeat.

6

Here is one example where, even in this, the earliest version of the story, Zavattini resorts to his compressed stories, taken from his raccontini or short stories.

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First, Totò tests his powers by making two fried eggs appear on the table, then he amazes not only his own side, but also the enemy, and not by acquiring deadly weapons and big guns. He wins, by virtue of following the commands of his imagination, deploying flocks of birds that drop something I can’t mention here on his adversaries’ eyes. All he needs to do is make everyone itchy or make their shoes unbearably tight. The struggle grows epic and ridiculous at the same time. The more Totò’s comrades witness his personal victories, the braver they feel. Ultimately, the city crowd must resort to rifle fire, but the rounds are deflected by simple tennis rackets. An entire regiment is ensnared by a huge sheet of sticky paper, of the kind used to kill flies. * There is sometimes a lull in combat, when the city attackers are forced to interrupt their offensive, literally nonplussed by events. Totò takes advantage of this, to sneak off at night from the battlefield. Where is he going? For a furtive visit to the stonemason’s, to make his dream come true: bringing to life the statue he has always admired in silence. And the statue becomes a beautiful young girl to whom he offers a wonderful tunic. The girl smiles and speaks a strange language of musical sounds. Totò brings her to the shantytown where he adores her, in utter silence, unable to say a word. He cannot even begin to imagine what kind of miracle he might work for her benefit. Clearly, Totò doesn’t know the woman. He stands there in silence, letting more and more flowers gather around her, until her gesture spells irritation, as if she were saying: ‘Enough of that.’ The enemy presses on with new attacks, but Totò has told all the others about his extraordinary powers. We watch ten children wearing paper hats and wielding tin toy swords throw the cavalry in disarray. In short, not only is Totò able to make the enemy retreat, but also immobilize whomsoever he wishes. Bang in the middle of an advance, we see Totò make a gesture and hundreds of soldiers are frozen to the spot, some with a foot in the air, others with an arm pointing upwards, others still, deprived of their buttons. The heavy artillery the city has decided to deploy, long last, doesn’t fire deadly ammunition, but releases fashionable popular songs. This is how he becomes the master of the city, walking down the streets working miracles and astonishing public opinion which immediately nominates him a prince. What has particularly caught the imagination of the citizens are some little bottles full of water that never become empty. They just go on pouring water endlessly. The financiers try to beat him through treachery, by bribing the nymph who agrees to tie up poor Totò in chains. They give her the kind of jewels and diamonds Totò could have given her in large quantities, with a mere wave of his hand. When Totò wakes up and realizes that she has betrayed him, he has no choice but to turn that girl’s dark soul back to marble. But he keeps the statue by his side, and begins to dream again the more he looks at her, constantly feeling tempted to turn her back to flesh and blood. He brings her back to life, then

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turns her back to marble, and again to living flesh. At last, he overcomes his desire and lets her be a statue. The other traitor, the man with the top hat, has a worse fate. Whatever he touches turns into a top hat. He goes to see Totò and humbles himself before him; slithering along the ground like a worm, until Totò puts two pastries and some fruit in his top hat. After a little while, Totò carries out an amazing clinical operation on one of his wounded men. He makes ribbons, flags, and rabbits flow out of his wounds. * Totò has no intention of taking his revenge on anyone. All he wants is to teach the financiers a lesson. He gathers the entire population in the square and while he gives the command to pull down their pants for a public smacking, a piece of timber falls on his head. This causes consternation. Everyone believes Totò is dead. The Plutocrats take advantage of this to regain possession of the city. With Totò out of the way, his generals and friends are no more than a huddle of tramps cowed into silence by four policemen, regardless of their uniforms as generals and high-ranking military. Where is Totò? They all think he is dead. What a pity that he could only be a king for a day, since on that day he made it clear that he would have sorted out quite a few problems. There are some who have words of praise for him and the bankers themselves decide to erect a monument in his honour and organize a wonderful funeral. Thanks to such initiatives, they shift public opinion in their favour. We are at the imposing funeral. All those walking behind the hearse are weeping or speaking highly of the deceased. One man with a long beard distinguishes himself for going from person to person, bringing words of consolation, saying: ‘But there is no need to mourn him. After all, he was much worse than you thought.’ All of a sudden, this mysterious gentleman’s beard falls off. It’s Totò. At this point, the people, who have recognized him, begin the chase and the bankers are among them. A dead Totò deserves a monument, a live one is simply an unbearable individual. They run after him and his friends, screaming and shouting. Then, Totò looks at his watch and notices that there is only a minute left to go, before the angels’ midnight deadline. What is he going to do? The fugitives run past a hardware shop selling brooms. ‘Follow me’, Totò shouts. He climbs on a broom and all his friends do the same.

Part two

Post-war

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9

Scenario Italy 1944 (1944)1

Context This scenario was written after the Liberation of Rome in July 1944, by which time the Allied forces had occupied and liberated the south of the Italy, advancing to Rome by that summer. The north was occupied by the retreating Germans and the Neo-fascist puppet Republic of Salò, where Mussolini was declared head of state. Zavattini proposed a filmed journey of reconnaissance, to find out what people were going through in other parts of the peninsula. The story was written when the screenwriter was advocating honesty among filmmakers about their personal involvement, including his own, during the fascist dictatorship. A meeting took place in a school, the Regio Liceo Ennio Quirino Visconti, formerly the Jesuit Collegium Romanum, attended by many, to discuss the future of Italian cinema. Zavattini resisted the urge of the majority to blame and shame, advocating instead, a public, individual, admission of complicity, or confession. This is the context of the last frame, a sound-image: Mussolini’s voice during a rally heard against the backdrop of rubble, defeat and the unwillingness to admit one’s complicity. In Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) there are two scenes which convey a similar striking juxtaposition. One takes places in the Reichstag in ruins, where a father and son stand in the colonnaded porch, while one of Hitler’s speeches can be heard on a record player. The other features a priest playing the organ in a roofless, bombed-out church, while people in the street assemble to listen and worship. Finally, this scenario presents the germ of the idea of Italia mia (My Italy), a project based on field research, initially conceived as part fiction, part nonfiction, but eschewing narrative. A handheld cine-camera and a small crew travel

Zavattini, ‘Italia 1944’, Bis, no. 10, 18 May 1948, then in Zavattini, Diario cinematografico, edited by Valentina Fortichiari, Milan: Bompiani, 1979, 30–3.

1

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the length and the breadth of the country, to find out about their fellow citizens and their lives.

Text [Alberto] Lattuada, [Diego] Fabbri, [Mario] Monicelli and I decide to tell [Carlo] Ponti about it. All we need is a small sum of money and a truck carrying the essentials: cameras, a few rolls of film and some spotlights. We’ll set off from Rome taking only some rough notes with us. The main idea is clear to me; an ethical, or should I say political, plot – I daren’t call it poetic. How the film pans out will very much depend on whichever events we come across or rather, which we contrive to come across in the liberated parts of our country. I’m putting myself forward as the narrator of such an audacious journey. We members of the film crew will perform as both actors and viewers, in response to situations, as and when they arise. I had this idea for a project a few months ago, based on the conviction that only at this moment in time is there a deep sincerity in people, something which is going to vanish very soon. Today, a house in ruins is a house in ruins; the stench of the dead is still here; the sound of the last shelling coming from the North can still be heard. Quite simply, our shock and fear really haven’t left us, to the point that we can almost observe them, as if they were objects in a test tube. The cinema must attempt documentation of this kind. It has the necessary means to move around in space and in time and draw into the viewer’s pupil the multiple and the diverse, provided it gives up its usual narrative mode of communication, to adapt its language to the content, given that even the most contemporary content is expressed in an archaic language, one determined mostly by Capital. I don’t know if we’ll be able to find the few millions of liras we require: Lattuada doesn’t think we’ll need more than five. If we manage to get the truck, we can go to Naples, Calabria, Sicily, perhaps – who knows where we will end up for a couple of months? Some examples of places: we’ll stop in a bombed-out village, where the people are gradually getting back to living their lives among the rubble. Then we’ll talk with them in the square. I’ll declare: ‘This is what I’m guilty of.’ They might take me for a monster at first, but it is the only way I can claim any legitimacy to act as a public prosecutor and then charge each of them with their own responsibilities, dragging them out of their anonymity, just like the satyr Marsyas from the vagina of his limbs.2

2

A classical reference needed to explain this. Marsyas challenged Apollo to a musical contest, lost and was flayed by the god. Cf. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bri​​tanni​​ca​.co​​m​/top​​ic​/Ma​​rsyas​​-Gree​​k​​-myt​​ holog​​y, accessed 3 August 2017.

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We’ll constantly be doing theatre. There are broken doors and entrances everywhere in the rubble, buried under the crumbled walls and I shall state: All you did was close the door tight shut behind you! Nothing could be heard except the sound of doors slamming behind respectable Italian families.

Some of the people in attendance will look for excuses, failing to realize that I’m giving them a chance to unburden themselves. The world says we can’t be trusted, that we have no dignity left, and that we’re turncoats. Worse still, that we deliberately lost the war, so that we could claim, long last, that we’re the worst. To be honest, the good-natured country people are going to get bored. That will be my cue to conjure up a plane to drop a bomb over their heads. The bomb is just about to fall, I freeze it in mid-air (there will be some idiots who are going to say that you can’t always get away scot-free, but they have forgotten their promises: I’ll be so good – to the point of even licking the ground if I have to – so that nobody is going to stop me from perching outside my door to hear the sound of a bicycle spinning past. That’s all I ask). ‘Look at the bomb stuck just a few hundred metres above your heads. Shall we drop the bomb?’ Everyone starts screaming: ‘No, no, don’t!’ I make it drop 200 metres more, then stop it once again. While the bombs are made to stop short by 200 metres from the ground (we could film this in slow motion) there will be time to chase the men who are running away. I’m enjoying their terrified faces and oblige them to cast their minds back to a year ago (I can see the scene in my mind’s eye), to ten years ago, to a moment of their childhood, then forward, to when they will be dead and buried. It’s amazing how these people can change from one minute to the next and how many things these men can do, standing stock still in the small square, while they stare at me and at the camera and listen to me with indifference: they might blanch within a fraction of a second, jump over a hedge like hares or push an old lady out of the way while they flee. Look at her over there: she has ended up in the dust with the hem of her knickers in full view. If I make the house collapse and their children are trapped beneath it, they’ll start digging in the rubble like dogs. I stop them digging. And now here they all are, listening to my homily, saying they’re innocent, it has nothing to do with them. We then go ahead and set up a rudimentary screen in the middle of the square and show them footage we shot elsewhere, in a field, a farmhouse, wherever chance led us. The narrator, that’s me – I’ll say it again – tries to get the people in the square to understand that these other men also weep, die, kill, flee and go with women; that they are no different from them, the people in the square, and that when a glass of water goes down their throat it goes glug glug for the people on the screen and for the people in the square (the sound track must be so good so that you can hear the glug glug sound very distinctly). Then I’ll show the hands of a dead man emerging from a pile of rubble. ‘Let’s pause for a moment, here’, I’ll say. They will turn away in disgust, be afraid. And we shall gradually piece together the rest: the man, the village, other towns, the world and the planets, if you so wish (some poor devil finds this very difficult

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for the cinema). We then go back to a shot of the hands slowly unfolding a black shirt one morning in a bedroom smelling of soap. The man shaves, walks into the square, goes home for a meal with his family, and takes a nap. This happens in 1932 or 1933. Let’s choose a year from before the war. From 1932, I switch to 1943 and, from 1943, back to 1932. The attention must relentlessly switch from before the war to during the war, to after the war, in the same way that one’s head turns from side to side during a tennis match. But the viewers are getting tired. They tell the moralist to go to hell. And that’s when I invent a voice issuing from a badly dented loudspeaker wedged in the rubble. It’s Mussolini’s voice you hear, wafting across the semi-derelict village. It’s the sound of applause you hear, some of it from that man smoking a pipe. A shot in extreme close-up of the man smoking a pipe, while he is clapping. It lasts five minutes. Everybody would like to silence that voice coming from the loudspeaker, but nobody knows how to. Meanwhile we climb up into our truck and drive away. The unexpected awaits us wherever we might turn.

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Scenario Sciuscià (1945)1

Context In June 1945, Vittorio De Sica carried out research in the streets of Rome for a magazine article, ‘Giò?’ The title refers to ‘Joe’, or (gi) Joe, the anonymous us soldiers whom the population of Rome first met on the 4 July 1944, when the capital was liberated by the Allied forces. The article was motivated by the shocking reality of child labour and its exploitation.2 A wealthy Via Veneto on the one hand, prostitution and wartime child labour, on the other hand. The contrast could not be starker. A contemporary commentator remarked that one of the richest streets of Rome had become one of the city’s shadiest: An impoverished, Via Veneto, in rags, tragic: frequented by shoeshines and prostitutes, one of the many streets of this moribund Italy, perhaps one of the most representative.3

De Sica followed several poorly dressed children around Via Veneto and other wealthy streets of the city. He approached them to ask them a few questions, with a view to making a film about them. De Sica noticed that they spoke in whispers to avoid being overheard. He only partly wins over their reticence, to the point of telling him their names and a little about their work. Their reticence, he comments, is due to shame, a sentiment they harbour, unlike adults, he observes. De Sica asks Giuseppe: ‘Are you a pimp?’ He answers: ‘No.’ ‘Do you sell cigarettes?’ ‘No.’ ‘So what is it you do?’ ‘Nothing.’ At one point, one of the children disappears on horseback. Giuseppe and Luigi then climb onto a horse

Translated from ‘Sciuscià’, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 87–96. There is a single version in the Zavattini Archive and a photocopy of a typescript with Zavattini’s autograph corrections, also a clean typescript with the corrections included. Sciuscià, acz Sog. R U92/2, fols 1–20. The corrected version coincides with Caldiron’s edition. 2 Vittorio De Sica, ‘Giò?’, Film d’Oggi, i, no. 3, 23 June 1945, 4–5. 3 Italo Dragosei, ‘L’ultima via Veneto’, Star, ii, no. 46, 8 December 1945, 4. 1

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and gallop into the distance. De Sica doesn’t remark on the absurdity of this. But later, Zavattini would pick up on it, as the main element to build a drama of suffering and yearning.4 Their (real) white steed equates with the (imagined) shiny motorcar of his 1930s story, Five Poor Men in a Motorcar or other such symbols of wealth and happiness. De Sica writes: You know what those days were like. And I’d seen enough to feel deeply disturbed: women going off with soldiers in their jeeps; men and little boys throwing themselves to the ground to grab cigarettes or sweets. I was less concerned about adults than I was about children. And I thought: ‘Now the children really are watching us!’ They were the ones who gave me the measure of the nation’s moral destruction: the sciuscià [‘shoeshines’].5

De Sica’s piece lacked any reference to photographs, but on a subsequent occasion, several photographs were taken – not by surprise, but in a photo shoot, judging from the quality and the angles of the shots. Two other children appear: Giuseppe and Luigi. Of these, Giuseppe, mentioned only in what constitutes his second account, and Pasquale, mentioned in both, were singled out by Zavattini as models for the two leading characters of his scenario. The real children had different names. Years later, De Sica remembered the two he first met whose nicknames were ‘Scimmietta’ (‘Little Monkey’) and ‘Cappellone’ (Big Hat). Scimmietta was homeless and slept in a lift, while Cappellone was an orphan.6 The account of De Sica’s contact with street children and his brief exchanges with them is, as one of the captions to the photographs makes explicit, the point of departure for a potential film about shoeshines or, in its Italianized form, sciuscià. The stand first, or editorial introduction, to De Sica’s piece about the children reads: Sciuscià. In the big city, this is the ‘official’ title of the little vagabond victims of the war. De Sica says: ‘So much hope for their future is needed!’ Is this going to be his film? They have found out that ‘the Press’ is talking about them. Unlike adults, they’re ashamed of themselves. They don’t want the Press to talk about what they are forced to do, which is often not limited to shining shoes.

At first glance, this article seems to serve the function of adding captions to photographs taken subsequently. But it is clear that this double-page spread of photographs, set against a black background, forms an almost stand-alone

Zavattini, Letter to Massimo Ferrara, 6 July 1981, in Sciuscià, Corr., acz Sog., R U9/3. Unpublished. 5 Vittorio De Sica, ‘Gli anni più belli della mia vita’, Tempo, xvi, no. 50, 16 December 1954. The reference is to The Children Are Watching Us (1942), directed by De Sica. It was one of the precursors of Neo-realism, together with Visconti’s Obsession and De Sica’s La porta del cielo. 6 De Sica, ‘Gli anni più belli della mia vita’. 4

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photo-story, as its ambitious title suggests: ‘Cinema in contact with Life’. In some ways, this title, the headline to a photo-story for a film proposal, sums up the project of Neo-realism. The captions to the photographs add further details, which are absent in the body of the article. Roberto is sitting on the runner board of a us Army truck. The relevant caption reads: ‘Roberto is sad. The Allies’ white star behind him seems to promise a much-desired freedom from need.’ The word ‘seems’, suggests that the promise is an empty one. Another caption refers to several portraits; of Giuseppe, Luigi, Roberto and Pasquale: Giuseppe: here is a photogenic face. Brave, violent, and yet childish. De Sica is right to harbour hope, against all odds. Luigi, the smaller child. He is a dishwasher. He has a sad and thoughtful look about him. In the evening he goes home and gives his earnings to his mother.

Close-up of Roberto. Caption: ‘He looks down: he doesn’t want De Sica to see what is going on inside. Losing your innocence is a trying experience.’ It suggests – as indeed De Sica’s article does – that more is at stake than shining shoes for these children. As for Pasquale, the caption reads: ‘Pasquale is smoking. His head is covered with a pre-8 September forage cap. Clearly, Pasquale strikes the pose of the cynic, the grown-up.’7 One of the photographs spells out what is only suggested in the text. It is singled out as more significant, iconic, even. It features a child sitting on the kerb next to a parked jeep, leaning forward to rest his head and chest on his thighs. He may or may not be aware that he is being photographed. Either way, he has his back to the camera and his posture is translated into words thus: This photograph sums up the entire recent history of Italy. The sciuscià’s weariness, sitting on the dirty pavement next to a jeep. There is no sign here of any disgusting speculation about ‘Mussolini’s boys’.8

Another paragraph containing more of a comment than a caption, reads: They are in rags, selling copies of Stars and Stripes. Respectable citizens probably treat them with contempt. But if only democratic Italy would help them, many of them will become men.

Loneliness and shame: At the age of five, they do the same amount of work men do. The shoe rest and the company of a dog as a friend. Francesco is ready to face all the The date is shorthand to signify the Armistice of 1943, when Italy surrendered to the Allies, and was immediately occupied by its former ally, Nazi Germany. 8 The reference is to the contemporary scandal in the press and the accusations made by the Right. 7

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unexpected situations that might arise in the streets of the city, setting off from Via Veneto.

Society turns a blind eye to their existence. Another caption reads: He looks small among the crowd. It’s not difficult to imagine the poetic themes De Sica will be capable of getting in his film about the street children and from these meetings. Isn’t anyone going to help them out?

Their response against society’s indifference is mutual solidarity: ‘The boys still know how to be together and stick together, out of solidarity. So many elements for a film script! So much material to overcome our inertia.’ And finally, the escape into the realm of the imagination, where abuse cannot reach. The horse that is mentioned in De Sica’s article appears in a photograph of Giuseppe in the saddle: They are not greedy for money. All they want is light, joy, and playing games. Giuseppe has no qualms to spend three hundred liras to hire a horse and go for a good gallop.

Vittorio De Sica’s article and the research it contains was enough to convince the producer Paolo William Tamburella to finance the project. So, De Sica involved a team of writers; his usual team: Cesare Giulio Viola, Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci, Ennio De Concini and a couple of others to produce a script, based on a draft by Tamburella himself. Casting began in July 1945. But De Sica soon realized that their script wasn’t good enough. He contacted Zavattini who was then working for other filmmakers, namely, Augusto Genina and Alessandro Blasetti. When the film was released, the credits for the story included the original team of writers. But the screen credits fail to acknowledge that Zavattini, after their work was rejected, had to start from scratch, to produce an entirely new story, his story. In 1946, he told a close friend: ‘The script is exclusively mine, absolutely; with no involvement by any other living soul.’9 He was involved in the screenwriting and later worked with De Sica in the editing room on the moviola. He told [Giuseppe] Marotta, his friend and former colleague: ‘The ethical purpose is the underlying element of the whole film, which concerns the children’s loneliness and the story of the horse as unifying feature of all the subsequent emotional events unfolding from the very beginning.’10

Zavattini, in Giacomo Gambetti, Zavattini mago e tecnico, Rome: Ente dello spettacolo, 1988, 133–4. 10 Zavattini, Letter to Giuseppe Marotta, 10 May 1946 in Zavattini, Opere. Lettere, edited by Silvana Cirillo, Milan: Bompiani, 2005, 136–7. 9

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Text Rome, 1944. Galoppatoio, the Villa Borghese riding track. A foreign army officer rides past on horseback, accompanied by a lady. Then we see a few shoeshines also on horseback. One of them, Pasquale, is striking for the way he is dressed: he looks like a monument made of rags, wrapped around his body – including his head – as if he were an Arab. His horse is rather thin and feeble, but the boy feels as if he is flying. He comes to a halt and another shoeshine, Giuseppe, wearing only a filthy pair of shorts, walks up to him. He’s flat-faced and has a cunning look on his face. The other boy’s eyes are very gentle. There is also a man. He’s bald, lightly built and shifty. He owns the horse. We’re in the middle of a transaction to buy the horse. It’s Giuseppe’s turn to go for a ride on the horse while Pasquale and the owner barter over the price. The boys have 20,000 liras, the proceeds of two months’ work. They have saved them up for this very reason: to buy a horse; a horse all of their own. But the bald man wants 25,000. ‘All right’, says Giuseppe, dismounting from the horse, ‘tomorrow we’ll have the money’. The two boys fetch their shoe-shining equipment, hidden in the bushes and head for Via Veneto where they begin to work near other shoeshines. Pasquale is the more naïve of the two, hoping to shine as many shoes as needed, so as to make up the shortfall between the price and their savings. Whereas Giuseppe has a plan of his own. And we watch him bravely asking a young man for a loan, someone at the centre of shifty comings and goings of other boys. It’s an advance on sales, since this cheerful young guy, always singing some popular tune or other in a low voice, is a sort of clearing office for the sales of American cigarettes and the boys are two of his associates. But ‘the Singer’, as they call him, has other plans. He’ll give them the 5,000 liras they have asked for so insistently, but he needs them to do a small job for him that same afternoon. And the boys agree. All they have to do is visit an old lady, a fortune teller, and keep her busy chatting in her place for an hour, from four to five. Maybe the two boys have understood, but they ask no questions: they are afraid of saying goodbye to the 5,000 liras on offer, too good an opportunity to make their dream come true, buying the horse. * The two fourteen-year olds go and see the old lady. They are so taken with the wonderful things they see around them and the words of the fortune teller that they forget all about their mission. When the old lady tells Giuseppe about a journey he must embark on, the boy is enthralled, because he has no doubt that the journey will be on horseback. Everything the fortune teller says, even about Pasquale, the two immediately associate with the imminent massive event, the purchase of the horse. The old lady has asked for her money in advance and yawns while she carries out her duty, because this is the time she usually has a

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nap in her room and she goes on talking, adding absurdities in a bored voice the boys take very seriously. Then the boys leave, the clock strikes five, and the Singer told them to keep the old lady busy until half past four. But they forgot the time and eventually the old lady asks them to leave somewhat abruptly. * The next day, the two boys own a horse: we watch them ride along Via Veneto, provoking laughter among the other shoeshines. Where on earth do they think they are going? * Meanwhile, someone is walking down the pavements of several busy streets at a slow pace, scrutinizing every single shoeshine. Now and then he points his gaze at the street. There’s a carriage proceeding alongside, at the same pace, with an old lady who is an acquaintance of ours: the fortune teller. From time to time he asks the old lady to say yes or no and the old lady goes on shaking her head to say no. When they get to Via Veneto, Giuseppe and Pasquale have just returned and got back to work. The man and the old lady in the carriage continue their implacable search. Suddenly, the old lady points at Pasquale and Giuseppe. The man speaks to a policeman nearby and with his assistance quickly grabs the two boys and loads them into a carriage. The two boys are not alarmed, since arrests of this nature are frequent and nearly always result in an almost immediate return to freedom. They are certain that it is one of the usual police raids against the black market. They are taken to the police station and questioned. The reason is that, between four and five, the fortune teller’s home was burgled, exactly when the two boys were there. The old lady has told the police inspector about those two unusual clients, and about their pressure to prolong the sitting, and of their shouting, however joyful it sounded; caused, no doubt, by the need to distract the fortune teller’s attention, while two unknown persons were breaking into her safe in the bedroom. The boys try to defend themselves, but it isn’t so difficult to get them to contradict one another and get them to confess as to what actually happened. But when it comes to say the name of the person who gave them their instructions, they refuse to speak. Threats don’t work, so then the police inspector hands them over to the warden to make them confess. * And the warden doesn’t hesitate to get to work on them, resorting to the strap and slapping them. Giuseppe is so distressed at the state Pasquale is in, that he confesses the name of ‘the Singer’, to put an end to Pasquale’s torture. They are put on trial without delay. At their trial, we meet Pasquale’s mother and father. They begin to shout that they are innocent. But as it happens, the

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only concern they have is being made to feel responsible, so great a concern that they are unable to feel any other emotions. Pasquale’s father is a manual worker who has been out of work for a year. We are given to understand that he makes ends meet as a black marketeer, which explains his fear that they might stick their noses in his scams. It could ruin the business that provides his livelihood. The wife agrees with her husband and sides with people who have suffered hunger and who dread ending up in the same situation again. But Giuseppe has no one. His family perished in San Lorenzo, when the bombs fell, and now he is compelled to sleep wherever he can find temporary shelter. His family is reduced to an aunt who is a seamstress, but at the trial she is too worried about having to admit that she has had no contact with Giuseppe’s family, considering herself, too refined, in terms of social status, compared to them. * At this stage, the two boys are lonelier than ever. The defence lawyers have only abstract words to say, as abstract as the judge’s, whose job it is to apply the law to their case. So far, we haven’t seen a single person treat them with love. They have been out to get something or doing no more than their duty: from the man selling the horse, to the Singer, to the police inspector and the warden whose job it is to keep an eye on them. Not one person has given the two boys a minute of their heart, of their real, genuine attention. They have always been alone. The trial leaves the viewer with a sense of resentment towards everyone present, except the two boys, who are very straightforward, showing solidarity towards one another. They are unable to stand such ugly humanity. Their shock and their suffering are caused only by their forced separation from the horse. When are they going to see it again? In a year, because the judge has sentenced them to live a year in the Rome Institute of Re-education for Minors. * Pasquale’s mother says goodbye to him before he is taken away by the guards. She says she is happy, because she knows that the institute is no Hell. At least he will be fed there, while outside you never know if there’s going to be enough to eat one day to the next. Pasquale would like to confide something to his mother, but Giuseppe gestures him not to. * He wanted to tell her the name of the person to whom they took the horse, so that she would make sure it was safe. But this will have to be their secret. A secret they kept even during the trial, using the reserve of cunning and tenacity from their remarkable interest in the horse. In the Re-education Institute they are met with hostility from the other boys. The word has gone around that they grassed on a comrade. But Giuseppe and

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Pasquale are as one and they can face the general malice. In an unguarded moment of sincerity, they said they own a horse, but this immediately becomes a source of ridicule among all the others. * This is a dramatic time for the Re-education Institute, which is suffering the consequences of five years of war. The Allies arrived five months’ ago, but the institute has been receiving barely enough to feed the inmates. Building work is underway to make the place less overcrowded, and cleaning work too, but in the interim, the inmates are living in dreadful conditions. Our two boys have been put in a cell which houses four other boys: a boy from Naples who is sick and desperately undernourished, they call him Ranocchietta and he spends his time dreaming of the Gulf of Naples; Marino Tutti, is very smart, calm and extremely cruel. He’s in for robbery. The guy from Naples stole a suitcase in a railway station and was caught red-handed. His mother travelled from Naples to Rome to look for work, but instead she has become a prostitute. * Our two boys immediately work out how many days and hours they are going to have to spend inside. Their multiplications grow. The numbers become huge and when they work out the minutes, for the first time they feel hopeless and very sad. * Their Via Crucis begins now. Ever since their arrival, the head warden, a man called Staffera, has been slapping Giuseppe, who is always talkative and very witty. Of the two, Giuseppe was the one in high spirits on their arrival at the institute, convinced as he was, before working out the all the multiplications, that a year isn’t long to wait. But Staffera treats them as if they were thieves. He too counts on a definition on paper: The Boys of B category. Whereas, these boys can think only of endless fields, galloping horses, just as the Neapolitan boy can only think of the sea. But Staffera is unable to see any of this. Staffera has a family and four sons. Sometimes he mumbles to himself: ‘If I didn’t have to feed my sons, I wouldn’t be here with these rascals.’ Staffera has no doubts that he is a good father. The guards reporting to him compete with one another to put into practice Staffera’s didactic methods. The other guards too have little to eat and have debts to repay and are burdened with the kind of problems that most people have during this trying, immediate post-war, period. They are unable to contain such ill-feeling, of being underpaid and undernourished, and so they take it out on the inmates, shouting at them, swearing at them, or striking blows with a belt. Because, for some of the wardens, the belt is the weapon of choice against the boys. They slip

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it off their trousers ever so slowly, almost as if they are relishing the moment when they will land blows on the boys’ bodies. The institute director is an honest man, but he never stops repeating: ‘I still haven’t received any news about my son who is in Germany.’ This is his recurring sentence, this is the idea that divides him from his mission, like a veil. Consequently, Giuseppe and Pasquale are not the only ones to be alone; the others are too. Because the people surrounding them, judging them, keeping them under lock and key, are obsessed. They are beings whose single concern is their own suffering, their own drama. The war has exacerbated egotism and the worst victims are the young. * Our two boys’ arrival at the institute coincides with the planning of a revolt. But they haven’t been included in the plans, since no one trusts them. The objective of the revolt is to escape. The organizer is the high school student. He is confident that he will be free in a matter of days. So certain is he that Giuseppe and Pasquale have hidden a treasure that he tries to befriend them. He makes them confess. He finds out their secret: the treasure is the horse. Nowadays, a horse is worth a considerable sum and he will use it as soon as he is outside. In no time at all, what with his slow voice, and the speed he can do multiplications, among other things, he has won over the two friends entirely. It’s the night of the revolt. A good choice: during the film screening, a film scheduled some time ago, an old war film. The high school student has watched it. He used to always go to the cinema. The moment when the planes drop their bombs on the city, the noise is at its loudest and the boys have to overcome the wardens and the sound of their whistles will be drowned out by the noise coming from the soundtrack, so that the revolt is bound to take the guards by surprise in all the rooms. They have considered other tactics too. Even the Neapolitan is watching the film; he is staying in the infirmary and he’s getting worse and worse. The show begins. When horses appear on the screen, we see our two heroes’ faces. And when the sea appears, we see the Neapolitan’s pupils dilate.11 The time of the revolt has come. But not everyone joins in the attack against the wardens. The defections of those who appear to be immobilized by the frightening scenes occurring on screen – since the screening continues – cause the failure of the rebellion. Inside the hall, the fighting is violent, but brief. Someone is pursued down a corridor, someone else attempts an escape. In the end, there are two casualties and one death, a juvenile. The Neapolitan who couldn’t extricate himself from the tussle among the combatants, because of his weak legs, dies of suffocation, like a young sparrow. The high school student Marini realized immediately how things were going and managed to appear as if he’d never been party to the revolt. Our two boys

11

Zavattini envisages these shot reversals.

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are caught up in the chaos and are now huddling together in their cell, shocked and afraid. * One month later. Pasquale’s parents came to visit once, twice and never again. They don’t send any parcels, because they have no money. They have tried to find out where the horse is being stabled, saying they would sell it and then they could send their son parcels full of wonderful goods, food and cigarettes, every single week. But Pasquale hasn’t given in. This horse of theirs has become a myth and not for them alone, but for the others too, including the high school student who mentions the horse from time to time, making it sound important and worthy of respect. He is the one who uses all the calm attitude he can muster to sow the seed of discord in the hearts of the two boys, telling them that they won’t be able to divide the horse and that eventually it will belong either to one or to the other. The high school student then starts provoking their rivalry, in terms of horsemanship, encouraging them to compete with each another for his approval, by trying to gratify him, and no longer compete with one other in a spirit of generosity. And the high school student twists them around his little finger. They really admire him, just as they look up to his group of friends. One of them gives lessons in pickpocketing, another is a dangerous burglar, another sings and challenges the harshest of punishments to sing, and even in the middle of the night, you can sometimes hear his beautiful high voice. Another friend who is eighteen or so, carries out experiments in hypnotism, with exhilarating results. The remark you often hear round here is: ‘If you don’t learn how to make do, you’re done for. Money lets you get on in the world.’ * Two months later. Some of the boys leave, others arrive. One comes back, only a few days after his release. He began thieving the minute he left and now he is back. Everyone makes fun of him. Even Pasquale and Giuseppe join in the mockery. * The days go by and the calculations get easier and easier. Even Giuseppe can do them now. Pasquale is now in Staffera’s good books, thanks to his hypocrisy. The others taught him how to do it and Pasquale is so good at it. No one can do it better than him, behaving like a well-behaved boy in Staffera’s presence. They even managed to convince Pasquale to become a spy: Pasquale, in cahoots with the cell mates of cell no. 8, told Staffera that the boys in cell no. 8 had a file. It was true. They did have one. And they were all punished. But from that day on, Pasquale is Staffera’s protegé and, thanks to Pasquale, who enjoys more

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and more freedom, there is a black market of cigarettes and whatever else can be smuggled in. But the news that Pasquale will leave early, thanks to Staffera’s positive report about him is troubling Giuseppe’s heart. A month early. It upsets him because Pasquale was going to see the horse first. The others are also unhappy that Pasquale is getting an early release, which is why they create an obstacle. They get the little hunchback – the most unpleasant person in the cell – to tease him, to make him react and start a quarrel. This creates a dreadful din, exactly as they had planned, and Pasquale loses the early release privilege. Giuseppe feels remorse and tries to forgive himself, through a few acts of ancient kindness towards his friend. But the old, uncomplicated, friendship that once existed between them is gone. We have watched it perish little by little, month in, month out. * When the time comes for the two friends to leave, the high school student insinuates to Pasquale that Giuseppe was responsible for the plot against him to prevent him from leaving a month earlier. But the day of their release, the morning’s sunshine is too nice for Pasquale to pick a quarrel with Giuseppe. * The two boys are released from the institute with abstract, professional-sounding words, no different from the ones they have always heard. At the door, they meet Staffera and his son. Staffera smiles at his son, but when he sees the two, his harsh expression returns. * The two friends are in the street. They are running and jumping and seem to be the way they used to be. A year has elapsed, but to them it seems no longer than a day. People are crowding the streets, and no one pays any attention to the two boys. They hang on to the back of a tram, to go who knows where. * We catch up with them in a ramshackle, half-abandoned housing block, not far from the Cecchignola district. They are speaking to a man outside his house, next to a horse and cart. He’s their man. That’s their horse. But the man denies he was entrusted with the horse and treats them as if they were mad. The two boys are completely taken by surprise and feel united in their seething indignation. Pasquale cries out of anger. Giuseppe braces himself. The man is short, fat and old. Giuseppe faces up to him, adopting a threatening manner and pummels him with his fists. Pasquale joins in the fight, attacking the man whom they

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strike to the ground and continue to strike with their fists. Meanwhile, Pasquale continues to sob. The old man no longer has the courage to open his mouth. Giuseppe says that rather than leave him the horse, they would slit its throat or tell the police, since they have settled their debt with the law. And they take the horse along the river Tiber. Giuseppe wants to ride first, but Pasquale says no, they should draw lots. They begin to quarrel. Pasquale reminds him of his betrayal in prison. Tempers rise to such a point that Giuseppe takes off his trouser belt and strikes Pasquale a blow with the same slow, cruel gesture the wardens used. Pasquale picks up a stone, throws it at Giuseppe with all his strength, and it lands smack in the middle of his forehead. Giuseppe screams. The horse is so alarmed it gallops off into the road. Giuseppe lies on the ground in a pool of blood. Pasquale flees. A group of workers nearby has witnessed the scene and go after the boy. They are obviously going to catch up with him soon. They are like a brace of dogs in hot pursuit of a fawn. * But the blow to the head has killed Giuseppe. He is now surrounded by three or four people who complain about the boys of this day and age. The film ends with a final indictment by adults against children, those children we watched throughout the film as they kept going, while never for a single moment was the adults’ gaze directed at them, never once wondering what their names were or ever looking for their heart.

11

Sciuscià Letter to Massimo Ferrara, 6 July 19811

Dear Massimo, I am sending you the signed statement you requested concerning the scenario Sciuscià and also a copy of the scenario. Embracing you and your son and with my best wishes, Yours, Zavattini PS. What follows is an account of the events leading up to this scenario (by now, they have become ‘historical’). De Sica was working with several valid associates on the screenplay, based on Tamburella’s scenario. But neither he nor anyone else was satisfied with the results. I wasn’t part of the équipe because I was involved in other work. De Sica decided to contact me to see if he could overcome a situation that was so grave that it threatened to completely thwart the project. He phoned me; we met. He explained the nature of the situation and asked me if I could help him. But how? After thinking it over for a long time, I told him that if I had two days at my disposal, then, I felt, I could propose a story I had in mind, a specific scenario. He said yes, and forty-eight hours later I gave him twenty pages, calling them the same name that is in the title. He read them immediately, gave his instant approval and got his associates to read them too. Someone pulled a face reading about the horse, the main feature of the narrative. But he still got his équipe to agree and get to work on it. I gave my word that I would do my best to give further assistance, as soon as I was free from other commitments which had prevented me from working on it from the beginning of the project, on a text that De Sica more than the others, found so weak. But all this is well known. As I re-read these pages (I submitted twenty within our agreed schedule), I have no regrets. And De Sica demonstrated his gratitude, consolidating our working relationship which became famous for the unprecedented way in which we communicated and developed ideas into films.

1

Letter to Massimo Ferrara, 6 July 1981, in Sciuscià, Corr., acz Sog., R U9/3. Unpublished.

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Scenario Bicycle Thieves (1948)1

Context Looking back on Bicycle Thieves, Callisto Cosulich has drawn attention to its influence on East European cinema in the twenty-first century.2 He is not alone to see the film in a new light. The most recent, brilliant, example, at the time of writing, hails from Mexico, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018). A man needs a bicycle to do the job which will rescue him and his family from long-term unemployment. Its theft, a fruitless pursuit, in the company of his son, to get it back and an uncertain future, are, in a nutshell, what little the story amounts to. The plot was inspired by a story written by Luigi Bartolini. The story was about how this artist and engraver tracked down his bicycles, after they were stolen in Rome. Zavattini told Vittorio De Sica about it. A successful search for two bicycles by a wealthy man living in the centre of Rome was transformed.3 Zavattini told a friend, Pietro Bardi: I suggested to De Sica that he make the whole film about the theft of a bicycle, taking the idea from Bicycle Thieves, by Bartolini, as I’ve already mentioned, but built around a different character from Bartolini. The theft of a bicycle is a huge event.4

Writer and director contacted Bartolini who was paid for the legal rights to use the title and Bartolini signed a legal document, accepting that the film would diverge from his success story very considerably, but subsequently Bartolini threatened to sue them.

Zavattini, ‘Ladri di biciclette’, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 138–46. Callisto Cosulich, ‘Come eravamo’, in Gualtiero De Santi (ed.), Ladri di biciclette. Nuove ricerche e una antologia della critica, Atripalda: Quaderni di Cinemasud and Edizioni Laceno, 2009, 5. 3 De Sica, ‘Gli anni più belli della mia vita’. 4 Zavattini, Letter to Pietro Bardi, July 1947, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 155. 1 2

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In Italy, the response was hostile, even before the film went into production. Initially, Sergio Amidei, one of the screenwriters, put up very strong opposition and insisted it should be entirely rewritten. He couldn’t see the point of the film. For, surely a worker would have been helped by his comrades. Amidei quit, but later, immediately after the first public screening of the film, he apologized to Zavattini. He’d been a fool, he told him. Now he understood the film’s allegorical subtext. Amidei was not alone. Franco Fortini defended the film against the criticism.5 He tells us that on the day the film was shown to two and a half million viewers in Rome, a twenty-four-year old was caught red-handed, while trying to steal a bicycle. He was beaten up and arrested.6 Fortini claimed the film was ‘of exceptional importance for Italian culture’. An unorthodox communist, and a founding editor of Il Politecnico, Elio Vittorini’s illustrious review, Fortini appreciated the film’s doubt, or lack of certainties. There is no definite outcome in this story. He considered it more political than what he called formula-driven films of the period, which were trying to further the communist cause, by using direct address or an obvious Stalinist typology. The best-known positive review came from abroad; from France. André Bazin wrote that Bicycle Thieves ‘justified the entire Neo-realist aesthetic’ in an epic which transposed classic Greek tragedy to everyday life.7 But how could a stepby-step account of the unfruitful search for a stolen bicycle rival ancient classical theatre? Bazin’s answer was that this was made possible by its phenomenological or materialist nature. Since the film attended not to action, but to events, and their detail, provided on their terms, as it were, of seeing, hearing, being in the moment, in all their ambiguity and singularity. A confirmation of Bazin’s point about what amounts to a phenomenological gaze can be found in the scenario, which resembles the script for Umberto D., produced later, but almost coeval in terms of writing. In both texts, language is pared down to moment-to-moment description, in which the point of view is the character’s, related at the level of seeing, hearing, reacting to situations as they crop up. What has sometimes been described as a sermo humilis, a particular type of rhetorical register, plain and simple language, deceptively simple, is already present in the written scenarios for both films. For Bazin, compared to coeval Italian films, only Bicycle Thieves was revolutionary, but without the aid of propaganda or direct address. One can see this rooted in the structure and subtlety of Zavattini’s scenario. It was De Sica’s and Zavattini’s merit to have shifted the attention from post-war resistance to revolution, leaving behind the problematic of post-war Italy, economic recovery and the war itself, opening a new chapter for Neo-realism.8 Bazin proposes a Franco Fortini, ‘Ladri di biciclette’ (1949) in ‘Dieci inverni’ (1947-1957), Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018, 151–4. Ibidem, 151. 6 Fortini, ‘Ladri di biciclette’, 151–4. 7 André Bazin, ‘Voleur de bicyclette’, (1949), in Qu’est que le cinéma? Paris: Les èditions du Cerf, 2013, 299. 8 Bazin, ibidem, 302. 5

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frame of reference which is the outcome of a minimalist approach. It results in the loss of the theatrical set; dispensing with professional acting; reducing time to the present moment; dispensing with action, as the trigger for advancing the plot. What remains? The event of looking, sitting, walking, wordless activities, taking place in a situation which lasts and lasts. And this is what replaces action, this is the phenomenology of the event in its unfolding. Here was a truly revolutionary film, not only in terms of aesthetic, Bazin points out, but in a political sense. The philosopher and abbot Amédée Ayfré went even further. Bicycle Thieves could be situated within what Ayfré defined as phenomenological Neo-realism, a film aesthetics which shows the event, instead of turning it into a story dispensing with the Aristotelian three-part structure of beginning, middle and ending and replacing it with blocks of reality or events, including situations that are generally considered too small, too insignificant to deserve the status of an event. Ayfré’s and Bazin’s line of interpretation and framing Neo-realism was grounded in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, and particularly his idea that things manifest themselves in lebenswelt, the continual flux of the everyday. Husserl observed that: ‘We are no longer in the realm of doing, but of being; revelation replaces demonstration.’9 Ayfré clarifies that he is referring to the revelation of the real, not of a preconceived thesis and this explains the element of ambiguity, where we are used to a direct message. Ambiguity, though, makes viewers wonder what to think, just as in real life one has to interpret situations or events for oneself. In this way, for the French philosopher the mystery of being, itself an ontological mystery, is foregrounded and respected by Neorealist cinema which invites interpretation.10 In such an invented, cinematic, world, the impression is that a sequence of events occurs, devoid of logic or cause and effect, which, as in real life, needs to be interpreted by viewers, who ascribe meaning and interpretation to reality, as it is presented on the screen, because the filmmaker chooses not to interpret reality for them. Ayfré argued that Neo-realist film phenomenology replaces the construction of reality with an encounter, which helps to explain its elliptical, interruptive, narrative, which distinguishes it from traditional, linear, narrative. The experience of watching, as constructed, mimics the phenomenological experience of sensemaking of events as they occur in real life in which the person who experiences the event is the one who must make sense of it, replacing the chaos of sense stimuli with sense interpretation. If they don’t follow the Hegelian structure of thesis, antithesis, synthesis or traditional dramatic plot resolution in three stages, it is because ‘reality is

Amédée Ayfré, ‘Realismo umano, realismo cristiano’, La Rivista del Cinematografo, no. 11, November 1954, 117. 10 Ayfré, ibidem, 120. 9

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messier than that’.11 How is it done? By representing time as duration, a series of extended moments. By opting for a concrete description of the real, as opposed to setting up a ready-made interpretation for the audience. This results in another aesthetic choice: dispensing with psychologizing and moralizing, and replacing it with a witnessing of physical reality and human interactions, as they appear, or seem to appear, in a film. This explains why even the slightest gesture, attitude or behaviour is noted – in Bicycle Thieves or Umberto D. especially, but the same is true of Rossellini’s coeval Germany Year Zero (1948). Of course, dwelling on detail, expanded in time, cannot but impact on the way Neo-realist films were structured. Ayfré noted that this was also a characteristic which is shared by contemporary (avantgarde) Modernist literature that likewise draws attention to all kinds of detail.12 The cinematic world is the world seen subjectively, by a specific character with a singular conscience, grounded in a cinematic aesthetic, which Ayfré defines as ‘phenomenological realism’.13 When such a frame of reference is applied to the manifesto-like Bicycle Thieves, it puts paid to misunderstandings which have identified this cinema with reflection theories and misrepresentations of realism. It was caricatured by the 1970s Screen generation of film critics.14 For Siegfried Kracauer, who wrote about Bicycle Thieves in his Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), theories of reflection and illusion constitute ‘a false problem, a vicious circle, an idealist prejudice’.15 He contrasted duration, or the space–time continuum, to the structure of tragedy, which characterizes mainstream cinema, since tragedy, he stated, presupposes an ordered cosmos.16 The core element of Theory of Film appeared in 1956, in Jonas Mekas’s film magazine, Film Culture, as ‘The Found Story and the Episode’.17 In The Last Things Before The Last (1969), Kracauer spelt out his philosophical phenomenology, directly derived from Edmund Husserl.18 In brief, its cinematic open-ended nature and elliptical narrative structure and focus on the lebensweld or life flow in time, deserve to become an object of philosophical enquiry which goes beyond, or sidesteps, issues confining realism to degrees of adequation of representation to the real, pinpointing the ‘antechamber’ of experience, or the first stage of cognition, through the senses, which, in the context of Bicycle Thieves and other films, Ayfré, ibidem, 116. Ayfré, ibidem, 117. 13 Ayfré, ibidem, 119. 14 Devin Orgeron, ‘Visual Media and the Tyranny of the Real’, in Robert Kolker (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 83–113. 15 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, translated by Shane B. Lillis, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008, 173. 16 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, 266. 17 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Found Story and the Episode’, Film Culture, 2, 1956, 1–5. 18 Siegfried Kracauer, History: Last Things Before The Last with an Introduction by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, 4. 11 12

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action is undecided, or yet to be decided. What characterizes dogma, didacticism, propaganda is avoided, because choosing and decision-making comes later.19 The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty also considered film in durational terms, as a new reality. In Sense et non-sense, he insists on the temporal structure being central and on the physicality of the body, the gaze.20 Bicycle Thieves, as early as its formulation as a scenario, presents us with what Maurice MerleauPonty described as: ‘the surprise of the self in the world’, in ‘describing the mingling of consciousness with the world, its involvement in a body, and its coexistence with others’.21 This constant sense of surprise, participation and human empathy typifies Zavattini’s Neo-realist Ricci and Bruno for whom reality is, respectively, either a nightmare or a series of problems to attend to.

Text What’s a bicycle? In Rome there are as many bicycles as flies. Scores of bicycles are stolen every day and yet the papers don’t bother to print a single line of text in six point about them. Perhaps these days the press is incapable of establishing the relative value of events. If, for example, Antonio’s bicycle were stolen, the papers should, in our opinion, cover the theft with a headline across four columns, since, as far as Antonio is concerned, a bicycle is a providential tool. He could prove to you, by working it out on a scrap of paper, that the bicycle saves him no less than thirty liras a day. He would spend as much commuting into town every day, using the bus and the trolley bus. Not that it’s a special bike. It wouldn’t be worth more than 15,000 liras, but for a manual worker that sum would be hard to come by. Antonio is about forty, he lives on the outskirts of the city, and he earns barely enough for him, his wife and son, Bruno, not to starve. He’s just been chosen for a job in the city corporation, after being unemployed for a long time. And he has had to pawn his bed sheets to get his bicycle back from the pawnbrokers. Not that he is unhappy. After all, you get used to just about anything. He is a billposter. He is as meticulous as he can be, and sometimes he reads the posters. He is a party member of a left-wing party, but he is equally scrupulous when he is required to put up right-wing posters. He often thinks the world is not going that well, but he has his bicycle. He has quarrelled with his wife, but he has his bicycle. He can’t buy a new pair of shoes, but he has his bicycle. And one day it is his bicycle that is stolen, just when he is putting up a poster for the class of 1927. To really understand the meaning of this, you need to try and make the effort to be Antonio. That’s no easy task. You would have to make a hole in the ceiling, Kracauer, ibidem, 192. Mereleau-Ponty, ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et nonsense, Paris: Les Èditions Nagel, 1948, 48–59; 54, 57. 21 Merleau-Ponty, ibidem, 58. 19 20

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for one thing, because when it rains in Antonio’s home, raindrops fall on his bed. He lives in one of those dank apartments in Val Melaina that don’t even have a toilet. I am willing to admit that people exist who are worse off than our Antonio. There are people who don’t even own a bicycle. But Antonio has one and his drama begins precisely because he does. We hope that wealthy viewers don’t reach the conclusion that workers would be better off without a bicycle. This is our opinion on bicycle thieves: they are sinister rogues, compared to other kinds of thieves. Theft, that’s all they know. They’re never concerned about the circumstances of the person they intend to rob. Then again, for thieves there is nothing but the material object to consider. If babies’ milk bottles were worth more, if there were a market for them, they would go as far as steal them from the babies’ mouths. Here in Rome, a week ago, an old man was robbed of 100,000 liras, the sum total of what he had. He was taking the cash to a clinic to pay for his son’s cure for tuberculosis. If you’d seen the expression on the face of the bicycle thief who stole Antonio’s bicycle, utterly devoid of any doubts whatsoever, you’d have immediately suggested the death penalty. He is about twenty-five, almost handsome, and as agile as an athlete. He shadowed our Antonio, then he gobbled him up, the way snakes do with a rabbit. If we could have found our way into the thief’s mind, we would have discovered some savage thoughts, worse than an assassin’s. He wasn’t operating alone. He was exchanging signals with his accomplices. The scene took place near the Traforo. The thief snatches the bicycle, leaps onto it, and off he goes. Antonio, wielding a big brush on top of a ladder, notices what’s going on, and gives the alarm. He gets off the ladder with a reckless jump, so reckless that he could have easily cracked his skull. One of the accomplices comes forward and starts shouting, to create more confusion, yelling that the thief is heading for via Due Macelli. Another accomplice is doing the same. He has turned off into the Traforo tunnel. The hunt is on, but there are buses in the way, cars, motorbikes. For the next five minutes, that spot in Rome is the centre of the universe. Antonio jumps on the running board of a taxi and chases after the thief who is swallowed up by the narrow streets near Via del Lavoratore. But Antonio has no intention of accepting what has happened. He runs to the Trevi Fountain police station. It makes people feel better to turn to the police, just as when they decide they need to see a doctor. Antonio explains what the bicycle means to him. If it was up to him, the Celere police unit would be let loose into the streets of Rome, with sirens at full blast. But the police explain to him that a bicycle is only a bicycle. They have other things to worry about. Their idea of what matters and what doesn’t is fixed in stone. Some crimes require a car, others don’t. When a lot of money is at stake, the whole unit snaps into action. Why’s that? It’s just the way it is. Sure enough, you sometimes read in the paper that a person’s jewels were recovered by the police, but it never happens with a bicycle. Someone we know in that police station is most probably right to object that only large possessions receive police protection. His bicycle was also stolen. ‘But at the end of the day, we can’t even understand one another, unless we’re affected by

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the same problem at the very same moment in time, the way I am and this guy here is’, he says, pointing to Antonio. ‘The fact is, that unless you had the same experience at some other time, you can’t understand one another.’ In Val Melaina, finally someone understands Antonio’s predicament, to some extent, at least. Life is like that. We’ll never be able to share the pain of our toothache. It’s Baiocco who makes a suggestion. To look for the bicycle in the street markets of Rome, where stolen goods end up. Baiocco is a road sweeper who works in Piazza Vittorio and that is where they are going to begin a search the following morning, at dawn, on a Sunday. It would be pointless to describe how dejected Antonio’s wife is. The only reason she doesn’t burst into tears is that there are so many people staring at her. She tells him that the bicycle is worth all the surrounding apartments put together. At dawn, Antonio is in Piazza Vittorio full of optimism, because he daren’t think that he won’t find the bicycle. His determination to recover it is as strong as his need. He has brought his son Bruno along. Bruno is so much more familiar with the bicycle than he is that he would be able to recognize it, even from a pedal bolted on to another bicycle. From now on, since you are familiar with the characters and what is at stake, we can proceed more quickly to outline the bare facts. The search in Piazza Vittorio is fruitless, despite the help of Baiocco’s friends, who are all street cleaners. Antonio and his son who is trotting behind him, convinced that he has an extraordinary role to play in the search, head for Porta Portese, another notorious market for stolen goods. It’s raining when they get there. They stand by, watching the departure of carts and handcarts, loaded with shoes, bolts of fabric, wheels, tyres, and bicycle frames, all protected by tarpaulins. Antonio thinks he has recognized the thief in a young man talking to a beggar. Too late. The young man disappears in the rain. Then Antonio confronts the beggar to find out the man’s identity. The beggar claims he doesn’t know that youngster, but it’s obvious that he knows him very well, which is why Antonio doesn’t leave his quarry out of his sight, following him into an out of the way church, where the weekly Sunday charitable mass for the poor is being celebrated. Nothing can distract Antonio, not the priest’s sermon, nor the tinkling bell at the Elevation of the Eucharist during mass. However, Antonio’s last chance, the beggar, gives him the slip. When Bruno complains to his father, as best as a child can, that the beggar has managed to escape, he gets a sharp slap from his dad. Now these two beings are even more despondent and alone in the city. It’s two in the afternoon and the son is walking alongside him. He sees his father as an enemy and his father understands that he has made a mistake. It becomes even clearer, when he hears a few people shouting by the riverside and it seems to him that something terrible has happened to his son, who stormed off after the slap, heading for home all by himself. But his son has come to no harm. Antonio wants to get rid of all the day’s built-up anxiety, so he takes him to a trattoria, a good one, so that Bruno can have a rest and taste food he has never eaten before. In other words, he wants to remove his suffering. Instead, as he sits there with his son, working out the cost of their loss on the table, it gets worse.

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He doesn’t want to return home without a bicycle. He doesn’t want to face his wife, looking scared and downcast. Since natural methods have failed him, why not give the supernatural a try? He visits la Santona, the healer, a confidence trickster who deceives workingclass people with her visions, her replies and her communication with heavenly forces. Antonio’s wife knows her well. She is a long-term client and Antonio has bitterly criticized his wife often enough for her naïve credulity. You have to talk about your private affairs in front of everyone else needing her help, all gathered in the healer’s bedroom: people who are seriously ill, mothers who want to find out if their missing son from the war is still alive. But Antonio is in no mood to empathize over the pain of others. ‘Either you find it now or you never will’, la Santona tells him in a solemn voice. No soon as he leaves that room, Antonio bumps into the thief. He grabs him by the neck shouting that he wants his bicycle back. The short road attracts a crowd of onlookers. The thief had sought refuge in a whorehouse, to no avail. A policeman turns up. Bruno, who always takes the initiative, went to ask for his assistance. This man is indeed the thief, but the wall of silence is too much for Antonio, an incredible resistance put up by the locals living in that street. All of them are the thief’s friends and neighbours. Every single one of them can prove that he has the strongest alibi in the world. Even the policeman explains to Antonio that he would be wasting his time, and perhaps his money, if the youth were taken to the police station. And what’s more, he argues, even his papers show that he has no criminal record. ‘Unless you catch them red-handed, unless you have a witness, at least one, willing to back up the charge, this sort always gets away with it.’ While the thief is on the ground in the throes of epilepsy, brought on by the dramatic encounter, the policeman searches the thief’s apartment. ‘A pointless exercise’, the policeman remarks. It takes no more than half an hour for a stolen bicycle to be dismantled, disguised or shipped off to street markets that are nowhere near Rome. Antonio would feel better, if only he could realize how this works. It would be a good idea to leave this place or he might even face being laughed at. Bruno’s small, weary, steps follow him, and Bruno daren’t say a word. He would have preferred it if he had picked a fight with one of those men, but there was nothing more than a scuffle. As they walk along the Lungotevere, they come across happy Italian families out for a stroll. They have reached via Flaminia, near the football stadium. This is where they catch a trolleybus, then a bus, and yet another bus to Montesacro. A match is on. They can hear the supporters’ shouts coming from the stadium. Antonio suddenly makes a terrible decision, suggested perhaps by the heaps of bicycles sparkling in the sunshine and parked under a lean-to shed, opposite the stadium. Or maybe it is his reaction to the indifference of the people walking by or the trolleybus due to arrive any minute. If Antonio gets on, it means he is giving up, to then climb the damp steps leading to his apartment, within the looming Val Melaina tenement blocks, with a heavy heart and without the bicycle. Antonio is no longer himself. Surely, he has a right to do it, after two such dreadful days, so full of hostility and indifference. He has singled out a bicycle

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that seems to be abandoned. It’s right there behind him, in a deserted alley. He abruptly tells Bruno to get on the streetcar and wait for him in Montesacro. He’ll join him later. There’s something he has got to do. The trolleybus arrives and Antonio walks away. He seems absent. But Bruno can’t get on. The trolleybus is crowded, and he is forced to witness an awful scene that petrifies him: his father making his getaway on a bicycle and pursued by the shouts of the man whose bicycle he has stolen and by four or five furious men. Antonio doesn’t react. The men are mollified by the son’s tears. They recover the bicycle and walk away without pressing charges. They have thrown his hat in the dust and slapped him one last time across the face. The two walk on in silence, and close to one another. They keep going until they climb on a bus. Antonio can’t bear to look at his son. Soon they reach Val Melaina. Bruno is tired. He leans his head on his father’s arm. Antonio covers his pale face with his big hand. Bruno feels all the air blasting in from the window. And Antonio adjusts his little scarf. Meantime, the same old arguments break out between a passenger and the ticket collector.

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‘What We Want’ (1950)1

Context What We Want is a short article about Bicycle Thieves by Zavattini, and, most probably, broadcast on Italian radio, according to the author’s signed handwritten note on the typescript in the Zavattini Archive. Its brevity, and internal evidence, the colloquial tone, the clear reference to the film as having been recently produced, corroborate this. It has a Manifesto-like ring to it, defending Neo-realism as an alternative within the context of contemporary debates in the press. It was published posthumously, twenty years after Zavattini’s death.

Text Writing scenarios for the cinema industry, you know, is like throwing a message in a bottle. Which director is going to pick up the message? How is he going to bring it to the attention of millions of viewers? When Vittorio De Sica is the one to pick up the bottle, the message will come across as convincing and urgent to millions of people. The purity and natural quality of De Sica’s shots convey the belief in reality itself, the best kept secret of the real. This is how it was for Sciuscià, this is how it was for Bicycle Thieves. By now, De Sica and I believe that we know what we want. We aspire to a cinema that will help us to get to know who we are. We are tired of lying. To use cinema to tell lies is the worst social crime one could commit. The cinema should tell the truth and you don’t need to be a prophet to do so. Today more than ever before, after a war that was more idiotic than the previous ones, if only because it came after them, we are able to tell the truth; it is only a few steps away from us, we can see it in the face of a factory worker or of someone living in poverty.2

1 2

Zavattini, ‘Quello che vogliamo’, in De Santi (ed.), Ladri di biciclette, 81. For Zavattini, the word ‘truth’ in the context of cinema should be understood as an approach to the real which requires the filmmaker to attend to social facts, by acknowledging their existence. In the case of Bicycle Thieves, bringing to objective visibility the reality of the subaltern which mainstream cinema had mostly ignored.

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That is to say that the two of us are against a cinema that would have us believe that injustice and unhappiness can only find an expression in fictional stories, in a ploy to delay the final reckoning. We would consider our venture a failure, if the story of the billposter weren’t seen as the most common kind of story in this world.

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Scenario The Great Deception (1948)1

Context The Great Deception, written in May 1948, precedes You, Maggiorani, named after Lamberto Maggiorani, the Breda factory worker who played the role of Antonio Ricci in Bicycle Thieves. The two stories feature the same basic storyline, the same sequencing of events and the same reactions to them, but in Tu, Maggiorani, a heavily edited version of The Great Deception, the director’s personal point of view has been removed altogether. The earlier, uncompromising, version, is more ambitious and more interesting. Why the change? Between the first draft and the rewrite, two planning meetings between De Sica and Zavattini took place. The outcome was that De Sica was no longer the narrator and central character, whose presence gave the proposed film its unique confessional character. In The Great Deception, a fictional Vittorio De Sica also conveyed his self-doubt, remorse and awareness

1

‘Il grande inganno. Idea per un film di Cesare Zavattini’, L’Unità, 8 January 1950, 2, and Genoa edition, 11 January 1950, 2. Tu Maggiorani was recently published in Zavattini, Tu, Maggiorani, in Uomo vieni fuori!, 138–46. A typescript with corrections of the first draft of the scenario Il grande inganno (The Great Deception), is in the Zavattini Archive, with a double title: ‘Tu Maggiorani’, ‘Il grande inganno’, acz, Sog. NR 29/2, fols 26–30. The Zavattini Archive contains three copies of the scenario in all. One with author corrections (fols 1–9) Zavattini’s signature appears on each page, indicating that this is a legal siae copy). The first draft appears on fols 26–9. There are also two articles that are, in actual fact, two editions of the final version of Il grande inganno, The Great Deception. The first version, submitted for copyright, contains Zavattini’s signature on each page. This text was published by Orio Caldiron. However, the earlier version, revised by the author Zavattini, is the one published in two almost identical articles: ‘Il grande inganno. Idea per un film di Cesare Zavattini’, L’Unità, 8 January 1950, 2, and 11 January 1950. These are two regional editions. This translation is based on the published, revised, version in L’Unità. A comparison with the version published in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 144–5 and the typescript and the version as published in L’Unità, 11 January 1950, 2, shows that Caldiron uses the first draft in the Zavattini Archive. This version published in L’Unità is the final version, corrected by Zavattini for publication in 1950, and the one that has been used for this English edition.

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of his shortcomings and those of Neo-realism, seen as a limit which is unable to express the complexity of reality. Both versions could have been called Life after Bicycle Thieves, narrating Maggiorani’s real life story, entirely at odds with the film’s worldwide success. It works through metanarrative and intertextuality, giving a behind-the-scenes account of how the factory worker was cast for the main role in a film and how, after he went back to his factory job when the film was finished, he was made redundant. Both are a cry for help. But this first version, The Great Deception, brings out Zavattini’s Pirandellian problematic of the divide between life and art, real life and flawed film industry, which Zavattini was to develop the following year in his scenario for Visconti’s Bellissima. In The Great Deception, fiction and reality coexist, as they tend to do in Neo-realist films which hinge on a form of mimēsis that dwells on and thrives on the contrast and dynamics of juxtaposing life world footage with fiction. In this case, news stories, producers, actors and directors being themselves, that is to say, dropping their public director persona, serve to paint the contradictory picture of the film industry seen from within, begging the question of social justice and solidarity. ‘It could be the film of conscience’, Zavattini wrote in his text for The Great Deception. The time between the first version of the scenario and the changes made to the second version, so strikingly different, marks a radical change of plan, producing a reduction in the scope of the film. The confessional mode, with which Zavattini experimented in First Communion, is central to The Great Deception, featuring a real film director having qualms about his actions, reflecting on them in public. In the second version, this has all but disappeared. In its place one finds a linear unfolding of events told by an anonymous narrator. The main character is now Maggiorani, not De Sica. Maggiorani’s point of view has replaced De Sica’s and consequently, the confessional, self-doubting mode has been dropped altogether. In the first version of 23 May 1948, published further, Maggiorani’s troubles directly concern the director De Sica, as imagined by Zavattini, in a story constantly interrupted by the free, open-ended narrative, a structure that made it possible to introduce secondary stories. But the most interesting aspect is that narrative was to be replaced by metanarrative, in the protagonist’s own reflections and self-doubts, his purpose and raison d’être as a director, faced with the true, tragic, story of Lanfranco Maggiorani, in the aftermath of Bicycle Thieves. Why utterly change the nature of The Great Deception? Because De Sica objected, as Zavattini suggests indirectly in a letter also published later, to the Hungarian director Géza Radványi, who was lined up to direct the film. It was too honest a representation. Yet, only two months later he went on to write the script for Bellissima, which developed the same theme, the divide between cinema, popular imagination and ordinary life. The Great Deception, not You, Maggiorani, is an early expression of Zavattini’s explorations into personal cinema.

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Text [The Great Deception was written on 23 May 1948. With this scenario, Zavattini is once again stressing the need for a cinema that is ‘devoid of fables’; that is to say, a cinema that exposes the countless lies spread by certain films, day in, day out. The story of the factory worker Lamberto Maggiorani, narrated by The Great Deception is a true story, so true that it cannot be compared to any invention. Zavattini is waiting for a director to produce it. He is aware of the fact that it is a brave undertaking, but he also knows that in Italy there are several young directors who are ready and willing to tackle greater challenges. If, one day, this film should appear on the big screen, you won’t read the same old opening title that appears in the credits of fable-films, but rather: ‘The people and events in this film have a direct referent in reality, which is why they should absolutely not be considered a coincidence.’].2 * We are in Rome, in the spring of 1948. De Sica the director is looking for a child and a factory worker to play the main characters for the story of Bicycle Thieves which is going into production very soon. His search is long and eventful. Casting for the other indispensable characters for the film – genuine beggars, prostitutes, poor people, looking for them in public dormitories, brothels, marketplaces, homes – is just as hard. But the search for the child and the factory worker is the hardest task. At last, almost by chance, De Sica finds his man, a genuine factory worker in the Breda factory in Rome. His name is Lamberto Maggiorani. He is suddenly plunged into a new and extraordinary life. De Sica manages to negotiate three months’ leave with the Breda works on Maggiorani’s behalf, on condition that the worker will be taken back after his exceptional holiday. When the casting stage is over – and what a chaotic time it is for mothers and fathers crowding the film studios and trying to impose their children – Maggiorani’s great adventure begins. His day-to-day life is new, full of surprises, following the director’s instructions on location, in the streets of Rome. During the next three months, we see how his private life begins to change, little by little. He has been given a proper contract, which means that he can buy a suit and new furniture for the dining room and all the family routines have been affected. The whole Maggiorani family is living in a state of light euphoria. Well, that’s what cinema would do to anyone. As we shadow Maggiorani, we become familiar with what cinema is like, not just its typical side, but, sometimes, its cruel side too, inconsistencies and shortcomings. The director can only see the work ahead. He is surrounded by people and places. Oh, the tears and laughter that will never be fixed on celluloid! The director is keen to get to know the truth, and film it from life. This need for

2

This paragraph [in square brackets], appears only in L’Unità.

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truth is the constant preoccupation of Italian cinema. However, in order to select the best locations for filming, he comes into close contact with different environments. He must engage with them, sift through them, and choose. From the four walls of these apartments, the faces of strangers fix their gaze on him. These are the people he meets; the people he will be interviewing, every single one has been asked to pretend, in a role, each person with a story of his or her own, far more disturbing, perhaps, than the one the director will tell. The film is over. Maggiorani withdraws into the shadows of the factory, back among his fellow workers. The film is shown to the public. It’s a great success. Maggiorani carries on being a factory worker, but he sees his photograph in all the papers. He has become a household name, applauded and fêted, and invited to attend screenings in some cinemas, together with the director and the child. The director is now thinking about his new film, while Maggiorani is back working the lathe at Breda. Yet he soon notices how low his earnings are, now that he has got into some expensive habits. He is forced to sell the new dining room furniture. Everything must go back to the way it was before. But worse than before, because he is sacked out of the blue, together with many other workers. They are victims of a wave of redundancies. He’s lost his job, while the future promises nothing but misery. Yes, he does own a fashionable dining room suite now, thanks to the kind of money you earn in the cinema, but also deep disillusionment. Why the applause from all those people? Why the flare up of solidarity intended for him, in those eyes looking at the famous director and actor? [It was as if everyone had understood the story of the bill poster of Valmelaina; as if everyone had come to understand what exactly it means to be out of work and not have enough to live on. But here he is, our Maggiorani, faced with his reality, sitting in a trattoria, figuring out if he has enough to last until the end of the month. In the meantime, in the same city, screenwriters, directors, producers, go on looking for fables. They all want to communicate with the world, open their hearts, confess and earn money. One day, Maggiorani is walking down the street with his son – yes, he has a son who is the same age as Enzo Stajola – when someone points him out, recognizes him.3 These people don’t know he’s out of work. In Piazza Colonna he meets De Sica. After exchanging a few words, the two part in silence, in the midst of a crowd. Many cyclists go past them, ringing their bells].4 De Sica will be the one telling this story about the factory worker-actor, as if he had been led to discover, in the thick of his professional life, a revelation of his narrow-mindedness and how infinitely broader and nuanced the horizons of reality are. And how, even the word Neo-realism, which is used to define postwar Italian cinema, is only an absurd limitation. In telling Maggiorani’s story, other stories will flash across the screen, the possibility of other stories and reality expanding into multiples, behind and Enzo Stajola is the name of the non-professional actor who played the role of Bruno in Bicycle Thieves. 4 This paragraph also appears only in L’Unità. 3

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before us. It will become clear that the call for solidarity isn’t loud enough. It needs to be louder and continuous. Whereas, once we have made a film, we sleep on our laurels, despite the fact that our artist’s vision enables us to see how blinkered we are, in the face of reality, partly due to what we deem convenient to see. This film needs to be a documentary of sorts about the Italian film industry, which also reflects the errors of a world that keeps duplicating into life and art. It may be that having an inkling of awareness is like a small light in a dark wood. But the question which Maggiorani asks, at the end of the film, and which echoes so alarmingly in the director’s heart, is the whole world’s question. It should bring the film to a close with a series of images coming up on the screen, like accusations: why not rush to help this child? (At this point, the child appears on the screen). Why not go immediately to that man’s aid? So many reasons for accusations, and what do we do? The world is at a standstill. When it moves, it only moves at a slow pace of a film or the even slower applause Maggiorani received in the picture house that day. What must be done, then? The film should be populated by real people and real news events: including [Roberto] Rossellini, [Anna] Magnani and [Aldo] Fabrizi, foreigners, capitalists of cinema, whatever can be unearthed about the film industry, including its hateful capitalist aspect. At the same time, alongside all this, one needs to distinguish, amid the confusion and the deception, the need for truth and justice in Italy, a stronger sense of solidarity for the working class than in other countries, as our cinema shows and this film, even more than others, could reveal through a synthesis of film conscience, if such a turn of phrase is permitted, to concretize an Italian state of mind in the face of a collapsing world. What must be done? The internal logic of the film about Maggiorani’s story will be strong enough to tolerate any essential digressions about the status quo, as regards the rich and the poor, since it is based on a free style, fragmentary narrative mode.5 The protagonist, De Sica, will put into words, we could say, his own reflexion, as if, at one point, he suddenly took the time to think back on his encounter with Maggiorani and reflect on his, and everyone else’s, subsequent actions. How should we act differently, when we realize that what we do is too little, far too little, hypocritical, even? This is the question he will put to the audience in the last shot.

5

Orio Caldiron made cuts to his base text (the draft typescript), marked in square brackets, which change the sense. By deleting an explicative clause, he makes the repeated word spiedo, a metaphor for organizing principle, into a repetition for emphasis. But Zavattini is making two separate statements: in the first, he observes that it is the film’s internal logic that provides a steady structure able to tolerate digressions. In the second, he states that the organizing principle actually coincides with De Sica the tortured central character. Cf. Il grande inganno, edited by Caldiron in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 145.

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The Great Deception Letter to Géza von Radváni, 9 March 19501

Dear Radváni, I am sending you the second version of notes for the Maggiorani story.2 I think that, after the second meeting with you, the producers and De Sica, I am in a position to draft the definitive version of the scenario. As I explained face to face, I know for certain that we can’t tell the story of Maggiorani, as if he were someone who would like to be involved in cinema, but lacks the skills, with all his problems being a consequence of being in that predicament. We can’t. Not only because it isn’t historically true, so to speak, but also because the viewing public itself will convince itself of the contrary when, under your guidance, Maggiorani will have to play a convincing role for the second time. Briefly put, the film is not a message aimed at Maggiorani, whose problems were caused by unemployment, not by cinema. I wouldn’t go looking for more complex meanings and, above all, I wouldn’t put any Pirandellian elements in it.3 Social facts – Maggiorani’s predicament – possess a natural power of their own which can move us. But we do need to tell the story of Bicycle Thieves, as if the public had never seen the film, since the point of the film is to see the fictional story repeat itself as non-fiction and, in both occasions, lived out by the same man. As for Maggiorani, we shall have to convince him that he is not an actor and that he owes his success and talent above all to De Sica whose choice he was, and who used him so well – just as his second success will also benefit Radváni – and we can only hope it will be a success, or else we wouldn’t even make the film in the first place. We must convince him that the cinema attracts sizeable earnings, albeit very temporary, above all for someone who is not a professional actor. Even so, it is equally true that the cinema is also a source of money for

Zavattini, Letter to Géza von Radváni, 9 March 1950, acz Corr. R24/2. Unpublished. This is the one published by Caldiron in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 2006. 3 By ‘Pirandellian elements’ Zavattini is referring to distancing, by showing the film within the film, the story within the story. The first discarded version is indeed Pirandellian. It also proves that Zavattini was very clear about the playwright’s influence. 1 2

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men who are not actors or artists. And why shouldn’t Maggiorani profit, when misery was knocking at his door? By all means, let’s give Maggiorani advice. We are duty-bound. We ought to be realistic about the nature of his abilities and his prospects, advising him to save up his earnings and consider the adventure of cinema very provisional. But that is as far as I would go. I wouldn’t involve him in making a film to teach a lesson to someone in dire straits who, whichever way you look at it, was a good factory worker whose employer gave him the sack. To come back to our film, then, I do believe that there’s enough to go on to justify a Maggiorani Mark 2 film. It demonstrates once again, just as Bicycle Thieves did, that human solidarity is only mobilized on large-scale occasions. The subaltern has to cope within a badly organized society, one in which the big fish eats the little fish. This society is therefore supportive during high-profile events (as, for example, The Crime of Primavalle).4 But it is always a minute too late. It sheds tears in the picture house for fictional heroes and as soon as it leaves, it forgets the real ones. I hope you share my view over the film’s content. If you don’t, my position is that I don’t want to hide this reality. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As soon as you get back from Milan, we’ll all meet up and have a constructive and definitive discussion.

4

A crime that took place in Primavalle, a district of Rome. Cf. ‘Cronaca nera. Delitto a Primavalle’, La settimana Incom, no. 414, 10 March 1950. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​ atch?​​v​=pp7​​​RZY8f​​UNk, accessed 23 March 2019.

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Scenario First Communion (1949)1

Context The scenario for First Communion, directed by Alessandro Blasetti, was written only six months after The Man and His Dog, the first version of Umberto D., demonstrating how different strands could, and did, easily coexist in Zavattini’s writing. The structure of First Communion harks back to his pre-war scenarios, insofar as it is the story of a man frantically pursuing an object or a person, for an hour and a half. Even his very first scenario follows that structure. I’ll Give a Million, was made into a film by Mario Camerini. Zavattini’s story was later purchased by Darryl F. Zanuck who produced a new version in 1938. Zavattini had already collaborated with Blasetti, writing the scenario for Four Steps in the Clouds (1942) and had also worked on several other projects with Blasetti, including the blockbuster Fabiola that same year. But after Zavattini’s 1930s experience, and the realizations that only came to him because in the intervening years there had been war, the light comedy touch was now combined with something revolutionary: his character is an anti-hero who constantly undermines the cinematic ideal protagonist, the wealthy civil servant Carloni, by reflecting retrospectively on his actions, in a film structured as a flashback, precisely to allow the voice of the narrator which coincides with Carloni, to add a layer to what would have been a straight narrative. Comedy issues from the gap between action and reflection after the event and from pacing at break-neck speed pacing in the writing and then on the screen. Yet there is irony too. The commingling of voices – the character’s and the film writer’s – is encouraged by the geography of Rome, so very familiar to Zavattini. For Carloni lives at 40, Via Santangela Merici – Zavattini’s genuine address – and the First Communion to be celebrated in the fiction is set in the nearby non-fictional basilica of Sant’Agnese. Zavattini’s scenario was first published in Cinema, ii, no. 25, 30 October 1949, and appeared again in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 113–27. This edition reinstates the initial paragraphs of context, which appeared only in the first edition.

1

Scenario: First Communion (1949)

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In a letter to Blasetti (dated 11 September 1949) Zavattini highlights the centrality of the confessional mode for the film – which is entirely alien to his pre-war writing. It originates in his literary experiments, culminating in the publication of Hypocrite ’43, in which the writer assumed a literary persona to experiment with self-reflective writing, without a trace of comedy, thus dispensing with his pre-war staple.2 The book, published in 1955, begins as follows: During 1943, someone kept a diary. Only the following scraps have reached me. No one has heard of the unhappy man since. Parce sepulto.3 [...] A man walks by wearing worn out shoes? Why tell only me? Why pick on me? Look, I’ll sign a cheque; just leave me alone. Isn’t that enough? [...] I’ll write a press release: ‘I, the undersigned have nothing in common with myself anymore and no one can stop me from making a clean cut. I’ll just let words come out of my mouth at random.’4

In First Communion, Zavattini shows how Neo-realism, as theorized by him, can handle humour and extend to the bourgeoisie, by exposing a lack of humanity that is classless. His protagonist, who belongs to the ruling class, is constantly undermining his own respectability and certainties, during a series of invented micro-events or incidents. Why is it such a funny story? One reason is the perfect timing of jokes, another is that Zavattini splits his character Carloni, in two. There is Carloni, the character, carrying out his actions and a second Carloni, in the form of his inner voice, reconstructing events and reflecting on his earlier behaviour and self-importance. In taking a second look at himself in reflection, he conveys amusing situations in a first-person narrative. Carloni comes across as the author’s alter ego, since the character’s voice constantly overlaps with the author’s, complicating what could have been a linear moral tale. The literary style is in a similar register to the one adopted by the author in his short book, Hypocrite ’43, where the experimental prose is poised between fiction and nonfiction, with one crucial difference: First Communion is self-reflexive, but a comedy at the same time. The working papers for the screenplay reveal tensions between the writer and the director over which direction the film would be taking, since Zavattini’s writing as a film text is at this stage an unstable text, in the sense that it is open to changes, to revision, which might be limited to tweaking, or might turn out to be substantial. The challenge was the function of the voice: either a Voice of God, all-knowing narrator, in other words, a heavy-handed didactic approach – Blasetti’s – spelling out the implications of the main character’s actions, or the

Letter to Alessandro Blasetti, 11 September 1949, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 141–3. Zavattini, Ipocrita 1943, in Zavattini, Opere 1931-1986, edited by Silvana Cirillo, Milan: Bompiani, 1991, 275–310. 3 The Latin phrase is a quote from Cf. Aeneid, iii, 13–68: ‘Refrain from resenting the dead’. 4 Zavattini, Ipocrita 1943, 277, 280, 286. 2

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character’s own voice internal to the action on-screen, constantly serving to problematize events, conveying Carloni’s shifting, self-reflective, narrative, doubt and regret. This, at Zavattini’s insistence, was the outcome both in the scenario and the screenplay.5 The (unpublished) production working papers expose the clash between director and writer. The preliminary page, preceding the text of the screenplay, carries the following instruction written by the writer himself: (In pencil: ‘The director is the machine, the voice is the machine (it is the cinema.)’) The author [amended in pencil to ‘director’] is not telling a story which has taken place: he is following an event which is underway. During the unfolding of this event, his voice sometimes makes a comment, revealing the protagonist’s thoughts, to the point of even bringing events to a halt to imagine different events or to juxtapose images of the present with images of the past, or of the future. For ease of exposition, such author interventions will be identified by the term: ‘voice’.

The back page of the inner binding containing the typed screenplay also contains several notes in pencil in Zavattini’s handwriting. The last reads: We see where the imagination should or should not be. It currently lacks a constant. Presently, the one imagining is sometimes him and sometimes the author [the director]. What sparks him off (forbidden dreams?). What sparks the author? We need to choose. Given the beginning, let the author’s voice be the only voiceover. The truth is that the story began as a confession and now the voice and the rest is an intrusion.

In the working papers appended to the screenplay, Zavattini 45/3, fol. 59, has a note asking: ‘what is the organizing principle behind the voice?’ [‘qual’è lo spiedo della voce?’] 45/3, fol. 63: Voice works (or imagination) when it goes into a higher pitch, not static, not moralizing. [Then] it ruins everything. It’s unbearable and destroys the pace. Everything, if clear, and here [too], if the voice and the imagination are at the right rhythm or they are not. To change the voice as it is would ruin the film. It would make it preachy, boring. Questions: the voice. Do we need the voice? What is its purpose? Who is it directed at? At Carloni or at us? Don’t the events explain everything? If so, what is its purpose?

The scenario was completed in June 1949 and published on 30 October of that year. The director accepted it, still hoping to make a number of changes which he later imposed. Zavattini went as far as stating privately:

5

Zavattini, Prima Comunione, Screenplay, acz, Sog. R 45. Unpublished.

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I’m not going to give in. Either he accepts everything I do in the scenario as is, or I’m not letting him have the story.6

The film was ready by August 1950 and won the Nastro d’Argento award for best director, screenplay and protagonist actor. This version was published in Cinema magazine. This edition reinstates the stand first, or editorial introduction as published in Cinema, omitted from Caldiron’s edition. In the event, Aldo Fabrizi, not De Sica, acted the lead role and Zavattini got his way.

Text (Italian cinema owes a great deal to Cesare Zavattini: when Sciuscià or Bicycle Thieves is mentioned, as well as citing De Sica, Zavattini should always be cited, since these two films are an excellent example of ideal cooperation between a director and his writer. After asking him for a scenario for Four Steps among the Clouds (Quattro passi fra le nuvole), Blasetti commissioned a new scenario from Zavattini, this humane, simple, delicate, First Communion. Another ideal collaboration is being attempted and everything bodes well, for the lead role will be De Sica’s.)7 * See this dark-faced man walking down Via Nomentana? That’s me. I’ve just walked out of the church of Saint Agnese, packed with girls and boys who are about to make their First Communion – what a din, what a feast – and I am making my way to my home, which is only 100 metres away. Today is Easter morning and everyone is so happy, except me. As soon as I turn the corner into Via Merici where I live, I bump into friends and acquaintances. Happy Easter, they wish me, Auguri, Auguri. And they look at my new suit, my shining and squeaky new shoes. If this had been yesterday, I would have been delighted, whereas today I have only one wish: to confess to everyone that all I am is somebody who should be given a kick up his backside. Let’s see if you can guess what I’ve done. Have I murdered anyone? Have I robbed anyone? Before I tell you this morning’s events between eight and ten in the morning, I should introduce myself. My name is Carloni, I have a wife and daughter. She’s nine and I adore her. I’m a high-ranking public servant and earn a lot. Until an hour ago, I had no idea that I’m a proud, and above all, selfish man. And now I know. I’m selfish, ladies and gentlemen, don’t trust me.

6 7

Zavattini in his private diary. Cf. Io. Un’autobiografia, 160–1. ‘Prima Comunione’, Cinema ii, no. 25, 30 October 1949. In the event, the lead role was given to Aldo Fabrizi, a perfect choice.

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To give you just one example, why did I buy this new suit? To walk down the streets like a peacock and to humiliate people wearing patched up clothes. Oh yes, this is the truth. Ignore external appearances; this really is the truth. * I’ll stop here to reconsider some recent attitudes of mine. Yesterday, at the tailor’s, where I was having the final alterations made to my suit, I noticed that I have a bit of a paunch and that one shoulder is lower than the other. The tailor broke the news to me very gently, but I was irritated and was rude back. The tailor said nothing in reply, and I was satisfied by the tailor’s servile response. I know for a fact that we only feel gratified when we can slam a fist on the table and watch our neighbour bow down in obsequious deference. Yes, I’ll come clean about it. I have a full stomach and it’s not the tailor’s fault. I must admit that when I walk past the janitor’s hatch and demand that he greet me first, I’m ridiculous. I remember I once had an argument with a waiter. The scene surfaces in my memory like a remorse. The waiter brings me tamarind and water and I said seltz. The owner comes over when I start remonstrating and takes my side. The waiter has the nerve to answer me back – I called him stupid – he reacts. I shout, saying that I’ll never come back to this bar. The owner forces the waiter to apologize. He does so, but he’s furious. What I deserved was the kind of hand gesture they make in Rome to say you’re a fool. And during the war how often did I swear to myself that I’d love my neighbour as myself. The sound of the air raid siren was enough to give me wings to fly. Will you just look at that man running as fast as a light-footed deer – in July 1943 – enemy planes overhead and the air raid siren wailing its long, ominous lament? Who is running to the air raid shelter, as fast as a deer? That waiter, perhaps? Or that janitor? No sir. You’ve already recognized me. It’s me, the one with the scared look on his face. You can hear the machine gun, while I’m saying to myself: ‘Save my skin, God. You’ll see. I’ll give everything to the poor. I’ll even kiss a leper.’ * Enough of these memories. You want to know what the hell I was doing this morning from eight o’clock until ten? Give me a minute longer and I’ll tell you. This woman here, who is greeting me with such deference is my nurse. For some time now, she has been giving me injections. Can she really be bowing her head to me, as if I were a prince, considering that she sees my bare bottom so often? I finally get it: we’re all hypocrites. This other girl, carrying two shopping bags full of stuff is my house maid. She was hired only a few days ago. While she walks away, loaded with the weight of the two large bags, I see her in my mind’s eye in my home the day we hired her and the doctor checked her state of health: she’s so thin that I was worried she had a chest infection. I am looking at

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her diffidently, while the doctor is checking her lungs. On this revealing Easter morning, I realize that it would have been fairer for the doctor to check my health, not hers, since she is the one washing my laundry and emptying my chamber pot! I have now reached number 40, home. I am in such low spirits that I hardly feel like going upstairs. How about if I go for a stroll along the railway embankment? I need to be alone with my thoughts. In the Convent vegetable patch opposite my front door, the nuns are walking backwards for one of their small sacrifices. At one point, I hear my name being called out: ‘Carloni!’ I turn around. A woman is running towards me in the company of a cripple. The cripple is holding a very large parcel. ‘The parcel!’ I shout. And my heart fills with joy. But let’s go back to the beginning and you can finally hear how things stand. * I woke up this morning at eight o’ clock, singing away. This person coming to greet me while I am still in bed is my daughter. No Happy Easter could rival this one, uttered by my daughter’s darling voice. My daughter looks like a sparrow. She looks even thinner in her nightie. She is waiting for her First Communion dress to be delivered. The bell rings. The dress is here. Everyone is rushing to the front door. It’s not the dress; it’s a bunch of flowers. They are from the people upstairs, one floor above ours. We rush to the landing – I’m still in my pyjamas – to thank them. I call out to them in a loud voice and they lean over the balustrade and I thank them waving the bouquet of flowers this way and that. The light in the courtyard! Amazing! My humble wife gives me a kiss and dashes off to set the table with cakes and bowls for hot chocolate, with the help of some relatives. Everyone knows I have a comfortable life. And perhaps, on this occasion, I have spent enough, maybe even more than necessary. The landings are crowded with people. The daubs of white of girls and boys dressed for their Holy Communion appear one minute and disappear the next. Some are ready well ahead of time, even though there is still plenty of time before the big event in the nearby basilica of Saint Agnese; almost two hours. But the mothers are even more impatient than the children and got them ready by dawn. While I’m putting on a tie, I carry out an inspection of the house. I offer my daughter a small cake. My wife stops me with a shout: ‘You’re not allowed to drink nor to eat before Communion!’ Oh, yes, that’s true, I forgot. I sing to myself, while I’m getting ready. My daughter follows me in her nightie, like a kitten, and from time to time, I give her a kiss. Wouldn’t you say that between these four walls, I’m an exemplary man? The godfather and godmother have arrived; more relatives, about ten people, but still no dress. My wife is combing my daughter’s hair for the umpteenth time. I begin to lose my patience: ‘This is the tenth time you’re combing her hair!’ I tell her, angrily. I remonstrate that my wife has chosen the least punctual

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seamstress in the neighbourhood. And why wasn’t the dress ready yesterday? My wife does what she can to calm me down. She’s certain the dress will arrive any minute. ‘Daddy’, says my daughter, ‘I’m going to count up to a hundred and the seamstress will appear over there, you’ll see.’ She goes to the window and counts to a hundred, slowing down when she gets to the last ten. Between 98, 99, and 100, she adds long pauses. No dress in sight. Whom can I blame? My wife, naturally. And I don’t spare her my most severe remonstrations, forgetting that she has been getting up at dawn for days, so that everything would be just perfect this morning. I leave the apartment like the wind, slamming the door. ‘I’ll go’, I said, which was supposed to let my daughter know that ‘only when your father swings into action does everything go to plan, don’t forget that after God, he comes second’. I burst into the seamstress, where they’re ironing the most beautiful dress. After barely a few minutes, I leave a trail of expletives in my wake, all directed at the seamstress. She’s made me waste two minutes, insisting on sewing her shop’s label inside the dress. ‘No’, I told her. ‘What do I care about your label?’ She looked at me with such beseeching eyes that I didn’t have the nerve to take away the dress without a label. Her five-year-old daughter was there, rather scared of me, as she stared while I was flapping my arms and raising my voice against her mother. If anyone dared mortify me in front of my daughter, I would ring his neck. I’m now in the street, carrying the unwieldy parcel I’ve been asked to carry very gently, as if I were a butterfly. What I need is a taxi. I can see one in the middle of Piazzale Annibaliano. I get the impression that that young man coming from the opposite side is walking towards the taxi. I walk faster, and so does the young man. I break into a run. Damn it! He’s beaten me to it by a whisker! The young man gets into the taxi and glides away in triumph. I incense him with a look. Just one more second and we would have exchanged a few offensive words. I feel humiliated by that young man who beat me by only a second. Shall we spend a minute examining the flash of lightening in my eyes that incensed the young man? It’s a nasty flash of lightening. But so was his satisfaction at beating me to it, which he was unable to hide. But let’s resume the story. There are no other taxis in sight, so I have no choice. I have to catch a bus. The bus is crowded, naturally. Nearly everyone is wearing their Sunday best. There’s even a child wearing a large silk ribbon on his sleeve with a gold fringe. I hold the parcel high over my head, like a sacrifice. I don’t want the dress to get creased. An old man next to me is fuming, because now and then a corner of the parcel hits his head. At the first stop, the old man gets off in a hurry. He’s jogged me deliberately and the parcel almost slips from my hands. But I stop it in time, and lift it up after a miraculous balancing act. But I stick my elbow into a little man who protests. I protest that he is protesting. He shouts: ‘You should take a taxi, with a parcel that size.’ ‘It’s Easter, it’s Easter’, someone says, laughing. The laughter exasperates the little man and me. He remarks quite sharply that I have no education. I reply: ‘I have pity on you.’ As

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far as I can tell, he mumbles: ‘Clown.’ I warn him that he should thank Heaven that my hands are occupied, otherwise I would make him swallow his offensive remark. He doesn’t hesitate to declare that I am an obnoxious person. You’d think such pale men, so pale they look yellow, with eyes filled with fire, have ancient and tragic matters of honour to settle. If it worked, both men would press a button to make their opponent disappear off the face of the earth. And to think that neither one nor the other cocky man knows his opponent’s name. Does the little man have a wife and children? Whether he does or not, right now, I have the genuine desire that he disappear like a soap bubble (this morning, I want to tell all, ladies and gentlemen). I see him dead, stiff on the ground, between two candles, and his wife and children grieving. They don’t move me. Let’s continue the story. The little man gets off the bus, grumbling. When he lands on the pavement, he turns to face me – I’m already at the exit, to save seconds – and looks at me, concentrating all the resentment he can muster in a single, last, gaze – because the two of us are unlikely to meet again. And I do the same. I move my lips to the right, in a grimace in which contempt and disdain find their perfect expression. The other man’s face seems to reflect mine. We’re alone. Everyone else has gone. It’s just the two of us face to face, as if we were in the desert. The bus moves off again and the little man has the last laugh: ‘Cuckold’, he says. In vain do I try to get off the bus, all the more reason, since the little man illustrates his epithet with a gesture, in case I hadn’t heard what he had said. The bus door slams shut, with all the mechanical violence these doors are capable of, and separates me from my enemy: ‘Stop, stop’, I shout – ‘I want to get off.’ At all costs. My hands are desperately slamming the glass. ‘Stop, stop.’ The passengers protest, saying that the bus shouldn’t stop, the rules don’t allow it. I don’t want to waste a second. But the bus, after some 30 metres or so, comes to a halt, because of the red lights and the driver opens the doors, to be rid of that hooligan (me). And I get out. Oh, I so wish he hadn’t opened the doors! I would have had the time to cool down before the stop, just enough not to be so foolish as to get off the bus. I would have got home and my daughter would have come to greet me, that thin little sparrow wearing her short camisole and we would have stayed there, gently opening the parcel and her little hands would have touched the silk that cost an arm and a leg, because I wanted her dress to be the most beautiful of all and the neighbours to envy my daughter and I. But no; here I am in some street in the centre of town and I fail to hear the usual sounds of the city around me, only the crack of rifles. In a few leaps and bounds I cross the short distance between where I was standing and where the little man got off. The other beast of prey, where is he? Motorcars, bicycles and Vespas whizz past in that luminous Easter atmosphere, yet I’m not aware of them. To me, my surroundings look bleak. Where’s the little man? He can’t have disappeared. Sure enough, there he is, reading the paper he has just bought at the news kiosk. By now, his head is full of those headlines, those events, and it is clear he has already forgotten what happened three minutes earlier. He is walking into a bar, he’s going in. I speed

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up and approach the bar, with the expression you already know, and in case you have forgotten it, I’ll remind you with a long close-up.8 Though I’m beside myself with fury, I’m hardly going to slam the dress on the ground and run the risk of ruining it completely in the tussle. I tell a cripple who is dragging his feet: ‘Hold on to this parcel, just for a minute. I’ll be right back.’ The cripple looks at me, somewhat surprised, but I insist, and he opens his arms to receive the parcel. I walk into the bar. ‘Good day, sir’, the barman says immediately. I have walked past two little girls dressed in white, without even realizing it. My enemy is there, in among a dozen other clients, eating his potato crisps. The barman is pouring a glass of Vermouth. He snaps his fingers, to get rid of what little salt and fat is sticking to them. Is he thinking about me, or the potato crisps? Who knows? I move in on him, grab him roughly by the shoulder, to force him to turn around and face me. ‘Here I am’, I say. He can’t hide his fear. ‘Take back that word’, I say. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you’, he says. ‘Take back that word’, I scream. And I lift a hand that in an instant will land on my neighbour’s face. I would deserve to be photographed, while making such an appalling gesture. Be my guests: take a photograph of me. Oh, if only I could stop myself! But no, my hand gets closer and closer. Let’s watch the scene in slow motion and while the hand gets closer and closer, let’s read the verse in the Gospel and go for a stroll where I’m buried. In vain. You can hear the sound of the smack. The man would have fallen to the ground, if someone hadn’t propped him up. I’ve slapped a man for the first time in my life. If I hadn’t been involved and the scene had taken place between two other people, perhaps I would have intervened with the same words another customer in the bar is uttering now: ‘There will be another war. The world is going to pot.’ Then, we would have gone on eating potato crisps, exchanging glances with other clients, glances that mean: ‘We don’t have the pleasure of being acquainted, but we share a different upbringing, don’t we?’ Then the little man tries to kick me – but fails. I take a swing at him. They manage to pull us apart. After scanning the bar with a menacing glare, I walk out. The incident is over. Two or three people are standing outside the bar, chuckling. They tell a woman. ‘It’s nothing. Two guys had a fight. We don’t even know why.’ My enemy is explaining his version of events and every so often mumbles: ‘Scoundrel!’ He has no doubts I’m a scoundrel. He should try asking my daughter. And what about the man with the parcel? He is no longer standing where I left him. In a flash, the thought crosses my mind; a thought that stamps out all the others: the cripple has stolen the parcel. Oh, cripples, indeed! Christ said we should beware of those he has singled out. Instead of looking around me carefully, I run up and down the street, like a madman. Gone. I ask two or three people if they have seen a cripple carrying a bulky parcel. No. So I run over to a traffic policeman. I’ve got to stop at the red lights. Seconds last a lifetime. As 8

The writer weaves the instruction for a shot into the narrative, by putting the words into his narrator’s mouth.

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soon as the lights turn amber, I rush over to the policeman. He hasn’t seen him either. What should be done? * Let me tell you now what I’m going to find out in an hour’s time. A sprinkler truck came down this way a short while ago and the cripple jumped into the closest doorway to avoid the splashes. But the truck wet his trousers and a few drops of water also landed on the parcel. The man placed the parcel on the ground and cleaned his trousers with a handkerchief. Then he dried the wet patch on the parcel. After three or four minutes or so he peered out from the doorway, to check if I was leaving the bar. I’d left two minutes earlier. I didn’t see him – now you know why. While I’m talking to the traffic policeman, I’m in the middle of the road, the cripple goes back into the doorway, dabs at himself a bit more with the handkerchief and then wonders what the parcel might contain. He makes a small hole and realizes immediately what is inside. Then he sits on the pedestal supporting a column outside the doorway and keeps an eye on the bar. The column hides him from my view. After a while, because he has the impression that I’m taking too long, he gets up and goes into the bar he saw me enter. He asks where that tall and somewhat pale man has gone. The little man, who is still complaining to the barman – they have now become friends – takes a fright at the sight of that parcel appearing in the bar without its owner, whereas, earlier on, its owner was in the same spot, but without a parcel. He dreads seeing yours truly burst in again too. But he is the last person the undersigned is thinking about. Yours truly no longer feels like a lion or a jaguar, but a tiny worm, willing to crawl at everyone’s feet, if they would only agree to help him find his parcel. If I were to bump into the little man, I would beg him on bended knee to help me find the parcel. I am so mathematically certain it has been stolen, that I feel like shouting: Stop, everyone! Help me find my parcel. There’s a little girl who can’t make her First Communion – my daughter. All the little girls in the world make their First Communion, except my daughter who is there, waiting for me at the window, and every time she sees a taxi turn up, she shouts: ‘He’s here, he’s here.’ If everyone spared only five minutes to help me, the parcel would be found. What are five minutes? Spare a thought for me, brothers, think of me.

A man suddenly drops to the ground. He’s only 30 metres ahead of me. Several people stop and stand by his side; not me. He might be taken ill, he might be dead; then again, he might be someone who is genuinely hungry for change, not just pretending. But I’m looking for my parcel and what could ever distract me from this search? A dead man? Two dead men? Three? I don’t even bother to look at the growing crowd of people standing around the person on the ground. All I can do is go home and acknowledge that it was irresponsible of me to entrust that precious parcel to the first person who came along, to that horrible cripple. He has done very well for himself, it is worth more than 20,000 liras.

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As I climb up the stairs to my home, I meet some of the neighbours and their children on their way out, all dressed up for their First Communion. My response to their greetings is mechanical; I realize I’m sweating. I ring the bell. They rush to open the door. They can tell from the look on my face, more than from the fact that I’m empty-handed, that something serious has happened. My wife says: ‘the dressmaker has burned it’. I shake my head to say no. The godfather and godmother and the other guests are waiting in silence for me to speak: ‘Someone stole it’, I say. The way my wife slumps into a chair you would have thought I’d announced the death of a son. My daughter just stands there, expecting me to conjure up the dress from the floor. I walk over to the landing to keep myself from a burst of fury, but whom could I blame? I hear the sudden sound of crying behind me. So much the better: someone should cry. It’s my daughter who is crying continuously, quietly and consistently. I reflect on recent events. The root cause – I’m sure of it now – was my not getting the taxi in the big square. Even if it meant getting it with my tongue hanging out, I should have got there first. In my mind’s eye, I see the scene again, almost as if I were hoping that it could miraculously be undone. Oh, if only I had said to that young man: ‘I would be very grateful to you if you let me join you, only as far as Via Garibaldi.’ But I didn’t say it. My pride prevented me from doing so. Now, I would be encouraging the photographer to take my daughter’s picture in profile, because she’s more beautiful from that angle than head on. There’s no turning back. My daughter doesn’t stop weeping. To my right, on the next landing, Giovanni, the handyman is brushing his hat. His daughter is also making her First Communion. She and my daughter are friends, despite the big difference in social status. Giovanni is a labourer and lives in an apartment which is as large as mine, because immediately after the war, he was able to occupy it, since he was a refugee. But one of these days, they’ll evict him. ‘Now, if I offer him ten thousand liras, he’ll agree’, I say to myself, feeling taller at the sudden electrifying thought. I shall say to him: ‘Giovanni, these ten thousand liras are yours, if you lend me your daughter’s dress. She’s about the same height as mine. It’ll only need slight alterations to fit her perfectly and you can book her Holy Communion for next week.’ I tell him. Giovanni is surprised. I shall also give him plenty of cakes for his daughter and an old jacket for him. He needs to consult with his wife. He walks over to his wife who is adjusting the veil on her daughter’s head. Their daughter is a little taller than mine, her eyes are very dark against a very wan complexion, but when her face lights up in a smile, she is a dear child, almost beautiful. Giovanni is back. He explains to me that he wants the 10,000 liras immediately. ‘Sure’, I reply. I only have 5,000 in my wallet, but 300,000 in my savings book. My wife has spent more than expected, handing out tips indiscriminately. I’ll give him the money tomorrow morning. ‘No, no’, Maria – the mother – replies. ‘Immediately.’ Their daughter approaches, looking radiant and urging them to hurry: ‘Let’s go it’s getting late.’ Giovanni is embarrassed. I’m also rather embarrassed, but that weeping that still reaches my ears makes

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me overcome my embarrassment. I rush into the house, speak in private to the godfather and ask him for 10,000 liras to be returned tomorrow morning. It upsets him. Perhaps he’s thinking that the seamstress didn’t hand over the dress, because I didn’t have the money to pay the bill. I can read it in his eyes. I’m indignant, but there’s no time to express such indignation. I rush over to where two or three people are listening to the wireless. I turn it off and carry it out onto the landing to give to Giovanni as a pledge until the following day. But Giovanni isn’t there. He’s on his way down the stairs with his wife and daughter. They had got as far as trying to soften up their daughter with a certain little speech, but the daughter immediately figured out what they were about to propose, and her eyes were bulging with tears. So, then, they said they were only joking and all three went off in a hurry. I have no time to stop and admit how so dreadfully selfish I am, willing to let another girl weep, so as to see my daughter laugh. And I would have gladly heard lots of laughter and clapping to drown out the crying and hide the sound from your ears. No chance: you would have heard it all the same in the end. If I had had the 10,000 liras in cash on me, Giovanni would have given me the dress. And why didn’t I have them? Because my wife handed out tips as if they were stones. ‘It’s your fault’, I shout. We’re alone in the bedroom. At last I can shout: ‘It’s your fault, it’s your fault and your fault alone.’ In this bedroom, which has overheard so many sighs of love, all you can hear is my irate voice. My wife reacts. I’m gobsmacked. She has always put up with my outbursts like a lamb. She says I have a terrible nature and that I should be ashamed of myself to think I’m always right. She bursts out crying. Someone knocks on the door. A housemaid peeps out through the gap. I shout: ‘Do not disturb.’ ‘They’ve found a dress’, she says meekly. My wife dries her tears and dashes out. I follow her and find the women peering at an enormous silk dress. It’s a neighbour’s old ballroom dancing dress. They are saying that it will only take an hour to adjust it for my daughter. The veil will conceal its shortcomings and the veil is in the house. I can feel my heart expanding. I rush off, while a guest is complaining because she has unwittingly eaten a confetto and so won’t be able to go for Communion. The others move close and show their sympathy. As for me, I’m off to Saint Agnese, to the church, to see how things are going, if there’s an hour to spare. It really will take no less than an hour. The women have the sewing machine at the ready and all the needles, thimbles, and scissors they can find in the house. Every so often, someone goes to my daughter’s room and returns making gestures that mean: ‘Yes, yes, she’s better now, she’s calming down.’ * And I’m rushing off to Saint Agnese. The street alongside the basilica is crowded with children waiting to make their First Communion, with little processions of close family and relatives. Some arrive in a motorcar. There’s an imposing carpet stretching out from the church altar all the way down the nave and to the street. I walk into the church. It’s already thronging with people. The communicants

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are lining up in specially prepared pews. The Cardinal is due any minute. That atmosphere of joyful children, pale, but happy, those red and gold colours, increase my anxious haste, the earnest desire that my daughter should be among them. A few late comers arrive. Some priests are trying to organize the army of chattering children. The usher is lighting the last candles on the glittering altar. I keep asking everyone what time is the Cardinal due to arrive and everyone confirms that he’s here or that he’s about to get here, convinced as they are, that this is going to please me. I’m not used to church ceremonies and so I also ask if the event will begin as soon as the Cardinal arrives. I wish to speak to the Archpriest. I’m sent to the Sacristy. The Saint Agnese Archpriest is wearing holy vestments. The Sacristy is full of young priests putting on their vestments or taking them off. I stand and watch the parade of chasubles, mitres, stoles, surplices and shining monstrances. No one is allowed in there, but I brace myself and walk in. The Archpriest doesn’t know me personally, but he knows my family. I ask him if he can delay the beginning of the ceremony for a little while. He looks at me in astonishment: ‘We can only hope the Cardinal is late’, he says. Then he almost regrets such a statement. He looks at his pocket watch which he extracts clumsily from all his vestments and says that the singing will commence shortly. I dare insist, suggesting that perhaps he could think of an excuse for a delay. The priest reckons that if my daughter is not in church in quarter of an hour, there’s nothing he can do. He looks rather put out by my insistence when he leaves. Outside, there are hundreds and hundreds of children with shining black eyes in the midst of the church’s candour. I’m no believer, but this morning, perhaps I would have joined in the singing. I would have even made the sign of the Cross which I never do, because I’m not a believer. And I think that if God exists, he is bound to make the Cardinal arrive half an hour late. It would be a great opportunity to make me convert. ‘Let me see’, I say, almost aloud, ‘Give me this proof and I’m very likely to be on your side.’ I also begin to hope for a car crash. I dash out to the street, wiping off my sweat all the while. No sign of the Cardinal. In the meantime, ten more minutes have elapsed, maybe fifteen, and the alterations to the dress should be nearly done. From inside the church, the sound of the church organ reaches my ears. That’s all it takes to increase my agitation. What if I scattered nails on the road the Cardinal’s car has to take? That way, the tyres will get a puncture and then it will take the Cardinal – who is elderly – fifteen minutes to get to the church. I can see the scene: poor old man; he’s alarmed by the blast of burst tyres. He’s proceeding on foot now, followed by the Bishop and his private servant. Everyone makes way for him as he arrives. They approach him to kiss his hand, and this pleases me, because it will slow the Cardinal down by a few more seconds. But the Cardinal reaches his destination and disappears into the church. I feel hopeless. I sit down on the church steps. The whole world is inside the church; that is where life is, out here, there’s nothing but death and the rare pedestrians look like ghosts. Obviously, God doesn’t exist. In the unlikely event that he does, he hasn’t wanted to grant me

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my wish. I shan’t forget. The sound of the church organ gets louder. I would be right behind my daughter, over there, if only I’d said to the young man in the taxi: ‘Would you mind taking me to Via Garibaldi?’ * I’m so annoyed with myself that I’d like to walk down the street carrying a placard on my back with the word proud pinned to this new suit of mine I’ve been wearing with such an air of superiority. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, I shout. ‘Stop and look at this miserable man. Let me tell you without any hesitation that he snores at night and that he has four false teeth. It is high time everyone should know. Have you ever watched him eat? Notice how greedily he tucks into a cream cake.’ You try and tell him: ‘There are creatures who are suffering from hunger.’ Nothing doing, he just goes on eating, rolling his eyes towards the sky. Or try saying to him: ‘The world is full of injustice; we have to do something.’ It won’t keep him from his food. Oh, the things I could tell you about him! I can tell you, for example, that he doesn’t love you, that he doesn’t care one bit about you, that when he gets home after greeting everyone in the street like a hypocrite, he slams the front door behind him, bang, and says: ‘I don’t care if the world perishes, provided the undersigned and his family are safe and sound. Yes, you, the poor and the downcast of the world, throw stones at me, and rightly so, go ahead and chase after me with cudgels.’ I deserve to be stoned, just for the words I spoke against my wife. But she pinned me to the wall with no more than a few words: ‘The one who always wants to be right.’ Ten years ago, when I married her, I got on my knees in the garden, where you could hear the sound of birds chirping and see the flowers all around, and I told her that I would love her all my life. Instead, I treat her like a slave. Yes, yes, stone me, strike me, like that, more, more, and again!

* See this dark-faced man walking down Via Nomentana? That’s me. I’m heading home, I’m tired. Then, I hear someone call my name: ‘Carloni, Carloni.’ I turn around. The dressmaker and the cripple are coming my way. The cripple is holding my parcel. He found the dressmaker, thanks to the label – oh yes, the label. And here they are out of breath. All three of us run upstairs. While ten people are dressing my daughter, at that very moment, my wife is walking down the corridor, inspired by an unrestrainable impulse, I intercept her and kneel before her for a moment, just like in the garden ten years earlier. The housemaid sees me like that and is alarmed. She lets out a scream. A few minutes later, my daughter and I run over to Saint Agnese, with her new dress which gets its final alterations on the way there. The others can’t even keep up. They’re scattered behind us, as if we are competing in a race.

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We get to the church in the nick of time, and at the very moment the singing begins. While she is kneeling down in among the other girls, my daughter gives me an affectionate look which, I can assure you, is hard to forget. See what children are like: as far as she is concerned, I was the best of fathers even two hours ago.

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First Communion Correspondence

Context A month before Zavattini wrote the scenario and published it in October in Cinema, he wrote a long letter to Blasetti about First Communion. The letter exposes their differences, confirming his marginal scribbles in the production papers mentioned earlier. As had already happened with De Sica, the director played down the writer’s contribution to the film in public, something which Zavattini points out in his letter to Blasetti. As for the second letter, addressed to Guido Aristarco, the recipient was a prominent communist film critic and journalist who worked for Cinema magazine until 1952, when he was sacked, during a Christian Democrat government purge, which saw the director of the Rome Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia Luigi Chiarini also lose his job, as well as his editorship of its film journal, Biance e Nero. Both immediately founded their own film magazines. Unsurprisingly, Bianco e Nero abandoned serious reporting of what went on beyond, or behind, the screen, in terms of campaigning for a New Italian Cinema, under the editorship of Mario Verdone. Aristarco’s rapport with Zavattini was always ambiguous. While he published (in Milan and for years) Zavattini’s extraordinary film diary in every issue of his new magazine, Cinema Nuovo, Aristarco didn’t share Zavattini’s views on realism. Aristarco’s position was entirely in keeping with that of the Italian Communist Party officials and of party film critics (Mario Alicata, Antonello Trombadori and others), and filmmakers, including Carlo Lizzani and Giuseppe De Santis. Clearly Aristarco and Zavattini agreed to disagree. The following letter gives some background to Zavattini’s scenario First Communion, for Alessandro Blasetti which Zavattini published in Aristarco’s Cinema, only ten days after this letter was written. At the time, Blasetti had cast Vittorio De Sica, for the main role of Carloni, but subsequently, in May 1950,

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changed his mind and chose Aldo Fabrizi instead.1 As noted earlier, the practice of publishing his scenarios before the film went into production was something Zavattini began ever since his first scenario. Publication asserted authorship and gave the text its writerly status, independently from the screenplay and film. To single out a screenwriter as auteur in his own right was not a commonly held view at the time, nor is it today.2

Text 1 Dear Blasetti,3 And as for my argument with you in Venice, my explosion was caused by the fact that those notes that you handed me – which represented, as far as you were concerned, the pre-history of First Communion – were not the same ones you gave me that day you came to my home, to propose that I write a scenario. You had no plot, suggesting only a structure of two stories running parallel. Therefore, the notes you gave me in Venice contain some of my subsequent ideas, such as the idea of a confession, the genesis of which you doubtless recall. You who have stated to me, so clearly, and so warmly, that, from every point of view, the scenario is mine, when talking with your friends, you tend to contaminate this state of fact. I understand you don’t do it with malice, but your words betray you, as when you told [Armando] Falconi that First Communion was your idea. As you well know, the initial idea can be the whole thing. Or when you say, tout court, that First Communion originated in a sonnet you wrote. Here too, anyone listening could easily be fooled, not having the sonnet and the scenario to hand. Even though you are so sure – as you were in Venice – that no one will ever doubt my authorship of the story, for being so quintessentially Zavattinian, I can assure you that experience teaches me that one’s enemies grasp the least syllable or sign to inflict a wound. I should know, as I have been in this predicament before, take, for example Sciuscià and Bicycle Thieves, which don’t credit me as the author of the scenario, but I am, as far as screenplays are concerned. All you care about – you told me – is that no one should think that you chanced upon a good scenario, but you want people to know that you looked for it, you commissioned it, because you wanted to make a particular type of film, and you came to me, in so far as you knew that I was the only person who could imagine a story that coincided with your moral world, even in terms of poetic sensibility. I am quite happy to say so and to show whoever you like

Caldiron in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 125. Zavattini, ‘Prima Comunione’, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 221–4. 3 Letter to Alessandro Blasetti, 11 September 1949, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 141–3. 1 2

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the pages you brought to my home that day, stating clearly that you wanted to commission me, as a specialist of this ethical world, and, you added, its poet. Let me get to the point (and please forgive the chaotic nature of this letter, which is by no stretch of the imagination a model epistle, but I know that you will pay attention to its substance). I am requesting that you let the ill-disposed know what you told me in Venice after my – let’s call it – outburst. In other words, that the scenario is, from every point of view, the work of the undersigned and that my ensuing satisfaction, as author of the work, will be diminished by no one. If today there are already those who are whispering that the scenario is both mine and yours, you can easily imagine what will happen in a month’s time, then in three, and finally when the film will go around the world, even if my name is printed on the celluloid in block capitals, as being the sole author. You told me in Venice that you are convinced that I have no intention of humiliating you, by feeding the belief that you are no more than a mere translator, nothing more than a lowly technician of First Communion. Have I asked for my name to be credited alongside yours as co-director? Such a fear dishonours someone like you who has been making the history of our cinema for the last twenty-five years. I simply cannot believe that you give your reputation and your sphere of influence so little weight. On the contrary, as far as I know, you value them very highly. Well? It seems to me that, as director, some credit remains to you. Nothing less than the authorship of the film. I send you all my time-honoured affection and high esteem, before we get back to work tomorrow, armed with good will and hope.

2 Dear Aristarco,4 Thanks for your letter. It’s true, Venice is not the ideal venue for genuine conversations. It’s just too crowded. But we still managed to exchange some views, at least, that’s my impression. When are you coming to Rome and Via Merici? Last time you came down with Bianchi you were exhausted and could hardly keep your eyes open, despite your best efforts. I hope we meet again soon. As for the proofs, it matters to me that the scenario appears in print with all the changes I’ve made to the film. It’s a very delicate film, not easy. But I’m very hopeful. Blasetti is following the work with such understanding that reaches the point of brotherly tenderness. But I should point out that it was he who commissioned this scenario, requesting something simple and humane, because he wanted to make a film that would be similar to Four Steps in the Clouds, adding to it only his technical experience and making no demands. Indeed, he has given me all the freedom I need to make something worthwhile. Do you really want me to write a few lines of preface? Be a good man, you write them or let’s dispense with them altogether. When you have made it clear 4

Letter to Guido Aristarco, Rome, 20 October 1949, acz Corr. A290/203. Unpublished.

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that the story is mine and that Blasetti is the director and that De Sica will be interpreting the main role, and that Salvo d’Angelo is the producer, what else do you need to say? Maybe nothing more. You can add, if you like, that the undersigned is already working on the screenplay. As for illustrations, I’d pick key moments, obviously, and small-scale illustrations, 4 cm × 5 cm, actual drawings, and sharp. I wouldn’t overlook, above all, showing the thoughts, memories, hypotheses (typical ones are the slap, him [Carloni] during the war, the final stoning). But it’s two in the morning, I have just finished correcting these endless proofs and am confused for the lack of sleep. I’m going to be selfish, say goodbye, and let you sort things out. And all the best to [Adriano] Barracco.5 I’ll write very soon, when I have read your articles about Venice. Whatever you might have said, I’m certain that you have said what you think. And this, above all, is what counts, today more than ever, Yours affectionately

5

Adriano Barracco was the publisher of Cinema magazine.

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Scenario Bellissima (1950-1)

Context The first of the following texts is the most concise version of Bellissima, written after multiple drafts and major changes. It conveys the nub of the narrative so clearly, pared down to a double-sided piece of typing. The main thrust of the scenario is the Pirandellian dream of show business, the unavoidable deception of the cinema, the spectators’, avoidable, self-deception, the turning point; the moment of self-awareness and the final refusal that follows. This early draft, a version first published in 2018, is followed in this edition by the definitive scenario, based on ideas Zavattini developed between 1940 and 1942. All told, Zavattini wrote eight versions of the story. According to Lino Miccichè, Visconti is supposed to have subverted Zavattini’s scenario, creating a complex story, working on multiple levels, out of the writer’s linear narrative.1 A closer look, as recent research has established, shows that complexity is written into Zavattini’s scenario from the very beginning, highlighting as it does the behind-the-scenes production process, conflicting modes of recitation, the pulp media of popular mass-produced photo-stories and contemporary film stars, Donizetti’s opera music and Howard Hawkes’s Red River (1948), using reflexivity, staging and, finally, dramatizing the clash of fiction and reality.2 The dates reveal that the screenwriter created the central theme, in line with a recurring preoccupation in his stories published in Cinema Illustrazione from 1930 to 1935 and in his 1940s essays published in Cinema, going as far back as his Chronicles from Hollywood of the early 1930s, stories which used gentle irony to expose the spectacle of cinema and criticize early on audiences’ illusory Lino Miccichè, Visconti e il neorealismo. Ossessione, La terra trema e Bellissima, Venice: Marsilio, 1990, 196–7, 200, 208–9. According to Stefania Parigi, reflexivity emerges in Zavattini’s writing as early as the late 1920s. Cf. Stefania Parigi, Fisiologia dell’immagine. Il pensiero di Cesare Zavattini, Turin: Lindau, 2006, 170. 2 Nicola Dusi, ‘Scritture a confronto: Bellissima tra differenza e ripetizione, a partire da Zavattini’, in Nicola Dusi and Lorenza Di Francesco (eds), Bellissima tra scrittura e metacinema, Parma: Diabasis, 2017, 123. 1

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belief in the false gods of Italian stardom. It emerges, then, that Zavattini had given much reflection to the theme of cinema reflecting on itself, but conveyed through the medium of fiction, of the meta-language of cinema, in his pre-war fictional journalism, and that he was influenced more by Pirandello’s theatre than he cared to admit. In 1940, his 1930s ironic exploration of Pirandellian problematics of illusion and reality in popular visual culture reappears and in his Bellissima scenarios, he produced a condensed critical study of popular film culture and its deluded perception of mainstream cinema, teasing out the gap between imagined lifestyles and everyday life. Zavattini’s original story sets up a director like Visconti, through the figure of another director, not a fictional invention, but Alessandro Blasetti, who plays himself as a character in someone else’s story. As has recently been shown, Zavattini introduces a meta-cinematic architecture built into his scenario, strong enough to survive all subsequent variations, and the work of subsequent screenwriters; indeed, all the decisions made during the transposition from script to screen.3 Blind ambition is dashed by human understanding in Zavattini’s subversion of the happy ending stereotype, when his lead character, Maddalena, refuses the mirage of a studio contract, obtained against all odds, deciding instead to return to her normal life, now perceived differently, and valued.

Text 1 Giuliana Troni has a six-year-old daughter.4 She always says, when she mentions her: ‘She is beautiful.’ Giuliana works at the Rome Rupe Tarpea, as a cloakroom attendant. She is a feisty woman; she is the one in charge in the marriage, while her husband lacks willpower, but is very devoted to his wife, and to his daughter, Maddalena. Her husband is a watchmaker in a small shop. She is unpopular in their housing block, because they consider her too proud. One day a film casting competition is looking for a six-year-old girl. So Giuliana puts all her efforts into getting her daughter on the list. From this moment on, she is obsessed that her daughter should win the selection. Nothing is going to prevent her from winning, no action is beneath her. And so she succeeds in getting her daughter almost to the finishing line, not thanks to her daughter’s efforts, but to her own formidable will, her boundless ambition, vying even with another girl who lives in the same block of flats. Giuliana almost reaches the point where she is willing to give herself to a man working in the film

Cristina Jandelli, ‘Cerchiamo un bambino distinto. La genesi di Bellissima’, in Dusi and Di Francesco, Bellissima, tra scrittura e metacinema, Parma: Diabasis, 2018, 89. 4 This version was written in 1950. ‘Bellissima, Idea per un soggetto cinematografico di Cesare Zavattini’, acz, Sog. R 10/2, fols 45–6, published in Dusi and Di Francesco, ibidem, 315–16. 3

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industry who tricks her into believing that he can make her daughter win the competition, thanks to his contacts, just when the final selection of the winner is being decided. Since her daughter is extremely shy and lacks any particular qualities worth mentioning, she pays for someone from a drama school to coach her and she herself constantly badgers her day and night to improve her diction, and to work harder. She even goes as far as slapping her. But when she reaches the point of believing that she has won, that she has overcome all the obstacles, she finally realizes the truth: her daughter lacks talent. She comes to the realization that she has fooled herself and that other people have deceived her too. But she also gains the insight that the creature in front of her who is incapable of acting, who stutters a little, and is not even beautiful, as she tells people, is a very ordinary little girl, but her daughter, nonetheless; the pupil in her husband’s eye; the same person she wanted to launch into a career in cinema, not out of love, but motivated by her own pride and selfish love. She must admit that her husband was right. She’s ashamed of herself. When she leaves the film studios, after seven intense days of adventures that have turned her life as a cloakroom attendant upside down, all she wants to do is ask her daughter forgiveness. She doesn’t, but the little girl can feel in her mother’s gaze that everything has changed, that everything is back to the way it was in her dreams.

2 Maddalena has a six-year-old daughter, Maria. Maria is not very beautiful, but her mother always says that she’s beautiful. Maria has a slight speech impediment, though her father doesn’t consider it a flaw, but a quality.5 Our Maddalena is thirty, a very lively woman, as well as very ambitious. Her husband is called Antonio. He’s a good office worker, doesn’t say much and adores his wife and daughter. He is popular with everyone, but they like his wife less. She does things like putting ribbons in her daughter’s hair that are as large as flags and buying her clothes that are much better quality than she can afford. * One day the news of a casting competition for a role in a film creates havoc in the huge block of flats in Piazzale Annibaliano, where Maddalena lives. They’re looking for a six-year-old girl, for an important film, First Communion, directed by Alessandro Blasetti. All the mothers, especially Maddalena, immediately reach this conclusion: ‘They’re looking for my daughter.’ And Maddalena immediately takes Maria to the best hairdressers in Rome – two long hours, no, three, of suffering for the little girl, whose head becomes

5

Bellissima (1951), in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 147–54. The definitive version.

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a battlefield fought over by the overly demanding mother and the hairdresser – then on to the overcrowded tram that goes from the centre of Rome to Cinecittà film studios. Don’t be surprised, if Maddalena quarrels with the passengers who threaten to ruin the dress of precious organdis fabric at every jolt, and her daughter’s equally precious hairdo. ‘Don’t move!’ she yells at her daughter. The daughter would like to look out of the window; it’s so nice to loosen your hair in the wind. But Maddalena shuts the window, saying once again: ‘Don’t dare move!’ * At last Maddalena crosses the threshold of Cinecittà, and not without some trepidation. This is the kingdom she dreamed about. Ten years ago, Maddalena sent her photograph wearing a bathing costume to a director, and maybe it was the same one, Blasetti. * A luxury car drives past. Someone says: ‘Bergman and Rossellini’. Maddalena chases after the car. She wants to take a look. She’s dragging her daughter along, but her daughter can’t keep up. Her legs are too short. So then she runs ahead by herself. But just when she has caught up and is only a metre away from the car, the car speeds up and disappears beyond the gates. Maddalena retraces her steps, but Maria is nowhere to be found. She asks after her, along those avenues full of mothers and little girls, all the competition, including a neighbour with her daughter wearing a ribbon that is even more conspicuous than Maria’s. But then she sees Maria whimpering in a corner. Maddalena is worried now, since her daughter has red eyes and might appear to look ugly. So first she begs her not to cry and then she orders her not to, in a loud voice, while enveloping her in a cloud of talcum powder. * In the large lobby adjacent to the studio where Blasetti is meeting the children for casting, all the mothers are busy combing the daughters’ hair and singing their praises, while forcing them to perform, using what they believe are their wonderful talents. Only Maddalena stands aside, like a queen. There are also a few fathers in attendance, looking rather out of place, in the middle of such a large contingent of girls and their mothers. Every now and then, when a famous actor appears, everyone makes a beeline towards him, to ask for an autograph and flatter him with applause and words of heartfelt praise. When it’s her turn, Maria walks into the director’s office like a sacrificial victim. She’s tired of the long hours of waiting, she’s tired, because her mother forced her to wake up at an ungodly hour, in order to be among the first to get to Cinecittà; and she’s tired of listening to the constant flow of advice her mother has been cramming into her since dawn.

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Maddalena shouldn’t really be allowed in here with her daughter, since the director doesn’t want the casting to suffer from any maternal influence. But Maddalena manages to be the exception to the rule. This is because, in the corridors over there, she has met Signor Annovazzi. This is someone who brags that he is a friend of Blasetti’s and that he wields a lot of influence over him. To be fair, Blasetti does speak to him informally, and even the other actors who come and go recognize him and are friendly towards him. Maddalena gets the impression that this guy is very influential. Since she is not familiar with how the industry works, she doesn’t realize that he is nothing more than a production controller, hanging around Cinecittà and looking for a job; someone who is used to getting paid a fee in exchange of all the extras he puts forward. Meantime, Maddalena has walked in. She has been allowed to watch her daughter’s screen test. Her heart is thumping. The director gets her to run, laugh, cry, sing, jump. When Maddalena leaves the director’s office, she feels triumphant: Blasetti has included Maria in the casting shortlist. Blasetti notices the girl’s speech impediment, but Maddalena has assured him that it will disappear in a matter of days. She also tells him a whopping great lie: her daughter is unwell, which is why there is a problem with her diction. But usually her diction is very clear, perfection itself. Faced with a hurricane of reasons, Blasetti gave in. Before going back home, Maddalena wants to look around here and there, taking advantage of Signor Annovazzi’s influence. It all seems amazing and worthy of admiration. Silvana Mangano is shooting a scene in Studio 4, and Maddalena wants Silvana Mangano’s autograph so badly that Annovazzi takes her there and has no trouble getting an autograph from the actress. All this enchants Maddalena in the dim light of the studio, while she watches the scene Mangano is shooting with tearful eyes, so that she doesn’t protest when Annovazzi places his hand on her shoulder. She is too happy to react: and she thinks that if she has had to put up with a mediocre life up so far, thanks to her daughter, she will be able to achieve her ambitions. Just look at those lights glowing from above, as if they were coming from Paradise! She doesn’t even notice that there are workers covered in sweat who are tilting the lights as required. Perhaps the thought occurs to her that it won’t be easy for Maria to win, without her husband Antonio finding out. She tried to broach the subject with him and quickly got the impression that Antonio would never allow his daughter to compete in a film casting. He’s a sensible man. He falls asleep during a film and expects his daughter to go to school as normal. Antonio and the child have much in common and they understand one another. They are two simple souls. * The week that separates Maddalena from the day of her daughter’s actual casting is thus a week of passion.

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Maddalena is convinced that when the time comes to say to her husband: ‘Your daughter has been judged the most beautiful and talented in Rome and is going to earn so much money’, Antonio will feel proud and embrace her. But under no circumstances should she tell him in advance, because she wouldn’t put it past him to ruin such a wonderful occasion. As the girl won’t be able to attend school, she’ll have to make sure that her husband doesn’t find out. She takes her to the Voice Therapy Institute in Monte Sacro. After two or three lessons, they tell her that it is going to take much longer to get rid of Maria’s slight lisp that her father finds so cute. Maddalena disagrees. She attends a lesson herself, and for the first time in her life, strikes her daughter who continues to repeat the words adding that ‘s’ the director does not want to hear. But our Maddalena won’t give up. All the more reason not to, because her neighbour is going around the neighbourhood telling everyone she is sure that victory will be hers, because her daughter moves with the grace of a ballerina. So then Maddalena takes her daughter to the Ruskaia School of Ballet and somehow expects her daughter to be transformed into a feather in a matter of days. Then she gets another big idea: she hires a retired actress to train Maria at home. It goes without saying that she has to find a good excuse for her husband. To this end, she fires her poor old daily help, after a big scene out of the blue. Then she tells him the old actress is her substitute, getting more and more caught up in her web of lies to Antonio. Maria also has to tell lies when her father asks her about her progress at school: that same father who doesn’t even remotely suspect what is going on behind his back, although he finds it odd that his wife’s kindness towards the new servant extends to washing the dishes and even sweeping the floor herself. * The waiting is over, the big day has finally come. Yet another early rise, a journey to Cinecittà, and the usual struggle for Maria who never complains, because she is afraid of her mother. There, inside the huge Studio 5, the director has at last begun the screening tests, assisted by the exceptional Aldo Fabrizi, who will play the main role in the film. All the candidates are expected to act out a scene of the film with [Aldo] Fabrizi, and Maddalena tries to befriend him, using flattery. She even fans his face, when she thinks he is feeling hot. But Fabrizi is rude to her. Maddalena almost faints she feels so upset, but then Fabrizi strokes the child and this gives Maddalena some hope. Who if not her own daughter is going to be the chosen one? Annovazzi encourages her to go on hoping, while he accompanies her right outside her front door and extracts the promise of a date from her. * Now that the screen tests are over, the old actress can go, and the previous maid is reinstated there and then. This game of dice surprises Antonio, but his

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wife manages to find convincing excuses. Antonio is ready to believe anything. Maybe this is why he makes Maddalena feel so uneasy. Maddalena is so impatient that she wants to see the screen test results before the others. She’s not getting any sleep, and when she does, her husband says that she keeps tossing and turning. No, no she can’t wait three days. And it’s Annovazzi, as usual, equipped with magical powers, who lets her have her way, and takes her to Fono Roma, where she can see her daughter’s screen test on the moviola. This is a big favour. Maddalena will have to acknowledge that. Later, they will go for a walk in the Pincio. When Maddalena and Annovazzi are watching Maria’s screen test in the editing room, thanks to an accommodating friend of Annovazzi who has let them in, Maddalena lets him keep his hand around her waist. And nothing more. But she is made to swear – and this time Annovazzi makes her swear, that tomorrow they will most definitely go to Annovazzi’s apartment. He makes it clear that if she doesn’t keep her word, Maria will most certainly not be selected. For the time being, he settles for a kiss and Maddalena, confined in a lift which Annovazzi has stopped in mid-air between floors, is compelled to give him the kiss. * Maddalena has been spending lots of money. She sends Maria’s portrait shots and flowers to the director, to the producer, to the producer’s lover, to the producer’s wife, and tries in vain to become friends with the director’s wife, getting her hair done at the same hairdresser, where she saw this woman walk in. She has taken Maria to the best portrait photographers in Rome, but the little child was too tired to smile for the camera. Maddalena is not the only mother waiting for news. All the other mothers are just as foolish as she is, including her direct rival, the neighbour, with whom she has just picked a quarrel, in which she nearly said more than she wanted to say, and when her husband has just come home, Maddalena is about to come to blows with her opponent on the communal stairs. * Tomorrow is the big day and Maddalena couldn’t be more agitated waiting for it in anticipation. Annovazzi, after any number of phone calls, has appeared right outside her front door, to remind her that he is waiting for her in his apartment. And Maddalena has had to agree to at least go as far as the Pincio with him. It hasn’t been easy resisting Annovazzi’s advances, there, on the grass, near the fountain, because Annovazzi knows full well that when the party is over, it’s all over, and so he wants to get everything now. But Maddalena manages to convince him that she is so romantic she can only become a prey to the senses little by little. We have finally reached the supreme moment. No one is allowed into the room where the director is judging the twenty screen tests. But Maddalena

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squeezes into the projection room with the agility of a cat and the complicity of the projectionist and from there she can see everything. A little earlier, she was offered a walk-on part, on the spot, in a Totò film they’re shooting. It was a very exciting moment. But then she had to rush off to hear if Maria made it. Now Maddalena is here with a fixed expression watching all those little girls through the glass, repeating the same scene: ‘Take 24. First Communion.’ At long last, we get to the footage with the scene recited by Maria. ‘Take. 1. First Communion, Maria Venini.’ Maddalena is standing there, very much on edge. She hears the director’s remarks. They’re awful. Annovazzi, who has been hired by Blasetti that same day, as props master, and is no longer interested in Maddalena, wastes no time in agreeing with Blasetti. He doesn’t know that Maddalena is listening. Actually, Maria’s test is among the worst. When the footage ends, the lights are turned on and the director confirms what he thinks with harsh words and Annovazzi spells it out. At this point, Maddalena has a violent reaction and from the projectionist’s cabin she screams it’s a Camorra conspiracy and many other things. In the end, they have to kick her out. * Now she and her daughter are alone in those avenues of Cinecittà, where poor, exhausted extras meet for a sandwich, dressed in all kinds of attire. Yes, her daughter lacks any special qualities and there are 100,000 as beautiful as she is, and more beautiful still. Maddalena also comes to realize something else: that it was only ambition that led her to do such stupid things; going so as far as to admit that she has been torturing her daughter. She is ashamed for what she has done; she daren’t even look at Maria who is skipping alongside her in silence. Mother and daughter get on a tram taking them back to Rome. Maddalena curls up in a corner near her daughter. She would like to ask her forgiveness, hear her voice with that lisp. A gust of wind comes through the window. Maria looks out, but isn’t allowed to lean out. Maddalena tells her to lean out, and says it again, and the child doesn’t believe her at first, but then she does and leans out. Maria is happy. Maddalena also leans out and is close to her daughter, while the first raindrops blend with a couple of tears on her face.

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‘The origins of Umberto D.’ (1951)1

Context After publishing the scenario of Umberto D. in August 1951, Zavattini went on to document its genesis in December of the same year, in Cinemundus.2 He drew attention to the fact that two of the characters, the young housemaid and the woman renting out rooms, were built on his personal recollections, as well as revealing the haphazard and fictional basis of Umberto D.

Text To relate the genesis of the story of Umberto D., I should start from the year 1948. The first idea that came to me was that of an old man who had a dog, yes, but, above all, a daughter. It was out of love for her that he went as far as thinking of crime. Then the daughter disappeared from view, which left the old man and his dog and then the landlady came into existence. If my memory doesn’t fail me, the landlady character was inspired by an event that moved the whole of Italy: to avoid being sued, let me just say that the landlady in that case was so hard-hearted that she drove her lodger to commit suicide. Real-life events also inspired me to create the character of the young housemaid. When I left Milan and moved to Rome in 1940, I lived in a rented room and got to know this housemaid who used to phone soldiers stationed in a number of army barracks in Rome during the day, but even at night, and get involved with soldiers from different regiments. She was a good person, honest and somewhat empty-headed. If anyone would like to know the reason for the title, here it is. There was no rhyme or reason to the title. It came from nowhere. It was a title and I liked it a lot. I later tried to justify it. My character was called Umberto Domenico Ferrari, but his modesty dictated that he should be content with signing himself as Umberto D. Ferrari. 1 2

Zavattini, ‘La genesi della storia di Umberto D.’, Cinemundus, xxx, no. 13, December 1951. Zavattini, ibidem.

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Umberto D. in Zavattini’s diary (1948-51)1

Context The entry for 30 March 1951 of his cinematic diary reveals the growing friction over authorship between Zavattini and De Sica. In the press, the director would often belittle, or pass under silence, the screenwriter’s work. This eventually soured their relationship, but only De Sica’s death stopped their collaboration.2 Zavattini’s response was vigorous, both in the press and, in the case of Umberto D., he published the treatment, before the film was released and later in book form. The book contained scenario, treatment, screenplay and an extended text, based on a series of interviews over several months, made by Michele Gandin, Cinema Nuovo editor and documentary filmmaker.

Text 16 December 1948. I dictated to Mario to lodge a copy of the film about the old man and the gentle dog – so sad I can hardly stand it myself, with the Society of Authors. We shall see who will direct it. * 18 December 1948. I tell De Sica my scenario The Man and His Dog. He really likes it. He wants me to keep it in store, in case Totò the Good is held up in production.3 (I agreed, but I can’t keep quiet about it. This very day I spoke to Emmer, Gatti and Fellini, and will carry on doing this; I can’t help it. I enjoy it.). We talk about our fathers. He tells me about the tailor who grabbed his father by the lapels. I told him about my father who only a few days before he

Zavattini, Private Diary, 16 December 1948, in Paolo Nuzzi and Ottavio Iemma (eds), De Sica & Zavattini. Parliamo tanto di noi, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997, 174, 194. 2 Cf. De Sica & Zavattini. Parliamo tanto di noi documents the tense relations between director and screenwriter. 3 The film in question is Miracle in Milan. 1

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died, pulled up his bed sheets over his face and cried in front of the creditors who were standing over his bed. * Diary. 30 March 1951. Benedetti, who works for L’Unità, sends me the text for an interview he conducted here in my place with De Sica, to ask me if he may have inadvertently made some factual errors. He says he is sending De Sica the same piece. When I read the interview, I am gobsmacked. According to the interview, not only did De Sica inspire me, as regards its social content, but it is no less than the story of De Sica’s father. Indeed, the interview claims that the film’s title is Umberto D., that is, Umberto De Sica. In the face of such manipulation of reality, I get on the phone, ask to speak to De Sica and tell him I have to speak to him as a matter of urgency. De Sica comes over and I tell him that Umberto D. is going the same way as Miracle in Milan and Bicycle Thieves, that is to say, yet another attempt to deprive me of, or lessen the extent of, the authorship of the work. I go on to tell him that at Rossetti bookshop they are beginning to say that the scenario isn’t mine, but the story of De Sica’s father. De Sica listens and then says: ‘We can sort this out straight away.’ He takes a sheet of paper and writes: ‘Dear Albani, please ask ansa to publish this news item: De Sica’s new film Umberto D. is about to go into production. The scenario and screenplay are by Cesare Zavattini.’ I look at him without hiding my surprise. I object that a press release of this kind changes nothing. It doesn’t address the problem which is that it is necessary to deny anything incorrect that might find its way into print. So then he says: ‘Well, alright. Then we need a good journalist who can explain exactly how things stand; Prosperi, for example.’ I tell him I agree, but not a word from him to explain how it happened that he told Benedetti the whole story of Umberto D. in such a misleading way. Yet another disappointment for me. On his way out, he tells me that we must meet urgently for a long conversation about our future plans. He says it will take a whole afternoon, because he wants to go to Cannes with a clear picture in mind. In other words, as I see it, I’m supposed to relate the two or three stories I have already told him which he wants me to explain in more depth, so that he can go to Cannes and tell René Clair he is thinking up a story which I would then write up. This is all so absurd that it is even stupid. * Diary. 25 May 1951. I’ve completed the screenplay for Umberto D. I’m glad I decided three major cuts. It is, however, a film that should have been shot before Miracle in Milan – now it’s rather behind.

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Scenario Umberto D. (1951)1

Context Umberto D. is one of the canonical Neo-realist films which is neither about the war nor the Resistance. This unsentimental film is generally taken to mark the end of Neo-realism, but Zavattini wrote the first draft of the scenario on 16 December 1948, earlier than Miracle in Milan, which was only completed in February 1950, following the film adaptation of his 1940 story Totò il Buono.2 Umberto D. went into production in the summer of 1951, immediately after Miracle in Milan won the prize at the Festival of Cannes. Jean Cocteau was the first to congratulate De Sica, but nobody came forward to fund Umberto D. In the event, De Sica funded it mostly himself.3 When De Sica told the publisher and producer Angelo Rizzoli the story, the response was frank: ‘You must be mad!’ Rizzoli had other plans for De Sica, hoping to persuade him to direct a film in the popular Don Camillo series.4 However, eventually he agreed to fund the film, together with another producer.5 The story first appeared in print in Teatro Scenario, on 15 August 1951.6 From the very beginning, Zavattini alludes to the fact that Umberto, the lead character, stands for a class of people, not the typical Soviet realist heroic figure, but the Neo-realist anti-hero, who can be a lower-middle-class office clerk on the bread line, such as the lead character in Umberto D. or the office clerk in Alberto Lattuada’s The Coat (Il cappotto) which Zavattini adapted from a short

Zavattini, Umberto D., Parma: Monte Università Parma Editore, 2005, 27. Zavattini, Io. Un’autobiografia, 161. 3 María Mercader, in Nuzzi and Iemma (eds), De Sica & Zavattini. Parliamo tanto di noi, 188. 4 Mercader, ibidem, 189. 5 Mercader, ibidem, 190. 6 Zavattini, ‘Umberto D. di Zavattini’, Teatro Scenario, iv, nos. 14–15, 15 August 1951, 47–54. Zavattini, Umberto D., dal soggetto alla sceneggiatura, Milan and Rome: Bocca, 1953, now in Zavattini, Umberto D., 2005. 1 2

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story by Nicolai Gogol.7 The character Umberto D. shares his predicament with many others, as in the opening scene among pensioners protesting for better pensions suggests. But his humanity is conveyed through an almost obsessive phenomenological treatment of invented situations which accentuate his loneliness, played out in the real environment. His loneliness and the lack of solidarity he suffers is more in evidence in the early working title, A Man and his Dog.

Text What is it like to be an old man? ‘Old men stink’, a boy once said. I fear that many people share the same view, even though they have never uttered such a cruel sentence. Am I exaggerating? I want to tell you the story of an old man and I hope that by the end you won’t say I made it up. His name is Umberto D. He is sixty with a smile on his face, because he loves life so much that he struggles with the government that refuses to raise his measly pension. So don’t be surprised if we meet him at an orderly protest demonstration of pensioners walking crossing town with placards saying: we only want the bare necessities to stay alive

But the police have been given the order to bar the pensioners’ way and so the demonstrators are trying to break through their line. There’s a scuffle. Nothing serious, luckily. Our Umberto flees down a side street, relying on his somewhat worn out legs; almost regretting his own daring, surprised, certainly. On the corner, he meets other old people who are running, and they all take shelter in a doorway. They’ll make another attempt some other time they say. Hope sustains them. They have toiled for thirty or forty years, showing loyalty to the State, bending their backs in the hope of a distant dream of a carefree old age. Instead, their old age is full of humiliations. * Umberto’s landlady rents out rooms. She rents them out by the hour, and you know what that means: the punters are lovers, adulterers, elderly men with young girls or young men with older women. Umberto has a nice room all to himself. He has been renting it for years. But the new landlady would like to evict Umberto, whom she only addresses in order to offend him. What makes matters worse is that Umberto has a dog and Signora Antonia hates the dog, because she hates its owner. It’s a mongrel, completely devoted to Umberto.

7

Mino Argentieri, ‘Uno dalle mezze maniche da Pietroburgo a Pavia’, in Lino Miccichè (ed.), Il cappotto di Alberto Lattuada. La storia, lo stile, il senso, Turin: Lindau, 1995, 57–68.

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Umberto loves it as if it were his own son. In the evening, Umberto sits by the window and the dog curls up at his feet. The window gives out over roofs, landings, terraces and a large dome. It is the dome of a picture house. When the dome opens, different sounds come out, the voice-overs of a Settimana Incom newsreel or the sounds of a feature film. Whereas, from the rooms nearby come laughter, sighs, and tears, and the old man dares look through the keyhole, not because he likes shameful things, but out of a deeper sort of curiosity. He wants to look in the face the main characters of the love adventures who appear and disappear in that apartment like meteorites. Signora Antonia is not ugly, but all she values is her personal gain and the men she fancies. She is always head over heels in love with someone or other, though she is cautious as to how much she abandons herself before the world, with the exception of the old man whom, on the contrary, she goes out of her way to shock, to make him leave. There is also a twenty-year-old house maid, a country girl, who is loosening her moral standards, what with leaning out of the window to talk to the Carabinieri from the military barracks opposite, whom she secretly lets into the apartment. Umberto lives among these women. He is constantly faced with the same problem: his problem is eating; the more time goes by, the less there is to eat. The press and the political parties have promised him that pensions will go up. He believes it and sometimes he stops by in Piazza Montecitorio, to see if there is any change, under the delusion that that same day, the topic of increasing pensions will come up for discussion and be resolved during the parliamentary debate. He cannot believe that they don’t realize that a week’s delay can mean death, or, if we don’t want to exaggerate, it could lead to who knows what further sufferings for an old man. It so happens that Umberto is in arrears, and, if he doesn’t pay up, one of these days, Antonia will be well within her rights to dump his suitcase outside the front door. And where will he go? And just the other day, his last source of extra income has come to an end. The old man taught a few hours a week in a school for the illiterate, people with beards and moustaches. But when discussions and quarrelling over politics began among these pupils, the school was shut down. Unless he wins the lottery, the rest of his life is going to be very tough going. * One morning, Umberto feels ill, but doesn’t want to admit it. Only when he has no choice, does he decide to go to hospital. The landlady won’t even give him a glass of water and the maid, who is not such a bad person, has her head in the clouds, because she notices that she is pregnant. But which of the two Carabinieri is the father? She doesn’t know. It’s best to go to the hospital, the old man says to himself. He asks the maid to look after his dog and here he is, our Umberto, in a hospital ward. Everyone complains here. They say that the food isn’t enough. They want to organize a loud protest. The patients wander around those plotting in their nightshirts, or their striped pyjamas in the unkempt gardens and wards. Umberto thinks they’re right, but he would make do with

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the little he is given, because in this place he eats at least three times a day. And he will pretend to be worse than he is, to stay there a few more days. * The patients decide to go on hunger strike. They block the access to the wards, preventing the male nurses from coming in. Even Umberto must join in, when they barricade the doors. But when the fire brigade is called in, the Rebels are beaten immediately. Of course, all the patients who have taken part in the protest – except those who are not seriously ill, obviously – are discharged. * Umberto D. goes home carrying his small suitcase. On the stairs, he meets a young lad carrying a sack. The sack begins to bark. The dog is inside. They are taking him to the river on the landlady’s orders. The old man becomes as fearless as a lion. He chases after the boy and frees the dog. When the landlady sees the two of them before her, she says that he has twenty-four hours to settle all his arrears, otherwise a new tenant is going to move in. Umberto understands that this time it really is going to happen. He has nothing left to sell. Little by little, he has sold all he had. Not that he would need a large sum, only a few thousand liras. He could ask for a loan. Ask whom? There are hundreds of thousands of people living in the city, but when we need to ask for a loan it seems deserted. At midday, Umberto goes to the Ministry where he used to work for so many years. He is waiting for the employees to come out for their lunch break. Some still remember him. Whom should he ask for a loan? This one? That one? He follows one for quite a while, and at last decides to cross his path and he talks about something completely different. My God, how difficult it is. He would like to approach an old friend of his, but sees him turn his gaze in another direction, with circumspection. He left a message that he is not in the office, because he has understood what Umberto wants from him. * The smile on Umberto’s face begins to disappear, above all for what it costs him to admit defeat, faced with a woman like Antonia. He would even go as far as doing a bad deed, just to have enough money to give it to his nemesis, with an air of indifference, as if he had plenty of it. Then she would no longer be able to evict him. * He is even prepared to go as far as begging. He gazes at beggars for a long while, working out how much they earn a day, and learns that some pitches are more lucrative than others. He chooses a neighbourhood that is very far from

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his own and finally takes the plunge. Umberto leans against a wall the way beggars do, along a quiet street. He stretches out his hand in such a way that it might seem that he is not stretching it out. The dog is playing with a stone nearby. A few people go by without giving him anything, then someone walks up to him who catches Umberto by surprise. Umberto is acquainted with him. He lives in his same street. Umberto greets him with excessive enthusiasm and forces him to have a coffee with him in the nearby coffee bar, to prove that he is in need of nothing at all, just in case he might have any suspicions. Then he goes to a cheap restaurant. But the reason he goes to the restaurant is that the dog gets a meal every day and for a long time the restaurant has been giving the old man leftovers for his dog. As he is walking down the street, in a rather confused frame of mind, he is suddenly approached by a man who yells: ‘Don’t turn round. Keep walking.’ The man’s face is so expressive that Umberto walks on. He keeps walking and when he finally turns around, he is distant and he sees a group of actors acting out a scene in the street being told what to do by a film director. He is tired. Should he go back home? On his way out, he told the landlady: ‘I’ll pay up.’ But he can’t. He only has 2,000 liras in his pocket and there are several days to go before his pension cheque is due to arrive. That’s right, he thinks. I have no choice but to commit suicide. At that moment he is standing still and narrowly escapes being run over by a car. ‘Should I throw myself from the top of the Pincio?’ He goes to the Pincio – not that it would be his first choice for suicide. He looks down the steep wall and grimaces. A rather worn out prostitute smiles at him. Perhaps Umberto would like to spend an hour or so of bliss before departing from this beautiful earth; maybe he would like to have fun and spend all his money. He sits next to the woman. She wants to take a horse-drawn cab. In the cab, the woman begins to fondle Umberto who feels embarrassed, because of some boys laughing at him, as they watch the girl caressing him. He pays the cabbie, gets out of the cab, and walks down the Pincio slope towards his home, followed by the dog. * It’s dark. Umberto is sitting in his room, by the window. The all-enveloping silence is broken only by the sound of the dog gnawing at his bone. He gets up, puts on his best pyjamas, writes a dirty word on the wall for the landlady, tidies up his room meticulously, while the sounds and the words of the Settimana Incom newsreel waft in through the window. Then he begins to prepare strips of paper to stop the gaps. He plans to kill himself in the kitchen. It’s very small and it will be easier, and all done soon. * He walks into the kitchen, turns on the gas to check it. The landlady has heard him moving around. She appears in her flip flops. The old man has turned off the gas in a hurry and is now pretending to drink a glass of water. The landlady

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sniffs the air, then goes back to her room, after switching off the kitchen light, to annoy him. The old man waits a little, then, taking the greatest care, goes back to filling the door gaps with paper. But then the dog begins to scratch at the door. Umberto has forgotten his friend. He opens the door and the dog jumps up to him enthusiastically. How can he abandon his dog in that apartment where they would gladly shove him in a sack and dump him in the river? He removes the strips of paper, wipes off the offensive word from the wall and puts off the whole plan until tomorrow. Before he leaves this earth, he must think of the dog and its future. * The next day he rises early and goes to the kennels to find out how things work. It’s bad news. At the kennels, they kill them, using gas, in exactly the same way as he would do, to kill himself. He heads for the park. Everyone knows him there. The dog is well-known. Perhaps one of those wealthy families will take him. Sure enough, a little girl would like to have him, but not her mother. There is a scene and the little girl cries a lot. The dog is paddling in the fountain, surrounded by paper boats. The old man has an idea. He will leave without being seen by the dog and end it like that. But he lacks the courage to walk away, so he hides behind the trees and watches. After a while, the dog pricks up his earls and looks for his owner. He looks for him everywhere. The owner gives in and shows himself. The dog barks with joy. * And what if they were to die together, he and the dog? There is a level crossing nearby. The old man goes in that direction, with the dog in his arms and stands there waiting and chatting to the railwayman. A less distracted observer than the railwayman would notice that the old man’s face is very pale and that his reasoning is rather confused. People come and go across the rails, on foot, in a car, on a bicycle, and the barrier slowly comes down and you can hear the distant noise of the train coming. But the dog is nowhere to be found. The old man put him down a minute ago. It has peed and chased a bitch. The old man starts looking for him. We could say that he is panicking. There he is. He whistles to tell him to come close and the dog runs towards him. He picks him up again and gets closer to the rails. The railwayman is holding the flag and resumes his conversation with the old man. His face is the colour of wax, his eyes locked into a fixed stare. The train appears in the distance. The old man is trembling, he hugs the dog with all his might, so hard that the dog struggles free and moves even further apart. Then he freezes and turns to face his master. Could it be that the dog has understood? The train flashes past behind the old man stirring dust and wastepaper. The dog has disappeared in among the trees. Now it is the dog’s turn to go and hide. The old man looks for him everywhere, whistling for him to come. At last he finds him, and the dog lets his master get close. The master

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seems to feel shame in the beast’s presence. He was about to do something really bad, he feels guilty, as if he had tried to snuff out the life of a human being. The old man picks up a pine cone from among the grass and throws it far away. The dog rushes to catch it and retrieves it for his master. Some boys are kicking a tin can around and stop for a moment, watching that old man running so fast among the trees and playing with the dog.

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Treatment Umberto D. (1951)1

Context The treatment of Umberto D. was first published in Teatro Scenario in August 1951. This translation is based on this text, including its introductory paragraph, later dropped from the book version of 1953. It also includes the screenwriter’s commentary, later dropped from the book edition of 1953. Zavattini’s commentary sheds light on the writing process and all the changes from text to screen. Clearly, the treatment expands on the scenario. What is surprising is that where it would be reasonable to expect a more complex literary style, Zavattini adopts the very same parataxis used for the story, in which sentences are mostly linked with a series of ‘ands’, and a few, rare ‘buts’. These conjunctions pare down communication to its simplest form, dispensing with the complexity of qualifiers, such as ‘ifs’, ‘buts’, for example. Why is this? Zavattini tends to use this literary strategy for many, if not all, his scenarios. This feature can be traced back to the 1931–41 raccontini phase of his writing. It would seem that the choice of dispensing with a more complex syntactical structure facilitates the phenomenological, apparently purely descriptive style which produces situations seemingly devoid of any all-knowing author commentary, in a kind of simulation of real-world perception and experience. Zavattini creates a bond with the intended reader with the use of ‘we’; ‘we’ stands for you and I, screenwriter and director, but also, ‘we’, meaning the intended viewing audience. ‘We’ see and experience what the character sees and does. This phenomenological ‘companionship’ occurs first in the writing, then in the moving image.

1

The introductory notes precede the treatment. Cf. ‘Umberto D. di Zavattini’, 47.

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Text Cesare Zavattini created and wrote the scenario Umberto D., towards the end of 1948 and, from it, the treatment we are publishing here, in the spring of 1950. The first version of the screenplay was completed in the autumn of the same year and it was followed by the final, approved, version made last winter, to which Vittorio De Sica also contributed. As the footnotes added by Zavattini show, in the course of its development, the treatment underwent several changes, before reaching the final stage that Vittorio De Sica is currently filming. * One beautiful autumn day a strange demonstration crosses the streets of Rome. There are between 500 and 600 people, perhaps more, each with a dog on a lead, people of all ages and all walks of life. They are serious, disciplined, and the dogs are just as well behaved as their owners. The march heads for Piazza Venezia, amid the curiosity of bystanders. We can’t grasp what it is about. When we get a sight of the Altar of the Peace in the distance, we surmise that the cortège is heading that way for a celebration, but no; it turns right and climbs the steps of the Campidoglio instead. But suddenly, at the top of the stairs, a police squad is advancing towards the demonstration. The march comes to a halt. The policeman in charge says they can’t go up to Piazza del Campidoglio. Many of the protesters are remonstrating, shouting, pushing. They want to keep moving forward. So then the police have no choice but to stop them by force. There’s a scuffle accompanied by the sound of barking dogs. One guy gets up on the pedestal of a statue and begins to heckle the crowd, while the police withdraw to the top of the stairs, to wait and see. The speaker uses pathetic words to let us know that these people represent all the dog owners of Rome. They have come here in protest against a new tax, aimed at dog owners. The protesters decide to send a committee to meet the mayor. Six spokesmen are chosen, one of whom is a man about seventy with a kind face and a lively gaze. The old man, who is the most embarrassed among them, tries to extricate himself from the job. He even swears that he thinks he might have a temperature. ‘Feel my pulse’, he says, then adds that, anyway, he is no good at public speaking, since he is only a simple primary school teacher, a former teacher, now retired. But the others insist and drag him into the Campidoglio. The dogs belonging to the six are left in the care of the others. Our old man is reluctant to abandon his mongrel and as he keeps walking away, again and again he turns around to face the dog and gesticulates to reassure him that he will be coming back soon. * An official receives the six ambassadors in the municipal corridors. The mayor isn’t here. And there is no sign of the accountant who deals with dog tax. One

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of the six, the most eloquent, begins to explain his arguments excitedly. ‘Do you want us to drown our dogs?’, he asks, in a loud voice. Meanwhile, wedding couples walk by and some of them stop in their tracks, when they reach our group. The photographers whose job it is to take pictures of newly-weds in the Campidoglio begin taking pictures and don’t spare the old man, who is alarmed by the flashes. At last, the official convinces the spokespeople to leave, assuring them that the mayor will meet with them in a few days’ time. In the meantime, he will convey their requests to the mayor. Could they please leave their name and surname, so that they can be sent the invitation to the meeting. And each of the six leaves his name. ‘My name is Umberto Domenico Ceruti’, says the old man. And while the scribe is writing, he adds with a little modesty: ‘It is unnecessary that you write out Domenico in full. D. is good enough, Umberto D. Ceruti.’ * The old man and his comrades walk down the stairs where they are met by the sound of applause. But their news isn’t welcome and the clapping turns into catcalling and widespread complaining. There is nothing more they can do. They have to split up. Even our Umberto D. walks off, with his dog, while the noon siren wails (1).2 * The old man and the dog walk into a soup kitchen in Via Nazionale, crowded with people who can barely make ends meet, the lowest ranking office workers, labourers and people out of work. The old man joins the others at a table, but he is not hungry. He hands the coupon to the waiter who brings him his dish. He gives it to the dog, but on the sly, because letting dogs eat out of the soup kitchen’s plates is severely forbidden. When the waiter comes over to collect his plate, Umberto D. collects all the dishes on the table, seemingly, to help him. The waiter thanks him, not knowing that our old man is only doing it to hide the fact that his plate is missing. Then Umberto D. tells the person sitting next to him that he doesn’t feel well. The man takes his pulse and asks the others for their opinion. They all start talking about diseases. Someone rolls up his trouser leg to show his varicose veins. Someone else is just about to take off his jacket to show an ancient wound, but Umberto D. gets up to go, disgusted and afraid.

2

Zavattini’s footnote [1] in Teatro Scenario, 47: ‘What follows here is a summary of the main changes to the story in the development from treatment to screenplay. For example, you won’t see this unusual protest march, but old people protesting for an increase in their pension. The police break up the unauthorized march, and those old pensioners scatter this way and that, alarmed by the sound of the sirens coming from the jeeps. I hasten to add that Umberto D. is no longer a former primary school teacher, but a public servant, perhaps a janitor from one of the government Ministry buildings.’

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Umberto D. exits the soup kitchen in the company of another old man whose appearance is very shabby. ‘Wonderful sunshine!’ they exclaim, as soon as they are in the street. Umberto says the world is beautiful, and if only they would increase his pension a little, he would be happy. They are chatting away, by the time they approach Piazza Esedra. Every so often, they stop outside a shop window. Umberto says he can understand how strange life is, judging from the cost of a tie. A good tie costs 1,500 liras and he can live on that amount for four days. They get lost in figures and statements. Not far from where they are standing, two cars have just collided. There are no casualties, but there is a great deal of damage and so many people crowding round. The lights are smashed. The old men take a look and carry on with their calculations. ‘The value of a single headlight would keep me going for a year’, Umberto D. says. His interlocutor doesn’t believe him. So they set off to find out how much a headlight costs. They go and ask the owner of the car that suffered the most damage. He gives them a figure and they walk away, still working it out aloud, as if nothing had happened behind them. Our Umberto D. insists that he would be content with living just another five years; he would like to die in 1955 and since he spends 250,000 liras a year, the price of one of those motorcars would be enough to keep him going until the Day of Judgement. Talking of which, today, Umberto D. is not feeling at all well. He is shivering. Then the other man lets him know that there’s a bad flu going around. It attacks the throat first with white plaques and you must drink a lot of wine. While he is talking or listening, Umberto often checks his dog that is trotting along, now on the left side, now on the right, but always running back to his master, when noisy vehicles get too close for comfort. The dog’s name is Dick and once he was run over by a motorbike. The other man says that he used to have a dog too, but he’s had to sell it out of necessity. Umberto D. cannot understand how one could do such a thing and sneaks a look at his companion, as if he were trying to figure out what this person who sold his own dog is really like. At one point, near the Planetario, the old man stops walking. He says he is a beggar. That is what he does for a living and this is a good spot, where you can make a tidy sum every day. He shares a few insights about begging as a job, and then they say goodbye. They agree to meet again the next day at the soup kitchen. Umberto turns around and sees his companion leaning against the wall, as still as a statue, while he waits for the coin to drop (2).3 *

3

Zavattini’s footnote [2] in Teatro Scenario, 48: ‘In the screenplay, what will change in our Umberto D.’s relations with the beggar? He sells him his watch and in exchange the beggar gives him all the small change he collected in his hat. This was after Umberto D. had failed to sell his watch earlier, when he sheltered behind a jeep with other old aged pensioners and then in the soup kitchen.’

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Umberto lives near the Old Mint, only a short distance away from the imposing wall of Termini railway station and next door to a cinema. His building is a tall, old building with a long staircase. He doesn’t usually go home at this hour, but he really does feel a little cold; he thinks he has caught goodness knows what illness and this is why he is heading home. He crosses a short corridor and walks into his own lodging, followed by the dog. But he has only just opened the door when he hears a scream. A couple is lying on his bed. He is a handsome young man. She is a forty-year-old woman who is quite attractive. The two are quick to get out of bed, naked as they are. The old man doesn’t know what to say. He is even more confused than they are. He mutters that it is his room; it really is. He retreats to the corridor, while the dog is barking. A sensual looking woman, she must be in her mid-thirties, suddenly appears at the far end of the corridor. She is fairly good-looking, but has a nasty attitude. She asks him why he has come back at this time. ‘Because I don’t feel so well’, Umberto D. replies, scowling as he looks at his room. ‘If you are thinking of complaining’, says the woman, ‘for a start, go ahead and pay the arrears, based on the increase decided by law. Yes, indeed, I put those two in your room.’ She has been caught red-handed and prefers to go on the attack, to avoid being attacked herself. The old man would like to react, he really would, but instead, he breathes a long sigh, while at the same time trying to soothe the dog that is growling at the landlady. The woman jostles the old man into the kitchen, telling him not to stand stock still like a statue, since the two will need to leave. * The old man walks into the kitchen where a friendly girl who is about seventeen is plucking the feathers from a chicken. She has a rather large bust for her age; her clothes are somewhat in poor taste. Her naïve gaze is constantly looking this way and that. The landlady has vanished, and the old man starts talking to the girl whose name is Giovanna and works there as a maid. He asks here if she has a thermometer. The maid sets off to fetch the landlady’s thermometer, careful not to get caught and hands it to him. The old man places it under his arm and sits in a corner. He is completely still, ‘Because’, he says, ‘you aren’t supposed to move, otherwise, the reading on the thermometer will be higher than it should be’. The maid laughs, hearing this, and tickles him to make him move. The landlady’s voice is heard in the distance out of the blue. ‘You may enter’, she says disdainfully. * The old man goes into his room just as the lady disappears down the end of the corridor. The old man examines the bed as if it were a precious thing that has been contaminated. The landlady has made the bed again without delay. He touches it, fingers it, to find out what they have done to this bed of his. He has

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even forgotten the thermometer under his arm. When he remembers it, it is no longer under his arm. He is frightened. He searches his whole body for it. At last he finds it falling out of the bottom of his trousers. Meanwhile, a giggle stops him in his tracks. It is coming from the room next door. The landlady must have given the man and the woman that room. The old man goes to the window and struggles to see his temperature, but he can’t. * So he calls the maid and Giovanna helps him check to see if he has a temperature and eventually they find that he has. Then, the sound of chuckling and gasping travels from the other room which makes the maid laugh too and she tells him those two are lovers and that the woman is married. And in a brazen, if innocent, way, she looks through the keyhole to see what is going on next door and she says all she can see is a leg. Hearing this, the old man is very embarrassed and dismisses her rather sharply. * The dog goes into its corner for a nap. The old man probes his bed again with his hand, then begins to undress. He extracts a shabby old overcoat and places it over the bed, because he feels very cold. Those two go on making love, with no shame and the sound of it carries. So then the old man decides to make his presence felt. He begins walking noisily up and down, loudly clearing his throat, and sings a tune. He feels almost compelled to look through the keyhole, but notices that the dog is staring at him; he carries on undressing, then puts on a long nightshirt and goes to bed. A lingering sound comes from the street. It’s a bugle call, but the old man ignores it; he must be used to it. Sure enough, there is a Carabinieri police barracks opposite. The house maid walks in like a flash, and only asks him to come in when she has reached the window. She starts waving at a Carabiniere who smiles at her from the barracks quad. The girl suddenly steps back, afraid; she has spotted a second Carabiniere. She doesn’t want him to see her. But he has seen all his comrade’s efforts to attract the girl’s attention. He makes a beeline for him. He’s angry. The maid hurriedly drops the blind and begins to watch the scene from behind the slats. Umberto D. asks her to fetch a water bottle in vain. She’s mesmerized by the two Carabinieri, who look as if they are just about to come to blows, if it weren’t for the others breaking them up. The landlady’s voice calling Giovanna interrupts her. The maid leaves, smugly saying that the Carabinieri are doing all this on her account. Now the old man is alone. The thermometer is on the bedside table and he is thinking of checking his temperature again, when someone knocks on the door. ‘Come in’, says the old man. Nobody enters. The landlady is standing behind the door. She begins to speak. She says that the cost of the room doesn’t include the maid. The old man has an unexpected reaction that is out of character: he

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jumps off the bed, dashes over to the door, not opening it, but shouting through it that he will never leave that room, because these days you’re not allowed to evict anyone. Her response is a sarcastic laugh followed by an announcement: she is getting married in three days’ time, so that she can get rid of him. The law states that if she needs the room out of family necessity, then the tenant must go. The old man laughs back at her in the same way and the two exchange a series of dismissive ‘ha, ha, has’. Then the landlady leaves, the old man goes back to bed, and tries the thermometer again. The apartment is enveloped by silence and the dog jumps up on the bed, nestling up to Umberto D. and the old man call the landlady ‘tart’, under his breath. From his open window comes a strange, dull, noise. It’s the cinema roof dome slowly opening during the interval, to air the hall. Umberto D. checks his temperature. He needs to turn on the light and put on his glasses. It has gone up. He shakes his head. The landlady is playing the piano and singing along, like someone who needs to learn a tune and repeats it over and over again. Umberto knocks on the wall ever so lightly a couple of times. It’s a signal. The maid walks in, treading softly. He asks her if she can see any white plaques in his throat. The maid checks his throat, using the light from the electric light bulb, but she cannot see any white plaques. But she does see things she has never seen before and describes what she sees to the old man in such a way that terrifies him. Then he asks her to phone the hospital. The girl is reluctant to do so, but he insists, saying he is seriously ill. ‘That woman won’t give me a glass of water, if I need one’, he says. Then the maid leaves the room on tiptoe once more, into the corridor, where the phone is located. He covers himself up as best he can with his overcoat and listens. But the maid is speaking in whispers, so he can’t hear what she says. The landlady goes on singing, but now it is a duet: there’s a male voice too and the sound of singing makes the old man drift off to sleep (3).4 * A loud knocking on the door wakes him up. The people from the hospital have come to fetch him in an ambulance.

4

Zavattini’s footnote [3] in Teatro Scenario, 49: ‘At this point, there is a long, new sequence, which can be summed up in a few words. The night of Umberto D’s fever, full of noises, squealing trolley buses, and the odd voice shouting: “throw down the keys!”. Only at daybreak, Umberto D., not the maid, calls the hospital. The maid is sleeping. She only wakes up after Umberto D. has made the call. We follow her slightest gesture. She goes into the kitchen and still feeling sleepy, lights a gas ring, deals with the ants, gazes at the deserted army quadrangle opposite with astonishment, then looks at her belly that is beginning to swell (we have learned that she is pregnant but that she doesn’t know which of the two Carabinieri is the father). She is moved, sitting down to grind the coffee, and wants to close the door with her foot, without getting up from the chair. But the door is out of reach, so she stretches and stretches until she is almost tipping over, to close the door with her foot, while the first ray of sunshine glows in the kitchen windows.’

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Umberto D. gives the maid some money to look after the dog in his absence. But he must leave without making any noise. Woe betide him, should the dog see its owner leave. The separation from his dog is just as painful for the old man, but the fear of dying is far worse. He convinces a male nurse to play with the dog ‘You can’t go wrong’, says Umberto D., ‘if you play ball with him’ and the nurse reluctantly rolls a handkerchief into a ball to play, while Umberto D. is carried off on a stretcher, before the eyes of the landlady who looks on in amazement from the door at the end of the corridor, standing next to a large tall man. * The ambulance cuts across the city, its journey accompanied by the sound of its siren and this persuades Umberto D. that he is far worse than he thought. The nurses talk to each other every, and now and then they pull up a blanket over his mouth, while he pulls it down to breathe better. They take him to Admissions, where there are two or three patients and he describes what he feels. The doctor doesn’t think it is anything serious, but decides to keep him under observation. They take his contact details and put him in B Ward, where he is greeted by the sound of a patient’s groaning. To block out the sound, Umberto D. sticks his head under the covers. * In the morning, the arrival of the doctors in the hospital ward is like an army parade. There’s the consultant who walks with the gait of a general, followed by all the other doctors. All the patients are anxiously waiting their turn. Legs, thighs, stomachs, tongues, and throats, are all very summarily inspected, and the patients’ questions receive no answer, as to what is going on, since the doctors are only prepared to give them orders and communicate with one another, using sign language. Our Umberto D. is more insistent than the others and manages to irritate the doctor. The doctor tells him that if he doesn’t have a temperature by tomorrow, he will be allowed to leave. When they bring the food, Umberto D. discovers that he has an appetite which he interprets as a sign that he is getting better. On his left side, there is a patient who prays incessantly. Actually, everyone is praying in this ward. His neighbour on the right admits in confidence that when he gets hungry, he contrives to be taken to hospital and explains how to fool the doctors. This is the only ward where the food is good. There is a good-natured nun, a little simple, who sneaks in some dessert for him. ‘Ask for a rosary’, is his neighbour’s advice. A patient arrives with a conspiratorial air, wearing a large nightshirt. He has come to collect as many signatures as he can in the shortest possible time, to protest against the hospital’s food which is poor quality and not enough. Umberto doesn’t know whether he should sign, as he has only just arrived, but a wink from his room-mate convinces him to sign. But the patient in the big nightshirt has to leave suddenly, even though he hasn’t collected the signatures, because the nun is coming.

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Umberto D. is reluctant to be a hypocrite, but, in actual fact, he is behaving like one, asking the nun for a rosary. The nun gives him a rosary and two ripe pears, at which, Umberto D. feels the wish to stay a few more days in hospital. He would gain a little weight and could even get a few tonic injections. But for this to happen, Umberto D.’s fever would have to last until tomorrow, and his neighbour teaches him how to get a fever, just a little one, for when the doctors come on their rounds. Meanwhile, his neighbour wants to gamble fifty liras on the temperature of a newly admitted patient who is not seriously ill. The neighbour who is closest to the truth wins, saying thirty-eight degrees. In the evening, when the nun is not around, not one, but three patients come over with a different sheet of paper. Umberto D. reads the sheet. It’s an ultimatum. If Management does not improve the quality of the evening meal immediately, the patients will go on strike: they won’t eat, so the story will attract the attention of the general public, and the press. Umberto and his neighbour sign, all those in B Ward sign, because they mustn’t let the others find out that, unlike the others, they’re in good health. * When the food arrives, the order not to eat, from the strike committee, also arrives. Anyone who is found eating will be in trouble. Umberto D. is forced to interrupt his meal, consisting in a small chicken wing. Never mind, he hasn’t eaten chicken for years. Later, they hear shouting, coming from the other wards. The hunger strike has soon sparked off arguments with a few nurses, a few doctors, and some nuns. Even the man in charge of the hospital has got involved, but the more violent among the protesters have prevailed and now the revolt is gaining momentum. Here in B Ward, no one knows what to do, all the more so, since the nun is present, with her hostile words of advice about the strike committee. Umberto is like a fish out of water. Some patients in long nightshirts and pyjamas arrive. They’re furious. They insist on barricading the doors. Some of them are suffering from asthma and some are afraid of drafts. Umberto D. and his neighbour dare not take part in the struggle. The nun is spying on them from a distance. The battle is soon over, because male nurses and policemen break in through the windows, having climbed up ladders supplied by the firemen. Umberto is crouched in his bed, but a striker accuses him of being a scab and throws off his bed sheets (4).5

5

Zavattini’s footnote [4] in Teatro Scenario, 50: ‘In the screenplay the maid comes to visit Umberto, bringing him a banana. The dog is waiting in the courtyard below. One of the two Carabinieri is minding him. Umberto springs up off the bed to wave to the dog. Umberto asks if that Carabiniere is the father of the baby. The maid thinks he is. He is the one who denies it more forcefully than the other one. Then Umberto feels very sad. When he discovers that the landlady really is getting married and that she has put in motion all the bureaucracy required to get rid of him, he starts shouting that he will not let that happen; that she is not

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The next day, on his way out of the hospital, Umberto D. walks down long corridors full of silent, pallid, patients. Now and then he also comes across a few policemen. When he is back in the street, he is surrounded by people who all seem happy and he feels happy too, and above all, in good health. He even tries out a bending exercise, just to test the flexibility of his muscles. He is whistling, he walks into a bar, orders a fizzy drink and asks for a few sugar lumps for the dog. While pouring, he happens to squirt some over him. The owner starts shouting at the barman. Umberto D. is unable to calm him down, by saying water is pleasant in such hot weather. Since the owner is shouting louder and louder at the barman, Umberto D. takes the selz and laughs as he squirts some over himself to show that a squirt of selz after all is nothing more than a squirt of selz. The owner is nonplussed as he leaves the bar (5).6 * And he gets back home. A boy with a low forehead, about seventeen or thereabouts, is standing at the top of the stairs pulling a string. ‘Let’s go’, shouts the boy. At the other end of the string is Umberto’s dog. Barking. Then the dog sees his owner and pulls away from the boy, leaping up to his owner. At any other time, the old man would be giving his dog a warm welcome, but right now he wants to know from the boy where he was leading him by that string. And the boy with the low forehead doesn’t want to reply. The old man is furious and wants to know at all costs, but the boy shrugs him off and runs down the stairs and all the while the dog is barking. The neighbours come out of their apartments to protest. Giovanna the maid appears. As soon as she sees Umberto D. she is happy, but her eyes are red. She looks like someone who has just been crying. Umberto D. asks: ‘Was he taking him to the river?’ The maid replies that he was, and Umberto D. walks through the door, saying no more, shocked by the crime the landlady was committing. Umberto D. goes into his room and looks around, then touches the bed. He feels weary. He sits by the window with the dog in his lap, feeding him sugar cubes. They were about to kill him! Meantime, the sounds of the Settimana Incom newsreel from the open dome of the picture house waft across. He sees the beam of light coming from the projector glowing in the dark, as if it were made of silver. While the maid fetches a legal notice, he is busy checking his dog’s coat for fleas. It is true to say that he has been neglected these past two or three days. The document states that at the end of the month Umberto D. will be evicted.

going to force him to go to the Shelter for the Poor. And the maid leaves a little confused, while he is still shouting that the landlady can’t make him go to the Shelter.’ 6 Zavattini’s footnote [5] in Teatro Scenario, 50: ‘The episode in the bar has gone. In its place, Umberto D. meets the arrival of spring on his way out from hospital, in the company of that crafty neighbour from the ward.’

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The maid remarks that the landlady is getting married, and laughs, while saying so. The owner is going to be unfaithful to her husband often enough. Then she bursts into tears, almost regretting that she has forgotten about her own sorry state. Then the old man rouses himself and asks her what the matter is, and she confesses that she is pregnant. ‘Whose is it?’ Giovanna replies that she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know which one of the two Carabinieri is the father of the child, because she makes love to both Carabinieri. While he is grooming the dog, the old man asks her a lot of questions to help her identify the father. She says that when her belly becomes visible, she is going to throw herself from the window (6).7 * Umberto D. has left with the official eviction notice in his hand. Now he is in the Law Courts, the Palazzo di Giustizia, getting into a spacious lift, together with a lot of other people, heading for the office upstairs. He is crossing those huge corridors, now asking this person, now that one, where to find Court Room xi. Then he draws a heavy curtain and witnesses an unexpected spectacle: a law court without a public, no accused. It is the Supreme Court of Appeal. There are several judges solemnly attired, who are listening, in silence, and motionless, to Counsel, making his address, almost under his breath. He stands there for a second, holding the lifted curtain. Then, because they are staring at him, he lets the curtain drop and goes away at a pace, followed by his dog. At last, he finds what he is looking for: Court xi of the Criminal Section. He has met all kinds of people in these enormous corridors. They are all in a hurry. There is even a woman who is running, who knows why? He walks into the crowded court, where there is a loud chatter, the same as in a square, and a defendant, about thirty or so, is looking very downcast, all alone on a bench. The judges are absent. Our Umberto looks around, in search of someone. Right. He has spotted the person he is looking for: a lawyer. He calls out to him. The lawyer turns around,

7

Zavattini’s footnote [6] in Teatro Scenario, 50: ‘It would take almost a whole page to point out all the variations made in this part. I’ll be brief: Umberto D. returns from the hospital only to find that the dog is gone. Instead, he is greeted by bricklayers and upholsterers who are renovating the apartment and even his very room, to turn it into a nuptial nest. The dog has escaped, because the landlady always left the front door open in the hope that he would run away, and that he might possibly be run over by a train or a taxi or end up in the hands of a dog-catcher. So then Umberto D. decides to take a taxi – the first, perhaps, in his whole life – and rushes to the municipal dog kennel, where he finds his dog just when he is being dragged out of a van on a string, like a fish out of water. He takes the dog home and bumps into the landlady on her way out, in the company of her groom-to-be, and he throws the dog at her feet, as if it were a ghost. They start quarrelling in the street. While this is going on, Umberto D. feels very alone. But he doesn’t want to give in, and he begins the agonizing search for cash which he needs in order to appease the landlady. What about the maid? She is still fooling around with the two Carabinieri. Umberto D. is looking for her, to ask her about the dog and finds her in tears and chatting with one of the two Carabinieri, while the other is looking on from a distance, hidden in a doorway.’

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recognizes him, smiles at him, and begins to walk in his direction. But a sudden silence descends that same moment. The judges come in with the sentence: ‘Innocent’. While the two women break down in misery, the lawyer leaves the court, followed by Umberto D. whom he had forgotten about. Umberto catches up with him and the lawyer carries on walking down the corridor alongside him and places his hand on Umberto’s shoulder. They walk into the lawyers’ chambers, full of lawyers coming in and going out, putting on their robes or taking them off. We hear the tail end of the lawyer’s advice to Umberto D. Given the similarity in their accents, it would seem that the two are from the same parts. The lawyer says he might be able to stop the eviction, on condition that Umberto pays up his arrears immediately. There’s no time to lose. And the lawyer quickly dictates to a typist: ‘Dear Mrs. Ponti, on behalf of my client, Umberto Domenico Ceruti, your tenant, I must advise you that the reasons that make quashing the eviction order are self-evident.’ And since Umberto has stopped in his track to listen, the lawyer interrupts himself and repeats: ‘Hurry up, hurry up, there isn’t a minute to lose, send her the arrears ... by registered mail.’ And Umberto walks off wondering what quashing might mean (7).8 * He goes home to count the money he has stored in the drawer. He only has 5,000 liras and needs a total of 27,000. He also finds the cobbler’s bill, an old, costly bill. Nor does he have anything to sell. He asks the maid how much she thinks some belongings of his might fetch. According to Giovanna, he could make a lot of money from the large glass bottle containing a miniature ship. But he knows that the girl is most likely the only person to think that it is precious. The landlady has brought in the upholsterer and the builder and the noise and the comings and goings of both only make the old man’s anxiety grow worse. While he is busy reckoning, you can hear a sudden sound of slaps, followed by weeping, coming from the room next door. The old man is frightened; he gets on his feet, reaches the door in an instant, and, through the keyhole, sees the lady from the other day, crying on her knees, crying at the feet of the young man who is wearing his hat, with a cigarette in his mouth, sullen and silent. The old man resumes what he was doing, counting up his money. Hopeless. He is 3,000 liras short. At this point, he picks up the dictionary, it is a sizeable book and as good as new, and puts on his coat to go out. In the corridor, he meets the maid and asks her if she is really certain about that matter – he means her pregnancy – and she says that she is, and adds that she has dreamt of which one is the father. It

8

Zavattini’s footnote [7] in Teatro Scenario, 51: ‘The scene in the Law Courts has been deleted.’

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really is the one who doesn’t want to know. She begins to relate her dream, but Umberto cannot stop to listen, he must go and find the money. * No soon as he walks out into the street, does he meet the Carabiniere, the one in the maid’s dream, but he doesn’t speak to him. He will talk to him some other time. Right now, his dominant thought is defeating his landlady. Oh, if only he could say to her in a couple of days ‘Here are the rubber-stamped legal documents. Get married, by all means, but I refuse to budge.’ At one point, he dashes across the road. There is no way he can walk past the next shop, the cobbler’s. He hides behind a passing van, but since it is going fast, the old man is forced to run for 30 metres or so, to put in enough of a safe distance from the cobbler’s. * He meets a travelling bookseller in Via Venti Settembre who offers him 1,000 liras for the dictionary. Umberto D. thinks that is extortionate. He tries two other book stalls and the deal is the same. He has no choice: extortion. While he is about to leave, the word ‘quashing’ comes to mind. He doesn’t know what it means, and he heard the lawyer dictate it in the letter for him. So, he asks for the dictionary, just for a moment, looks up the word, finds it, and then leaves. * He goes to the entrance of the school where he taught for so many years, the Mazzini. He waits for the pupils and the teachers to come out. He sees the dogcatcher’s van arrive and quickly muzzles his dog. The dog-catchers slowly entrap a stray dog and manage to get him into the loop. The bell rings, signalling the end of class. Children, teachers, and the man he is looking for come out. Surely, he must be a teacher too. Umberto D. follows him, but he is in two minds whether or not to stop him. The man gets on the tram and Umberto D. gets on too. * The tram is crowded and Umberto’s efforts to reach his friend take time. The friend is now approaching the exit. So then Umberto forces his way through and reaches his friend, pretending that he has bumped into him by sheer coincidence. The friend asks him how things are, and he says everything is just fine. The friend is glad for him. Then Umberto D., after a long pause, corrects himself, and says that actually, things aren’t so great, because pensions are not going up. The friend seems to sense that Umberto D. would like to ask him for money and suddenly gets off, leaving behind Umberto on the tram. The friend makes a

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gesture from the pavement, to mean ‘What a shame we had to go our own ways so suddenly’ (8).9 * Umberto gets off too at the next stop and discovers that he is a long way away from his own neighbourhood. A beggar asks him for charity. He is taken aback by the beggar’s gesture of taking the money out of his hat and putting it in his bulging pocket. The beggar is leaning against the wall and just stands there, calmly reaching out his hat. One passer-by gives nothing, pretending to read the paper, while another gives him something and yet another does the same. Umberto works it out, counting on his fingers. He reckons that in an hour you can make a lot of money. Time is running out and he needs cash. He wants to bring home the cash. He leans against the wall. But he doesn’t like this street. He goes to another one, where hardly anyone goes by. The dog stops at a fountain where a child squirts him with water. The old man leans against the wall and stays there for a minute. Then he reaches out his hand. A man in a hurry walks past. Umberto is ashamed and pretends to have stretched out his hand to see if it is raining. Then the man in a hurry looks up, gazes at the sky, before pressing on. A light breeze moves a few leaves on the tree-lined street. The dog is now in front of him and looks at him in silence. Umberto D. takes off his hat and puts the brim in his mouth and tries to convince the dog to stay by his side. But then he is the one who ends up as far away as possible from the dog, to give the impression that he is not the owner of that dog begging for charity. The dog would like to get close to him, but to make him stay, to make him stand still, he uses gestures from a distance and the dog obeys. Meantime, he is pretending to read a poster. At one point, he sees someone arrive on the scene whom he recognizes: one of the spokesmen from the Campidoglio, just like him. Umberto D.’s body gives a jolt. He gestures to the dog to come close to him, but the dog doesn’t move. He then pretends he is playing with the dog and the acquaintance finds him like this, unable to get his hat back from the dog who thinks it’s a game. Umberto D. greets the acquaintance with enthusiasm just when he was about to put five liras into the dog’s hat, and the two of them laugh as if it were quite a coincidence. Umberto wants to buy him a coffee and the man agrees, and, while they are drinking the coffee, the acquaintance, remembering what had just happened with the five liras, bursts out laughing and spills the coffee all over himself.

9

Zavattini’s footnote [8] in Teatro Scenario, 51: ‘Umberto D. sells the dictionary at the beginning, not now. He looks up the word detumescence, not quashing (he has heard someone from Tuscany in the soup kitchen use it, while giving him advice for his sore throat). Nor will you see him get on the trolley bus. Only his friend gets on. He waves at Umberto from the footboard, shouts a question, if he has any news about a certain colleague of theirs, and Umberto D. shouts back that he is dead and the other person doesn’t move from the footboard. He is as still as a statue, and disappears on the horizon like this.’

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Since he has to catch the trolley bus going by, he runs off drying himself, while Umberto pays for the coffees (9).10 * Now Umberto D. is tired and downcast. He sits on the steps of Trinità dei Monti where so many people talk about love or have a rest. He buys something for the dog from a street vendor and gives half of it to the dog and keeps the other half for himself. A girl appears and stares at him. She is clearly a prostitute. The girl smiles at him and he smiles too, as an automatic reaction. Then he sets off for the Pincio and the girl follows. Umberto reaches the high retaining wall of the Pincio and looks down, feeling a strong compulsion to jump. The girl appears right next to him and asks him jokingly if he is planning to jump. He replies that he is. Then the girl starts laughing and says: ‘You good-looking old man, why don’t we make love, first?’ He just stands there, not saying anything and looks at the city below as it lights up. ‘Let’s take a horse carriage’, says the woman. And she leads him to a nearby carriage. The dog jumps up and settles quite happily on the seat, but the girl shoos him off the seat. The cab sets off and the woman wastes no time in trying to seduce him. He has no idea why he has climbed into the cab with that girl who says so many foolish things. Maybe it was a way of resisting the temptation of throwing himself off the wall. But the girl really is very silly. She tries to tickle him and coaxes him to smoke and keeps saying they are going to have a lovely evening. When some youths begin to make fun of them from behind the carriage, the girl responds with a raspberry. Then she says that she has taught them a lesson. That is how you have to treat such bold behaviour. At the turning, the old man makes the cabbie stop, saying he must go. He takes out 1,000 liras and gives it to the girl and tells her to pay for the cab. His is almost an escape. He turns back only to wake up the dog, asleep under the girl’s legs (10).11 *

Zavattini’s footnote [9] in Teatro Scenario, 52: ‘Umberto accompanies the acquaintance, obviously not one of the spokesmen, since the Campidoglio scene has been – as I said earlier – cut, up to the square with the coaches. The acquaintance gets on one of them and there they are, not knowing what to say to one another. The acquaintance is looking out of the window and after looking this way and that for a while, drums his fingers on the coachwork to strike a pose, and says, just to say something, “Will a war break out?” Umberto D. really has no idea. The coach departs and Umberto D. waves his handkerchief to say goodbye to that man whose name, perhaps, he cannot even recall.’ 11 Zavattini’s footnote [10] in Teatro Scenario, 52: ‘Other small – or big – events contribute to mortify our Umberto D. A passer-by who stops him, only for an instant, mind, with a smile; but he’d mistaken him for someone else. Then a stranger shouts at him not to turn round. He must keep walking. Umberto D. has stumbled across a real-life scene a film crew is shooting in the streets. He doesn’t turn around; he walks on. Nor is he in any way curious to know what that madman really wants. The sequence with the young tart might even disappear.’ 10

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When he gets home, he is met by the sound of partying. There are many guests in the room next door. They’re playing music and dancing. It’s the evening of the wedding and the landlady crosses the corridor wearing her wedding dress she is trying on. The maid secretly pulls a face meaning: ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t say goodbye. The landlady is watching me. She doesn’t want me to be kind to you.’ Now they have formed a quartet next door, accompanied by the piano. He suddenly feels so desperate to let off steam, after such a dreadful day, that he hammers the wall with his fist again and again, making the sound echo across the apartment. The quartet is silent for a moment, no more than an instant, then resumes and he has run out of courage to beat his fist on the wall anymore. He turns on the light and begins to walk up and down. Then he puts on his nightshirt, combs his hair, and sits at his desk to write a letter. Eventually, the landlady’s guests leave, with loud festive goodbyes, in anticipation of the following morning, and louder still, outside the old man’s door. The landlady’s exaggerated good cheer drowns out all the other voices, as if she wanted the old man to know that she is the happiest woman in the world. Little by little, silence descends, broken only by the sound of crockery coming from the kitchen. In the kitchen the maid is drying up the glasses and every now and then she looks at her belly in the reflection from the cupboard. The old man picks up some old newspapers and starts making thin strips of paper. It looks like he is making party decorations. Then the door opens gently. It’s the maid. She has a piece of cake for him, but he refuses it, even though he likes cake very much, and he gives it to the dog. Then he gives the maid all the money he has. She doesn’t understand why he is doing so. He says it’s a present. They communicate through sign language, for fear of being heard by the landlady. He says he will explain the reason tomorrow. The maid leaves and the old man listens from behind the door. He hears her locking the door to her tiny bedroom. The old man goes to his desk and straightens the letter that is slightly askew. It is addressed to the landlady. His expression is set in pain, like someone who can only concentrate on a single thought. He snatches the sheet, rips it apart, dips a finger into the ink and writes ‘shit’ on the wall. He stands there for a while, looking at his writing, then he dries his hands, picks up the strips of paper, while only the sound of a bugle from the barracks plays Taps, and very carefully opens the door. The dog is sleeping on his mat. Umberto doesn’t want to look at him. He is afraid that he will get too emotional, if he says goodbye to him. The old man makes his way very quietly into the kitchen. Then he remembers something and turns back. He has forgotten to put on his dressing gown. He also puts a nice clean handkerchief in his breast pocket. He has also forgotten to place his slippers under the bed. He wants to leave everything tidy – and to be found smartly dressed. He goes back in the kitchen, switches on the light, places the strips of paper on a chair. He walks over to the gas range, looks at it, then opens a tap. But he shuts it off immediately, grabs a glass and puts it under the tap he has quickly opened: he has heard the sound of someone in the corridor. He doesn’t turn, but he has a feeling the landlady is standing behind him. He lets the water run over his hands but doesn’t look round. The landlady, wearing

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a brand-new silk dressing gown, switches off one of the two kitchen lamps; another way of showing how much she detests him. Then she leaves, slamming her bedroom door at the far end of the apartment. Now the old man can open the gas. He picks up the strips of paper, to block out all the holes. He needs more paper, so he gets some from the larder, where he sees some good food, made in preparation for the wedding. He stops for a moment, to watch a myriad of ants attacking the sugar bowl. He stops suddenly, when he hears scratching at the door: it’s the dog. There and then, he cannot decide what to do: he would like to open the door, but at the same time he’d prefer not to. He decides to open it. The dog jumps up enthusiastically, as he always does. He strokes him and feels overcome, to the point of tears. Then he gives him everything he can find in the larder, as if he were trying to feed him for the rest of his life. Little by little, while the dog is eating, he picks out all the paper strips, even the one from the hole in the window, whence all the ants are already retreating. And he returns to his room (11).12 * At the break of day, Umberto is getting ready to leave the house. He would like to erase the offending word written on the wall with a cloth, but, in the end, he changes his mind. Why should he? He shrugs and leaves the word on the wall. From the military barracks comes the sound of the bugle: Reveille. He takes one last look around his room. On tiptoe, he makes his way into the small room where the maid sleeps. There she is, young and beautiful, and fast asleep. He would like to wake her up and say goodbye, but he sees the money on the bedside table, the money he gave her, and takes it back. Why? It amounts to 3,000 liras. Then he changes his mind and puts down 1,000. He leaves very quietly with the dog in his arms, so as not to make any noise, and a suitcase containing all he has. He meets the milkman on the stairs, who is just that moment leaving a few milk bottles outside the front door. When he reaches the ground floor, after some hesitation, he picks up a bottle, and puts his finger through the lid, drinks half and lets his dog drink the other half (12).13 *

Zavattini’s footnote [11] in Teatro Scenario, 53: ‘Even the story of the attempted suicide using gas has been deleted. Umberto does want to throw himself out of the window, but the thought of the dog, which would be left at the mercy of the landlady, prevents him from doing so. The landlady has even had the dividing wall in Umberto’s lodging knocked down. Without hesitation, she keeps up the battle. And Umberto can do no more than write the word you know on the recently upholstered wall.’ 13 Zavattini’s footnote [12] in Teatro Scenario, 53: ‘But the maid hears him when he opens the front door. She runs out onto the landing in her nightshirt and asks him where he is going. They exchange a few words, like a father and a daughter. Farewell.’ 12

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He leaves carrying his big suitcase. Rome at dawn is almost deserted. Taking his time, he reaches Via Leccosa, a short, narrow street where a bicycle mechanic is opening his shop. This is where a huddle of dogs congregates, at the end of this dead end, some twenty or so, of all pedigrees, gathered around a thin, tall, old man who is distributing some food. There are different kinds of dogs, goodlooking and ugly alike. Some are on a chain, and the old man handles them somewhat roughly. Umberto’s dog is badly received by the other dogs and only the use of the thin old man’s whip calms them down. Umberto is really shocked. There are two dogs who would tear his dog to pieces, if they were let off the chain. The thin man yells a woman’s name, and a woman appears from a door who is about sixty or so, rather fat, and carrying a small dog. She lets Umberto into the house, a small room full of dogs, and immediately asks him how long would he like to leave the dog? He replies that he would like to leave him for a long while. The old woman says boarding costs amount to 5,000 liras a month and explains all the things she and her husband do for the dogs; how they look after them and feed them. People who leave her their dogs have to travel, but cannot take the dogs with them. Umberto says that all he has in his pocket is 2,000 liras, plus these clothes and personal laundry, all of which would add up to a tidy sum. ‘But where are you going?’ asks the old woman. Umberto replies that he is going abroad. The old woman says that you need clothes to go abroad. Umberto feels undermined. He is lost for words and the old woman gets suspicious and asks him what is really going on. Then Umberto replies, confessing the truth from the bottom of his heart. He is going to kill himself. Maybe he felt compelled to tell someone. But the old woman and the old man are certain they have misunderstood, unless he has lost his mind. The conversation is interrupted by noisy barking. Umberto’s dog is fighting with another dog. Umberto grabs his dog close to his knees and then digs out his id to show his identity. The old woman says they cannot even spare the space, because this is a dog that fights at the slightest provocation, so they would have to give him somewhere separate, but they no longer have the room. At this stage, the old woman is only trying to convince this mysterious guy to leave, and Umberto says that perhaps it is best this way, because he doesn’t think that she and her husband love dogs. Umberto has never raised his voice up until now, he has maintained the sort of calm attitude of someone with one foot in the grave. The old woman’s husband has heard Umberto D.’s last words and says that if he has come here to speak ill of his kennels, then, he is not the type of person who would be afraid of swinging a punch at him. * Umberto D. goes to the park with his dog and his suitcase. The park is near the level crossing of the Vicinali line. He wanders from path to path. He is looking for someone. He is looking for a little girl and finds her in the company of other

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children. She must come from a rich aristocratic family. The dog and the little girl are happy to see each other. You can tell they’re old friends. Umberto tells the girl that he has decided to give away his dog to her. The child is so happy that she begins to cry. So then he tells her it’s really true and the child begins to play with the dog and roll over on the grass with him. Then he walks over to her maid who is minding a smaller child nearby. The maid faces up to the old man saying that she doesn’t want any dogs. The old man assures her that this dog doesn’t make a mess indoors. But the maid cuts him short, making off with the child who is crying and dragging her feet, so as not to be taken away. Meanwhile, the dog is playing with some children and Umberto comes up with the idea of leaving surreptitiously, leaving the dog behind with those children. Who knows, perhaps someone will turn up who will take him. Without letting the dog see him, he walks some distance, then turns back to look at the dog that has suddenly stopped playing. His eyes are searching around for his master. Then Umberto D. quickly hides behind a tree. The dog is looking right and left, then trots along in search of his owner who is hiding behind the tree. There is a lady, about forty or so, who is watching the old man’s moves and laughing benignly, as if it were a game. She follows what she thinks is the old man’s game and at the same time she is keeping an eye on some children playing piggy-back. One of these children must be the lady’s son, because every time he jumps, he calls out to her: ‘Yoo-hoo’, and the woman replies with a hand gesture, meaning ‘Well done, I saw you.’ At one point, the old man’s gaze meets the lady’s gaze. They both recognize one another. This is the woman Umberto found in his lodgings, in the company of her young lover and whom he saw through the keyhole, in a state of dejection at the feet of the attractive young man. The woman who is knitting, immediately takes control of her feelings, and resumes her motherly and serene response to her son’s ‘yoo-hoos’ with a gesture of her hand. The old man too has neither the time nor the will to dwell on that sad recognition. The dog suddenly catches sight of Umberto, and Umberto tries unsuccessfully to hide behind two people who are confused as to why that old man in front of them is bent over and walking backwards. But the dog is full of glee, reaches him and jumps up. And he takes him in his arms and reaches the level crossing, no more than 50 metres away. He keeps stroking the dog, as he walks those last 50 metres, virtually hiding his head in the dog’s coat. The suitcase, that big suitcase, is left abandoned over there, on a park bench. * The old man has decided to die with his dog. He hugs him tightly against his chest. The dog tries to wriggle free from such a stifling embrace. The old man’s eyes are now glazed over and he no longer knows what he is doing. At the level crossing, there are a few other people, some on a bicycle or on a Vespa. And there, in the far distance, is the train. A man behind Umberto makes some funny gestures at the dog that is leaning its head over Umberto’s shoulder. Another

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man asks Umberto D. the time. Umberto D. automatically rummages in his pocket for the watch he no longer owns. With an effort, the dog manages to slip out of the old man’s fingers. The old man pulls himself together and calls out to the dog that has tumbled over onto the ground and is getting away as fast as it can to gain some distance. Then its look, as it turns around facing its master in askance, is almost human. The owner orders him to come here to him. The dog stops in its tracks, looking at him. Then the old man takes a step in its direction, but the dog trots off. Meantime, the train roars past. By now, the noise is far away, and the old man is still calling the dog. It seems that the dog has no intention of re-joining its owner. Perhaps the sound of his voice, or the strange expression in the owner’s eyes or the fact that it was being hugged so tightly, or all those strange acts that morning, have made an impression on the beast. And the dog continues to move further away, and its owner keeps following him. If the owner speeds up his pace, even the dog, who is very aware, speeds up. * Now and then the old man makes a sign with his hand, but in such a way as not to be seen by anyone else. The old man takes off his hat, dries the sweat off his brow and leans against the wall for a short while. The dog stops and looks at his owner. They stay where they are, looking at each other in the middle of all the hustle and bustle of the crowd, blocking off each other’s sight. The dog is in the middle of the road and a motorcar almost runs him over. His owner hasn’t noticed, because just at that moment a long vehicle is going by, but the dog takes fright. For a few seconds, Dick is right in the centre of Hell, when, from a nearby cross, the traffic policeman signals go, and lorries, motorcars, bicycles, motorcycles, and pedestrians, are all moving in the dog’s direction, like a horde. Now that the horde has gone, and he has even been kicked by a cyclist, very fearful, and with his ears flapping down, he turns towards its owner. The owner is waiting, looking quite content. They have made it up. But again the dog stops for an instant, and again Umberto D.’s smile disappears from his face. A motorbike roars up to the dog from behind, like a flash. With a start, the dog runs over to the old man who is waiting with open arms. He picks him up and aims for a quieter street. He puts the dog back on the ground and, as if to make sure that the dog has really forgotten everything, that it is ready to play with its owner, he picks up a stone and throws it some distance away. The dog runs after the stone and brings it back to his master. Oh yes, they have indeed made peace. Some boys are playing football with a tin can. The can falls on Umberto’s feet. He gives it a kick and laughs, and he goes on laughing, while the dog runs after the can and manages to steal it from in between the boys’ feet and bring it back to him. The boys protest, but the old man calms them down, and they carry on kicking the noisy can, while the old man sits on a bench and watches the match, stroking the dog and holding him back, to stop him from fetching the can again.

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Screenplay (extract) Umberto D. Umberto’s Lodgings. The Kitchen. Dawn (1951)1

Daylight grows in intensity little by little. The housemaid walks in with her eyes half shut and walks towards the cooker, takes a match from the matchbox tray and tries to strike it, then picks out a second one, but she is so sluggish that it fails to ignite. At last it works, and she holds the match flame over the gas ring, but the gas doesn’t burn, because she has not turned on the tap. When she notices, she opens it and the gas burns into flame with a small pop, while the housemaid looks out into the courtyard (the window is right next to the gas). She daydreams as she looks down below into the courtyard, cupping her cheek with her hand. The yard is empty. All the windows are shut. You can’t hear a sound. She is still, everything is still. A light appears in the windowpane, gradually growing brighter. It is the rising sun. The housemaid collects herself, walks over to the kitchen sink, picks up a small pot, fills it with water, then bends the rubber tube connected to the tap into her mouth and takes a sip of water, but the water squirts into her blouse which makes her leap back, then she shakes her blouse, so that the splash that has wet her breast can drip down. She takes an ink pot from the marble table, a dip pen and a sheet of paper with the beginnings of a letter and places them on the sideboard. Then she places the pot on the gas ring, sits down and watches the flame in a mesmerized daze. Her eyes gradually fill with tears. She looks at her stomach. She stands up and takes another look, to check if you can see how big it is. Yes, it looks big alright! Slow tears continue to flow. Then she sighs, makes a move to get the coffee grinder, and takes a look at the ants on the wall, following with her gaze their entire new journey. She is just about to put down the grinder (while she continues to look at the ants), and do something about the ants, but changes her mind. She sits down and begins to grind. The loud noise of the grinder makes her think of closing the door. She wants to do it without having to get up. Then she tries to reach it with the tip of her toes, while she carries on grinding the coffee. She has 1

Zavattini, Umberto D., 2005, 111–12.

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to stretch right out to reach it, running the risk of almost toppling off the chair. But she just does not want to get up; now she’s determined; and at long last she does it. Suddenly the doorbell rings. The maid leaps up, almost in fear. She puts down the grinder and runs down the corridor.

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Zavattini, Miracle in Milan, La Voce Repubblicana, 7 July 1951

Context This brief article represents one of the rare occasions in which Zavattini finds the time to convey the subtleties of Miracle in Milan, and explain his recourse to the simplicity of a fable, which serves as an allegory. He calls it ‘a simplification of the real, not an exaggeration of the real’. It generated a great deal of debate, mostly negative. As he quite rightly points out, the Cannes Grand Prix scotched the controversy.

Text Regardless of all the objections – too harsh, at times – Miracle in Milan seems to be an important film, as far as I am concerned, which neither De Sica nor I should regret. I have seen people from different political leanings, from Trabucchi to Ingrao, from Omiccioli to Guttuso, from Carrà to Flora, from Malaparte to Carrieri and Calcagno, show what I would describe as such ‘childlike’ enthusiasm, which has lead me to the conclusion that there is something in the film which everyone shares: a desire for goodness, as well as the immense sadness one feels at the realization that life is the way it is and not how it should be. This is something I find very alarming: the strong misgivings so many have definitely shown for the words of the Gospel. I’m shocked. Having said this, I do appreciate that my shock is justified, because the words of the Gospel are radical in their simplicity. By comparison, who has ever seen days of such compromise, as the ones we are living in today, the world over; days which are so diplomatic? It follows that that which is elementary produces such monumental annoyance. And moreover, it seems to me that most of the opinions expressed are biased by real passions, since in our film, everything, no matter how fable-like, contains the real world. And when I say fable, I mean to say a simplification of the real, not an exaggeration of the real. It is regrettable that political polemic has grown so

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much that it makes one afraid to say that the truth is to be found in the evidence of facts, in the different ways in which facts are used in political programmes. Anyway, the film is not saying anything new, anything which I have not already stated. It becomes a mere fable, let me say it once more, by comparison with the Gospel which, long before many other sources, sought to denounce all the poverty and all the inequality there is the world over. And while De Sica has turned it into cinematic poetry, all I am doing is insisting – like De Sica himself – on my response of consternation, of someone who refuses to surrender and fails to comprehend how certain social differences can persist. Perhaps the Cannes Grand Prix makes all this informal talk redundant, as it appears to have put a stop to any polemics, while filling De Sica and myself with sincere jubilation.

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Scenario Miracle in Milan (1950)1

Context The scenario Miracle in Milan was based on a novella, entitled Totò the Good, published in 1943. The novella was an adaptation of a scenario by the same title, published in 1940, and included in this anthology. Totò was the name of the variety show comedian, who had already established before the war a reputation in show business for his unusual brand of comedy, consolidated after the war in many film roles, which led Zavattini to change the title. His first choice was The Poor Are a Nuisance (I poveri disturbano). Because this title was censored by potential producers, he renamed the scenario Miracle in Milan. This became the title of the film directed by De Sica. The film conveys the magic realism at the centre of Zavattini’s pre-war comic writing, which relies on a montage of jokes connected to imagined, plausible, situations, resulting in absurd, rather than surreal, comedy; only deemed absurd, because of the way society is organized and how individuals behave. Absurd, because it is utopian, unconventional in the extreme. A challenge. This kind of humour draws on his short stories or raccontini, from as early as 1927 on. His comic writing had already influenced his writing for the cinema, as his scenario Everyone Should Have a Rocking Horse (1939) shows and jokes from this earlier story which found their way into Miracle in Milan. Zavattini and De Sica planned to go into production in 1948, but only did so when De Sica found the right location, and recreated a shanty town on the outskirts of Milan, by a railway station, in an area called L’Ortica. Filming only began in February 1950 and was completed in October of that year. It was very brave of De Sica to attempt at, and succeed in, filming and producing such an ethereal story, bordering on intangibility.

1

The scenario Miracle in Milan was published in a newspaper, Il Momento, on 23 February 1950. Miracle in Milan (1950), in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 128–35.

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The film premiered in February 1951, amid positive and negative reviews, but won the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or in April and went on to great acclaim in the United States. These two entries in Zavattini’s private diary demonstrate that the writer’s role stretched from writing to the final edit on the moviola: October 1950. De Sica talks to me about Totò. He says that, all things considered, he’s happy with the result. He says that I must do the same work for Totò that I did for Bicycle Thieves; that is, to be equally obsessive and thorough in the editing room, at the final stage. We continue in about threeor four-days’ time. 27 November 1950. I have seen edits of Totò (Miracle in Milan) for the umpteenth time. We are at eight tenths of the way to the final edit. We have lost the thousand, and I mean a thousand, cuts from when I saw it screened for the first time, more than a month and a half ago. I came across as an iconoclast. De Sica was looking at me with a mixture of respect and diffidence – and really with respect, every time I found a reason for a cut – but he understood that I was right and then he went as far as suggesting even more cuts himself.2

Text There was once a very kind old lady called Lolotta who was nearly eighty. One morning, she found a newborn baby in her vegetable patch and she called him Totò. They were very happy and often, when the milk was boiling on the stove, they would be looking at it and would get carried away, while it boiled over like a large cloud emitting smoke, and hissed and spilled on the floor into a trickle that looked like a stream crossing an endless land, so then Totò and Mrs Lolotta would say: ‘Isn’t the world enormous. There really is room for everyone!’ One day, Mrs Lolotta became seriously ill. They were alone in her bedroom and she asked Totò: ‘What is six by six?’ And because Totò replied thirty-six, she knew she could die in peace. When the doctors came, one said colitis, the other, pneumonia. The larger of the two men raised his voice and the smaller of the two didn’t dare contradict him. Two days later, Mrs Lolotta’s funeral crossed the city, just a horse-drawn hearse followed by Totò. Then a thief followed the hearse too, and pretended he was weeping, to escape the police, but at the first cross, the thief walked off to go about his business. Totò went straight to an orphanage and came out when he was twenty. ‘Good day!’ he said to all the people walking by. ‘I really do mean good day’, he explained to those who looked at him suspiciously. 2

Zavattini, Io. Un’autobiografia, 166.

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When he saw labourers struggle hard to lift rail tracks for the tram, he helped them and then asked if there was any work. The foreman said no. He wandered around the city, carrying his little suitcase, and, in the evening, he came across an imposing theatre. The rich on their way in were as resplendent as diamonds. Totò was so enraptured that he began to clap. Meanwhile, someone called Alfredo, who was very hard up, stole his suitcase and ran away. And Totò ran after him but didn’t have the heart to catch up with him. Finally, he found the courage and Alfredo was very upset, because he had to return the suitcase, and so Totò gave it to him for keeps. They became friends and since it was already late, Alfredo let him sleep in his hut. Alfredo’s hut was situated in a big meadow on the outskirts of the city and steeped in fog. Trains went past nearby. There were about six shacks in all, and one was shorter than the next and the poor who lived there couldn’t stand inside, but had to crouch on all fours, just like dogs. They were cold and were waiting for the sun to warm them up. That morning, as soon as a ray of sunshine made a hole in the fog, drawing a white circle in the meadow, all the poor, including Alfredo and Totò, rushed to warm themselves inside that circle. Then the ray disappeared and after a second it reappeared elsewhere in the meadow and they all charged in that direction, fighting for their place, just like passengers on a bus. Later, the wind tore off the roofs from the shacks and now that the roof was gone, the poor were exposed from the waist up. Even a child almost got swept away, so Totò suggested to these people that they build sturdier huts, and he helped them. The snow fell, the poor grew in number, and Totò took care of their needs. The shacks grew to over 100, and streets were born. The roads didn’t have proper names, but were called Seven by Seven Forty-nine Street, or Five by Five Twenty-five Street. This was the only way the children would learn their multiplication tables that he had been taught by Mrs Lolotta. A girl came on the scene too. She was about fifteen or so, Edvige was her name; so very poor that she worked as a maid for the penniless couple Giuseppe and Marta. Edvige threw a ladle of water over Totò by mistake and because Marta wanted to dismiss her, Totò threw a bucket of water over his head, to show Marta he loved water. One of the camp dwellers was Arturo who often felt like killing himself, because he was ugly, and women didn’t fancy him. Maybe this is the reason why he was always looking at a plaster statue of a beautiful girl in the middle of the square. Then there was Rappi, proud and spiteful. He thought he was better than anyone else, because he used a toothbrush. He had a catapult he used against sparrows and doves. There was Gaetano who was teaching his three-year-old son to stop passers-by, saying ‘I’m hungry’ and everyone laughed, as they watched him rehearse outside his shack. There was a man with a limp. There was a man with a crooked mouth and another who was unhappy because he was small. When he walked past the short man’s window Totò would bend his legs to become shorter, and when he crossed the lame man’s path he pretended to be lame, and when he met the guy with a crooked mouth he pretended to have a crooked mouth.

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He once bumped into all three of them. Then there was Giulio, who sold balloons and once he was lifted off the ground by his balloons, because he was so thin. But Totò put a sandwich in his mouth and his feet touched the ground again. One morning, eight cars from the big city pulled up, four on one side and four on the other. Two men wearing top hats got out of the first two. It looked like a duel. But it wasn’t. The two were Signor Mobbi and Signor Brambi and their retinue. Brambi was trying to sell the entire plot of land to Mobbi, Brambi was bidding twenty and Mobbi ten. Brambi nineteen and Mobbi eleven and while they were gradually getting closer to the same figure, the poor suddenly realized that they wanted to get rid of them. Only Totò kept insisting that it couldn’t be true. It was so cold. The breath that came out of the mouths of the poor looked like small clouds and they seemed to be smoking. ‘They’re smoking’, Mobbi exclaimed, to say that after all they could afford extras. When Mobbi saw the poor getting closer and closer with a threatening look on their faces, he was scared and improvised a speech. He said a nose is a nose and he was just as cold as they were, because he was made like them. The poor applauded him, and he concluded that Signor Brambi had no right to send them away. Walking backwards to his motorcar, he handed out to everyone his business card and the poor shouted ‘Up with Mobbi’ and ‘Down with Brambi’, while the cars set off for the city with Mobbi mopping the sweat from his brow for the danger he had been in. The spring came and Totò inaugurated the shantytown with a big party and the lottery prize was a boiled chicken. Number ninety was the winner and Rappi, who had eighty-nine, demanded a chicken leg. Meanwhile, there were those who planted a Maypole and the little children were letting off firecrackers. A black boy and a white girl were looking at each other during a party, but because of his black face, the black boy lacked the courage to go near the white girl. Everyone was singing. Suddenly, someone shouted: ‘The water, the water.’ Planting the Maypole made a huge jet shoot out of the ground. At first there was no water, and now there was, and the poor wrote ‘water’ on placards to form a procession. But they soon discovered that the water was crude oil and all you had to do was make a hole in the ground with your finger to make oil squirt up in the air. They began to use it as heating fuel and to remove stains from their clothes. Totò and Edvige were among the happiest people there and while they were letting the jets push them up and down like little celluloid balls, they came to realize they were in love. Only Rappi was unhappy, because he could not stop thinking about Mobbi’s fur coat and top hat. He would have done anything to have his own, which is the reason why he left and headed for the city as soon as it grew dark, not making a single sound, while his friends were singing: −− All we need is a hut −− In which to live and sleep.

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All we need is a patch of land To live and die. Give us some shoes Some socks and a morsel of bread These are the terms We can believe in tomorrow.

And he went to Mobbi to tell him to buy Brambi’s land without delay, because there was oil there. The very next day, Totò got up at dawn to place a flower at Edvige’s window. He had hardly had time to put it there, when click-click, the window opened and closed, and a hand took in the flower. Perhaps Edvige had been waiting there all night long. Trains were flying past. Far away in the distance, you could see the other houses in the city and the tops of the oil fountains were gleaming at first light. Arturo was about to throw himself under a train again and Totò had to explain to him that everything is beautiful. Edvige walked by with her noisy slippers that embarrassed her, which is why, as soon as she saw Totò, she hopped onto the grass, nimble as a sparrow, and walked on the grass. Totò carried her pails of water home and was happy, until he saw Rappi. He was wearing a top hat and a fur coat and behind him some men and the police were writing everywhere ‘Mobbi Property’. They said that they had twenty-four hours’ time to leave the encampment. All the poor armed themselves with clubs, except for Totò. He kept saying that it couldn’t be true. But Mobbi’s men and the police were chased away by the poor. Even Totò ran after them, but only to say that nobody wanted to harm them. They ran so far that they reached Signor Mobbi’s door. ‘Wait a minute’, said the janitors, holding them back, while Mobbi was consulting his people. Mobbi made a decision, and so the janitors told the poor: ‘Come in.’ Mobbi offered them tea, after asking them if they were the leaders. Gaetano answered yes. The sound of mooing came from inside the door and Totò and his people took fright. Mobbi kept a cow on standby, day and night, because you have to be well prepared, and if, one day, a war should break out, milk is all you need to stay alive. He asked the waiter what the weather was like and the waiter opened the window, unhooked a small servant hanging outside, and the servant said it was damp. So Mobbi put on his scarf. Then, when one of his people whispered in his ear that a sizeable number of policemen were already making tracks for the shantytown, he told Totò: ‘You can go.’ Totò and his men went quietly, because Mister Mobbi had said goodbye and had patted them on the shoulder. But when they were within sight of the camp their hearts trembled: the police were evicting the poor. They had already formed an orderly line, carrying their belongings on their back. Totò lost his patience and set up a barricade. The poor put up a defence and because Totò had nothing left to pile up on the barricade, Edvige jumped up and placed her body ramrod straight across it. Whereas Alfredo sacrificed his small suitcase. The police were at a loss as to what to do. Mobbi appeared and threw a small bomb, the type that doesn’t kill you, but produces so much smoke it

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makes you weep. Then everyone wept and Totò climbed up the Maypole to wave a white flag. Luckily, Signora Lolotta descended in a flash from the sky above and handed Totò a heavenly dove to do whatever he liked with. She didn’t want Totò to be sad. She had to leave as suddenly as she had arrived, because the angels were chasing after her. No one has permission to steal miraculous doves from Paradise. Totò felt so happy that he almost fell off the pole. He said: ‘Two eggs fried in butter’ and immediately two eggs fried in butter appeared behind him. He grasped that it wasn’t a dream and he blew away all the smoke that was clogging up the camp. The other poor began to blow, wondering why they hadn’t thought of it earlier. Mobbi and the police blamed the wind. And they prepared the attack. ‘Forward’, shouted the captain. But he sang. They all sang, and this was Totò’s doing. Then Mobbi replaced the police he judged to be drunk, and issued the order to flush out those tramps with water hoses. But all the tramps suddenly discovered they were holding a brolly and were not afraid of the hoses. They looked at Totò in amazement, because they were beginning to see that he was behind everything. ‘Perhaps he is a saint’, they thought. And someone actually said: ‘I’d guessed as much a while ago.’ Edvige looked at Totò in awe. She now lacked the courage to be close to him. Totò wasn’t aware of it, because he was enjoying himself at Mobbi’s and at the policemen’s expense. He had frozen the land in front of the camp which meant that the police were slipping and sliding and looked as if they were skating. Then Totò was surrounded by the poor and they were all asking him for things. The person who wanted a fur coat got a fur coat. The person who wanted a bicycle or a lampshade got a bicycle or a lampshade. Alfredo desired a suitcase large enough to contain his small one. Someone else wished to be taller and the lame man wanted to walk straight. But then the lame man wanted to be lame again, out of fear that nobody would give him any charity anymore. The black man was delighted, because Totò had made his skin go white and he ran to look for his girl. But he was nonplussed, because the girl had turned black, thanks to Totò. So the two of them looked at each other as shyly as before, but in the end, they embraced. Arturo even succeeded in getting him to turn the statue into a real girl who was as naked as she was in plaster, and she ran round the camp, with the men in love in hot pursuit, shouting: ‘Lallalaà, to the city I want to go’, followed by Arturo, now more miserable than before. Totò also managed to get Rappi’s hat to blow away, to punish him, and Rappi ran after his top hat, but to no avail. Then Totò made a top hat appear on everyone’s heads, and when Rappi saw that they were all wearing a top hat like his own, he fled, making for the railway line as fast as a train and, instead of dust at his heels, there was a trail of top hats. Then Totò dodged his friends who went on making demands for wardrobes, bedroom blankets, and millions of liras, to rush to Edvige, who had gone to hide in her hut. Totò tried to persuade her that he was just a man and all the credit belonged entirely to the dove and to Signora Lolotta.

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Meanwhile, darkness had fallen and Mobbi and his policemen crossed the frozen forecourt, clinging to ropes. Their plan was to avoid making any noise and to surround the encampment by surprise. Mobbi was cold and his men were blowing on his fingers to warm them up. Mobbi and his men looked like a wood in the moonlight, because they had stuck branches into their helmets and onto their uniforms for camouflage. He ordered a policeman to go and see what was going on in the enemy camp. The policeman went to have a look and saw that they were all jolly and everyone was holding expensive things in their hands and that Totò was performing miracles. He immediately asked if he too could be granted a wish: to be made a general and he returned to his side, wearing a general’s pips. Mobbi was alarmed when he saw him come back making a din with no circumspection whatsoever, instead of crouching and proceeding quietly, as he had done on his way there. The policeman stated: ‘I’m a general.’ And they handcuffed him and sent him back to the city. * Mobbi decided it was best to wait for dawn before launching the assault. He fell asleep and every now and then he opened his eyes and spied some of the poor out there in the camp, strolling past in evening dress, carrying lampshades. But he thought he must be dreaming. Meantime, Totò felt the desire to kiss Edvige at last, and give her an amazing gift. He made the broom in her hands vanish and replaced it with a beautiful electric vacuum cleaner. Then who knows what other present he would have given her, when he suddenly noticed that the dove had disappeared. He rushed out to look for it and met the poor who were running after the statue and when the statue saw Totò, it kissed him passionately on the mouth. It upset Edvige, but he found the dove that had flown up to the bare branches and said: ‘Ask me for whatever you want, Edvige.’ They kissed and their joy was so great that they climbed up the posts like squirrels. Then, since she wanted dawn to come so much so that she could tell everyone they were in love, Totò summoned the sun immediately, although it was only two in the morning. Dawn came and Mobbi woke up and yelled: ‘Forward!’ Then, you could hear the sound of rumbling tanks, and soon the poor were captured and led to the police vans. While the police were hitting them over the head, they were laughing, in the certainty that Totò would defend them. But Totò no longer had the dove, since the angels had taken it away and Totò was looking for it in the sky and the poor looked up to the sky, because Totò was looking up, and when Mobbi saw everyone looking up to the sky, he stretched out his hand to feel if it was raining. The police vans, crowded with the poor, headed for the city, while Edvige was in tears and was looking everywhere among the huts for the dove that belonged to her Totò. The camp echoed with the metallic noise of oil rigs under construction, ordered by Mobbi. This really was the end and Gaetano was in tears: ‘Farewell, small valley!’

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But Signora Lolotta appeared, as suddenly as the wind, and carrying the dove. She had stolen it again from the angels. The old woman ran as fast as a hare and gazed at Edvige, who was also running, to give Totò an ordinary dove, in the hope that Totò could work miracles with hers, since she couldn’t find the other one. The angels held up the rear, shaking their heads at stubborn Signora Lolotta who was breaking celestial law. At the red traffic light, the disciplined angels came to a stop, which enabled Lolotta to catch up with Totò and Totò, holding the dove in his hand, shouted ‘Victory!’ and all the police van doors opened wide. The poor flew away like sparrows and you could see the sky filling with puffs of smoke, because the police were shooting at them. A smiling Signora Lolotta was surrounded by the angels, then taken away and reprimanded by them, for her deception, having given them Edvige’s dove, instead of Totò’s magical dove. Totò flew next to Edvige, Alfredo had his large suitcase, which was just the right size for a journey, the poor were happy, and a little frightened for being so high up in the sky. They decided to fly far away, but first they descended for a short while over the camp, to take one last look. Mobbi, who was making a speech to his men, took fright and retreated, as if they were planes. But then he said: ‘It’s not true!’ It couldn’t be. And he continued his speech, while Totò and the poor disappeared from the horizon. There was so much land beneath them. They felt just like Totò and the Signora Lolotta, enthralled at the sight of spilt milk that seemed like a river on the immense land mass of planet earth. Then a beach and white waves came into view, then only the sea, and they flew towards a realm where saying ‘Good day’ really means ‘good day’.

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Scenario Italia mia (1951-2)

Context In 1953, Zavattini published two versions of this scenario, and, in his anthology of scenarios, Basta con i soggetti! (1979) a third one, written in the 1960s for television, In 2006, in his more representative anthology of Zavattini’s scenarios, Orio Caldiron published only the first version. This edition brings together, in translation, the successive versions which, in their entirety, form the scenario of Italia mia. The project’s publishing history signals in itself the importance, for Zavattini, of the idea’s development and transformation over time. In addition to three versions for De Sica, Zavattini produced three successive ones for Rossellini, the last one containing the most detail. Taken as a whole, Italia mia emerges. Its development in the 1970s version appears later, in a separate section of this edition, as a hinge between Italia mia and its last transformation as The Truuuuth or La veritàaaa. As for the first version, it was written for De Sica in September 1951. The relevant translation is based on Italia mia, taken from his 1979 anthology.1 However, by comparison with Orio Caldiron’s 2006 base text, the first paragraph, La prima idea in quattro paginette (‘The first idea in four short pages’) which comprises a very short version of the scenario, was omitted.2 The second version, also written for De Sica, is dated 24 October 1951. As Zavattini explains in the article cited later, after copyrighting the initial outline for Italia mia, he developed the scenario between September and October: ‘In the meantime, I went on thinking about Italia mia and this letter, in a sense, constitutes a new version of it.’ This more elaborate version of the story was sent to De Sica in a letter which was first published in 1953, ‘Meeting with the director: Letter to De Sica.’3 The third text, to be found in another letter to De Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 155–7. Zavattini, ‘La prima idea in quattro paginette’, in Zavattini, ‘Come non ho fatto Italia mia’, Rassegna del film, 2, no. 12, March 1953, 21–8. 3 Zavattini to De Sica, Rome 24 October 1951, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 387–92. 1 2

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Sica, dated, 24 January 1952, expands on the original idea, building on a rough plan the writer had already sent De Sica and is contained in a letter to him.4 All three appear later. When De Sica, under pressure from Giulio Andreotti, withdrew from the project, Rossellini expressed an interest. A new version, tailor-made for Rossellini, is dated 15 April 1952 which Zavattini immediately copyrighted.5 It was followed by a version included in a second letter to Rossellini, dated 31 May 1952 and appended to a letter to Carlo Ponti.6 Judging from Zavattini’s approach, the purpose of the second version for Rossellini, written for the producer Carlo Ponti, would seem to have been to dazzle him with examples and images conjured up by language and win him over to commit himself to the project. Note the arresting opening sentence in which Zavattini almost creates an oxymoron, by equating spectacle and everyday life. There is correspondence in the Zavattini Archive of Reggio in Emilia from Zavattini to Ponti, repeatedly requesting that he sign the contract as promised, but Ponti did not sign. The third Rossellini version is contained in a private letter from Zavattini to Rossellini, 16 December 1952 and published in the same article in Rassegna del film.7 It is striking that Zavattini made public the whole pre-production history of the project. He explains the nature of Italia mia in an interview: ‘Cinema, Zavattini, and Reality’ (1951): Italia mia is no different from My Germany, My France, My America, and so on. The idea was suggested to me by Italy, of course. Italia mia seeks to be the experiment of a cinema that has respect for what makes us live and in which we live, and escapes from an imagination that is always something of an ‘ivory tower’. In other words, by giving value to phenomena, by treating them as the story to tell, we can hear ‘the voice of reality’.8

As far as he was concerned, the ethical and, indeed, political, demands on the cinema dictated that the next phase in the development of Neo-realism was to endorse non-fiction as mainstream filmmaking.9 The project met with opposition and rejection, first in Italy, then in Mexico, where Zavattini proposed a version

Zavattini, Letter to De Sica, Rome 24 January 1952, ibidem, 172–4. Zavattini, ‘Quando preparavo il viaggio con Rossellini’, in ‘Come non ho fatto Italia mia’, 27–8. 6 Zavattini, ibidem. And: Zavattini, ‘Altri appunti per chiarire le idee’ in ‘Come spero di fare Italia mia’ Rassegna del film, 2, no. 13, April 1953, 21–9; 22–3. 7 The third Rossellini version is dated 16 December 1952, in ibidem, 22–3. Zavattini sent it to Rossellini on 16 December 1951. It was subsequently published in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 1988, 397–99. 8 Zavattini, ‘Il cinema, Zavattini e la realtà’, interview by Pasquale Festa Campanile, La Fiera Letteraria, no. 47, 9 December 1951, in Neorealismo ecc., edited by Mino Argentieri, Milan: Bompiani, 1979, 81–5. (This interview appears in English translation in Volume 2 of this edition). 9 Cf. the relevant texts in Volume 2 of this edition which trace and document this development. 4 5

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adapted for Mexico, entitled Mexico mío, based on two months of field research he carried out in the company of Fernando Gamboa, and scores of interviews with local people. Episodes that figured within the original Italia mia project were developed into films, the medium-length The Story of Catherine (1953) and the full feature length The Roof (1956). Even Rome, 11 o’Clock (1951) was driven in its original investigative form by the ideas underpinning Italia mia, as were several later projects. One might also point to Zavattini’s projected book publishing series entitled Italia mia, which led to his collaboration with the photographer Paul Strand, Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village, not to mention The Mysteries of Rome or The Free Newsreels, movement and films.10 The literature on the subject sees Italia mia exclusively in light of its failure to go into production, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

Text 1 This scenario strives to be the story of Italy’s higher sentiments, its humility, first and foremost, its love for life, its strength in labour and hope.11 It doesn’t take place in any one part of Italy, but across the whole of Italy and in a timespan which reaches from wartime up to the present. It is not limited to two or three episodes, but includes numerous episodes of varying length, some short, some very short, some single shots, which develop a unified portrait of Italians, alternating between Italian customs, way of life and attitudes, be they passionate, pathetic or lyrical. Where contradictions might emerge, these will still make sense, thanks to a common organizing principle. It will be like an essay about Italy, all based on images, but with interruptions, jumps and variations, which someone who is well informed and prepared can develop on the subject. The story begins with an iconic episode of war. A farmer strafed by a plane while he is ploughing a field. Only a large oak tree can shelter him. But the enemy’s tenacity is brutal: the plane sweeps back and forth, back and forth, machine gunning the tree, again and again, but disappearing for ever when it realizes its efforts are wasted. The farmer goes back to work. Then the war is over. A choir from Romagna leads into the second episode with close-ups of the singers’ faces. It will always be choirs from one region or another that mark the cut of all the following episodes. Here is the river Po

Cf. Section 26 below. Zavattini and Paul Strand, Un paese, Turin: Einaudi, 1955, and Zavattini, Un paese, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1974, 9–14. 11 This is the first version of Italia mia written for De Sica in September 1951. This translation is based on Italia mia, in Zavattini, Uomo, vieni fuori!, 155–7. The first paragraph is missing from the version published under the title: ‘La prima idea in quattro paginette’ (‘The first idea in four short pages’), Zavattini, ‘Come non ho fatto Italia mia’, 21–8. 10

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with its broad banks, its boatmen, and its navvies, gliding past in their barges.12 We shadow them in their work, as if we were making a documentary. We pick out those gestures and words, which reveal most clearly their patient and calm nature. Then they get on their bicycles, no soon as they hear the sound that marks the end of the working day. And, as a single group, they wend their way back to the village in their own time. One of them stops at a watermelon stall packed with people to buy a slice. He eats it slowly and with satisfaction. He is happy. He would gladly buy a second one, hesitates, checks the change in his pocket, but doesn’t buy one in the end. He gets back on his bicycle, slowly turning around as slowly as an ox, to look at the inviting slices the vendor is cutting from another melon. More songs. Then a group of children appear. They are playing football in the middle of the street. They are working-class children. They are playing with boundless enthusiasm. We see their faces one by one, track their smallest gestures, hear their cries and insults. A fight breaks out among them; then they resume the game. Never will a match be filmed with as much fidelity as this one. A child is whimpering in the corner, because his friends have banned him from the game. ‘He’s no good’, they claim. His mother gets involved. She wants to impose her son on the match and forces him to kick the ball. The others disagree, his mother is furious and strikes one of the children. Then that child’s mother comes on the scene and an argument breaks out between them that spreads to the other mothers, who appear at the windows and balconies and at their doorsteps, ready to defend their sons with all their might. But when they realize it has nothing to do with their own son, they retreat, as if they were seeking refuge in their sanctuary. Here come more Italian mothers: an elderly woman with her old son, a girl with her newborn baby. Twenty or thirty mothers, together with their sons in the most typical of motherly attitudes. Here come the people whose work involves hard physical labour and people who eat nothing but bread and water. And simultaneously in different places the same thoughts are shared by the humble. A calm and perceptive conversation of factory workers takes place over here, discussing legitimate strike action which they need to organize; and over there, twenty or thirty people are in the confessional. We can overhear their mumbled words to the priest. Here is a procession and the desires of all the people following the icon of a saint; and there, the sound of a horn in a village in the middle of nowhere, calling the illiterate to their single hour of class. Here are factory workers on a Sunday and here they are on the following Monday, getting up for work. A fusillade marks the point where the next episode begins. It’s a battalion’s target practice at the shooting range, followed by a break for rest. In the silence of the dormitory, a soldier is dictating a letter home in a low voice to his neighbour. He cannot read or write and suffers from it. He struggles with dictation. His

decauvilles (in French) in the 1953 edition.

12

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feelings are so strong that he is unable to express them. His companion tries to help him. They are both so overcome by their imagination that little by little the first letter by the conscript (which was supposed to convey his initial news about what it was like to be in a city) becomes an amazing list of things which are more in the realm of dreams than of reality. The film continues to unfold through a series of episodes or moments, in different places, the names of which are unnecessary. It is always Italy and the protagonists are always Italians. We shift from an episode of two young people before their first tryst, which we see in sequences alternating between one of them anxiously getting dressed in the family home and the other getting ready in the office, to the portrait of an Italian family, as a documentary filmmaker might do it, to the moment of departure and arrival in city railway stations, then in small town stations, then in sea ports. We go from an open-air social dance out on the streets, to an altercation between the poor in a large housing estate, to bricklayers building a house filmed at the very moment they are going back to work after a break. We hear their own words; we watch their minimal gestures and see the world around them. All this takes places from the last days of the war up until the present day. The war is visible in the opening episode, then the end of the war, the return to work, then the fear of another war, the desire for peace, expressed above all in this current year we are in. Such hope is so natural, broad and human, that the hope of Italians signifies the hope of mankind.

2 A couple of months ago, I mentioned that I had a rather crazy proposal which I might not have the courage to put to you: well, it was called Around the World.13 Don’t start laughing, but listen to what I have to say with as much good will as you can muster. Anyway, you’ll soon realize that these ideas also apply to Italia mia. As you know, it is possible to travel around the world in barely a few days. It would take us three months, since we would have to stop here and there in up to fifteen key locations. The two of us would be travelling with a cameraman, an assistant cameraman, a secretary, or similar, and a couple of cameras, possibly 16 millimetres, in any case, the Settimana Incom type.14 In my opinion, twa, or Alitalia or cit would sponsor our crew for the journey, in exchange for relevant publicity. Three months’ later, we would come back with thousands of metres of film to edit.

Zavattini to De Sica, Rome, 24 October 1951, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 387–92. The letter was first published in 1953, and titled ‘Incontro con il regista: lettera a De Sica’ (‘Meeting with the director: Letter to De Sica’), ‘Come non ho fatto Italia mia’, 23–5. 14 Settimana Incom was a regular weekly newsreel shown in the cinema. Zavattini is referring to lightweight portable cameras. There were many types available. What they lacked was portable sound-synchronized cameras, not available until the beginning of the 1960s. 13

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Before I go any further, doubtless, you will have realized that I am still thinking of my original idea of the journey, the Return Journey from Rome to Naples I wanted to do just after the war, as well as American Journey which you were enthusiastic about from when I first mentioned it. It seems to me that this really is the right time for a film of this kind, a film without a script, but which suddenly comes into being through our eyes and ears, making direct contact with reality – this is the real destiny of Neo-realism, in my view. There is no shortage of events. What we need to do is select some of them and film them in the very moment they take place. But sometimes, we will have to provoke them, set them up, yet always in keeping with the theme that we are establishing. What theme will we be developing? At this difficult juncture in the history of mankind, two Italians, a film director and a writer, get it into their heads to embark on a journey around the world, as journalists, reporters, to see and to listen to white, yellow, red and black men, and portray them in the course of their everyday life. These two Italians believe in the unity of the world. In other words, they believe that the only possible measure of the world is man on any meridian or parallel, loving, suffering, dreaming, feeling hunger, thirst, making love, coming into being, growing up, having children, dying and asking for other people’s solidarity. We are not concerned with expressions of difference, but those which demonstrate that, whatever the culture, they share the same fundamental life needs. This film is simply an invitation to consider the similarity between man and man. Equipped with such a map and founded on such sentiments, Bombay will cease to be an abstract word, conjuring up fables, but a place where children die of starvation or a man prays to his God with specific requests or a girl waits for her boyfriend or a worker has a problem with shoes. The functional voice-over, the director’s voice, will serve, for a change, to provide guidance to the viewer, during such a freewheeling journey, so full of unexpected surprises, coincidences, similarities or differences. We might use 300 metres of film on an old woman we meet on the shores of the Baltic sea or only 20 metres for Paris. We might bring together in a square all the mothers of a small town in Japan and talk to them (here is an example of intervening in events, provoking events). We could assemble four or five children of different nationalities in Tunis, for example, and look on, to see what they do in the enclosure we have put these white, black, yellow children, who don’t know one another and who speak different languages. We could witness starvation in the North, the South, the East and West, and how cries of suffering come from all over the world: the humble need justice, bread, work, solidarity. I think it would take us three whole months from today to develop the main lines of enquiry of a film like this, ‘without a story’. Of course, there’s no denying that such an enterprise requires some guesswork from us, but then a journalist also works on assumptions. Will the two of us know how to look and listen wherever we go, responding as storytellers, as poets and as filmmakers?

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I would never have thought up such a project if I hadn’t been sure of you and me. We will understand each other, as always, without raising our voices, we’ll always decide for the best, equipped with such energy and empathy towards other people as we can muster. Your cautious approach to production will temper my irresponsible imagination, but, in essence, we shall always be aiming for the same goal. I could only carry out such an enterprise by myself, if that is, I were a director. Otherwise, I could only do it if I worked with you, because no one else has your candour, acumen and necessary courage (as a man of action, and not a practical man; it goes without saying). And now let us set aside the tour of the world which I consider overtaken by Italia mia, though I must say it has been very useful indeed, because I asked myself: why not use the Around the World concept for Italia mia? In other words, after a reasonable period of time working things out on paper, why don’t the two of us take to the road on a three-month journey across Italy? We would get back to Rome with several thousand metres of film to edit. What would the framing idea be in this case? To show humble Italy: the Italy with its roots within the family unit, at work, in hope. But we would also show its passions, and what we could call its shortcomings. Despite its different cultural traditions, which will make the film a very good spectacle, what should emerge is a unifying portrait of Italians and Italy (the love of which is declared by the film’s title). One day, then, the two of us will set off from Rome and begin our journey. Regional songs will accompany us during this itinerary which might seem casual to the viewer, but will have been decided beforehand, to a large extent. We will chance upon a small village, which only a few hundred people have ever heard of. We will only stop for a few minutes (I mean to say that it will seem as if we only stopped for a few minutes, whereas, we will be stopping for as long as it takes to assemble those few minutes of the film). More than a film of episodes, it is going to be a film made up of moments. We’ll be gathering more moments than episodes, just as if we were travelling through Italy in a car. Even a short exchange, while we stop for only a minute or so with a road worker, along any road whatsoever, can take on dramatic meaning, relevant to the overall theme we are exploring. At dawn, you hear the sound of a horn summoning illiterate people to school, peasants of all ages, who go to school for an hour, before going to work in the fields. We witness a wedding in another village. In yet another, people are leaving, bound for Venezuela; and in still another, we witness the birth of a child. We shall be stopping in a place where a woman is about to give birth and wait until she has. We will shoot everything in minute detail and from our point of view. In another town, the peasants are occupying the land; in the North, an authorized demonstration is taking place (but even in these events, we will endeavour to grasp the more human aspects rather than the so-called political ones). There is a flood in the South; all kinds of poachers who need food and this is the only way they can get it, in the Po Delta. And then the latest stories in the news, only the most significant, mind, from the priest who was

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kidnapped by his congregation out of love to the Don Zeno community15 where there are loudspeakers on the belfries which broadcast songs while the farm workers are tilling the land. There is also the small town where the children venerate the memory of an Indian, killed by the Germans, an extraordinary and subtle veneration. I will have to peruse the post-war newspapers to find more information about it; and seemingly minor events which took place in different parts of Italy from the post-war period up until the present day. Since the film will embrace such a time frame – from the end of the war until today – reconnecting to the past, precisely through memories, reconstructions, sometimes fleeting or compressed, sometimes more extended, made by the people we encounter or suggested by the places themselves (e.g. your voice will say: ‘And now, we are entering the village of ... . This is where ... . Remember? A mother’ etc. and we see a re-enactment of the key moment, right there, in the very place where it happened). This is how long moments will alternate with short ones, lyrical ones with descriptive moments, dramatic moments or provoked moments with moments that really have been taken from reality, always following this discreet voice which accompanies the Italian citizen, and not only the Italian, to discover Italian values and Italian places. The montage will, of course, need to be tense and surprising. The material is so varied, the places so true and the people too, and the themes around the fables, the sounds and the songs are such that montage will be pivotal to making a success of it or not. Sometimes, we are going to be travelling with a specific objective in mind. For example, a visit to the Amiata miners or lunchtime in the home of a family near Cassino. Or five minutes spent in the company of a beggar in Rome or three minutes in a betting shop in Naples, shadowing one of the people who were betting there or in Monsumanno spa, for another three minutes, where we can film some of the more fantastic shots and funny too – we will make the viewer laugh often enough – I’m thinking of people emerging from the steamy hot grottoes, wrapped up in their bath towels and walking down a lane that looks like Hell. How many times are we going to be in the countryside or in conversation with people in the tavern, on the lookout for something that might inspire us, perhaps, as little as only 50 metres of film? And this will be wonderful. Maybe the nicest and most authentic part of making the film and perhaps of the film itself. I can tell you now that there won’t be a single actor in sight – this really is the film in which it would be a disaster, unless we had a sequence in which some actors are the protagonists. After all, they are also part of the Italian human landscape, aren’t they? We are going to have to pay the others. Not everyone, since many people will be appearing only very briefly, almost taken by surprise, but there will be those having to repeat the scene and be on standby, for a day

Nomadelfia. The place was a former Nazi concentration camp, turned into a community by the legendary Don Zeno.

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or two for you. It could be that we might need a whole town for a day (in which case, joking apart, you can come to an agreement with the mayor). I’ve reached the stage of proposing, in other words, this new form of Italia mia, which is the result of a great deal of difficult reflection. This is how the idea developed when I explained it in April to Mr Graetz: a series of episodes from 1900 to the present day; minor episodes of everyday life which was meant to be the conduit for seeing the history of Italy. Then I changed it, to encompass the period from the war up to the present day and beginning the film with the episode of the enemy plane strafing the farm worker alone in the field (this episode also fits in to the new approach, told by the farmer himself). Since then. I have continued to think about it and I think I have made progress with the new formula which can contain all the ideas and experience we have acquired up to now. It is also new for other reasons. Because it is making a contribution, one I dare call important, to narrative modes of cinema. Umberto D. closes one genre and Italia mia opens another. This is not down to the willpower of a programme, but is dictated by the urgency of our time, by the wealth and complexity of the sensibility we seek to express, I could add, of the speed, simultaneity and extension of time and space. Our film is not political; we have no thesis we want to demonstrate in a political way. It is a meeting with men, women and children, the elderly and with towns, so that we can demonstrate with the freedom of poetry (if, that is, we can find it in us) the wealth of human nature in Italy and how it always expresses the will to develop a constructive approach to life, both implicitly and explicitly.

3 Italia mia, both in terms of form and content, has come into existence, after years of work and of my growing experience in the film industry.16 This is what has enabled me to think in terms of Italia mia. In its simplicity, it is the result of my own thoughts and sentiments. From my point of view, it is a point of arrival. As you can appreciate yourself, from the pages in your possession and from the copyrighted version, I framed it in such a way that it can contain the best of things, including my amazement and my desire, or rather, my need, for personal contact with ordinary people, and also the desire to understand others, who are identified as Italians here, and based on my confidence that events worthy of being narrated, which many do not consider are such, will always arise. It also reflects my very open attitude and empathy for everything that exists. Italia mia is a sort of compendium of my ideas and of the ways in which someone like me, screenwriter that I am, can express them. You know all this perfectly well, and you have full confidence in these qualities of mine. You know that you are not

Zavattini wrote this text in a letter to De Sica. Cf. Zavattini to De Sica, Rome 24 January 1952, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 172–4.

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venturing into the unknown; on the contrary, that, at the end of this journey, I will have produced a script you are going to be pleased with. Moreover, it cannot be a script which reflects just any old perception or interpretation of reality. For the motif of the journey might suggest a series of illustrated postcards to some or folklore to others: depending on who is doing it, the journey could be treated in different ways, ranging from an unsophisticated treatment to an intellectual one, from pathos to frivolity, to name but a few. The reason you have accepted my idea is that you know how I’m going to develop it. You know that I am going to resolve the range of serious problems it poses and that I shall do so in a simple and clear manner, quite suitable to your means of expression.

4 This is a film invoking an honest and warm invitation to get to know one’s own country.17 It will unfold through events filmed when they are taking place, as well as through reconstructed events from the recent past and events provoked by the author, during his encounter with stark reality. These are the events that will comprise the film’s countless moments. To be more specific, it will be a summation of moments, not of episodes; a face-to-face encounter with brief moments and very brief ones, in different parts of Italy, following the seasons that make a year of Italian life. For example, we will watch a man praying; a girl waiting for her boyfriend; people from different countries who have never met and have been brought together by the author to observe their reactions on a given subject; a road worker talking to the author who has met him in the street; the stages in a childbirth; a lunch in the company of Cassino farmers; the Feast of the Redeemer in Venice or in Piedigrotta in Naples. We shall follow the more mundane activities of one or two people taking part in the holy festivity. We shall witness adolescent love; the border crossing of a few girls on their way to Switzerland to work as housemaids. We might film an actor being himself or, equally, we might observe the same kind of thing in someone else, such as, for example, Fausto Coppi or Padre Pio of Pietralcina.18 Each event will have to conform to the requirement of being filmed without delay, simultaneously, and for the length of its duration in time and space. This will serve the specific purpose of trying to give a sense of a town or of a person, by selecting images which reveal the human dimension of our people. It is a film that is devoid of any preliminary treatment, except the broad outline conveyed by these words. This film is to be made on the spot and in tune with the capabilities of whoever is directing it, based on his narrative abilities

This is the first version written for Rossellini, dated 15 April 1952 and copyrighted by Zavattini at that time, ‘Quando preparavo il viaggio con Rossellini’, in ‘Come non ho fatto Italia mia’, 27–8. 18 Fausto Coppi was a famous racing cyclist, several times winner of the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France; Padre Pio was revered as a saint even during his lifetime. 17

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and understanding of an Italy which is to be experienced directly, through sight and touch; not preconceived, but observed; that is to say, based on living skilfully in actual contact with ordinary people, so as to contribute to the broad spectrum, to be found even in a single gesture – or perhaps less than a gesture. Finally, the editing stage will be the juncture when a creative synthesis of all this vast and varied material, in terms of places, people, themes, stories, sounds, songs, will take place. It will be necessary to undertake a two- or three-month journey across Italy to make this film, as far as the author is concerned. In the course of such a journey, his encounters with reality will constitute the material for the film. In other words, the journey itself is to be considered the actual screenplay stage. The author will need to travel by car, sometimes using other means of transport, (trains, trams, coaches) considered environments worthy of study in themselves. The author will need a production assistant to take all the notes and organize all the practical arrangements for making all the film reconstructions of moments which are deemed interesting and feasible. There also needs to be a cameraman with a handheld camera to film the events which we come across along the way and which can be shot without a film crew. To be precise, we shall film in the same way as La Settimana Incom newsreel filming.19 Consequently, the production house financing the film will need to provide a car, a driver and a cameraman (a photographer at the very least). It might be possible to save money, by combining the two functions in a single person. We have to rule out considering this first journey an economy trip, because the material itself will constitute the film and it is not unlikely that we will come back from this journey with several hundred metres of useable material for the film, or, at least, with the kind of material and of experience which will allow us to make considerable savings in time and money, at the point when it is time for the camera to ‘roll’, as well as having a better choice of locations, people and even things to say. The itinerary for this journey, merely a technical itinerary, could include a departure from, and return to, Rome, going down to Sicily first, then from Sicily up the other side, whence we started, towards the north, the Veneto, from Trieste to Piedmont, Liguria and Tuscany. The two to three months’ journey could be divided roughly into a set number of days spent in one region and another set in another. But this is not advisable, because what will determine the length of stay in the places are circumstances, the quality of the encounters and the degree of curiosity arising along the way. It might be worth staying two days longer in a small village, to film a childbirth or the complete unfolding over time of such and such an event; an event that deserves to be told. Be it a political rally, a wedding, the detonation of wartime explosives, the return of an emigrant from America, a reconciliation between two families or two villages, a funeral,

La Settimana Incom was a weekly newsreel, shown in cinemas. Eventually, it was superseded by television news coverage, equally banal, mostly.

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a competition between two village bands, a hearing in a court of law and so on and so forth. At journey’s end in Rome, the author should allow a couple of months to allow all the material to dictate the definitive direction the film is going to take. This timespan could be reduced to a month – such a possibility shouldn’t be dismissed outright – since the general direction of the film, in terms of clarity and substance, should emerge one day at a time, during the journey itself. Having said that, we should estimate four to five months, between the journey and the definitive draft. The journey could begin in August, to include experiences occurring during summer and autumn. It could be interrupted for a month, to allow what has been done to be reworked and then continue in winter, with a few sequences in several places that are particularly suitable for winter sequences. Perhaps, in light of suggestions received during the summer journey. Consequently, the author estimates that film production could commence in the month of December. However, as to filming, we must bear in mind that the film requires specific elements from each of the four seasons. This means shooting the film in a timespan going from December to the following June. Obviously, it won’t be a case of months and months of uninterrupted work. We can use the intervals to edit the footage, so that we have a completed film for screening by the end of August. To wit, one year exactly.

5 The film Italia mia seeks to present Italy courageously, sincerely, combined with conveying a feeling of empathy towards its everyday manifestations, its liveliest and most authentic, and, therefore, its most spectacular.20 We’ll be travelling from a city to a village, from a mountain to a river, from a house to a square – following our intuition more than geography – to wherever there are striking signs of the public sphere and private life or even the secret life of our people. We shall pick out collective or individual signs, be they joyous or mournful; of the kind that could help form a portrait of the humble side of Italy which works, nourishes, hopes and loves life intensely. One could say that the film wants to be a figural witness to the Italian passion for life itself. Whatever we witness with our eyes won’t be filmed in its folkloric dimension, but in its human aspects, which form the very rationale of the film itself; comprising in all, forty, fifty or even sixty episodes or moments, the significance and dramatic form of which will increase through the juxtaposition created by montage. This way, we’ll see the departure of some emigrants at the port

This is the second Rossellini version, dated 31 May 1952 and appended to a letter to Carlo Ponti. In Rassegna del film, it appears before the previous version, dated 15 April 1952, ‘Quando preparavo il viaggio con Rossellini’, in Zavattini, ‘Come non ho fatto Italia mia’, 27–8, but herewith the chronology has been respected. Cf. Zavattini, ‘Altri appunti per chiarire le idee’ in ‘Come spero di fare Italia mia, 21–9; 22–3.

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of Genoa or we’ll follow in the footsteps of those men who invoke Saint Gennaro in Naples. In the heat of Sicily, we’ll watch the ritual of the kidnap of the bride or, in a Milan shrouded in fog, one Sunday afternoon, the thousands of domestic servants by the ramparts of Porta Venezia; along the Via Emilia, the countless bicycles; in Bologna, the departure of the conscripts for military service; in Parma, the return of the rice pickers from Piedmont; in Nomadelfia, Don Zeno, who, to lighten the load of people working in the fields, by installing loudspeakers on church towers to broadcast songs. In addition to all this, we are going to include whatever else the authors will encounter in the course of their unobstructed journey across Italy, a journey which will seem to appear before the camera, as if by magic. There will also be what the authors themselves are going to provoke, in response to the places and the people. It might be a meeting with all the mothers or all the women from the village whom the authors will gather in a public square to have a conversation with them and find out what these women, who live in a village in the middle of nowhere, want. Then we can include the victims of the Polesine flood, who will recreate under our very eyes the tragic scenes they witnessed and lived through. Furthermore, like hunters after a prey, we shall immediately head for places where an event is taking place, which is meaningful in terms of our theme, regardless of scale. It could be an event we find out about during a pause in our journeying across different places. It might be a village carnival or a fire, flooding or scouring the countryside hunting down wolves, an alleged miracle, a lottery win, a hurricane or a landslide, the return of a long-awaited person from across the seas, a collection among workers for a needy comrade. This is how the four seasons of a year in Italy, its summer, its winter, its autumn, its spring, will cross the screen, and, within the passage of the seasons, and along with the farmhand sowing and watching the immense flocks of birds flutter like flags in the wind, there are the other actors of Italian popular life which is always animated by the need for work and for peace.

6 I’ve drafted the summary notes you wanted, concentrating on the theme of winter.21 As for the rest, I’m more and more convinced that, without a few trips, Italia mia could end up lacking the kind of spontaneity we’re seeking. What we really need to do is to go on an extended journey, at least a month long, travelling the breadth and the width of our country. Among other benefits, this will give us a broader sense of the enterprise, making it more spontaneous and authentic, both from an empirical and intellectual point of view. In our case, I feel a little disgusted at the thought of writing up the ideas on paper, carrying This is the third Rossellini version, dated 16 December 1952. ‘Come spero di fare Italia mia’, 22–3. The text originally appeared in a private letter from Zavattini to Rossellini, 16 December 1951 in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 1988, 397–9 which Zavattini made public in the Rassegna del film article.

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out research based on books, newspapers and magazines, delving into memory, listening to friends from this or that region, and I know that, with the help of our imaginations, we are capable of drafting not one, but two, or even three versions of Italia mia and I am certain that you would know how to make it into an important film, but it seems to me that our ambition goes deeper and, at the same time, is subtler. I don’t think we should deny ourselves the pleasure of a certain amount of direct contact, the pleasure of days and revealing hours spent in who knows which town and beaches or homes. Am I mistaken? Nor do I completely dismiss the pleasure of memory, of reconstruction, though this other pleasure must be the running theme of the film. But I don’t want you to believe that I have lost confidence in your organizational abilities. If I keep insisting, it is because I am trying to get you to devote as much time as possible to Italia mia. I also ask myself: is it fair that I should be the one to suggest to Rossellini episode a or episode b about Calabria or Puglia, never having been to Calabria or Puglia? If I don’t go, my own contribution won’t be as insightful; there’s even the risk that it ends up being a bit rhetorical, despite everything. With nothing more than the aid of the imagination alone, we are never going to get the kind of ideas that only everyday life can provide so generously. For example, when I went into a tavern in the Reggio Emilia Appenine Mountains, a month ago, two young men began to sing in counterpoint, out of the blue. I was familiar with counterpoint singing, but their behaviour, their gestures, indeed, the whole scene, can be narrated just how we would like it to be, for the simple reason that I witnessed them. There are dozens of instances such as this one, and namely events which only take on a singular, sincere, vitality when they issue from direct experience. Here is a preliminary list for you to select something useful, if you wish.

Episodes which can be filmed without delay Episode of the Don Gnocchi disabled children, blinded by bomb explosives found while playing in the fields, on the shores of rivers etc.22 There are some in Rome, in the ex-gil gym at the Foro Mussolini.23 Approach: The war is a distant memory, but you can still see its telling signs. These are the children destroyed by wartime explosive devices, still to be found all over Italy which was reduced to one big battlefield. A kind soul gave them shelter. Here they are, these blind kids, playing

In 1950, Zavattini scripted a short film produced by De Sica, himself, and the Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation, a ten-minute documentary about children maimed by wartime explosives and grenades while playing. Cf. Ansano Giannarelli (ed.) Zavattini Sottotraccia, Edizioni Effigi, 2009, 51. 23 ​g​il stands for: Gioventù Italiana del Littorio Fascista. The Foro Mussolini, a sports centre, was renamed Foro italico, after the defeat of fascism. 22

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a passionate match, just like other kids. Let’s follow the match in minute detail, including the players’ mistakes, the moments of confusion and the wrong kicks. Palermo, 17 December 1952, 3.00pm. In a small square near the municipal building, a fifty-year-old man sitting on a stool, leaning against a tree, tells the story of medieval knights.24 He is at the centre of a circle surrounded by a crowd of old men and some children. He is leaning on a stick and has a bottle of water nearby that he sips from now and then. He talks for a minute, half in plain speech, telling the story. Then, when the battle begins, he begins to describe it imitating its sounds and underlining the story with movements of his stick that becomes a sword, as if the storyteller were one of the contestants. Every so often, one of the onlookers leaves, giving him a few cents, while all around the usual life of the city carries on. Rome, the Night of Christmas Eve, Via Panama. The night has fallen in the big city. A small truck comes to a halt. Two or three men and a pregnant woman get off. They’re circumspect. They begin to unload stones and bricklayers’ tools like someone who is about to build something. That is exactly what they’re doing. They must build their home in record time. It’s only a simple room, and just 2 metres tall. If they succeed in building it before it comes to the police’s attention, including the roof, the police won’t be able to send them away from this accommodation of theirs. They need it because they haven’t got one, and the woman is heavily pregnant. I’m concerned that Via Panama will make the event more exceptional, I mean too exceptional. There would need to be other dwellings near this kind of hut. Because then the problem wouldn’t come across as so unusual. What this young, newly married couple is doing today, others did yesterday. It becomes typical, not fictional. Indeed, that thirty-year-old worker and his young, twenty-year-old wife will have built it on land where other people had already won their battle of home seekers pushed to their limit. Let’s follow the stages of building, working faster and faster, the solidarity of some of the other hut dwellers, the woman who is cold and is unable to keep a lookout and finds refuge in another hut, up to when, at dawn, the roof is on and daylight can expose them, because no one can get rid of them. I suppose this sketch can last about ten minutes. This guy Zambon and his wife shouldn’t come across as a couple of tramps, but good people, simple, humble, serious, people with urgent problems to resolve, and the sketch does so without resorting to the picturesque, but with intelligence. Calabria (based on a second-hand source). I’m told that something very interesting happens in Calabria during the entire month of December, the chestnut harvest. Hundreds of women spread across the woods collecting chestnuts. They get paid on the spot – and searched – there and then, to stop them taking away kilos of chestnuts, beneath their capacious dresses. Napoli, St. Gennaro, 16 December. One of the miraculous appearances of the saint, according to the Treccani Encyclopaedia, takes place on 16 December. Paladini in Italian, a reference to Sicilian folklore. They appeared, and still do, in Sicilian puppet theatre.

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Since it won’t be possible to move around with the camera inside the church and its immediate environs, as we would prefer to do, I think we should be able to reproduce the authenticity of a few details with shots and sound recordings, at the obsessive pace we discussed.25 Tiny village x. We’ll come across a mountain village where a baby is about to be born any moment and tell the story of this baby in this house of a tiny village of 300 inhabitants, from when they go to look for the midwife to when the baby comes out of the womb. The little village is in the middle of nowhere; there may be no water, which is the reason why they have to fetch it from the well. From ... To ... In other words, a journey on a small train bound for Puglia, from one stop to the next, lasting no more than ten minutes. We should pick two stations where what is interesting is people getting on and people getting off; the kind of traffic; the way the passengers settle in the train; how they quarrel; how they sing and even the landscape they cross. I’m saying Puglia, but anywhere providing third class travel would enable us to show the everyday life of ordinary people. Abruzzi. This is the season to film the wolf hunt, when they sing that marvellous song which says: ‘It seemed to me we were ascending to the infinite, one step at a time’, referring to climbing a mountain. Tiny village y. This is the season when you can film The Passion of Christ enacted by the villagers in the streets, at Valmontone, for example. To show the profane way of preparing what is not profane. Tiny village h. At the break of day, the sound of a horn alerts the peasants that the schoolmaster or mistress is ready to take the class for the illiterates that morning, before they go off to work. The horn again, and the peasants and labourers get up, go to the school, and sit at the desks. The schoolmistress begins: ‘Sun-Sound-Space’ and says: ‘Repeat out aloud.’ And then they all read aloud in chorus. Port Tolle. The river Po is teeming with people lying in wait for waterfowl. Only later can we see that this is that part of the Po valley where the villages are flooded. The Po is still a threat, just as it was last year. A group of women describes last year’s disasters. Their mimicry says it all. As we proceed slowly on a boat, we discover a woman washing the dishes in the swollen river and another descaling fish in it. A poster on a wall: this evening the radio stars. It’s the end of the show. Everyone comes out carrying their own chairs and walk along the riverbank, while the water gauge climbs another centimetre. A town in the provinces, whichever we like. Forlì, for example. It’s the Hour of the Amateur. One by one, four or five characters among the audience get up. We choose those who best convey Italian musical talent or other typical talents. We have no option but to set one up and choose on location whichever acts are the most expressive. A village? Choose a village where there’s a woman who has the largest number of children, or better still, one who is living with the greatest number 25

Rossellini borrowed Zavattini’s Italia mia proposed episode around this fabled event for the ending to Journey to Italy (1953), reworked as the film’s transcending climax.

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possible, and shoot a short sequence set in the morning, when the sons get up and go to work, while the mother stands there among them, calling them out by name (a town is better than a village). A letter from one of those from the Resistance read out aloud by his mother.26 It is the letter he wrote to her only a few instants before dying, read right there, where he lived, and in his home. A village in Emilia. Hundreds and hundreds of bicycles on their way to an open-air dance in one of those large wooden barns, covered by an awning. Actually, dwelling on this topic, I can see in my mind’s eye a wonderful scene which I witnessed in Suzzara, two years ago, in September: a big popular dance in a huge farmyard, located among the peasants’ homes. A sudden wind blows dust in every which where. Everyone was running to get away on their bicycles in the dust storm and all that was left in the yard were the small light bulbs, violently swaying to and fro. Even the scene of all the girls on their bikes, in a frontal shot or filmed from the rear, and caught by the lights of a car which also picks out a couple here embracing and another there, also embracing, but in a different way, the latter, hiding from the lights, by fearfully putting their hands forward. Maybe these scenes should be done this coming summer or in late spring, with a voice-over saying: ‘It’s spring and in Aemilia it’s the time for the first open-air dances’, and so on. Pisa (very short). The Pisa Baptistry seen from the inside, while the caretaker is allowing a group of people to hear the echo from a shout travelling across the Baptistry dome. Their faces are looking up, as if they were in a painting by Giotto. Rome. Gregorian University. It’s the end of class. The young priests, wearing a variety of different uniforms, leave to go back to their boarding houses. Those living in the university itself run out into the courtyard to play basketball, with their robes gathered up in all kinds of ways. They play with passion, shout, argue, laugh, as if they were real basketball players. All the while, you can overhear several conversations. Rome, Termini Station. This is not the Termini railway station choked with traffic. It’s an empty Termini; deserted in the night. There are trains ready to depart in the very first hours of the morning, with their different destinations in Italy on display. People are sleeping in the waiting rooms. They are the ones with transit tickets and not much money. There is the emigrants’ hall, the military Zavattini is referring to a recently published anthology of letters and messages written by Italian Resistance fighters, most of them on the eve of their execution. Cf. Piero Malvezzi and Giovanni Pirelli (eds), Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana (8 settembre 1943-25 aprile 1945). Turin: Einaudi, 1952. The anthology broke the long silence and taboo, caused by official governmental censorship. Official censorship lasted from 1947 until 1953, when Zavattini was involved in a ten-minute documentary in which passages from some of the letters are read out. The story and screenplay are attributed to Zavattini and to the editors of the book, Malvezzi and Pirelli, but Zavattini’s involvement was limited to giving the project the go-ahead which was a condition for the publisher’s permission. According to Ferruccio Parri, this was the first anti-fascist film to be produced since Giorni di gloria (Days of Glory) of 1945. Cf. Giannarelli, Zavattini Sottotraccia, 2009, 556–7.

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conscripts’ hall. A mother accompanies her two children to the toilet, crossing a wide, shiny, empty space. All these people sleeping in so many positions and belonging to different groups, both in terms of quality and quantity, but also dress, give a sense of the long and tiring journeys down the length of Italy. We might wish to close the sequence with loudspeakers announcing the departure of the first trains and the ensuing general agitation while passengers are making for the platforms in a hurry. First of all, given what you told me in terms of your requirements, I hope you’ll find a couple of episodes among all this material. If I were you, I’d go and shoot a few hundred metres of film at Sora, where there’s a flood; several hundred more of a key football match, where you’re bound to find something unusual. Then I would shadow people betting on the Totocalcio football pools of a Sunday evening, you could shadow someone who has hit the jackpot, just when he has been told the good news. We would then stop to observe him better, since the Totocalcio football pools these days are so typical. Otherwise, we could describe what Sunday is like in a small village down south and one up north; something we could easily do, even now. Then Matera; from what I’ve heard, all you need do is take the sequence from the road, just a short distance before you reach Matera, then through Matera itself and beyond it, with a road sign on display and nothing else marking the centre. (I know for a fact that Lattuada is using Matera very differently from the way you would.) We could then enter the sulphur mines. You might be inspired by that novella by Pirandello in which a young miner discovers the light of day, as if for the first time, having always worked in a mine during the daytime. Even in winter, there are famous pilgrimages. We’re spoilt for choice. A pilgrimage could play out for ten minutes or so. We could choose specific moments of it. When they’re eating, sleeping, singing, rolling about on the ground, screaming and so on. Winter would also be the right time to go to Carrara and see how miners carry the massive blocks of marble down the mountain, pacing their descent with their voices. An immediate task for you in the meantime would be making the selection of folksongs and not just for the soundtrack. Some songs (and even certain musical instruments) are extraordinary for their beauty and originality.27 Likewise, in winter we can shoot an episode about the occupation of uncultivated land. I’m told it is an extraordinary spectacle, with flags, horses and the whole town in procession, a serious event in which everyone is fully aware of what they are doing. If, say, there is no such episode taking place in the lands of the South, it would be worth our while to reconstruct it as faithfully as possible, staying for a couple of days or so where this sort of event has taken place. You could even shoot the Padre Pio episode in winter, but it’s a delicate one, which would need very careful thought. And you could also go to the Maremma in winter. You mentioned Montalto di Castro to me and if we go and live there for two or Zavattini’s appreciation of folk music coincides with when, earlier in 1952, he met the ethnographer Ernesto De Martino.

27

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three days, something good is bound to come of it. Then there are farm animals, and some things on farm animals could be done even in winter; they could form part of those very short shots that serve to make cutaways. Another episode you could consider for a selection to shoot immediately, if that is, there is a logic to make it a necessity, would be the introduction. If, that is, you agree that we need one, and that it would fit in. The noise of a fighter plane coming close, some farmers or just the one, working in a field. It’s an enemy plane and flies in and its strafing begins. The farmers scatter into the vast field, running with difficulty across the furrows, some throw themselves to the ground. One of them is barely in time to get as far as an oak tree, when the fighter plane returns. We heard the sinister sound of the engine getting louder and louder. He is aiming at the farmer who finds shelter behind the oak tree. The rounds hit the tree, causing splinters everywhere. The plane flies away. The terrified farmer runs towards the house over there in the distance. But the fighter plane is back and as he is closer to the oak tree than to the house, he retraces his steps, to shelter behind it. Still, the angry fighter plane won’t give up. During the last lull, another farmer calls out to him from afar, encouraging him to make a run for it. In the vastness of the fields, the cries in dialect are hard to understand. They remain suspended in the air, creating even greater fear. The man awaits the next attack, leaning his face against the tree trunk, his head is in his hands; he doesn’t want to watch. The machine doubles back one more time, lashing out at the oak tree from another angle. But the plane doesn’t return. The other two farmers come out of the farmhouse. The farmer sheltering behind the oak tree relaxes. They talk about what has happened, going back into the middle of the field to look up and down its length. One of them drinks from an earthenware mug, lying there, in the dust under a jacket. Then they slowly go back to work, talking about what happened in their incomprehensible dialect. (Perhaps we should also include a cow or an ox there. We can discuss the specific type of work.)

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Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village (1955)1

Context Italia mia was rejected and censored. De Sica first, then Rossellini, were both passionate about the project, yet both withdrew. Christian Democrat minister Giulio Andreotti had made it clear that an investigative film about Italy would not be tolerated. But Zavattini didn’t give up. Armed with his pre-war publishing experience and with his high-level contacts within the major publishers of the day, he planned a book version. The first book was Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village, which he considered the first episode within the Italia mia series. Ethnographic research orchestrated and partly conducted by Zavattini would be accompanied, in this first book, by the photographic illustrations by the American photographer Paul Strand, a recent fugitive from McCarthyism, who found refuge in France where he spent the rest of his life. Zavattini had first met him at the Perugia Conference on Neo-realism, in 1949. Before the definitive book version appeared in print in 1955, an earlier version came out in Cinema Nuovo. The flexible magazine layout seems closer to Zavattini’s vision, more ‘urgent’, than the austere book version, dominated by hieratic, dark portraits of what to Strand were strangers and foreigners, in the vein of his pre-war portraiture. Zavattini’s detailed plan of work, sent to the publisher, clarifies the book’s purpose: The text in the book will comprise my Preface of ten pages or so and then about fifty statements (or confessions) made by people from my town which are like very succinct autobiographies, as I explained to you some time ago. Taken as a whole, their combination should convey a feel for the town’s identity, but in no sense do I mean folkloric.2

1 2

Zavattini, Un paese, 9–14. Zavattini, Letter to Giulio Einaudi, 30 October 1953, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 411. Letter to Paul Strand, 23 January 1953, in Elena Gualtieri (ed.), Paul Strand Cesare Zavattini. Lettere e immagini, Bologna: Comune di Reggio Emilia-Biblioteca Panizzi and Fondazione Un Paese and Edizioni Bora, 2005, 64.

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Clearly, for Strand, the Zavattini–Strand book was a vehicle for his photography, in which anonymity and the strangeness of the Other would appear to be the striking, underlying factor. His vision is entirely at loggerheads with Zavattini’s which is played down into the background, by the dominant scale and type of Strand’s photography and layout (Strand insisted that he himself would exert total control over the design and layout which he carried out himself). Strand later used the same format for further projects, but none of them, however attractive they are, were accompanied by cutting-edge, testimonial, ethnography. Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village was intended as the first of film books to be made with other filmmakers. The idea was that they would be illustrated proposals for film scenarios. In the event, a second, lesser-known book came out about Naples, written by De Sica, published in German, then translated into Italian. The text which appears below is a selection, translated by the author. It comprises part of Zavattini’s Introduction and a representative number of complete testimonies. This translation seeks to echo the spoken syntax of the people’s voices. Apart from the Introduction, which follows the norm for such writing, the other texts are written by the villagers themselves, including some of the children of the village whom Zavattini invited to keep a diary. They are all witnesses to their own lives and memories. Some were lightly edited by Zavattini, in a pioneering form of testimonial writing, resulting from what can be described as non-professional, ethnographic, field research, requiring listening and empathy. This aspect provides a context for what Zavattini means by ‘folkloric’, which, in his sense, could be defined as an outsider representation which spectacularizes the Other, an objectification or reification, as his Italia mia script points out and briefly explains. The high contrast and large scale of Strand’s photography stands out. His villagers are strangers in the book published by Einaudi. At first glance, the layout suggests that the text provides nothing more than a series of captions. A closer scrutiny shows that each text is not in tune with its related beautiful portrait, realistic, if an abstracted, almost anonymous, representation. Strand’s layout show a series of dual portraits, the image-based one standing out more, as hieratic, silent, distant, the text-based one, less in evidence, visually. Only when you read them do you see that they are also portraits, not estranged figures, but communicative, personal, unique individuals, each with a story to tell, and many memorializing recent Italian history.

Text 1 Introduction. In 1953 the American Paul Strand suggested, in the unperturbed voice of a patriarch, that we make a book together, about some Italian place or other. What came to mind first was Sperlonga near Fondi, Gaeta, then, Gorino

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in the Po Delta, Bergamo, Alatri, Carrara, Via Emilia and a trip along the Po, from its source to the sea. Then I said ‘Luzzara’ and he said: ‘Let me go and see it first.’ Strand’s idea came after a year spent planning, together with the publisher Einaudi, a series entitled Italia mia, a combination of photographs and captions such as: How much money does this man crossing the square have in his pocket? Where is he going? What does he want? What does he eat? And we were undecided whether to go for the book format or the brochure format. We found that the cheaper brochure had the advantage of being more accessible in this format to a wider audience, as well as reflecting it in its popular content. The themes went from cleaners in our three major cities, Milan, Rome and Naples who were to be patiently interviewed, white collar workers, farm hands, wet nurses, train workers, bicycles, Saturdays, Sundays, a day in the life of an unemployed person, a strike at Sesto San Giovanni over a stretch of time from morning to evening, shadowing a worker’s family, country priests, army conscripts and so on. The plan was that the authors would be filmmakers, famous or not, provided they were inside the Neo-realist movement, which translates as genuine generosity of ears and eyes, in the direct experience of the events and of the people of one’s own hometown. Above all, I wanted to get some young people to travel around Italy. There would be someone stopping for a chat with a bricklayer, taking photos with his Leica or Condor, another talking with a mechanic, and yet another with whoever he might come across. But my conviction was that wherever they might decide to stop would be fine; whoever they might talk to would be fine. It would be fine, just fine. For the time being, this is the only publication to come out of that ambitious project. I met Strand at the filmmakers’ conference at Perugia in 1949. Pudovkin was present. His gaze was so alive that it seemed he would never die. The theme of the conference was modern man’s responsibilities regarding cinema. Strand had already demonstrated his point of view, as the author of This Native Land which means, among other things, loving one’s country and being willing to take risks for it. I don’t think we shook hands at the time, since I felt intimidated by his silences. Then I met him again in Rome three years later and now here I am faced with his work, some ninety photographs of Luzzara which prove Strand’s attentive solidarity towards others. He has been to Mexico, New England, France and this part of Padanía with his ancient camera. Now he is in Scotland. Wherever he goes he finds the right light and line of the time when things have absorbed our presence and our labour. As far as Strand is concerned, not even a tree is ever in isolation; he is the facing tree. Forty years or so ago, my teacher read a letter in Latin by Petrarca stating that he had visited Luzzara, which he criticized for being a town wedged in a swamp populated by frogs and mosquitos. My emotion was such that I shot up shouting: ‘I’m from Luzzara!’ But I wouldn’t want the fact that this is my town to confuse the reader as to the reasons why I suggested it to Strand. It so happens that when Strand put this proposal to me, I wanted to close my eyes and put my finger on the map of Italy and wherever it landed, whether

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north or south, I would follow Strand to try and become Italian, as well as being it. Then it seemed to me and to Strand that it would be better to choose a place I already knew something about. I must confess, however, that I knew nothing about Luzzara, though I assumed I knew everything. I had even written in my will: ‘Bury me in the place where I was born’, giving what I thought was a precise instruction when, really, it was nothing more than fantasy. This is another reason I am grateful to Strand for having obliged me to cohabit for the first time and in earnest with the people from my town. To do so was very hard at first, but then wonderful.3 Strand stalked Luzzara and environs for a whole month and finally laid out on my desk fields, faces and homes. And then I followed in his footsteps with the help of a farmer, Lusetti, Valentino Lusetti, who acted as Strand’s and his wife’s guide, who talked to them in English, because he had been a prisoner of war in America. Lusetti is very knowledgeable and is both accurate and tender in the way he says the names of things in the countryside. When, for example, he names the birth of some plants, his fingers convey the delicacy of silk. He interviewed people I couldn’t speak to, as if he were their brother. Without his research, the work would still be only half done, I thank you. You could say that Luzzara is situated between two bridges, Guastalla Bridge, about 6 kilometres away, and Borgoforte Bridge, about 10. The bridges were blown up during the war, and when the time came for the retreat, the Germans were frantic, because they had no idea how to make the crossing. There were no boats. There was nothing. Many of them headed for the farms to take anything that can stay afloat, wine vats for crushing grapes, laundry tubs. They kept asking politely for civilian clothes, while constantly looking this way and that, because they were afraid of the partisans. The ones on the other bank called out loud enough to hear the shouts from shore to shore, their voices carried across as slow as crows’ cries and always sounding so frightening that the ones on this side would become increasingly anxious and many threw themselves into the water on lengths of timber and bundles of firewood or they rode in on horseback at a gallop and drowned. For two or three days, in the river Po you could see corpses of horses and Germans floating downstream. The flames in the fire, shining on my grandmother’s face who was throwing corn into the ashes where they disappeared, only to pop out with a bang, plump as can be, in a whiff of smoke, bringing good cheer to the next day. Enough is enough. My friend Bruno [Fortichiari] brought me back to reality with his letter: A village like outs, dear Cesare, faces us squarely with the problem of social relations. Have you noticed that our youth is as good-looking as it is shortlived?4

Cohabitation is a key tenet of ethnographic filmmaking which Zavattini developed in theory and practice. 4 A relative on his wife’s side, Bruno Fortichiari, was involved in the project. As the quote suggests, he was a socialist. 3

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Now I want to make an effort to concentrate on statistics: local administration has a budget of 120 million liras. It spends six million a year for the old people’s home. Forty-five people live there; a million to send children to the seaside and mountain summer camps, and six million for hospital care. The village street sweeper earns 36,000 liras per month and collects the rubbish with a donkey cart. Let’s have a look at Paul Strand’s photographs and ponder my countrymen’s personal statements. The words are essentially theirs. I think I have hardly ever betrayed their spirit. Nor did we choose the people you see and whose voice you hear because they, of all people, had something to say, since it is well established that everyone has something to say. This is the reason why I would have liked to interview at least 1,000 people, and make a big book devoting a page to every single person from Luzzara. One of these days I should make a work like that. It is only a question of good will. If I don’t, someone else could, about any single populated part of Italy, and do so more thoroughly and in more depth.5 * She was one of the most beautiful girls and one of the nicest.6 My aunt told me that she met her and asked her: ‘Ciao, Paolina, where are you going?’ But Paolina never replies to anyone. Although it was pouring, my aunt got the impression that she was going to meet someone. It was Christmas evening and she was on her way to throw herself into the Po, out of love. They never found her, and it seems that she ended up in the Paolina bend of the river – it’s been called Paolina ever since – but covered in 2 metres of sand, because, even in the space of a day, the sand collects and forms a strand. * I want to die the very same day I’m no longer able to get dressed and undressed by myself.7 * We sink the large boats in winter, to keep them in good condition, otherwise the ice cracks the wood.8 In 1944 we sank a large number of them, but that was sabotage. There was a curfew and we went down to the Po during the night. There was a new moon and we sank fourteen boats as fast as we could, because we were afraid the fascists or the Germans would come. On the other bank, someone shot a few rounds from a machine gun. Maybe they heard our blows,

Zavattini, Un paese, 38. Zavattini, ibidem. 7 Zavattini, ibidem, 47. 8 Zavattini, ibidem, 55. 5 6

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but since they didn’t know what caused them, they were trying to scare us off. I think Battaglia’s son was there too. They captured him and while they were taking him to Piazza Guastalla for the execution, he broke into a run. They took a pot shot at him, but he immediately turned off into the alley by the church and went on running for 9 kilometres, as far as the Casoni, and he saved himself. * If a storm breaks out while I’m collecting the hay, I take a forkful of hay and run home, holding it over my head like an umbrella.9 * I got married at eighteen and had fifteen children, four of which died young.10 In 1921 Lusetti my husband was beaten up then he suffered another beating in 1926. I never found out the reason for all this. All I know is that it was the cause of his death. In 1933, on Christmas Eve, my husband died, leaving me in extreme poverty with eight boys and three girls. During the war, my dear sons were conscripted into the forces in Italy, and went to France, Greece, Germany, Africa and England, except the youngest, who was only sixteen. In 1946, we were reunited after fourteen years of a mother’s pain. My dream is to have a home near a church I can go and visit often. My son Bruno says I want to work our land with machines, such as tractors and the like. There are fifty-five plots and 43 per cent of the produce goes to us, and 47 per cent goes to the landowner. If you include the women’s labour, we get seventy liras per hour. Everyone complains that it is a humiliating job. Remo was there to see his father being assaulted in Via Catania in Campagnola. There were about five or six witnesses. It was about five in the afternoon. Nino says he has never understood why they had to fight a war. Nino was a prisoner of war in Africa, where he came across his brother Valentino, who was also taken prisoner. Afro was on the train, after he was conscripted in 1943. Then he disbanded and came home. Guerrino’s health was affected by the beatings in Germany. Nando was there too and, to stay alive, he even ate a rabbit’s skin. He lives 8 kilometres away from me, because in the farmhouse close to the land, there is not enough room for everyone. And the roof leaks. In 1945 they asked me if I wanted revenge, but I had no desire for revenge. * I was the caretaker at the infants’ school for fifty years and I can honestly say that I’ve wiped the little bums of all the Luzzaresi.11 I managed with 1,100 liras Zavattini, ibidem, 57. Zavattini, ibidem, 65–6. 11 Zavattini, ibidem, 71. 9

10

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salary from the Town Council, plus 200 liras a week from the Opere Pie and a little begging. I was always afraid of ending up in the old people’s home and that is where I ended up a few days ago, because of my paralysis. I would like to go home. * I’m the postwoman. Compagnoni was my husband and they shot him at Reggiolo, for being a partisan.12 There are still the marks of all the bullets in the wall near the cemetery. Around seven in the morning five of them turned up. My husband had already gone out. They came back at nine and my husband was there, and he hugged one of the five who was a friend from when they were in the army. He told him: ‘We’re only checking papers.’ This calmed us down. But one of them said: ‘Have you got a bicycle?’ My husband replied that it had flat tyres. The fascist militiaman drew his revolver and said: ‘I told you to get the bicycle.’ They took him to the square where there were sixty or seventy young men, who were captured together with their families. The families on one side and the men on the other side. They took them to Reggiolo on foot. They made them run for 12 kilometres and the women were following them, but then they had to stop. My husband was shot two days later, together with the other eight Luzzaresi. My daughter was just ten months old. After Liberation, the town organized a funeral for my husband and the others who were executed at Reggiolo. All you could hear was weeping. The funeral cortège was just approaching the turning for the cemetery and the cars coming from Guastalla had stopped, to let the procession go past. There was also a man on a motorbike who was watching. He was wearing goggles, but someone recognized him all the same and shouted at him: ‘He’s one of those who killed our people.’ He realized they were staring at him and rode off, but they ran after him, caught him and took him to the woods. * I spend more time helping my husband in the fields than at home.13 I was like that when I was a child too, because when I finished third form I went to work in the fields with my dad. My husband and I used to work as labourers, then he could afford to rent thirteen plots of land, thanks to a one-year loan. Of the three children, two were conscripted into the army, but in 1944 the terror began. On 15 December, my husband and I were captured and put in prison in Guastalla. I asked myself: ‘Where are my sons?’ And Franco was in the cell next to ours keeping up our spirits, but the next morning they shot him dead. On Christmas Day, I found out that Erminio had been captured too and might be in Bolzano. Then the Liberation came, and the others returned home, but there Zavattini, ibidem, 72. Zavattini, ibidem, 73.

12 13

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was no sign of Erminio. I thought I’d lost him too. He finally returned on 8 May. I had so many ideas, but I didn’t even have the strength to welcome him. Now he’s married. He’s the mayor. * I’m a primary school teacher in Luzzara. One day, in March 1954, my fellow teachers and I assigned the pupils of all five forms a diary. These are the twentythree diaries.14 * Yesterday afternoon, I went for a walk in the fields.15 You could feel a beautiful cool breeze, and birdsong everywhere. The men were coiling steel wires around the wooden stakes dividing the rows. I sat in the sunshine today, watching some bees landing on the hyacinth flowers. I was so concentrated on looking at the bees that I didn’t spot a swallow flying across the sky. It was my grandmother who said: ‘Look, Gina, a swallow! It’s the first.’ My dad’s a builder, he makes homes for other people. In winter the snow falls and it’s cold and he has to stop working. Now that it’s spring, he can go back to work. * This morning, on the way to school, a classmate of mine found some violets and he destroyed them, and I called him a dunce.16 We kids are like old people: when it rains, we cry, and when the sun is shining, we’re happy. * If it rained every morning, the Po would break its banks and we’d drown and so would Luzzara.17 * A short while ago, Miss read us an article in the paper.18 It said a fishing boat with a crew of twenty-seven men was out fishing in the Sea of Japan. One morning they saw a big smoke billow in the sky in the shape of a mushroom. Suddenly, a white cloud of ash fell on the fishing boat and stuck to the sailors’ clothes, to the fish and to the boat. Before they returned to harbour, the fishermen sold the

Zavattini, ibidem, 75. Zavattini, ibidem. 16 Zavattini, ibidem. 17 Zavattini, ibidem, 76. 18 Zavattini, ibidem. 14 15

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fish. When they got back to the harbour, they were taken to a hospital in Tokyo, where they were cured immediately, because atomic ash could make them ill with ulcer or cancer. Miss told us men are stupid, because they make hundreds of people die with a bomb, and to save a small child from cancer they make a plan and come from America all the way to Italy. I agree with her. * Yesterday morning, my dad went to see his brother, because he was in hospital and, very soon after he was gone, a man came inside, the one who buys cows and he asked me: ‘Where’s your dad?’19 I replied: ‘He’s gone away.’ He asked me to sell him a cow and I told him I wanted 85,000 liras and he replied: ‘I’ll buy it.’ ‘But I don’t want the responsibility’ I told him. He replied they’d come and fetch it tomorrow. When my dad came home, I told him, and he said I’d been a good boy. * My radio doesn’t talk, because it’s broken.20 If I give it a big punch the voice comes back again. * On my way to school this morning I was so distracted, because I was gazing at the train, I nearly got run over by a lorry.21 * The house where I live is beautiful, but it’s not mine.22 * On 14 March, at two in the afternoon, two calves were born in the stable.23 Twins. They were both the colour of ash. But the more handsome one was blind, lame, and very poorly. It died two hours later. Whereas, the other one was big and strong, so my dad sold it. The little calf’s mother died. But I dug a grave for that little calf and will always remember him, as if he were my brother. I’m a very poor little boy. I have four small brothers. Today is a beautiful day. The sky is blue, the sun is warm and it’s nice in the shade.

Zavattini, ibidem, 78–9. Zavattini, ibidem, 79. 21 Zavattini, ibidem. 22 Zavattini, ibidem, 80. 23 Zavattini, ibidem. 19 20

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The Story of Catherine ansa Press Comuniqué (1952)1

Context The following press communiqué, stored in the Zavattini Archive as a typescript, presents The Story of Catherine, at the time when the writer visualized it as a stand-alone film, or a ‘flash-film’. Zavattini gave it this name to suggest a film that would close the long gap between selecting a symptomatic social event and turning it into a finished film. His plan was that the film’s intended production and release were to follow the real-world events it concerns by only a matter of months, something inconceivable in the early 1950s. The text is typed with small corrections, suggesting that it was most probably written by Zavattini himself, for release by the state press agency. Elsewhere, the writer theorized the flash-film, as direct cinema, ‘using the cinema to get to know what is happening around us, but in a direct and immediate way’. The idea being that direct cinema was a response to indirect cinema and its invented stories.2 It had an ethical dimension, in the aspiration that cinema could express and elicit solidarity with real people, instead of empathy for fictive characters, even more so if the real people acted out their own stories themselves. But there was also the filmmaker’s learning and a growing self-awareness that would come with relating to others and finding out about ourselves in the process. Making the private and personal public, by selecting the particular, symptomatic of the universal, could lead to an increased awareness of collective destiny. And finally, the idea was that a reconstruction of events historicizes them, encouraging reflection, especially of that which is happening, when it is happening; historicizing the contemporary, ongoing, moment.

1 2

‘Caterina Rigoglioso’, ansa Comuniqué, acz Sog. R8, 122–3. Zavattini, ‘Film-lampo: sviluppo del Neo-realismo’, 26 June 1952, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 89–91. This and related articles are translated in Volume 2.

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Text Caterina Rigoglioso. Caterina Rigoglioso, the young mother from Palermo whose story has been covered by the press of all political tendencies, leading to some expressions of solidarity, and whose case was immediately heard in court at the Rome Courts of Law, and accused of having abandoned her own son of a year and a half, will be the lead role in her own story. Caterina Rigoglioso, who, after sentencing, was issued legal papers to go back home, where it is likely that she would be met with misunderstanding, will instead remain in Rome, near her child, because her court papers have been replaced by a film contract. We shall watch on the big screen a rigorous reconstruction of the final episodes of the story of this mother from Palermo, a person who is worthy of great compassion, and no less needy of help than anyone else. Cesare Zavattini conceived the idea of this film. Zavattini has said that this is going to be the first of a series of films, based entirely on news stories, which have already moved the public or ought to have moved the public, faithfully reconstructed and always, and only, interpreted by the same people who were directly involved. Caterina Rigoglioso has given me the opportunity – says Zavattini – to launch the kind of film that in Italy, before anywhere else, sooner or later just had to be made, because Neo-realism leads quite naturally to deal with events concerning people, which are more genuine than events regarding fictitious people. I believe that this example will help extract cinema from so many formal restrictions, and give it the character of direct, human information, which is its principal destiny. I also think this film provides something new in terms of technical innovation. We could call it a flash-film, since it will be ready for viewing two months from when the news event occurred: a record timespan.

The young director, Francesco Maselli, at the age of twenty, has already made fourteen acclaimed shorts. Zavattini is writing the text in collaboration with Luigi Chiarini and the director. The company that has put itself forward to fund this brave initiative is Astra Cinematografica.3

Deleted: ‘che ne ha affidata l’organizzazione a Geo Tapparelli’ (tr. which has commissioned Geo Tapparelli to produce it on their behalf).

3

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Scenario The Story of Catherine (1952)1

Context The Story of Catherine was completed on 10 June 1952, only a few days after the scandal broke out in the press. A few days earlier, Zavattini attended the nineteen-year-old’s trial in court. At first, he thought Rossellini would be interested and Carlo Ponti could produce what he proposed to him in the form of a medium-length documentary, with a view to making the film occupy mainstream space, which was at the time entirely occupied by feature films, and mostly foreign. From this broader perspective, the film was a programmatic intervention. His letter to Renzo Rossellini forms the basis of the scenario, more of a short proposal than a fully worked-out story. Even in this respect, The Story of Catherine is programmatic, excluding from the documentary a fully fledged script, following Zavattini’s logic, elaborated in the Italia mia project, according to which only through direct contact with people and places could the detailed story unfold, in an intermingling of art and life, which is at the basis of Neorealism. This first formulation of The Story of Catherine as flash-film didn’t go ahead. The idea went from producer to producer, until Faro Films, set up by the young Marco Ferreri and his business partner Riccardo Ghione, took it on with Zavattini’s help, as part of an even more ambitious episode-film, entitled Love in the City. Zavattini succeeded in involving Carlo Lizzani, Dino Risi, Francesco Maselli and Federico Fellini, as well as the veterans Roberto Rossellini and Alberto Lattuada. The film was released in November 1953, only a matter of weeks before the Parma Conference on Neo-realism. In this light, the context of its release accentuated its Manifesto quality, so that it is not surprising that the film became

1

Letter to Renzo Rossellini, 10 June 1952, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 175.

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a flash point, more than a discussion point, at the Conference itself.2 Lizzani was one of the fiercest opponents to Zavattini, despite having just directed one of the episodes. Years later, in an interview with Lorenzo Pellizzari, Zavattini explained his idea of the flash-film, or fast cinema, to coin a phrase, which he wasn’t seeing as competition with television, but a proposal that mainstream cinema had the potential of responding to contemporary events immediately, if it so wished, involving the participation of filmmaker and protagonists. As for authenticity, the writer later came to the conclusion that the version of events told by the protagonist didn’t tally, as far as he could ascertain, with what had actually happened, for which as he acknowledged in the interview with Pellizzari, ‘Catherine’s Lie’ would have been a more accurate title. Yet this adequation to the truth in no way invalidates the programmatic call for striving to convey social events and for a Manifesto defending an ethical approach to the Other, seen, as always in Zavattini, as the Same. As he told his 1954 interviewer Fernaldo di Gianmmateo, despite the film’s weaknesses, what mattered was the principle the film stood for in 1953.3 There is no one scenario as such. What was published as a scenario in Orio Caldiron’s anthology of 2006 is little more than an expanded version of the letter to Renzo Rossellini. Given the programmatic and theoretical significance of Zavattini’s intervention, related texts have been brought together, which, when combined in a sequence, with no further editorial intervention, form a more complete composite text. The letters and production notes, each set out in separate sections, are signposted by an asterisk.

Text It is a question of relating, in as detailed and documented way as possible, the woman’s last days, or last day, before she reached her regrettable decision, and then the ensuing events, up to the trial currently underway.4 Clearly, the protagonist of the film should actually be Caterina Rigoglioso and her child, as well as all the people who were part of the real-life story in the moments we are interested in, including the judges too, if that is possible. In addition to making economic provision for this woman and her son, with the aid of actual millions of liras, we are making one of these films we can describe as genuinely humane, using a new approach, and moreover, giving yet another proof of the vitality of Neo-realism, which seeks to be ever more direct cinema, ever more immediate. This film, which really could go into production in a week’s time (this would

Zavattini, ‘Film-lampo: sviluppo del Neo-realismo’, 26 June 1952 in Zavattini, Cinema, 711. Fernaldo di Giammatteo, ‘Colloquio con Zavattini’, Rassegna del film, iii, no. 21, June 1954. 3 Lorenzo Pellizzari, ‘Una conversazione con il medesimo’, Cinema e Cinema, vi, no. 20, 6 July–September 1979. 4 Letter to Renzo Rossellini, 10 June 1952, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 175. 2

Scenario: The Story of Catherine (1952)

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mean completing it by the end of July) would constitute the first of a series of flash-films, as we might call them, in which those news events which deserve to be remembered are reconstructed on the large screen with the participation of the protagonists. * The film we intend to make is inspired by – or rather, is, an accurate, genuine reproduction of – the following news story: the fast-track court case, concerning an unemployed housemaid who came to Rome to look for employment, found work and met a man who seduced her and then abandoned her.5 The girl had a baby. At first, she kept him in an orphanage, then she paid for a wet nurse to look after him. Such a huge, decisive delusion in her life shook her, making her feel hopeless, both as regards her emotional life and her future. From that moment on, we can say that she has taken one day at a time, sometimes feeling abandoned, sometimes hopeful. This weighed negatively on her state of mind, so that when the wet nurse gave back her son, having received no pay for the previous month, she felt encumbered by her son, whom she didn’t love enough, not as much as she thought she did. Having to look after her son alarmed her, confused her and weakened her ability to cope, instead of increasing her sense of responsibility. She abandoned him in a field, in the certainty that someone else would take care of him and give him what she is incapable of giving. But at the very moment she carried out this action – the corollary, the apex, from the gradual build-up of feelings since when she was seduced and abandoned – the separation from the small child, her action and no one else’s, provoked her conscience and, in the course of one long day, the need to return to that spot grew and grew, and with it the feeling of being a mother, passionately, unambiguously, definitively. She wills away the night that separates her from when she will be able to reclaim her son. ‘Give me back my son’, a request that restores a purpose and meaning to her future and her son’s. * The fundamental requirements of such a film, which could be the first of a series of film-documents, are: the assured speed of execution of the text, consisting in genuine reportage research, carried out in the space of a few days, while the production team is working to the same timescale, immediately followed by filming.6 Further requirements are: the need to adhere, as faithfully as possible,

Zavattini, Storia di Caterina, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 163. This is the more detailed version, placed in a footnote by the editor, Orio Caldiron. 6 The variant version, published as the ‘Story of Catherine’ scenario in Caldiron’s 2006 anthology of scenarios, consists in, mostly, a reflection, which is the reason why, in this edition it appears after the exposition above, containing more factual details. Zavattini, ‘Storia di Caterina’, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 162. 5

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to the actual news story, to listen to the woman’s first-hand account, interviewed at length, consisting in her internal and external story, and using the shorthand account of the trial (which took place very soon after the event). Then drawing on all the facts, in order to pinpoint the specific truth of the event, to use as protagonists of the film the protagonists of the event, in their respective roles in real life, including among these, the authentic judges of the Tribunal, if possible, and all those officials and people who were involved in the event, as it actually unfolded in the past few days. A crucial need of this film is the ethical integrity of standards, which the authors – if this is how we wish to refer to them – are to respect, even during the film’s production. Such an ethical stance has all kinds of positive effects. It will assist the unfortunate woman financially; it will establish the discovery of a further, decisive, stage of immediacy in Neo-realist-cinema in respect of reality, a stage which has greater potential. It will enable filmmakers to reach the height of ethical engagement, over and above all other considerations.

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Love in the City Voice-over and dialogue excerpt (1953)

Context The Story of Catherine eventually became an episode of Love in the City, an ambitious non-fictional, episode film, with the notable exception of Federico Fellini’s episode, entitled Wedding Agency, which resorts to paradox in a fictional context, as a means to address a real problem. Zavattini was closely involved in writing and producing all the other episodes: Carlo Lizzani’s Love for Money, Dino Risi’s, Paradise for Three Hours, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Attempted Suicide and Alberto Lattuada’s Italians Turn their Heads, including his own, The Story of Catherine, directed by Francesco Maselli. Although it is normally viewed as a series of entirely separate films, there was an overarching plan, which Zavattini had developed, expanding his original idea of a single flash-film short or medium-length film. This is borne out by two initial sequences which precede the episodes. The opening credits are set out like a magazine layout, from the very title credit, looking like a printed frontispiece of a magazine cover, to the ordering of material that follows how text and features are designed and laid out in illustrated popular magazines, using, for example, box sections and rubrics (‘Our Dossiers’– Le Nostre Inchieste). Such an approach carries across to the soundtrack which contains its own ‘Editorial’, in the form of a voice-over, one of two bookends to the film, the second being a conclusive voice-over. The text of the ‘Editorial’ is illustrated, first, by a series of photographs closely related to what is being said and second, by moving-image sequences, in which couples play out different kinds of love. Therefore, taken as a whole, the episodes form a programmatic Manifesto to the film, and later to Zavattini’s Parma Conference intervention, in what is ultimately a filmic equivalent. The film met with strong opposition, both in terms of aesthetic appreciation and of criticism. There was a marked inability, or will, to contextualize this experiment which breaks out of such (art historical) parameters of film theory and history, in which the art or filmic object is considered and evaluated in isolation. Incidentally, this is no longer considered a sound methodology in art history.

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Yet, leaving aside its aesthetic merits, Love in the City intervened in a climate of ideas wrought with conflicts: the idealist line pushed by Communist Party officials which saw the next step in Italian cinema as developing realism into ‘Verism’ (in line with the pre-war project of the Cinema group of filmmakers close to Count Luchino Visconti) visually expressed by La terra trema (1948). Zavattini’s documentary approach was antithetical to this line. It was equally antithetical to Rossellini’s and Fellini’s increasing allegorization of reality, but entirely consistent with Zavattini’s increasing endorsement of the non-fictional component of Neo-realism. The anonymous first ten to fifteen minutes of Love in the City are attributable to Zavattini himself. The voice-over refers to ‘Our magazine’. The viewers are shown a layout in the opening titles and provided with a framework, instead of a traditional establishing shot. A series of shots, photographs accompanied by a commentary which invites the viewer to consider the multiple dimensions of the city. Zavattini theorizes his adopted city as a concrete, by no means ideal, reality, while at the same time ignoring Rome’s folkloric tourist attraction aspect, consistently with his Italia mia project. The assertion is that Rome is a space for living, a concrete space, populated by concrete people. This lack of abstraction plays out in the specifics of lived experience, which contemporary critics mistook for bozzettismo, undigested, unartistic reality of non-fiction or documentary, at a time when, in Italy at least, documentaries were fillers or mundane and generic official newsreels or cheap expedients to make money; vehicles for films which attracted funding, but were rarely, if ever, distributed. Zavattini also discards the abstract idea of space in favour of lived space: a space as human environment, as outcome of living and working together: a social space, a social product, a space of interaction: the city.1 This is how Henri Lefèbvre and, more recently, his student David Harvey have thought of space, negating conventional views of space, that is, Euclidean, geometric or abstract conceptualizations of space, in favour of relative or even better relational space, somewhere where things happen.2 What follows is a transcript of the ‘Editorial’ voice-over, followed by the ‘Conclusion’ voice-over, after the last (comedic and ironic) episode. After the editorial introduction to the ‘magazine’, the framework proceeds with a visual example, or rather a set of visual examples, each one portraying a specific moment in time and the situation it contains. This additional footage immediately follows the unusual opening credits discussed earlier but does not coincide with the episode films that follow. The series of still photographs are followed by a series of moving images, comprising timed moments of micro-events in the city, in which couples play out different kinds of love. For example, one touching example features a deaf and dumb couple in which the boyfriend learns that his girlfriend is pregnant. Henri Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 26. 2 David Harvey, ‘Afterword’, in Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, 425–32. 1

Love in the City: Voice-over and Dialogue Excerpt (1953)

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Text 1 ‘Editorial’ voice-over. The big city is made of stone, steel and people. Two million men and women who live, toil, suffer and love one another; each in his or her own way and each attracting a different destiny. This magazine of ours, put together with film and a lens, rather than pen and paper, is dedicated to the love of people in a metropolis. Not what you often see on this same screen, interpreted by athletic men like Kirk Douglas and seductive women like Marilyn Monroe, a manicured love, revised, improved upon and scripted, to make you shiver with carefully manipulated passion.3 The characters in our magazine are not movie actors, but ordinary people living in the city. We found them in everyday life, but we chose those very people who had a role in the events we are going to narrate. They all have their own ideas, worries, hopes. At a certain time of day, someone is waiting for them. Expectation, encounter and parting are the three aspects of love. Have you ever overheard what people say to each other on each occasion? What they really say when they believe nobody can see them or listen in? * The first issue of The Spectator ends here. It hasn’t exhausted all the possible aspects of love in the city, but it has deliberately left out the banal. Our magazine has simply intended to research the more intimate and authentic forms of the real, conforming to a style and to the purpose of a new and reflective kind of cinema.

2 Dialogue from opening short sequences −− −− −− −− −− −− −−

Well, are we going to the pictures? No, listen, there’s something I need to tell you. And what’s the matter? Eh, what is it? I’m pregnant. You’re expecting a baby? But are you sure? Yes!

* 3

A poster of The City appears on the screen. It starred Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dik Powell, appears. That film won six Oscars.

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Via Trasimeno 19, 7.30pm. −− −− −− −−

Have you been with many women before me? Well, yes. So then I am only one of a number. But with you it’s something different.

* Trinità dei Monti 3.00pm. −− How can I be certain you’ll always love me? −− But I’ve proved to you that I will. −− Even so, how can I be so sure, for example, that you’ll love me in ten years’

time, in 1963? −− You see, I’d like a man who can give me that certainty. −− Well, I can give you that confidence. −− My dear, if I don’t know, who else would? I know myself. In 1963, in 1973,

I just can’t live without you. I know this very well. But if you don’t believe me, let’s just drop the whole thing. −− Oh no, I believe you. Swear to me once more. −− I swear.

* Gas works 12.10pm −− −− −− −− −− −−

We’ve been married one year, and still no kids. But it isn’t the right time, darling. And why not? We’re both working. No, we’ve only been married a year. Well, we’ll take out a loan. That’s how we’ll do it.

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The Story of Catherine Interview (1962)1

Context In March 1962, Lorenzo Pellizzari, at the time, a desk editor for Cinema Nuovo, interviewed Zavattini. His questions included one about The Story of Catherine. The writer critically reviews his experiment of a decade earlier. The interview was recorded on 24–25 March 1962, at 40 Via Merici, Zavattini’s home). The interview was published in a special issue of Cinema e Cinema, containing articles by Goffredo Fofi, Giorgio Cremonini, Sandro Bernardi, Roberto Campari, Alberto Crespi and Lorenzo Pellizzari, who also contributed an article about the screenwriter: ‘La notte che ho dato la mano a Zavattini’.

Text [Pellizzari] Does this mean that today you are not entirely satisfied with films like Love in the City and We Women? [Zavattini] I consider both Love in the City and We Women incomplete experiments, containing real intuitions, though incomplete films, because of the presence of compromise, whereby production was unable to limit the gap between the idea and its expression. This led to a compromise in both, some confusion in language or method. Even so, there’s a fundamental impetus towards radical change, towards a practice of cinema which corresponds to my specific ideas, always seeking to reject the narrative formula. There is no denying that the story can even translate into films that achieve brilliant, even sublime, results. There have been films which have done just that. It doesn’t follow that we should not assault reality from all these other angles, which, in my view, are specific to the cinema. [Pellizzari] In my opinion, in The Story of Catherine episode, there was hardly any compromise and the diaphragm between idea and its realization was minimal, almost non-existent. 1

Pellizzari, ‘Una conversazione con il medesimo’, 65–6. Pellizzari, ‘La notte che ho dato la mano a Zavattini’, 49–53.

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[Zavattini] This is very subtle. You are touching a very delicate issue which I may never have mentioned. I think that the insight was first rate, I really do, and that it created a legacy over time. Where did its forceful impetus lie? A desire for truth, the energy of those flash-films, consisting in reviewing a specific news story, with everyone’s help, including the people who were directly involved in the event itself, to analyse it in its real context, its ethical and social dimensions. The fact is that the truth element was crucial: the truth element in this kind of film must not be betrayed, even if it means going to the extremes of ultimately not making the film. Paradoxically, I’d go that far. Or at least, if I found that I was unable to express the truth with conventional means of communication, I should say so openly; say that I am unable to go further. Do you understand? The expedition reaches the 24 kilometres distance, but the value of aborting it and stating it openly takes on an ethical significance, a constructive action. Whereas, what actually happened with Caterina Rigoglioso? One day I am going to write about this, and at length.2 What happened was that I sensed a different story to the one Caterina Rigoglioso was telling me. I couldn’t find out why, because I accepted a compromise. The story took a form which was open to the events which had taken place, raw facts, however personal they might have been, and then there was an overlay, associated with a narrative, sentimental, tradition, which belonged to my heritage, and which I should have cast off earlier. Two conflicting dimensions coexisted in me: on the one hand, the need for truth to the point of cruelty, on the other, a tendency to adapt the event and ultimately translate it into spectacle, in accordance with criteria that meant sacrificing, to some extent, something on the altar of production or of stereotype. I should have tackled Caterina Rigoglioso according to what I had really understood: Caterina’s lie. This would not have entailed making a film against Caterina, because Caterina was someone who came from a particular social background, but I wanted to make her a one-dimensional heroine, and therefore I betrayed something.

2

In the event, Zavattini never did write about it. He didn’t tell Pellizzari the lengths to which he went, to the point of interviewing Caterina extensively, over several sessions, producing some fifty or so pages. This is probably because his attention was taken up by too many different projects, often running concurrently.

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Scenario A Child’s Funeral (1954)1

Context A Child’s Funeral is set out as if it were a poem. Almost every sentence is typed on a new line, and, in many ways, that is what it is: a cinematic poem. The theme is very personal to the author, whose younger brother died as a child. Zavattini was living in Parma, where he was studying law at university. He left Parma meaning to attend his brother’s funeral. However, when he was halfway to the cemetery, he found it too unbearable and turned back. The child’s funeral or funeralino is also a recurring feature in the writer’s paintings, a solemn reminder of how precious time is, from moment to moment. The scenario is minimalist, both in terms of plot and of characterization. There is little of either: a grieving mother, a shadow-like figure and her daughter; a horse-drawn hearse, a small procession from the back streets of Naples to the avenue along the sea front. Zavattini seems to be describing a vision, in minute detail. But what is a description? A good one adds up to so much more, evoking in its wake, an afterthought or, better, an aftersight; a reverberation of silence, a juxtaposition of silence to sound, life and death. Il funeralino is the last, very short, episode of The Gold of Naples (L’oro di Napoli), an adaptation of a novel by Giuseppe Marotta by the same title. Zavattini knew Marotta very well, having been his boss in the 1930s Modernist publishing world of Milan, at Mondadori. Marotta wrote his book in 1947, encouraged by Zavattini who put forward the idea in a letter to him in January of that year.2 Marotta’s book is an affectionate celebration of the city that could not fail to appeal to De Sica, who was keen to direct this episode film. It culminates in an episode featuring a very young Sofia Loren, whose job it is to sell the pizzas her husband bakes, when she is not dilly-dallying with her lover, in the kind of humorous story which was to become so popular, and become a

1 2

Zavattini, Il funeralino (1953), in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 167–71. Zavattini, Letter to Giuseppe Marotta, 2 January 1947, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 108–9.

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commercial genre all of its own, the commedia all’italiana. Sofia Loren’s episodes is followed by The Child’s Funeral. Nothing could be further removed from all the other episodes – all of which are adaptations of chapters from Marotta’s novel – than this last episode, Il funeralino, not an adaptation, but an original story written by Zavattini. What should be the climax to the episode film and entirely in keeping with it, is, instead, an anti-climax, either a subversion of the rest of the film, or the flip side of filmic comedy, but doubtless integral to it. As a reminder of mortality, it flies in the face of the nascent Italian-style happy-go-lucky comedy, just as it had done in the writer’s raccontini of the 1930s. The Child’s Funeral is also an essay in durational cinema, in which there is virtually no action as such. As Zavattini explains in the opening line of the treatment, the script was inspired by nothing more than a sentence in Marotta’s book, a reflection: ‘Many children die in Naples’ The two writers collaborated on the screenplay in 1953 and the film was released in 1954, minus The Child’s Funeral, this ironic counterpoint to the rest of the film. Its censorship was a disappointment for Zavattini and De Sica, who spelled out why it was a loss in an interview. Coming immediately after the Sofia Loren episode, entertaining, if superficial, it was in fact its opposite: ‘a positive episode, about goodness, generosity, ethical courage’, as De Sica put it.3 Other values.

Text This phrase, from Death in Naples: ‘Too many children die in Naples’, appears superimposed on the first shot of the new episode, featuring a panorama of rooftops. It is late morning. The scene shows a miserable terrace with tufts of Parietaria weeds here and there and a worn asphalt surface underfoot. From a brick hut in the corner of the terrace, a tiny coffin emerges, borne by an undertaker, as if he were carrying a box of things. A woman of about forty or so follows him, demure and lifeless, and holding a black veil. She is the dead child’s mother. Then it is the turn of a twelve-year-old girl in tears, Consiglia. The mother is obviously dominating her suffering. She turns around to lock the hut. Then she faces the undertaker and stretching out her arms, telling him: ‘Give him to me.’ The man holds back, replying: ‘Don’t worry.’

3

De Sica, ‘L’episodio di bontà è stato soppresso’, L’Europeo, xi, no. 485, 30 January 1955, in Gualtiero De Santi and Manuel De Sica (eds), L’oro di Napoli di Vittorio De Sica. Testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura, Rome: Associazione Amici di Vittorio De Sica, 2006.

Scenario: A Child’s Funeral (1954)

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The woman stays calm, but is insistent: ‘Forgive me, I want to be the one to carry him, you, my best-looking son.’ The man places the small coffin in her arms. The three of them climb down some ramshackle steps, and walk the length of corridors, landings, small passages, where a few people are looking down at them from the windows, and others join the procession (two little girls who were sitting on a step). They reach a square at the very moment when an old lorry is driving past with two little children hanging on to the rear, like monkeys. A white carriage is waiting in the small square. Six or seven people of varying ages are walking around it. One of them is holding a small wreath. Meanwhile, from a side street, first-grade pupils from primary school are approaching, wearing their aprons, accompanied by their tiny teacher whose skin and clothes are equally black. The undertaker takes the coffin from the mother and puts it on the hearse. The mother smiles at the schoolteacher and the children. The teacher immediately walks towards the mother, embraces her and kisses her on both cheeks. Then she joins the children and lines them up. They all follow the hearse. There are now about twenty people altogether, of varying ages but all from identical extremely humble backgrounds. The mother looks anxiously around. She sees a priest arrive. He is out of breath and accompanied by an altar boy. The priest approaches the hearse and sprinkles holy water over it, giving his blessing over the tiny coffin. Some people are leaning out of windows to watch the small funeral. Others are leaving their homes to join it in silence. The priest is going to the front of the hearse which is about to depart. But the mother gestures him to wait, because she wishes the procession to look its best. She asks three or four men who form a group behind the carriage to assign the little pupils their places. Then she tidies up the row of pupils who are closest to her. Then she makes a gesture directed at the priest, who is impatient and turning around to face her, to say that now they may leave. The carriage begins to move, while the mother gazes at the small procession, and steps forward, taking Consiglia’s hand as she does so. But there is still something not quite right. It is the man carrying the flowers who has joined the other men. She tells him to stand next to her. She wants him to walk alongside, and to carry the flowers with all the majesty he can muster. Then another lorry rattles past. The mother turns from time to time, to check that everything is proceeding as it should. The small group following the hearse is so carefully surveyed by the mother that nothing distracts it from its official grief.

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The funeral procession skirts the row of slum housing in a lane, revealing tabernacles, tiny balconies, and faces in the doorways. Some of them step out to express their grief. Others, going about their business, suddenly feel moved, and assume a doleful expression. A mother is combing her child’s hair, we see two children eating on the doorsteps of a slum, a woman and a man, who are trying on pinned garments, a young boy who is playing cards inside a doorway with an old man; other children who are playing in the street and, when the carriage reaches them, run across the road, to watch, enthralled, with their backs to the wall. A girl is weeping with her hand in the hand of an old woman. When she sees the funeral, she suddenly stops. The hearse is about to turn left into another lane. But the mother, breaks off from the others, reaches the driver and says: ‘We’re taking the main avenue’ The driver obeys and the woman goes back to her place. The carriage exits the dark, narrow lanes, heading for the main avenue, Riviera di Chiaia. The glowing vision of the sparkling sea suddenly appears, as if this were a dream. The carriage is in Via Caracciolo, heading for the Dell’Ovo Castle. The mother looks on with satisfaction at the crowded, lively scene the procession is crossing. Looking in one direction, she sees the rough sea and the dashing spray against the rocks; the sea is heaving and breathing within hearing, while overhead some seagulls weave and dip down low over the surface and the fisherman are busying themselves preparing their boats and nets. In the other direction, she sees a line of park benches under the trees, where some couples are sitting, some women reading or knitting, nurses4 in their candid uniforms, keeping an eye on smartly dressed little children, playing with their toys, a few wet nurses holding a child in their arms. Many of these people are oblivious to the funeral hearse as it passes by. Though the odd person turns, instead, to take a look. Some motorcars speed past, leaving behind the strident echo of their tyres on the tarmac. A few horse-drawn carriages carrying tourists also cross their path. Their drivers take off their hats, in deference to the dead child. The hearse is now in Via Partenope. The mother asks Consiglia for the confetti, looking around, behaving like someone who is about to do something. She sees the long row of packed tables outside the coffee bars. One of the many customers gets on his feet, to pay his respects to the dead child.

4

In English in the Italian original, signposted by underlining for emphasis in Zavattini’s typescript.

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She sees two traffic policemen on horseback looking solemn, as their horses step out from side to side. The mother stares at the hand holding the bag, then throws handfuls of confetti it contains in different directions. A street urchin – scugnizzo – appears in the road from nowhere to catch the bouncing confetti. A minute later, there are six or seven scugnizzi who dive in among the legs of the people in the funeral procession. One of the small pupils can’t resist the impulse to take part in the hunt for confetti and launches into the fray. His classmates join in. This makes a few adults in the procession smile. The people walking down the attractive road, including a few foreigners, look on, some are curious, some touched. The mother casts one last look around. The small spectacle to honour the child death has gone to plan – just as she wished. Now the mother can give in to her pain. She begins to weep. The carriage turns off at the corner of the Excelsior Hotel, revealing the view of the port, the ships’ funnels, and, far away in the distance, Mount Vesuvius. Behind her, the scugnizzi stay behind to pick or peck like hens the last confetti scattered along the pavement.

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Scenario The Roof (1955)1

Context By May 1954, Zavattini had completed the first version of the scenario, after writing five drafts. It is exceedingly long which is why, for reasons of space, the version later is a relatively short one. Although the details of the story changed, the more research Zavattini carried out, during two years, this one is as undramatic as the later versions, by choice and, as Michele Gandin has noted, all the versions of this project follow the dictates of his long interview with film critic and documentarian Michele Gandin, published as ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’ in La Rivista del Cinema Italiano (1952), putting into practice the theory discussed in the interview.2 Zavattini completed the second version of the scenario, more like a lengthy treatment, extending to twenty pages, on 30 May 1955. The screenplay was finished only on 10 November 1955, due to Zavattini’s two-and-a half-month journey to Mexico. The first section of this version of the scenario consists in Zavattini’s revised Preface, taken from the second version (the switch is signposted by an asterisk and endnote), which, by comparison with the first draft of the Preface, contains a far more developed framework, and is therefore more revealing of the filmmaker’s overall approach to the problematic underpinning the film. To be more specific, in his revised Preface (which he dropped in the final version) Zavattini replaced most of his original, well-researched introductory text with a contemporary article in Rome’s daily, Il Messaggero, proving the topicality of the theme and providing a first-hand witness account, followed by a brief recasting of the content and link from general theme to specific cinematic characters (based on the actual married couple featuring in the story, the Zambons, and their life experience). Zavattini, (scenario, first version) Il tetto, in Michele Gardin (ed.), Il tetto di Vittorio De Sica, Bologna: Cappelli, 1956, 35–45. 2 Gandin, ‘Fame di realtà’, ibidem, 16. 1

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His approach builds on the experience gained carrying out and directing the research for several projects, notably, Rome, 11 o’Clock and Love in the City. Whereas, The Story of Catherine featured Caterina Rigoglioso herself, for The Roof, two ordinary people played the roles of Natale and Luisa, chosen for their roles after countless casting sessions held in different parts of Italy. The fiction is a compilation of real experiences, gleaned through extensive interviews with the couple and many other people, and focussed, fact-finding field research. The initial objective was non-fiction, to be included as one of the many episodes of the Rossellini version of Italia mia. Then, in February 1952, Zavattini and a group of young filmmakers, with whom he was working, planned to use the idea for an episode of a scenario entitled Seguendo gli uomini (Shadowing People) which, as the key word in the Italian title – seguendo – (shadowing or following), indicates, was a clear signal of the kind of things below the surface Zavattini thought filmmakers should be filming. These aspects of reality they could only discover, if and when they made the effort to film everyday life; life in its hidden contradictions and tensions; life excluded from the cinematic frame. Seen in its original context, The Roof belongs to this problematic.3 ‘Shadowing’, a practice Zavattini was perfecting in the early 1950s, notably, working on Rome, 11 o’Clock with Giuseppe De Santis in 1951, required Zavattini to produce ethnographic, first-hand research. At the centre of The Roof project was a new phenomenon, and namely, illegal construction by the population, as a response to the need for affordable housing in early 1950s Italy. What, in 1952, was intended as one of many episodes for Italia mia, now grew into a stand-alone project for a full-length feature film. The shift also meant a shift from the emblematic use of a story to a phenomenological study of many related stories about the same problem. The writer pursued the singular and concrete real, as opposed to the typical or ideal story, as Soviet realism was advocating at the time, embraced as it was by orthodox Italian communists. He got an acquaintance, and friend of his eldest son, Arturo, called Natale to tell him the whole story of how he and his wife, Luisa, came to build one of the illegal shanty huts overnight, providing facts and figures in a very detailed account, from when, in 1949, he and Luisa got married, to when, in 1953, they were able to afford to build a hut illegally in Ostia.4 However, tasked with writing a fiction, based on his practice of Neo-realism, Zavattini would have to compound Natale’s single account with other real-world experiences. A year later, on 21 November 1954, he interviewed Giuseppe Rao who was living, or rather, squatting at 157 Via Fosse di Sant’Agnese, relatively close to Zavattini’s home. He learned about storage, solidarity among the Adapting the idea for an episode took place in early 1952. Gandin published the transcription of a discussion for Seguendo gli uomini, dated 24 February 1952, in Zavattini, Il tetto, 26. Later in the year, such discussions gave way to a series of extended interviews in which Gandin teased out the theoretical basis for Zavattini’s documentary idea of cinema, as a development of Neo-realism, published in December of the same year as ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’. 4 Zavattini, ibidem, 30–4. 3

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homeless, information about the police, how to get past the bylaws governing overnight builds, and the specialized language used in construction work. He enlisted the help of his eldest son, Arturo, to carry out further research, gleaning information on building techniques and kinds of materials, how to locate water springs. In February 1955, he gathered further life stories of poor people living in these shanty towns.5 He met one of the most active builders, operating in a different shanty town of over 2,000 brick huts – Borgata Terme Gordiane.6 Two policemen working in the area tell him that the shanty town inhabitants ‘are like wolves, who never dirty where they live’.7 But the refuse hole is overfilled with waste and the entire surrounding fields are littered, partly because when it rains or the ground freezes, the dustcart can’t negotiate the terrain.8 After meeting a builder on 24 March 1955, who tells him the story of how he built a dwelling overnight, Zavattini has enough material for a second version of the scenario. He wonders about creating a simulation; subsidizing an overnight build and letting the police know, in the hope that it might provide some dialogue.9 But he doesn’t go ahead with the idea. On 29 March 1955, he makes contact with members of the City Council who deal with for illegal construction work or squats, and learns about the legal loophole allowing these stand-alone shacks to cluster into new shantytowns.10 On 30 March, he visits a building site where he sees some potential ‘shots’ for the camera and construction workers teach him about construction and minute details which he would otherwise have missed. Then, on 1 April 1955, he organizes a meeting at home with seven workers to test the idea for the film and gauge their reactions. He gets confirmation that many newly-weds were building illegal shacks.11 They point out to him that he knows more than they do. Yet, Zavattini is able to collect their anecdotes, based on their experience and the stories they have heard. On 2 April, he discusses the feasibility of the scenario with a policeman. Meantime, squatting is back in the news. The Rome daily, Il Messaggero, brings out an article entitled: ‘Homes, homes, homes. The greatest problem of our time.’ Another article, detailing a tragic case, follows up in 24 April and after Zavattini completes the draft of the final version, before pressing on with the screenplay, the Unità publishes a report on a family resisting attempts by the police to knock down their overnight squatting build.12 Proof that his project is topical.

Zavattini, ibidem, 49–61. Zavattini, ibidem, 53. 7 Zavattini, ibidem, 58. 8 Zavattini, ibidem. 9 Zavattini, ibidem, 61. 10 Legge Urbanistica no. 1150, 17 August 1942, articles no. 31, 32, and 41. Cf. Zavattini, Il tetto, 71. 11 Zavattini, ibidem, 73. 12 Zavattini, ibidem, 78. 5 6

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On 1 May 1955, he invites two policemen and a married couple who have built their own squat to his home. He reads them the scenario and asks for their feedback.13 The policemen express concerns that the film might be an invitation to break the law and suggest a few changes. Authenticity is the screenwriter’s paramount concern. This is what he meant by being true to reality. Is this or that detail credible? Would it happen in reality? What do they think? They tell him that the film would appeal to ordinary people, because it is ‘a big problem and one which people can identify with’, but ‘not to the people who live in the Parioli part of the city’.14 ‘Would the rich be in favour of more affordable housing, after watching the film?’ ‘No.’ Zavattini has already completed the first draft of the screenplay by 18 June 1955, when he discovers that in Pietralata, also on the outskirts of Rome, a young newly married couple has just finished an overnight build. More useful details to glean for the screenplay.15 It becomes clear then, how carefully Zavattini builds up a precious oral history of the contemporary moment, of a new phenomenon of its time, unrelated to immediate post-war Italy, but indicative of the 1950s, a period of hardship for subaltern classes and, most importantly, an oral history, mobilized for a film about the present moment, not the past. The obvious contradiction was the clash between the mushrooming new buildings for the middle class and mushrooming single-room shacks for the poor, occupied by entire families. ‘Shadowing’ then, as this account shows, was tantamount to field research. However, much of the feedback couldn’t be included in the screenplay or the film itself, which, as was the norm, under the rule of post-Andreotti governmental control over political content, had to face two stages of censorship, following fascist best practice: final scenario and final screenplay had to be vetted by the governmental film agency, before the film could even go into production. After its release, De Sica claimed that Zavattini’s screenplay had suffered from self-censorship, confirmed by Michele Gandin who said that even Zavattini, one of the bravest among Italian filmmakers, had succumbed to the threat of censorship, consciously or not.16 Zavattini’s response was that he had to deal with la situazione, meaning the political climate of the day. He also conceded that: If the climate had been different, the screenplay would have stressed individual and collective responsibilities of the [housing] predicament. So, undoubtedly, I was consciously exerting self-censorship on The Roof.17

Gandin made the point that both writer and director were faced with the threat of the film not even being allowed to go into production or, if it did, being denied

Zavattini, ibidem, 77. Zavattini, ibidem. Parioli, then, as now, is an upper-class part of the city. 15 Zavattini, ibidem, 116. 16 De Sica, ‘Questionario per Vittorio De Sica’, ibidem, 238–41; 240. 17 Zavattini, cited by Michele Gandin, in ibidem, 20. 13 14

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permission for sales to foreign markets.18 The production notes suggest that Zavattini was under pressure from De Sica to censor the content. What is more, the amendments show that, for example, references to strikes, to party political rallies, to a family participating in the upcoming elections, were removed from the script.19 Between editing (which the writer considered an extension of his writing), and release, there were strong clashes between De Sica and the writer which included an altercation about ‘hating’; also, Zavattini’s observation that feeling the urgency of such stories was his ‘speciality’; and rejecting De Sica’s point that a foreign audience had to be spared too many uncomfortable facts about contemporary Italy (harking back to the direct pressure exerted in 1952 by Minister Andreotti, then in charge of the governmental Direzione generale dello spettacolo) and, finally, that loyalty, presumably to the cause, was preferable to hypocrisy. In the event, the systematic removal of hard facts from the story, made the screenplay and subsequent film more like a fable, turning it into a fairy tale fiction which was more palatable than the non-fiction it was authoritatively based on. Self-censorship guaranteed the film’s release, especially after the warning of 10 March 1956, when a member of the governmental commission for Italian films to be sent to Cannes, made it clear that the film was ‘too polemical’.20 That Zavattini felt he had to take the precaution of writing a defence of a simple story about working class into his scenario is also a sign of the times: And we hope that, by the end of the film, even the viewers will feel empathy for our humble heroes and won’t want to accuse us of only putting on display, yet again, the ills of those in need. It so happens that this is a tribute to our country to see how those in dire need tackle the vicissitudes of life, simply and honestly, and with a firm belief in the family and employment. But perhaps we are using big words for a story of such humble proportions.

In the event, the film won the Italian prize, the Nastro d’Argento, for its scenario and screenplay, and the OCIC (International Catholic Organization for Cinema) Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Writing in 1999, Lorenzo Pellizzari, discounted the negative reception of The Roof, in Italy, stating emphatically that the film deserves to be valued as a fable and also as a Neo-realist film.21 He doesn’t expand on this, but it seems that if Miracle in Milan is a Neo-realist film, then so can The Roof be, should we be prepared to go beyond a literalist understanding of realism and adequationist polarities. Zavattini told Giacomo Gambetti: Gandin, ‘Fame di realtà’, ibidem, 20. Gandin, ibidem. 20 On 10 March 1956, a member of the governmental commission for Italian films to be sent to Cannes, warned the production team that the film was ‘too polemical’. Zavattini, Il tetto, 230. 21 Lorenzo Pellizzari, ‘Vittorio De Sica e la critica’, in Pellizzari, Critica alla critica. Contributi a una storia della critica cinematografica italiana, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999, 153–70. 18 19

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The Roof, in my opinion, is a great intuition concerning social facts, clearly set out and then transposed as a fable, a story. The Roof should have been more influenced than it was by its film inquiry matrix.22

Zavattini’s solution to resort to fable and allegory had worked under fascism, and it worked again under the Christian Democrats. The version below includes an important Preface, later removed. Zavattini cites in full a contemporary article published in the Rome daily Il Messaggero, conveying out of allegory the harsh ‘social facts’, mentioned earlier.

Text Many Left- and Right-wing daily papers have repeatedly stated that construction should begin in Rome without delay, for basic humanitarian reasons, to build no fewer than 230,000 apartments for working-class people.23 New houses are going up every day at a phenomenal rate. All things considered, the city is expanding in peacetime, and yet, for thousands of people the problem of where to live is still very serious. One of the most honest and rewarding discussions in the Capital’s city hall meetings of 1955 dealt with this topic, which is why I believe that no Preface to my scenario could be more apt than the following paragraphs from an article by Guglielmo Ceroni, published in Il Messaggero, on 20 March 1955 in which he relates the episode of a frail woman falling off a chair in front of the president of the Institute of Popular Housing, saying only ‘I’m so tired.’ ‘This phrase says it all’, Ceroni writes, ‘This is a problem that just won’t go away, a pressing and distressing contemporary problem which makes you feel helpless. No matter how much empathy one might feel, such a problem cannot be resolved by empathy alone; even though human empathy, and a sense of social solidarity, are essential to address it.’ ‘I’m so tired!’ means years of vagrant existence, it means the squalor of living in a cubbyhole or a damp and insalubrious dwelling place, in a single room, crowded by human beings, regardless of age and gender. It means anxiously chasing after a flimsy hope of a joyful, private, brightly lit home. It means sudden uncontrolled emotional outbursts, or the harsh, hostile silence of someone who has given up believing in anything. It means children growing up with neither an experience of a home, nor of something more precious, more humane, and more sacred that a home has to offer: intimacy. It means the dread of returning home after a day of knocking on doors looking for work or returning home from a poorly paid job. It means spending nights this close to being fully awake for the worry, or, tormented Zavattini, in conversation with Giacomo Gambetti, 9 July 1973, in Gambetti, Zavattini mago e tecnico, 135–6. 23 Preface (scenario, second version), Il tetto, 65–7. 22

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by the very real possibility of inadvertently crushing the youngest born, sleeping in the same bed, when you turn around in your sleep. It means another day which we greet with cold rancour, knowing that there will be no change. ‘I’m so very tired!’ sums up a life of misery, a truly hopeless future. Can you imagine what it’s like to spend twenty-five years on a waiting list, while living in a hut, or in one of those single rooms in the Garbatella district, which measure three metres by four on plot number 43? Twenty-five years of life and its vicissitudes, its urgent needs, its changes. The family grows up. Yesterday’s children reach adulthood. They marry. The men are bent over from lung disease or heart condition. The women stoop from a life spent within those four walls, in such squalor, which seems to collect all the misery of the earth, where fate seems to have taken permanent residence! It’s her exhaustion that left her barely enough energy to make her last attempt at rebellion, when the slight, weak, and heavily pregnant woman, having lost any trace of deference, animated only by her desperation, found the nerve to barge into the President’s office at the Popular Housing Institute. As chance would have it, the exhausted little woman was met with kindness and understanding for her predicament, something which took her completely by surprise. Her expectations of an insurmountable obstacle were contradicted by a kind human being who was full of compassion, who almost seemed to be expecting her. It is likely that this was the only time that the weak, frail woman came across a word of kindness. What about all the others? Life goes on. The city is growing. Big, modern, luminous buildings are going up wherever you look. Science and civilization move forward. New idols appear. New money is transferred to those who are well-connected. Yesterday’s anonymous young woman is today’s big celebrity, who profits from all the gossip around her. While society keeps going with its sufferings, anxieties, and conflicts, there among the huts and the refugee collection points in the Gordiani and Garbatella housing plots, under the aqueduct arcades, on the banks of the Aniene, life seems to have stopped on a dark day during the war, when city dwellers were taken there against their will, or when those men and women who had somewhere to live, friends, and a job, had to give up everything, including their nearest and dearest, to seek asylum between the walls of a ramshackle hut or a damp room. For such people, the war is not yet over. All this takes a toll on their children’s health too, and also at times on their soul. Their women have given up hoping and fighting. Either they seek oblivion or an escape in the tavern from this squalor, or they become distant. An infinity of mothers, of hopeless women. ‘I’m so tired!’

This story is inspired by these same sentiments, but refuses to resort to narrating extreme events, such as what happened to crazy Cannarozzo, or the story of that invalid who removed his orthopaedic limb before the mayor and his councillors,

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shouting: ‘Are two wooden legs not enough to get housing? I’ve been asking for somewhere to live for the past seven years.’ Our characters are ordinary, by comparison. We bump into them every day, doing their best to face the situation head-on, looking at the To Let signs, attached to the main entrance of apartment blocks, often taking a newspaper with them open at page four, full of pencil marks. They climb up and down the stairs, ask the price, work out what they can afford, and many of them, who were planning to rent a four-room apartment, for example, end up accepting the reality of their salaries, and settle for three, two, even a single room. At the very least, they need a wall for privacy, to defend their nights from other people’s gaze. [But not even this is easy. Even in the saddest, outer reaches of the suburbs, from Mandrione to the Orti di Sant’Agnese, those tiny houses, barely a room, measuring 4 metres or even only 3 metres in length, and no bigger in width, cost 10,000 liras a month to rent. These buildings are as small as the ones in fairy tales, which look cheerful enough, when it isn’t raining, because it doesn’t take much to brighten up a wall with colours and flowers, but when you take a closer look, you soon realize that there are as many as four or five people living in that narrowly confined space. Every now and then you read in the papers that a storm has flooded these homes. Now we want to tell you the story of a newly wedded couple and of its trials and tribulations to get a roof over their heads].24 He is from Friuli and twentyfive, he is a construction worker, and she is an eighteen-year-old housemaid, from a village near the sea, not far from Terracina. Their names are Natale and Luisa. They’re neither ugly nor attractive, but when you meet them, you feel very well-disposed, because you become aware of the fact that they married for love and that they face the difficulties of everyday life with the same tenacity and hope of a lot of Italians, the same kind you will find, for example, in emigrants. One evening, while they were discussing their situation, Natale and Luisa said: ‘We’ll get a roof over our heads.’ And with the same frugality of ants, day in day out, they saved up enough to carry out their plan, and after a few months the roof was over their heads. I don’t think we can be accused of being bombastic for saying that the young newly-weds almost cried for joy. And we hope that, by the end of the film, even the viewers will feel empathy for our humble heroes and won’t want to accuse us of only putting on display, yet again, the ills of those in need. It so happens that this is a tribute to our country to see how those in dire need tackle the vicissitudes of life, simply and honestly, and with a firm belief in the family and employment. But perhaps we are using big words for a story of such humble proportions.

The text in square brackets is from Zavattini [scenario, first version] Il tetto, 35. What follows, up to the asterisk mark, is from the Preface [scenario, second version], Il tetto, 65–7. The ‘you’, his referent, is not De Sica, his producer and funder. De Sica had already bought the idea and needed no further convincing. Zavattini is addressing the censors who had the right to veto the production of a film even at its earliest stage, that of the initial scenario.

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Natale is twenty-five, he’s a bricklayer and he enjoys his job, working in one of those new districts in the city where dozens of cranes collect, as if it were a seaport. It seems to be populated by no one but bricklayers, carpenters, workers specialized in mixing concrete, tilers, including ones who only do majolica, plumbers, electricians, bent over their work from early morning to evening, accompanied by the deafening sound of diggers, the hammering of pneumatic drills and the grinding of cement mixers.25 It’s twelve noon. You can tell because the hammering on a suspended steel girder announces it. The manual labourers sit down the length of the walls or wherever they can find a perch nearby to eat their meal. Some of the young ones are playing football with a makeshift ball made of bunched up rags or kick around a tin, and so many of them would like nothing better than have a nap, but there aren’t many comfortable spots to do that, which is why you can see a sleeper’s leg dangling out of a window, and someone else’s arm hanging out from an unfinished stairway. On Natale’s building site, they’ve got as far as the roof, just about. They’ve made it and now they are hoisting the Italian tricolour flag and having their lunch inside the site office to celebrate. Natale meets Luisa, while he is working on the site. Luisa is a housemaid, working for a colonel who is married with children and they are the first to move into the new apartments, still smelling of lime. Natale is carrying some facing bricks in the unfinished wing and sees Luisa from a distance, while she is rubbing off the windowpanes the big white S marks, made by the construction workers. The colonel is standing on the balcony with a friend, admiring the beautiful view. * Luisa is sixteen. She’s from Aversa where her family lives. She and Natale exchange the usual banter, while he’s hanging from scaffolding and she’s on the terrace doing the laundry. But they’re not the talkative kind. On another occasion, she keeps him company, while he is waiting in a queue for his pay packet, outside the assistant’s hut and, since the senior workers get paid first, he is standing right at the back of the queue. Natale says he is making 850 liras a day, but that soon he is going to be promoted to second class bricklayer, and will be on 1,100 liras, and that’s when he wants to get married. Meantime, arguments break out over the rate of pay, hours worked, the cost of living and of living allowance. At last (the day the street sweepers go on strike) Natale helps Luisa carry the dustbins to a field and they get engaged.

Zavattini, [scenario, first version] Il tetto, 35–45.

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* On Sundays, they go dancing together in Via xxi Aprile, or they go and watch football matches for free, on the football pitch by the railway, near the river Aniene. Then, one Sunday, Natale introduces her to his family, to his mother, to his brother who is seven years older than him and is also a construction worker and is married with children; to his older and younger sisters. They all live under the same roof, including Natale, in just two rooms. She tells Natale that she has written to her father that she wants to get married. Her father comes all the way from Aversa to tell Luisa that she is too young and that the family still needs her financial help. Luisa introduces Natale and the sequence is muffled, except for mutterings of a couple of words. They accompany him to Castro Pretorio, the head stop for all long-distance coaches. And Luisa speaks to her father in earnest, just when the coach is about to leave. Clearly, her father is weak-willed, and Luisa is the strong character. Even so, her father refuses to say goodbye to Natale. * A few months later, they get married. She is wearing a lovely white wedding dress and he is wearing a black suit. Natale has spent all his savings on the wedding. His family turn up at the wedding, but not one of her family is present, because they couldn’t afford to come. They have their photograph taken on their way in and on their way out. It’s such a beautifully decorated church, thanks to an earlier wedding of wealthy people and the parish priest had the kind heart to tell the men not to take away the carpet, so that Natale and Luisa walked up to the altar on that same carpet. Then they visit Aversa and it becomes obvious just how poor Luisa’s family actually is; her mother, father and two children, not ten yet, and a thirteenyear-old girl. ‘This is the limit’, her mother says. ‘There’s no way you can send us 5,000 liras a month to bring up these poor creatures.’ ‘Look, I’ll try to keep sending you the money’, Luisa replies. ‘That’s easy to say’, her mother objects. There’s no room for them in Louisa’s family home, so a relative of hers puts them up for the night. She gives them some wine and a fizzy drink – nice and cool – as she says. And a room with a very high bed and squeaky mattresses filled with corn leaves, which make such a racket that Natale and Luisa have a good laugh before making love. * The next day they go back to Rome and we get a better idea of the situation in Natale’s home. His brother and sister-in-law are sharing a bedroom with their two children, while the other room is where Natale’s mother, his two sisters sleep. And now even Natale himself and his wife will have to sleep there. They use curtains, to create some privacy, but this is obviously only a temporary arrangement. They are far from shameless, but it embarrasses them to make

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love when other people can overhear them. To make matters worse, they catch his younger sister standing outside, spying on them. They end up sleeping in the corridor, but it feels as if they’re in the street. * Because of all these inconveniences, Natale and his brother start quarrelling. So Natale and Luisa decide to leave the household. The very next Sunday, Natale and Luisa go looking for lodgings. They view several rooms, some big, others small, some attractive, others not, some cheap, others expensive, and cross paths with many people like them who are also looking for a place to live. They still haven’t found a place by the evening, because of the cost. The rent alone could eat up as much as a third of their income. * It’s spring and there are posters on the tree trunks, on the walls, posters everywhere, for the up-and-coming elections. Natale and Luisa bump into a party political rally and stop to listen. They can’t stay all day, or else they would have to wait for another Sunday to look for a room to rent. Natale would like to stay longer and hear what they have to say, but she walks off, so then Natale has no choice but to run after her. Luisa is tired out, but she won’t admit it. She has found a room she likes, which is too expensive: 10,000 liras per month. Perhaps if she goes part-time, Natale will agree to take it. * The room is both roomy and attractive, but not too smart. But to them it looks overly middle class. Yet they take it. The landlady knits cardigans for a living and is single, minding a twelve-year old. She looks very friendly, but she wants three months’ rent in advance, and that is all they have. * It’s easy enough to move their furniture. All they need is a hand cart to transport a bed, a wardrobe, a chair and a couple of parcels. Natale leaves his family on bad terms, apart from his mother. During the move, Luisa says she’s pregnant. She is happy. She barely manages to keep up with the handcart alongside her, while Natale weaves in and out of the surrounding traffic, replying that you only hear good news in the morning. * But a sudden event rattles them. After less than a month, the knitter is evicted and Natale and Luisa are positive they are going to lose the room and their big

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advance deposit. The owner of the apartment tells him not to worry. He wants to sell, rather than let the place, and they are allowed to stay until he makes the sale. So Natale and Luisa are now on their own in the five empty rooms of the apartment. They have no use for them. At night, Luisa checks all the rooms are locked, to deter any burglars, because she is a bit afraid, though she won’t give in to it. And they go on living in their room, using the kitchen too. It seems so large. All they have are their two dishes, two glasses and a couple of small saucepans. * Every morning, Luisa leaves home, at exactly the same time as Natale. She goes to her part-time job, still at the colonel’s and now Natale is working far away, in that popular housing estate going up next to Cinecittà. They love one another. While Lisa’s belly is growing bigger and bigger, they sometimes go to the pictures, but Natale prefers to play bowls in Via Panama and Luisa sits quietly watching him. * Winter comes and they’ve moved from Via Fezzan. Now they’re living in Via Tripoli. The Via Fezzan apartment has been sold to a railway station and the owner has let them a room in Via Tripoli, where they pay less, because it’s a basement flat, and all you can see from the windows are the legs of people walking past the courtyard. Luisa says she would prefer not to live in this hole when her baby is born, but now is not the time to look for a room, since she has grown so big and, anyway, they can save up. There are going to be extra costs to face after she gives birth. * The baby is born in the Policlinico hospital and something funny happens to Natale. They show him a baby and let him hug it, but it is not his baby. The misunderstanding is soon cleared up. Then they show his, and everyone begins to laugh and say: ‘Thank goodness we noticed so quickly.’ * Luisa is in good health and gets discharged very soon. The baby is baptized almost immediately, and the colonel agrees to be its godfather, on the following Sunday, because people like them can only do the stuff that really matters on Sundays. They go to the baptism in the nearby church on foot, sheltering from the drizzle under a brolly. There’s Natale, the colonel in civilian clothes, and the godmother to be, a friend of Luisa’s, who is about seventeen, and a little bit in awe of the colonel, who is actually a very decent person. Before the baptism, everything has to be explained several times to the colonel. He has never been

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a godfather. Then they go home, where Luisa is waiting for them. There is also the colonel’s batman with his gift, one of those collapsible prams, and Natale and Luisa keep saying ‘Thank you, thank you’, for at least five minutes, ‘You shouldn’t have. It’s too much.’ They want to celebrate with two bottles of wine and a tray of cakes, but the colonel can’t stay, he has got to change into his military uniform, to attend a ceremony in the barracks. * It’s spring again, and Natale and Luisa are thinking of looking for somewhere else to live and so begins their climb up and down the stairs and they leave the baby with the janitor or if that isn’t possible, they carry him with them. They also visit the area called Lungotevere dei Fossati di Sant’Agnese, where you don’t have to pay for the land, because it belongs to the City Council, and a lot of people build illegal dwellings there, like the ones we mentioned early on, which you can build for as little as 50,000 liras. Natale doesn’t say much, yet he is very level-headed about it all. He draws her attention to the new building sites encroaching like large ships into a port, and says that in a couple of years those huts will be swept away and large new houses will replace them on that same land, which means they would still have to struggle to find somewhere to live and the 50,000 liras will be lost. He discusses the matter with a guy who is also worried that he would be swept away in a couple of years who shows him the Bought and Sold column in a paper, where it says that in Ostia they’re selling plots of land for 170 liras per metre; because there is no water, no light. It’s like living on heathland, but it’s still a plot of land and you can build a house yourself, a small, affordable house. They go into details and others join in. Some say it’s too far away, others that if they had the money, they would jump at it. * Natale visits the place, to get a better idea. One Sunday, he takes his wife and baby to Ostia, as far as the twenty-third kilometre, near Ostia Antica, by the huge fields and by an almost deserted valley, with sewers crossing through the plots of land. The part by the main road belongs to Cucini, an engineer; all the rest, to Prince Aldobrandini. Natale talks to a tiler who works as a night-watchman to guard a building where they store building materials to cover the sewage culverts. Luisa tells Natale she likes solitude, to encourage Natale, who says he will buy the plot. They need almost 100,000 liras. Some wild horses suddenly break into a gallop and, somewhere in the distance, a hunter fires his shotgun, and a herd of sheep, with one rubbing itself on a post to ease its delivery. The 600 strong herd of sheep belongs to two men from Abruzzo province, from Rieti. They have a shack for overnight shelter, some 200 metres away. The Rome to Ostia highway is less than a kilometre away, a busy thoroughfare what with coaches, motorbikes and mopeds.

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* They make their way back to Rome and go and see Natale’s family. They aren’t talking to one another, since they had a quarrel and left, and now you can see that they are happy to see each other again and they make a big fuss of the baby who looks like this or that relative, and go on like this for an hour. Natale explains the business of the plot of land and, if his brother and sister agree, the three of them could share the cost. ‘I’m going to build there, as soon as I save up enough money, for a house that, one way or another, will give us all a roof over our heads’, says Natale. ‘You’ll find out at your peril that you’ll be evicted from here, because the owners of these old buildings are going to sell them to the construction companies building new apartment blocks.’ Sure enough, in the street where his brother lives, they have started a large building on a spot where there used to be a house of no more than four or five small apartments. His brother and sister, after much indecision, agree, and they talk well into the night. Natale will get a loan from the workers’ Credit Union at the Barriera Nomentana, where 100 workers deposit 1,000 liras a week and when they need money, they can ask for a loan. Two or three days later, Natale goes to the offices of engineer Cucini, but they say there is nothing left at 170 liras per metre. They have plots at 200, and he ends up buying 800 metres, amounting to a total cost of 60,000 each, including drawing up the deeds. * The following Sunday, he and his wife and child go back to Ostia, together with his brother, his sister and mother, and have a picnic on that piece of land which is now theirs and mark it with posts. Everyone is happy, except his brother who is shaking his head every now and then. He’s worried that it’s a bad deal. It was fine at 170 per metre, but they never agreed to spend 200 to buy it. He has been swindled, because the night-watchman told him there were still some left at 170, but they deny it, so as to shift the dearer plots of land. * Now Luisa has taken two part-time jobs, to pay off the Credit Union debt, carrying the baby with her, because that’s the deal: she is allowed to bring along the baby. She puts him in a wickerwork cot and luckily for her, he isn’t a nuisance. She works part-time at the colonel’s and part-time for a captain, thanks to the colonel’s good word. They want to save up for a house, which is why they are still living in Via Tripoli and in far worse conditions than before, since the baby was born. Natale carries on with his job at the waterworks, acea, and supplements it working overtime, and in the evenings he does jobs for the new small shops in Via Libia and we see him finishing off a floor for a small bar, then chatting to the proprietor, saying that he wants to be there to watch the first customer walk in,

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and so many people walk past, and finally someone walks in and says: ‘A coffee!’ And the proprietor is happy now, the wheel of fortune is beginning to turn, and he offers the customer and Natale a coffee. * One day, Natale’s brother picks him up at work to discuss matters that it is in Luisa’s best interests not to overhear. He tells him he would like to sell his share of the plot of land, because he is not convinced. It’s too far away. Natale says there are thousands and thousands of workers commuting to Ostia. He needs to be patient and the house will get built. But his brother says that it is not possible, because it is illegal to build a house there and Natale should have been better informed. Natale tells him that it is feasible to build there. Nobody takes any notice. His brother tells him that is idle gossip and that he has been tricked and even his sister wants her money back. Natale is furious and says he’ll give him back his money. So, once again, they part on bad terms. * Then Natale visits his sister at the Trinitarian Sisters and convinces her not to pull out. When he sees her, she is lining up the orphan children with their crooked little legs, distorted from birth, to take them for a walk. He walks alongside her, trying to persuade her while they walk. She’ll see. Nobody is going to interfere while they’re building the house. Nobody in that place goes to check and once the house is built, no one can do anything about it. That much is certain. * In the summer, Natale takes a big step. He has purchased a small hut for a few thousand liras and moves to his piece of land in Ostia. He gets there on a small truck and now the road is crowded with people going to the seaside. Farewell Via Tripoli. He has paid off his debts and from today, he is saving money from the rent and soon the day will come when he can build his house with one large room, divided in two by a partition, half for him, and half for his sister. They need 100,000 liras altogether, 50,000 from him, and 50,000 from his sister. The small hut is temporary. It looks like a kennel, but they are not going to live there for long. He works for the whole of Sunday to assemble it, and that night they can sleep in it. ‘The baby is fine here’, says Natale. It’s true, there’s no shortage of space, but there are also nasty mosquitos and grass snakes. The child isn’t scared of them, and chases them as best he can, while Luisa is afraid for herself and the child. They have brought candles, bottled gas, and there are a few gaps in the woodwork, but it’s hot, so it makes no difference. Through the cracks, you can see the sudden flash of headlights coming from the distant highway. The air is full of croaking frogs from the nearby ditch. Natale tells Luisa he likes

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frogs. Venetians like them a lot and he will go and catch some. Luisa finds them disgusting, but Natale explains how to clean them and that you fry them. * The next day, he gets up at four, it is not quite daylight yet and his wife is still sleeping with the child in her arms. Natale gets to work in all that silence. He is glad to see that something has been done. ‘This is where the foundations go’, Natale says, ‘and when we can afford it, we’ll begin to build.’ She makes him a coffee on the gas burner, but there is no time to drink it, because it’s late and he must get to Rome on time to start work at eight. Luisa would like to fetch some drinking water, while the baby is asleep. She realizes it will take her ten minutes, so then she turns back in a hurry, she doesn’t want to leave the baby all alone. She will just have to go later, carrying him in her arms. She will buy some milk at the same time, from the shepherds from Abruzzo, when they are milking the sheep. The next day, Natale wakes up Antonio, the man stationed in the building nearby. Together, they are going to drill some holes in the ground looking for water, taking no longer than half an hour, before he too sets off to work half a kilometre away. He has hired a drill and between the two of them they are able to use it. They work until seven, for the same reason. He must get to his job in Rome. He is hoping it won’t take longer than five or six mornings to finish the job. They’ve reached the water table, but the water is salty at 7 metres depth and the potable water runs even deeper. This will have to do for now. It is going to take time and money to reach potable water. On Saturday nights, he goes off to catch a few frogs, with a light to guide him and Luisa looks on, sitting on the bank of the canal and Natale tells her not to make any noise, because it only takes the slightest noise for frogs to vanish into thin air. On Sundays he goes to an equestrian open circus, which puts on temporary shows in Ostia Antica. He comes home carrying the child in his arms in the dark. It is always so dark and so late when he gets home. He finds Luisa barricaded in the shack. She is scared stiff, though she says nothing about it. To get home earlier, he would have to stop working overtime. But then the house would never get built. There is no time to waste. Neither does his sister want to waste any time, since she is being evicted from the house we know, just as Natale had predicted, that one of these days, those old houses would be demolished and would be replaced by the huge new apartment blocks. And in the alley where his sister’s and family’s home is situated, they have already started demolishing the other houses. There is so much dust, so much construction traffic that the original buildings are being eaten up and replaced by Innocenti scaffolding. * At Christmas, a blessing in disguise happens to him, a dash of lime gets in his eye while he is working at his daytime job. He immediately goes to the inaic

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accident and emergency ward, where he meets other labourers, all victims of an accident and meets Fedele, another Venetian worker who has injured his foot and tells him about the plot of land in Ostia. He is interested and will come and see for himself, one of these days. The doctor gives him a sick note for eight days, but if he wants to get sick pay, he will have to report to the hospital every two days. So, he takes advantage to concentrate on building the house, even though one eye is bandaged. It will take him ten days or so to get the walls done. He will do as much as he can with the money, and then ask for another loan from the Coop later. He goes down to Ostia to buy hollow and solid bricks, because they are cheaper than in Rome. Solid bricks cost eight liras each, hollow cost twelve. The workers from the shed up the road lend him a few tools, so he can make faster progress. Luisa is pleased and tells him to work hard, because she has a feeling that another baby is on its way. He replies that he was expecting it. They don’t talk much about it, but they’re both glad. One Sunday, Fedele and his family visit them. At last Natale’s son has found another child to play with, while Fedele and his family look for a good plot. He has decided to buy one too. It will feel less remote with two buildings in the field and Luisa says she’s happy, because she is afraid of being on her own and now she can openly admit it. * One night, the wind is so strong that when Natale wakes up the next morning, he finds that it has knocked down the wall. He’s a good-tempered man, but he picks up a brick and throws it against the wall, says that he is going to throw in the towel, Luisa manages not to burst into tears, but she’s on the verge. But then he gets back to work with more energy than before. While he is working, Fedele turns up with a piece of paper in his hand. He has purchased his plot of land. Fedele stakes out the land and leaves. He has hardly reached the end of the road when two men appear in the distance on bicycles. When they get closer, Natale realizes they are policemen. They are looking for him. ‘Good day’, says one of them and spends some time to look over the construction site. He then says that Natale doesn’t have a permit to build here. ‘What do you mean? I can’t build here?’ asks Natale. ‘To build, you need a building permit. You know that, and even if you ask for one, they won’t give it to you, because this area is not designated for building.’ Luisa also asks: ‘Surely that’s not so? It can’t be.’ The other policeman keeps silent. He is perched on his saddle, with one foot planted on the ground. The place is full of mosquitoes and the policemen swat their hands or face, because they are biting. Natale says they ruin your face and hands and that he and his wife and child are ruined for life. The policeman means no harm. It is the way it is. He says the inspector is coming over tomorrow. Otherwise, they could have turned a blind eye, until he has finished. ‘How much longer will it take?’ Natale says that if he worked flat out it would take three days, since he’s doing it single-handed. He says that if

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the place already had a roof installed, then he would only have to pay the fine. 1,600 liras it would cost, since, once the roof has been fitted, the law cannot force you to demolish the building. Trouble is, there is no roof yet. He has a long way to go before doing that. And they have no choice. They must report it to the inspector and the inspector takes these matters very seriously, because if someone reports him for not doing his duty, he could lose his job. Three months imprisonment for illegal construction work, plus 80,000 liras fine. And he would have to demolish everything, because, if he doesn’t, the fire brigade will do it for him. ‘It’s a different story, once the roof is up’, he says. Natale says in a loud voice: ‘This doesn’t make sense!’ Then he wonders if they might like a glass of wine and asks them. They say no, but Luisa turns up with two glasses and a fiasco. The police still say no, and one of them says he is not feeling well, but it is just an excuse not to drink. Luisa persists, and one of them accepts the offer, while the other sets off. He drinks, says it is good, and asks where they bought it. Natale says: ‘In that shop in Ostia Antica with the sign outside for vini di genzano.’ The policeman says ‘Oh, right’, meaning that he has understood and gets up to leave, saying: ‘See you tomorrow.’ Natale is standing there with his arms crossed, when Luisa says: ‘Well, eat some food now’, because, when the police turned up, she was cooking a meal. But Natale is not hungry. He says he is going to phone his sister. In the meantime, could she go and fetch the man from the nearby shack who is working. He needs his help. He goes to Ostia Mare, phones his sister and explains the situation, asks her to bring some stuff over, he is compelled to get the roof done by the morning. He makes a list and explains what to do again and again. He’s shouting on the phone, as if he were alone. He isn’t. The place is full of people in bathing costumes or wearing very summery clothes and some people are waiting to use the phone. ‘Bring over two kilos of size ten nails, three kilos of size seven’, he shouts, ‘And go to Tadisco in Via Alessandria to fetch forty small 3 x 3 containers.’ * In Ostia Mare, he buys bags of hydrated lime, some solid bricks and cavity bricks, loads them up and returns home. The man from the hut nearby whom Luisa went to see, to ask him to lend them a hand is ready and willing. His sister will arrive later, with a truckload of building materials, but Natale’s brother has also come. Natale is taken aback. He is glad, but they don’t say a word to each other. Not even hello. Natale’s brother gets straight to the point. He has bought one kind of nails, in preference to another, because they didn’t have them, but it turns out that these are better, so they get down to work, erect the framework, then the lengths of timber for the walls, and then the sun goes down and Luisa has made spaghetti for everyone and half of them eat it standing up and the other half sitting down. Some farm workers from the Prince’s estate who happen to be passing by stop and stare for a while.

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It’s very dark and the breeze is putting out their candles. They light up the lamp Natale uses when he goes frog hunting. Then a bit of good luck. The moon rises, so they can get on with the job. Luisa makes coffee and they all drink it. They don’t say very much while they’re working. At one point, the man from the nearby hut whispers that he has just seen a hare. They catch a glimpse of it, spellbound in moonlight, so they try not to make any sudden movements, as if they were hoping to catch it, but then the hare disappears into the shadows. * At first light, the work on the roof is well advanced. Natale’s sister has fallen asleep outside. The child wakes up and irritates Luisa. Natale, his brother, and the man from the shack nearby carry on working hard. Now and then, the man from the hut rolls his own and the other two are grateful for one, since they have run out of their own cigarettes. The sun rises and some of Prince Aldobrandini’s farm workers walk past on their way to work. * By 10 o’ clock, there’s only 1 square metre left to tile and Luisa and Natale’s sister, to make what is already their new home look like home, and carry all the contents of the wooden hut into the room; the bedstead, the wardrobe, the two chairs, the gas burner, the dishes, the clothes and so on and so forth. They are keeping an eye on the road, and the minute they see outlines of men walking in their direction, they say ‘It’s them.’ Twice or thrice, it’s a false alarm, but then it really is them, the two policemen and the inspector. When they arrive, the inspector has a look at the house and confabulates with the policemen. Natale’s brother positions himself in such a way as to hide from view the gap in the roof. It’s naïve of him of course. One of the two policemen remarks that all it would take would be a shove from his shoulder and the whole construction would collapse and begins to laugh, moving his head from side to side. ‘You’ve fooled us’, says the inspector. ‘Fooled you? What do you mean, we didn’t even take a break for some food or get any sleep’, Natale says, and more besides. ‘Well, in any case, you’ll have to pay the fine’, says the inspector. ‘I’ll pay’, says Natale. He pays the fine, hands him a receipt, then notices Fedele’s stakes marking the nearby plot and says: ‘Who does that other piece of land belong to?’ Natale says he doesn’t know. The inspector tells one of the two policemen that they can’t do anything about this one, but there can’t be a second one. If it were up to him, it would be different, but he knows his superiors won’t stand for it. He seems almost apologetic in having to say so to the policemen. *

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Natale’s brother and sister have to leave soon after. Such heavy work has just come to an end as simply as that. ‘Let’s settle up’, Natale tells the man from the nearby shack. ‘Sure’, says the man from the hut as he sets off. Natale must go back to Rome to get his eye checked out again, so he will be travelling with his brother and sister. They have a quick wash at the water pump and leave and Luisa heats up some milk for the child who is wading up to his knees through the puddle near the pump. She looks out of the window and sees the man from the hut in the far distance, Natale, his brother and his sister. She looks tired. She splashes her face with water from the bottle, goes out to fetch the child from the puddle, shouting as if she were about to strike him. Instead, she picks him up dripping wet and kisses him.

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Scenario México mío (1955-8)1

Context México mío is based on a conflation of materials in the Zavattini Archive, as listed in the footnotes. The reason for this is that there is no single scenario. The first version Zavattini gave the Mexicans was the several texts comprising Italia mia, and related articles. However, in 2006, a scenario entitled México mío was published by Orio Caldiron, but by no stretch of the imagination is it México mío. It is an entirely different story, also about Mexico, true; though in no sense is it the ambitious documentary Zavattini was proposing. Hence, México mío is established here, on the basis of several texts which, taken as a whole, constitute the story for the film and its ongoing development, over a span of three years.2 As the title suggests, the story is based on Zavattini’s Italia mia, an ambitious project, originally conceived for De Sica, then for Rossellini, then for a younger generation of filmmakers, all documentarians, and built on cinematic ethnographic research. The project met with official censorship conveyed by unsubtle threats carried out by Minister Giulio Andreotti, who kept a tight control over Italian New Cinema in the 1940s and early 1950s. Zavattini was contracted to write scenarios by Teleproducciones Barbachano Ponce, including this one, in which the ‘my’ referred not to the Italian screenwriter, but to each individual Mexican viewer. Because the Mexico of the 1950s, or indeed 1960s or 1970s, was governed by the one party ever since the Mexican Revolution of 1910, it was far from being open to critique, yet critique and a Neo-realist

See the following footnote for the constitution of Zavattini’s scenario México mío. This is the first edition of the scenario, if in English translation. 2 Zavattini, México mío, Rome, 22 September 1956, acz Za Sog. NR 20/3, fols 238–50; 2. Unpublished. Zavattini, ‘Nota relativa a una prima stesura per la necessità del deposito presso la Società Autori di México mío’, December 1955, acz Za Sog. NR 20/3, fols 252–5; 3. Zavattini, ‘Prime reazioni leggendo le 31 pagine della sceneggiatura di México mío’, acz Za Sog. NR 20/3, fols 256–64; fol. 256. 4. Zavattini, ‘México mío, Nota di cose consigliabili’, acz Za Sog. NR 20/3, fols 269–71. 5. Unpublished. Zavattini, ‘Considerazioni su México mío’, acz Za Sog. NR 20/3, fols 266–8. Unpublished. 1

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popular view of Mexico, based on field research and observation, was exactly what Zavattini was proposing, after carrying out his field- and text-based research. Because of the theory behind Italia mia, also relevant to this Mexican proposal, Zavattini resisted the pressure to produce a fully worked-out screenplay. After all, he had been contracted to produce scenarios, not complete screenplays. Field research, field notes, interviews, visual notes and filming on site, in his intentions and planning, were supposed to become the definitive screenplay, to be edited into the final film on the moviola by the Mexicans. To this end, he spent most of his two and a half months’ trip to Mexico in 1955 travelling inland right across the length and the breadth of Mexico, making contact with ordinary people and their ordinary lives, in the company of his guide and friend, Fernando Gamboa. His new vision of filmmaking led to a constant clash with the production house, leading to his project being substantially resisted and consequently undermined, because the Mexican production house really wanted a spectacular documentary about the natural wonders of Mexico and its customs. But Zavattini simply refused to accept an out and out compromise in favour of a stereotypical spectacle, presenting a vision of the country which would appeal to tourists, but which had little or nothing to do with the Mexico of the second half of the twentieth century, forty-five years after the Mexican Revolution, ultimately betrayed. At the same time, it is true that Zavattini was willing to be flexible enough to include glimpses of natural beauty, but within an overall open framework that concentrated on tangible people, living in real places, with the attendant problems they faced in their daily lives. Hence, a sociological and ethnographic understanding of lived space was his prime concern. Regrettably, Zavattini was pressurized at every juncture to develop the project into the very film he was trying to transcend: something along the lines of the marvels and natural attractions of Mexico, similar to existing films of that kind. As the opening lines make clear, the first text was a spoken one, dictated to the Mexicans, following the screenwriter’s practice of speaking out his ideas and later editing them on paper, once he had the typing in front of him. The sparks that flew between screenwriters and producers honed his ideas and forced him to make them more and more explicit, and so his scenario developed, as a consequence of this ongoing dialectical clash between modernity, tragedy of suffering, the plight of seasonal emigrants, and various examples documenting the harshness of everyday life on the one hand, and breathtaking, timeless, ahistorical beauty on the other hand. In his journey of discovery around Mexico, Zavattini sought out and soon discovered the kind of opposites this quote suggest which are precisely the story the Mexican production house sought to suppress: Juárez city centre and its extremes: the crowds of tourists and the brothels on the one hand and braceros trying to cross the border on the other.

Zavattini also wrote two other scripts, concerning other Mexican themes and social problems. Orio Caldiron wrongly mistook one of them for México mío,

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and published it with that name, presumably on the strength of a handwritten title in red crayon on the typescript in the Zavattini Archive labelled ‘Mexico’. But the scenario, which it would be more accurate to call braceros, is actually about seasonal migration from Mexico to North America, only one aspect of Zavattini’s ambitious scenario.3 Who were they? Braceros were the seasonal workers, forced to temporary emigration, lasting months, a year, or even several years. The other, El Año maravilloso, The Marvellous Year, concerns a historic act of Mexican defiance against multinational oil fields in Mexico when, on 18 March 1938, the oil fields were expropriated and Mexico took over its own oil crude extraction, and processing. In the company of Fernando Gamboa, Zavattini carried out several field trips in Mexico in which he interviewed local people in the oil fields, and pieced together, through oral history, the history of what had happened in 1938. His scenario related the story, combining history with fictional characters, acting as witnesses. It was part of a larger project entitled El Pétroleo. These scripts, written during and after his second visit to Mexico in 1955, were not acceptable to the Mexican producer who eventually rejected them. Why? For the same reason he rejected in practice, though not in appearance, Mexico mío. Because they were all conceived as popular critical realism, finding effective ways to explore sensitive topics, combining fiction with solid ethnographic field research. Mexico was divided by class. Barbachano Producciones was an expression of the ruling class which believed the Mexican bourgeois narrative of a land of beauty and promise. Whereas, Zavattini saw it as a land of contradictions, which had witnessed a failed revolution, a vision he articulated in the proposals and scripts he had been contracted to write. Following on from his work on Italia mia (My Italy), the best Zavattini had to offer was a fact-based, ethnographic cinema, critical and dialectical, all the more controversial for positioning itself as popular cinema, as opposed to auterist elitist cinema. His vision of the country, in no way Orientalist, was too far removed from the kind of folkloric, celebrative and spectacular representation of Mexico that Producciones Barbachano sought.

Text 1 I think it is crucial that we retain for México mío the original geographic idea of the Pan Americana highway that goes from Tuxcle to Yota. The organizing principle was already set out in what I dictated in Mérida to give a framework to the competition.4 3 4

Zavattini, ‘Mexico mio’, Uomo vieni fuori!, 357–63. Zavattini refers to his suggestion to the Mexican production house to organize a competition which would involve ordinary people in presenting their ideas for their film, their My

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What distinguishes it from competing ideas that are cropping up to make films about Mexico – which, as far as I can tell, don’t have a central, unifying concept – is that we have a beginning and an ending, starting from one national border and ending up in another. This allows us any number of geographic digressions we want, all branching off from the same main theme. Let me reiterate the basic concept: while the Mexican working class crowds the roadside for miles and miles, to see these modern racing cars from all over the world, the camera swivels round with a reverse shot, to focus on all these people watching, to observe their way of life, their needs, in short, who they are. In this first draft, which we will be developing independently from the outcome of the national competition,5 we need to establish strong indicative elements to characterize the film, alternating what constitutes folklore and local colour, pure spectacle, like a dance or a song, with more analytical aspects, concentrating on ordinary people, the working class and their everyday life.6 By and large, the film should comprise fifty or so moments of varying length. The following provisional, short list, merely indicative, opens with a description of the virgin forests that stretch from Yucatan to Quintaxna Ro Capeche and Chiapas, gradually getting closer to where the Pan Americana highway starts. The voice-over will say: ‘As we come in from the Yucatan Sea and we move inland towards the Maja ruins and the impenetrable forests and take in the worker’s toil for the caobo chicle, this is where this imposing road begins.’ In these first 400 metres or so, we see two or three important sights, such as, for example, the magical wilderness, and there is a sense in which the beginning expresses the harsh way of life still common today, elemental, primitive, sweaty: the chicle should be the longest episode. The camera then focuses on a very long section of the Pan Americana highway, to select whatever is going to attract our attention the most on both sides of the road, revealing above all a tragic dimension, as the most typical and most dramatic. Instead, in the North we need to convey the nation’s modernity. A degree of confidence will be required to alternate elements like the Huetyotzingo Carnival with braceros departing from Zacatecas in their thousands; the Tanaumaras’ hunt for cash with huge Cantinflas puppets and music;7 a show in a carpa at San Juan de Latran; yarab tapaito and vanilla harvest at Papanclas; a bullfight and the lone, vertical structure in the wilderness of an oil well; a game of frontón, the participation of people betting and shouting at every ball hurled and the players caught in mid-air; planes spraying insecticide over the connote fields and perhaps the fatality of a pilot crashing to his death: a peasant digging the parched land like a beaver, in an attempt to grow fields of maize; the huge Mexico, in an innovative, participative approach to screenwriting and filmmaking. It was not followed up. 5 Zavattini had suggested to the Mexicans to run a national competition to interpellate the public as to their issues, and the concerns they considered important for inclusion in the film. 6 From the very beginning of the project, the screenwriter draws a distinction between spectacle and the everyday. 7 Mario Moreno’s stage name. Moreno was an extremely popular Mexican comic.

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dam carrying masses of bountiful water downstream to the valley below; Juárez city centre and its extremes: the crowds of tourists and the brothels on the one hand and braceros trying to cross the border on the other. Not all of these moments revolve around a specific plot as such, with a main character and a qualifying anecdote. There may be a series of images which appear and disappear like a breeze of butterflies on the Southern road or a funeral procession accompanied by its music. There will be some episodes, however, with a narrative core. For example, the chicle, the miner, el petrolero, el bracero, the algodonero, could all become characters picked out during a typical moment in time during their work, dramatic and moving moments from the viewer’s point of view. For example, during the extraction of crude oil, one might focus on the specific instant when a fire is about to be put out or similar events. We must not forget to include events such as torrential rain along the route, when all the peasants wear chirgos; and anyway, how can we make a film about Mexico without a shot of a sudden violent storm? Let’s not get too bogged down in having to follow the Carrera Panamericana too closely. It is only meant to be a loose framework. Its purpose is not to limit us, but to give us the leeway and creative freedom we require. We don’t have to wait for the results of the competition. Based on the text I wrote for Italia mia and what I told you about it, I think you’ll find enough similarities to help you set out a first draft of México mío.8 And don’t worry about the editing (I’m referring to the edit on paper). Feel free to jump from the butterflies in the wind suddenly sucked into the car to a tourist, to a jarripeo – which is just what Gamboa and I saw in a small courtyard. The draft treatment you are going to write will be useful, both for the legal side (to establish copyright) and as a working document, because it will function as the first stage of the project. You yourselves are free to add any indicative episodes or beautiful images you wish.

2 So now let us pick up the México mío discussion where we left off at Mérida.9 The problem is still the method for establishing the narrative structure of the film. The idea of the Caretera Panamericana has turned out to be fragile, because the car rally has been discontinued, which means we have lost the spectacular and popular elements we were counting on. A day in the life of Mexico seems to me the best human and lyric narrative thread. It is an idea I have tried to use before, but could never put into practice,

This is the passage in which the screenwriter makes clear that the new scenario based on Italia mia, an adaptation to the reality of Mexico, is at this early stage only a loose idea. He refers the Mexican production house to his original scenario. 9 Zavattini, ‘México mío’, acz Za Sog. NR 20/3, fols 238–50. 8

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since the films didn’t make it into production. On this occasion, I shall do my best to explain it as concretely as I can. The very title of México mío, similarly to Italia mia, suggests a sentiment of love; and I do think one should be able to translate such a love, such an awareness, of what Mexico is, into images. What I’m saying is that the direction we want to take departs from illustrative travel films and films about distant places made in recent years, just as it has no truck with mere folklore or the pure and simple adventure story, no matter how exceptional. What we are aiming to achieve should be equal to what I wanted to do with Italia mia and, namely, establish a clearly defined and straightforward point of view, by means of the hours of the day, from the first light of the morning to the first light of the following day, in order to show how Mexicans live. I am thinking of the working class, which forms most of the population and, indeed, gives the country its unique character. We watch a person’s day in the life, not shadowing a single individual, but many, in several parts of the country. When taken as a whole, their actions will convey a sense of what the life of ordinary people is like in a country like Mexico. It is not a question of seeking out a secret life, but universal needs, encapsulated by moments, in any life; namely, eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, working, birth, death, getting married, having fun, having a faith. However much these needs are shared by the entire human race, here in Mexico our task is to establish what sets them apart, what makes them unique, in terms of their singularity, we might say. This is what worthwhile spectacle is.10 This is a source of curiosity for everyone else but also, we might say, for the Mexicans themselves, who have never embraced in a single gaze the life of their country across the timespan of one day. This is a point of view, an arbitrary perspective to be sure, realist in its purpose, if not in its editing. Agreed. Let me elaborate: the underlying intention is to use the imagination to produce a realistic portrait of Mexico through the lens of empathy, solidarity, love, as opposed to seeing it with eyes that only seek out what is extraordinary, in the vulgar sense of the word, as if the only objective were to hunt for the roar of lions, should there be any about. As in the case of Italia mia, the viewer’s interest should be aroused both by each moment taken in isolation, but also by how the material is edited, creating juxtapositions among the countless moments we can choose from in such rich subject matter. The point is that we are expecting a greater involvement and level of attention from the viewing public than is the norm. We could also emphasize in the posters and the publicity in general that the film contains mystery, magic and tragedy. But above all, we want to show the timeframe of a single day, a measure which is not only the measure for the inhabitants of such a huge land, thirty million Mexicans, the overwhelming Quite early on, Zavattini overturns the definition of spectacle, no longer seeing it in opposition to the everyday, but integral to it. The whole scenario builds on a dialectical clash of opposites; that is to say, Mexico is seen as a reality of opposites.

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majority of whom share traditional customs and are straightforward, forceful and hardworking in their activities, but also for everyone else on the planet. But leaving aside general considerations, let’s try to sketch the overall shape of the film, to see if this particular kind of narration captures our imagination first, and then, if it also appeals to the general public. I’d like to start by saying that for the time being I am relying on my memory to shape the film. However, on the ideal screen, that is, the ethical and poetic space I am hinting at, we want to place particular moments, picked out from a wide choice of material (which is why I insist on thinking that the competition will serve to elicit such moments, both from the viewing public and from us). The competition will be instrumental in helping to identify which aspects of the Mexican people we wish to describe. The more responses we get, the better we will come to know the people whose nature, I repeat, we are trying to portray.11 In terms of method, in practice, I’d like you to do what you did for Italia mia that is, make a chart on a wall of all the themes we can think of and of those suggested to us by others, then put them in some kind of order, so as to produce that probable and approximate portrait of contemporary Mexicans, not only portrayed in their private, vexing, psychological problems, but also in their more apparent and universal ones. And let me underline once again what we established clearly earlier: we are concerned with problems rooted in their everyday life within a cycle of birth and death. I have every confidence that if we choose the moments well, that is, by alternating the dramatic moment with the lyric one and with the humorous one too, the moment of natural disaster (a tornado or a river flooding its banks), with the civic moment (such as the bracero pushing to the front of the queue to be enlisted among the people crossing the border), with the wildlife moment (showing the life of animals in the wild and animals hunted by Indios deft at deer hunting), then we are bound to hold the viewers’ attention – even without having to resort to the allure of suspense. To put this differently, the stretch of a single day unfolding, establishing its beginning, its middle and end, must be the organizing principle to shape a film of this kind, making it eminently watchable. It will encourage the viewers to make comparisons with their day and to see things on the screen they identify with and some others which are so different from their own experience that they cannot but provoke a reaction of either empathy or intense dramatic emotion. Ultimately, the authors’ ethical stance needs to inform all the subject matter like a continuous vibration of a higher order, by comparison with the vulgarity informing similar films, exception made, of course, for father Eisenstein’s great film.12

Indicative of the problems the screenwriter faced was the fact that the Mexican production house did not pursue the competition, the vox populi idea, though there was at least one film company that was using it at the time in Mexico. 12 ¡Que viva México! 11

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With a less charged, less tense, less extreme style and less exceptional in terms of camera work, we aim to achieve results that say something about a more everyday Mexico. This necessarily involves a problem of film style.13 We might begin by briefly explaining a map of Mexico for a couple of minutes, establishing its geographic position in the world, giving a sense of space, of a self-enclosed world, with North America on one side, an ocean on the other, and, beyond thick forests, yet another country, Guatemala, also characterized by hard manual labour and hope. It is immense: seven times the size of Italy, with a population of thirty million inhabitants. It is an ancient land and perhaps its people first came from distant Asia. After such a brief introduction, which only seeks to have an indicative value, since words can be even more evocative and precise than these ones, the scene could shift immediately to the dark of night in Mexico in one of its regions, while the commentary speaks of the break of day, and plays on this contrast for a few seconds, while the light begins to dissolve the darkness elsewhere in Mexico, that is, the sun begins to rise in the north, revealing the first outlines of nopal, while in the south it picks out the coverage of hennequín with leaves as sharp as swords and, in the centre, out of the darkness of the virgin forest, the immense spherical tree shapes emerge, and in the east the first glimmer of white crests accompanying the sound of the regular rhythm of the sea waves. While the slow sun rises in its natural course over different parts of Mexico, allowing the viewers to appreciate the extreme diversity of its vegetation and of sounds too, in one area you hear the cry of the sapo and hither the whinnying of wild horses, thither, the sopilote call from tree to tree. In the meantime, the commentary offers generic information about Mexico. It will be best not to linger on the map, but instead shift the attention to the actual geography of the land. After this beginning which we could call biological or natural, for example, the image of a volcano or of the two white mountains near Mexico City, in other words, showing seven or eight natural wonders of Mexico which prove its geographic visual power – virgin forests, huge hennequin fields, immense nopal fields, mountains like the ones near Mexico City, the sea, filmed at one of its most imposing and booming locations – we then shift to a indistinct landscape which we gradually begin to perceive more clearly, a landscape animated by the presence of human beings. Indicatively speaking, I think a good way to start is to film one of the rougher looking peasants on his way to work in a maize field, laying bare the sheer effort of working such a parched soil. Maize is actually the connective tissue of the entire Mexican population. This is a simple way to begin, and pertinent to our general theme; a beginning, then, from the very first frame up to this slow and expansive moment.

In other words, Zavattini is criticizing Eisenstein, preferring, instead, a Neo-realist camera eye which does not draw attention to itself, but to phenomena.

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From this point on, the voice-over clearly states that we are now going to another part of the country, many, many miles away from here; where you see the sun’s reflection on a windowpane and three or four women working outside their homes. They are grinding maize down to make tortillas which they will then place in baskets and cover with a white cloth. From now on, the shifts from place to place aren’t always marked by a voice-over. The public is now expected to pick up the structure of the film which we have already been obliged to convey so clearly. While daylight reaches different parts of Mexico, the voice-over states that the film seeks to tell the story of a day in the life of Mexico. It will travel across this vast nation like a greedy eye. Where will it stop to look? Wherever there is a sign of Mexican life, labour, people. Here is a woman walking down a street with many other women, all obviously going to the market. We reach the market when they do and immediately it appears to us in the first light of dawn, at a time when the streets are crowded with people sleeping, while they wait for the moment when the arrival of the sun brings noise, buying and selling. There are those who are already pushing aside their blanket. Some mothers are giving their breast to numerous babies whose heads appear from within these temporary beds along the street pavements. But where is the woman going? We follow here into a church at the very heart of the marketplace, an ample Mexican church, crowded with faces, gold, candles, wealth. She’s carrying two live hens under her arms which she definitely must sell. She looks at the icon of the Flagellation of Christ and, with the simplest gesture imaginable, she tethers the two hens to the altar, while she begins to speak, as if she has an appointment with Christ and what is so extraordinary is how spontaneous her words sound, growing more and more dramatic, to the point of her weeping and imploring Christ again and again, while the clucking of the hens is irritating the other faithful, who are all working-class people, all peasants who have come for the market. Then the woman begs Christ for the very last time, before picking up her hens again and moving to another part of the church, walking past another woman, who is also talking to another crucifix, as contorted as the root of a plant and spattered with more blood than the previous one. By comparison, the other woman speaks in an intimate, intense and anxious way, but in a calm voice. She then walks into the street, where a little more daylight picks out the profiles of men loading goods on their backs, carrying heavy sacks of fruit, men who are slight in build, short and bent over, as they go forwards in single file, bent over with thick rope straining between forehead and heavily loaded shoulders. The scene takes place in Oaxaca. From here, we move freely in a spatial sense and in terms of our preference, in terms of episodes, while bearing in mind two considerations: the time element of portraying events in succession, and the ethical element, in terms of the overall framework; as for the time flow, I don’t keep looking at the time. I’m not saying that events must follow a strict time sequence. It is clear that, at certain times, several events take place simultaneously. But there is no need to go back in

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time. It would be ridiculous if, after reaching a moment in time qualified by full daylight, say, ‘the midday meal’ in a particular ambience, we went on to describe an activity which takes place early in the morning. What I mean by ethical framework is that among the huge variety of subject matter at my disposal, I should give preference to what contributes to a description of Mexicans as a people, on the basis of empathy and of an overall particular interpretation. In other words, there’s a consensus among all three of us, [Manuel] Barbachano, [Carlos] Velo and I, that we prefer the birth of a child to ancient magic rituals, possibly even bloody ones, of the kind that some say are still being performed today on a certain mountain.14 Of course, we have to convey with historical accuracy the rituals, beliefs and intuitions which belong to a world of the past, but the shadows of which continue to influence their world view. But it is one thing to communicate the shadows underlying the present, but ‹another›15 giving it such emphasis that effectively it turns into an operative dimension of contemporary Mexico. Because the purpose of the film – or rather, what we feel the film ought to be – is to make the Mexican people emerge through their specific singularity and their own specific tradition, while at the same time sharing a minimum common denominator with universal man and, in their best moments, harbouring a desire to share the most progressive tendencies of contemporary man. It would be ideal if, for the most part, successive episodes shared the same amount of narrative detail and consistency, as the episode of the woman we followed into church, because, although it might only seem to be a passing observation, it retains such unity and concreteness as to really constitute a short story in itself. And, furthermore, this can also be done with many other aspects of everyday life. Take, for example the petrolero who is coming off his shift very early in the morning, in some extremely remote province, deep in the virgin forest. You see the oil well in the heart of the forest. The camera follows the lines of the oil pipes recently installed. Once we are there, we see these sweaty faces and hear the frightful roar of the oil well, no different from all the other wells in the world, and yet quite different. We watch the moment when the oil gushes out with a sudden flame that scares off coyotes and vast flocks of birds into the trees, while the inside of a rubber pipe shakes this way and that like a snake and a large lorry load of petroleros, wearing steel helmets has just arrived and others are just about to leave. It is getting late. Let me interrupt my examples to say that it seems worthwhile to begin the film with the pace of morning routines, to continue with what else the day has in store and end with the faster paced sequences that are more blatantly spectacular16 – bearing in mind that we mustn’t treat the musical episodes in the more immediately obvious dimension, but seek out

Marginal note in pencil by Zavattini. Barbachano was the head of Producciones Barbachano Ponce and Carlos Velo the main editor of the documentaries they produced. 15 Lacuna. 16 Here Zavattini reverts to the original sense of the word spectacular. 14

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even here the human point of view, which we can use to build a quintessentially Mexican individual, or even collective, episode (there are some carpas, for example, in which the public takes part in the show in the same way Sicilians do, participating in the Teatro dei pupi, their traditional puppet theatre). Where to find the most effective subject matter, in terms of the norm for a show? We must concentrate on specifically human behaviour and not shy away from coming to grips with context and detail. An example? The bullfight. Surely it must be included among the episodes, being, as it is, a fundamental aspect of the life of the people. One approach is to shoot only the exterior of the Plaza de Toros, showing the mounting anxiety of all the people waiting to go in, including a child who makes every effort to get in, but fails, tentatively walking away, complaining and in floods of tears, because someone caught him and slapped him during his last attempt to sneak in, attracted as he was by the shouts coming from inside the bullfight arena. Another approach is to take a single moment in time, while the bullfight is going on, and analyse the ways in which it becomes a magnet for a range of passions, of collective Mexican feelings. So the commentary picks out and dissects a telling instant during the bullfight, slowing the pace of the voice-over right down, an equivalent of the slow motion of the moving image, to convey the sense that in the vase-shaped arena of the corrida, feelings reach their highest pitch, where courage, fear, ambition, the foreboding of mortality, the contempt for death, the beauty of the show, all merge into a single Latin unity, in all its contradiction of savagery versus civilization, for the ritual’s beauty and the courage it displays. This is only intended to spark off a discussion through an exchange of ideas with you. It is the second phase, following the first at Mérida. The third phase will be my response to the first draft which will, without a doubt, be based on all the excellent contributions you will have translated so well into organizational practicalities. We must give priority to all the material that provides anecdotes of people’s lives, in the best possible sense, never for a moment neglecting pure visions that offer brush strokes towards a painted portrait, encompassing psychology, social contrast, hard labour and pure Mexican visuality.

3 If, for example, a typical Mexican flower only opens at a specific time of day, then I see such a marvel as something I can make use of. What I mean by this is that this flower unfurling its petals also expresses the passage of time, which leads me on to emphasize how crucial it is that the film should embody the unfolding of time as its internal poetic logic, for it is the day’s overall temporal movement which reveals Mexicans lives and often participates in them. It will benefit the viewers if we find a way to clearly establish the connection between time and labour, the relation between time and human life, between the time of

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day and the fundamental aspects of a day in the life in Mexico.17 Ultimately, we are going to have to pick three or four elements to communicate transcendence, vastness and universal content.18

4 Because the film we want to make is intended to be feature length, we must set a limit to very diverse raw material and select from it what conveys best, in the space of 3,000 metres, the film’s purpose and namely, the story of a day in the life of Mexico, its everyday, especially in the sense of the everyday of most of the population. The film’s basic feature consists in a choice among the many manifestations of the everyday life of the nation, the ones that typify it, sometimes using violent clashes to show a country where there is enormous creativity, combined with a desire to develop, which sometimes faces formidable obstacles, created by conflicting interests by the nature of a particular society, no different, in this respect, to what happens elsewhere in the world. To repeat what I said when I came up with the idea of the film, we should have the ambition to show, with simple and direct methods, the broad scope of human activity, filming images and actions which take place every day, showing the poetry or the drama of a nation’s everyday existence, a nation having to toil for its progress, conquered one hour at a time.19 We have agreed in principle on the general narrative framework of a day in the life of Mexico. This still seems to be the best idea, in so far as it supports a very precise and very human narrative timescale, because a day is the measure in which each hour has its purpose and the power to resonate, each hour has its specific and recognizable character, comparable, but distinct, from the hours and days of other nations. Therefore, we must make an effort to make it clear for viewers that we are telling the story of a single day that acts as a container, rather like a vase full of flowers. The reason I say so is because this is how we can be certain that viewers will make sense of everything they watch, since they are made aware of the fact that it fits into the measure we have set. Consequently, the function of some episodes will be to help convey this, and even the beginning and ending will make it clear how they express this time dimension. The narrator should always bear in mind the day as a presence. The film’s narrator, author and director must be totally aware from the very beginning that the story of a day is being told, and therefore it will be all the more vital not to simply string all the episodes together in a collection of sorts, but to convey this common thread of the feeling of a day which sums up humanity and its new beginning day in day out, with

Zavattini, ‘Prime reazioni’, acz Sog. NR 20/3, fols 256–64; fol. 256. Ibidem, fol. 263. 19 Ibidem, fol. 265. 17 18

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its hopes, its labour, its suffering, right up to the time of the silence of the night, when everything stops for a while, to then begin all over again.20 I insist on the difference between this film and other films made about countries. We need a concept which is more than a mechanical method of sewing together all the episodes, an idea which enlightens all the episodes and draws on them at the same time. The problem is, first of all, how to express this idea and convey it to the viewers. And this is where we must ask ourselves if, in order to communicate, we need the same old voice-over, or something else instead. It seems to me that, in any case, it needs to be the narrative of a day in the life, clearly and simply framed, so that within that timeframe a diverse range of subject matter can be used with a free hand and with the greatest sense of spontaneity. In other words, it is not that I deplore voice-overs, or captions in the margin of the frame, provided that we immediately switch to our kind of narrative, for the benefit of the viewing public. I do think that by giving the viewers an initial orientation concerning the climate of ideas which we seek to portray at the beginning, we make it feasible to reduce the voice-over to a minimum later on.21 We might even do away with the commentary altogether, if we conceive of the images and sequences in such a way that they don’t need one. [...] We can dispense with the voice-over, a point worth emphasizing, if the sequences have been thought out in such a way that they contain the essentials for communication, from every point of view. [...] What I am trying to say is that beyond the apparent boundless freedom a film of this kind seems to allow, there is the same necessity for construction and rigorous montage a narrative film requires. [...] It could well be that all we need is a very short and explicit preface leading into the film proper, with words saying that we are going to present the genuine image of our nation,22 stating the point that this image is the image of a single day. Should we decide to do away with the voice-over, of course we are going to need some other source of information, emerging from within the sequence itself, to make us aware of the passage of time, as I said, and remind us of the sense of the day unfolding, marking time with time-specific actions.

5 One of the elements we must definitely include is the tripartite social composition, to put it one way, of the Mexican population, the so-called three layers: the whites, the creoles and the Indios.23 The drought problem, the difference between North and South, the literacy programmes: we mustn’t forget them. I mean to say that they deserve to be included.24 Then the small planes in the cotton fields

Zavattini, ‘Considerazioni su México mío’, acz Sog. NR 20/3, 266. Ibidem, fol. 267. 22 Ibidem, fol. 268. 23 Zavattini, ‘México mío, Nota di cose consigliabili’, acz Sog. NR 20/3, fol. 271. 24 Ibidem, fol. 271. 20 21

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in the North, coming down low over the crops to spray their disinfectant. Deer or Taraumara hunting in Jucatan. The chicle. Tortillas: the lifespan of the tortilla begins in the morning. It is such a vital feature that you might make use of the tortilla in three or four separate moments in the course of the narration, and in an unhurried way. Those parks full of cars for sale lit up at night (best to shoot the scene at night) by spotlights that make everything shine. There is even a car as tall as a monument on a pedestal, while poor Mexicans, with all their incredible admiration for cars, are looking on. Talking about modern Mexico, such attraction for large saloon cars is typical of Mexicans. One of the people looking might be a young Mexican who then gets on his bicycle (the kind that is decorated with a horse tail) and disappears into the noise of Insurjentes.25 With evening shots still in mind, the large spotlights covered in flies at baseball matches would make a strong image: then a crane shot, swooping down into the stadium where everyone is drinking out of small bottles. We would want to show ordinary people, the kind of public that watches events, while carrying their children in their arms. To show, for example, the public watching a carpa, so graphic, so very popular, so poor and with so many children and extraordinary expressive faces, and, also, the public watching a wrestling match taking place also in San Juan de Latran. That kind of public is so striking for its vehemence, just as the wrestlers coming out into the arena are an equally unique and very Mexican spectacle, both for their physique and their marvellous clothes. By the evening and night, we can linger on the entertainments in the capital city, while taking care to convey them in a humane way. I think another typical sight justifying a powerful, long, dolly shot is Saloon Mexico, with its public of domestic servants, soldiers and poor people, with a single bottle of Crush orangeade as a mark of thrifty consumption on all the tables. I think an episode of nightlife in San Juan de Latran could add to the representation of the life of ordinary people in Mexico, if it isn’t shot exclusively as a festivity, but seeking out individuals who are taking part in the entertainment. When night descends in the film,26 there could be a long sequence featuring Saloon Mexico, carpas, wrestling, Plaza Garibaldi, with the mixture of foreigners, drunks, mariachi music, carnitas eaters and a long travelling shot in Panama Street, in the semi-darkness, of those women in a queue along the wall, waiting in silence. An example of contrast during the night: from the capital city, where we say what we mentioned earlier, we move to the dark, a remote village where you have to strike a match to see or you can barely make out the profile of one of the huts.27 We see a group of men sitting on a low wall, peasants, therefore manual workers. They get off the wall to go to bed. And we follow one of them down the dark road and into his hut. We see him getting into bed, while we

Ibidem, fol. 270. Ibidem, fol. 271. 27 Ibidem, fol. 272. 25 26

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Scenario Short Love Story (1958)1

Context Short Love Story appears only in a letter dated 16 March 1958, from Zavattini to Manuel Barbachano Ponce. His company, Producciones Barbachano, specialized in documentaries, advertising shorts for television, and newsreels. The letter begins: Dear Barbachano, I’m writing to you in a hurry – since in a few hours’ time I’m off to Budapest – but clearly enough, that you will catch my drift, hopefully. I have given some thought to the short love story you need, and it seems to me that the one I mentioned to you is sound, so I’ll relate it again today, with an ending which gives it a sharper focus.

The topic, still sensitive at the time, was brought up by Zavattini during his visits to Mexico: Mexican machismo. Barbachano had requested a scenario, as Zavattini explains after relating the story, to be produced as a medium-length film, one of three episodes. Zavattini heard the following true story of Mexican machismo from Laura Alazraki, the wife of Benito Alazraki, formerly a director working for Producciones Barbachano Ponce. The tourist attractions of Mexico City which these Mexicans were so proud of become a backdrop for a night of revelry which should have been the newly-weds’ first night together. The giant scale of the Modernist metropolis becomes a symbolic space juxtaposed to the enormity of loss, emptiness, provoked by machismo. He cuts to the quick, tearing the illusory veil of progress, to reveal male ignorance and violent domination which can obdurately survive so-called progress. These were too many home truths, neatly compressed in a medium-length feature. Zavattini’s touching story

Zavattini to Manuel Barbachano 16 March 1958, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 416–20.

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goes to the heart of the problem, which is precisely why the producer, as he had done with all Zavattini’s work, except ¡Torero!, rejected it.

Text This short love story touches on a typical psychological situation in Mexico, which can be understood perfectly well by other cultures too. It has an ‘exemplary’ problematic, if I’m not mistaken, which gives it its humane resonance. Never mind the form this takes in writing. It has been done in such a rush.2 Two young kids from Mexico City are getting married. The film’s opening sequence is at the wedding ceremony in full swing, the boda,3 and naturally, I’d use those colours, those elements, which are always visible in any nuptial ceremony, and especially in a Mexican one. I wouldn’t choose an anonymous district of the big city, naturally. I mentioned Balbuena, near the airport to you, where modernity and tradition mix, and bicycles decorated with tassels, the way horses are, glide past, while airplanes of all makes fly overhead. I’m also envisaging those huge fields of grass where working-class youngsters play baseball on Sunday mornings. All those matches going on at the same time, in among those grey electric streetlights that give the scene a cruel hue. But let me say once and for all, that this brief love story could be staged anywhere in Mexico and, I’d say, whichever location the director knows best, the one where the protagonists can move with the greatest ease. I envisage, then, this young couple’s joyful wedding celebrations. He’s about twenty, and she is eighteen or so, and they’re surrounded by friends and family. The first shot shows them leaving the church, and then the camera follows the real journey of these nuptial days, expanding on their characters, they’re happy and somewhat shy, with all the grace of their youth. You can tell they really love one another. The festive hours go by fast, on this Sunday in the Mexican metropolis, what with eating, drinking, dancing, and all so normal, in observance of local popular custom. Occasionally, the newly-weds are alone, but most of the time, they’re surrounded by their parents, and he is at the centre of his friends’ attention. Some of them are bachelors, some of them are not; some of them are accompanied by their small wives, already full of children. After drinking too much tequila, they become more and more insistent towards their friend and young groom. They want him to leave and go with them. They tell him he should begin as he intends to go on and establish his authority. He is the boss. He needs to be macho. They are poor folk, mostly, and working class. This Latin feeling of dominion over women has never been challenged; as if they still lived under the reign of Porfirio Díaz, instead of an era in which air flights touch down or take off all

2 3

The only technical flaw is one repetition. Day breaks several times. boda: wedding, wedding celebration.

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over the world.4 Now it’s dusk. Soon it will be the time when the newly married couple would be let alone for their first night of their marriage. Theirs is a small, single storey house, one of those buildings which make such a contrast against the backdrop of the skyscrapers, which stand out in the immense cityscape. The lingering sounds of the last songs, sung by the mariachi for the day-long wedding party, are tailing off and the singers are about to leave. Now and again, the bride looks at the groom with whom she will retire in their nuptial bedroom. She is a quiet girl, but expresses all her love with her eyes, all her love, all her anxiety. Every now and then, she leans her head on her husband’s chest, like a kitten. But the more she prepares for the special moment, the more she feels tender towards him, the more he heeds his friends, partly because the pulque has had its effect. ‘You have to show you’re a man from day one’, they tell him. And they confabulate among themselves, as if they were plotting, and one of them says that he didn’t go to bed with his wife on the first night. Instead, he went out with his friends to have a good time, and this was how his wife got the message who would be boss for the rest of their lives. The young groom, at the very moment his bride is about to give him her arm and enter their bedroom together, tells her he is going out with his friends, and that he will be back late. The bride looks at him, in total disbelief, but doesn’t dare say a word. Her expression registers only an immense shock and immense suffering. But her young husband doesn’t give in. He doesn’t want to disappoint his friends’ expectations. He goes off to town with them, to drink, sing and make a nuisance of themselves. It could be that the young groom is feeling a little remorse inside, from now on, but his friends soon help him to overcome it and forget about it altogether. They gad about town, now deserted until the break of day, armed with a little foolishness, a little childishness and the strength which comes from feeling justified by the habits of the silent majority. Here they are in Avenida Juárez, under the tallest skyscraper in the city, in the silent garden of the Alameda which their laughter wakes up. They laugh in the company of some prostitutes. A few children are selling lottery tickets, and there are the last of the news vendors still around. Little by little, they grow weary. It’s dawn. Perhaps they went to the Salón México and ate something in the open-air stalls of San Juan de Letrán, or they went down that street where women are on display, in the shadows, glued to the wall in a statuesque and dramatic invitation. Dawn. The day begins to spread its muted light during the earliest hours in the life of the metropolis. Emblems of wealth, power, progress, mix with telling signs of poverty, humility, here in the heart of the metropolis. And his friends begin to go off, as they reach the outskirts of the city, leaving behind the centre, to go back to Balbuena. The closer they get to Balbuena – now they’ve taken a cab – the louder the sound of giant planes overhead filling the air with the thrum of their screeching engines. A mysterious unease has got hold of the young groom. His friends have left and a short while before they did, he withdrew into silence. 4

Before its 1910 revolution, Mexico was under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.

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The cab dropped off each of them on the doorstep of home, and, after he has paid for the ride, the young groom walks up to the front door. But the closer he gets, the more he sees that something unexpected is going on. The young bride has taken her own life. He left her, and perhaps the future had revealed itself during that long night of solitude, heralded by the young husband’s insult, full of mystery and fear. She waited for that night for years. To her it was like the sun, like the moon of her adolescence, the culmination of her eighteen years; and we could see this during the boda, where everything was beautiful, where everything was acceptable, all that loud partying, the noisy guests, their intrusiveness, awaiting the evening, the night when at last the two of them would be alone. But no, he went off without saying a word. On the contrary, in his embarrassment, in his ostentation of machismo, he came across as even more hostile and distant than he really was. Now she is dead and so many loving people surround her with lamentations, and the young husband cannot even fully engage with reality. He can’t even weep at first. Only after a while, when he has seen her lying over there on the bed with its unruffled sheets, he finally bursts into tears, as if, he too, has, in the space of an instant, at last understood the evil he has inflicted upon her, the appalling stupidity of that evil, and grown into a man, too late, and all of a sudden, while, in the meantime, one of his friends has rushed to the scene, also stunned, after contributing to inflict so much suffering, almost inadvertently. Only the deafening roar of a plane hides the young groom’s screams of desperation. Clearly, such a story could be made into a full-length feature, but I suggest that you make a twenty- to thirty-minute episode out of it instead. This, it seems, is the length you require. I know it’s not easy to convey all these elements in barely thirty minutes. But I think it can be done. The priority is to express the love, the innocence, I’d say, of these two working-class youths, their deep love, even though they don’t know how to express their love so well.

36

Correspondence with Carlos Velo (1955-8)

Context Carlos Velo was a documentary film editor in the employment of the Mexican independent production company Producciones Barbachano. Carlos Velo wrote the first letter, dated 7 November 1955, soon after Zavattini’s return from his second visit that same year to Mexico where the two first met. Zavattini travelled extensively in the company of Fernando Gamboa, then also employed by Producciones Barbachano Ponce, an independent producer who made a niche for himself in documentary newsreels and television commercials. Zavattini had been contracted to write several scenarios for the production house. Producciones Barbachano Ponce was the only part of the Mexican film industry not locked into a cartel and was not entirely closed to outsiders and, apparently, to New Cinema. Carlos Velo spent his entire career working for Manuel Barbachano Ponce, mostly editing documentary footage. The contract was for Zavattini to collaborate with Benito Alazraki Algranti, the director of Raíces (the closest to Neo-realism that Mexican cinema attempted in the early 1950s) and colleague at Producciones Barbachano Ponce. But, disagreements between the director and the production house led to his sacking. When his promising participation in several projects came to an end, including those for Zavattini. Carlos Velo took his place. This letter mentions what was then called Toros, which later, after Zavattini’s vigorous input, became ¡Torero!. This documentary is not normally attributed to Zavattini, but its focus on the personal dimension, namely, the life of Luis Procuna, a doubting matador in a personal crisis of confidence, and other features, indicate the Italian’s direct involvement. In this letter Velo was subtly asking Zavattini to help in another capacity, by using his authority to promote ¡Torero! in the film festival circuit of the day, which Zavattini duly did. One of the points made by Velo concerning Zavattini’s contracted work for Producciones Barbachano hinges on the contradiction between the personal and the political. Would viewers really need to be exposed to the social dimension? This is symptomatic of a disagreement and fundamental difference of approach between Zavattini and the production company which was to haunt all the projects. The production company benefitted enormously from his collaboration.

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¡Torero! was the first Zavattinian personal, confessional film in Mexico, for which the Italian writer received no official recognition, and, during his protracted visits to Mexico in 1955 and 1957, he also trained a generation of young Mexican writers, introducing them to a subtle, personal, testimonial and research-based frame of reference, which they carried into their later literary output. The second, letter by Zavattini, was written towards the end of his collaboration with Producciones Barbachano, on 2 October 1958. It documents the difficulties in reaching an agreement, as to the overall framework, not the detail, to be adopted for México mío. The context is the substantial disagreement between Producciones Barbachano and Zavattini. The third, also by Zavattini, was written only three days later, on 5 October 1958. Barbachano had, in the meantime, travelled to Italy where he discussed the Mexican projects with Zavattini in Rome. Zavattini sought to drive a wedge between Barbachano and Velo, siding with Barbachano. His aim was to ensure that Velo followed his framework for México mío. But his last ditched attempt to save the project from internal Mexican censorship failed. And anyway, Velo had no clout in the matter, since he was liaising with the screenwriter on behalf of his boss, Manuel Barbachano Ponce.

Text 1 Mexico City, 7 November 19551 Dear Zavattini, Your friendly letters addressed to Gamboa have been translated, analysed and discussed in detail by the Teleproducciones group, informally chaired by Barbachano. I thank you for your praise and hope I don’t disappoint you too much in my filmmaking. Up until today, when at last the end is in sight for the film Toros, I haven’t been able to work on El Petróleo, let alone México mío, as I would have wished. The body of advice you gave me regarding Toros has been decisive to come to the logical decision that there is a need to ‘create’ real dialogues and to reduce to a bare minimum the narration and monologue voice-over. In this way, I believe that my film has gained a lot, in terms of truth and genuine emotion, casting off the format of classic documentary. Barbachano is planning to take Toros to Cannes. What do you think about such a brave decision to ‘set up a Mexican corrida’ in France? I’m sending you a synopsis of El Petróleo. Writing these ten pages has been very painful for me. First of all, I organized my notes and I wrote a rough treatment, based on the story you dictated to us at Chichen-Itzá. Then Fernando Gamboa added his precious facts on concrete places, actual key dates, political events and

1

Carlos Velo to Zavattini, 7 November 1955, in Álvarez, Cartas a México, 87–9.

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new sequences, drawn from the north-bound migration, all of which have improved the treatment. Barbachano and Ascot contributed ideas and final corrections. In our view, the El Petróleo synopsis is no more than an ambitious summary of the ideas and situations you narrated to us. However, we also think we need to analyse them very carefully, especially the following aspects:

a. The lack of balance in the conflict: on the one hand there is the psychology of a man fighting in some way to establish himself in life and on the other a foreign company exploiting him. Which of the two is more important to maintain the viewers’ interest? Or is it precisely the conflict between a concrete and identifiable individual and society that which will enable this story to be understood and appreciated? b. Andrés’s journey and adventures – I’ve provisionally given him this name – are many. They’ve been developed to give a focus to the scenarios you specified with Gamboa and, of course, they will be deleted in the new integrated storyline. c. The main character’s primitive, wild, dark nature produces an uncomfortable impression. We suppose there will be a slow transformation over twenty years of struggle with himself that will make him appear human and friendly. I’m attaching a press cutting with details of the competition launched by the producers of Espaldas mojadas. For you to deposit your stories in Mexico, at the Authors’ Union, in the Education Secretariat, you will have to sign the papers accompanying this letter and send them to us, together with five synopses of twenty pages of the Anillo Meravejoso. Clearly, it would be best to do the same for the Anellito (signed with your name at the foot of the page), bearing in mind however, that since this is an original work, there is less danger that anyone is going to steal the theme. The field research for México mío has already begun. I’ve received the copies of Rassegna del film2 and, thanks to them, also, a strong impulse and a torrent of ideas, as regards how best to plan out the work. As soon as I manage to get something tangible down on paper, I’ll write to you.

2 Rome, 2 October 1958 Dear Velo,3 After reading your dear letter, so full of enthusiasm and intelligence, our Barbachano arrived and we spent three long afternoons together discussing México mío. The film journal La Rassegna del film had published the versions of Italia mia, to serve as scenario for subsequent adaptation to Mexico. 3 Zavattini to Velo, 2 October 1958, acz E/72, fol. 27. Unpublished. 2

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Manolo will tell you exactly my point of view, because I’m sure that he has perfectly understood my reactions to your important work. I don’t have the time to carry out a detailed analysis, so I shall set down a few hurried observations on a separate sheet that Manolo will convey with more precision. First of all, I agree that México mío should go ahead immediately and that there is already a good probability of its success. Manolo has come up with a very tight and concrete working schedule. I am ready to stick to it, as far as my contribution is concerned, and willing to dedicate to it all the time it needs. The material you and your contributors have collected is very rich and exceptionally varied. The problem at this stage is to make a selection and give form to the material for selection. I shall, therefore, do my best to contribute to this definitive selection and this form it will take. As to the 300 metres Manolo will talk to you about, regarding the Oaxaca market, allow me to remind you that one of the most surprising and emotional moments of this market is when at dawn, in the silence of the city, many vendors who have spent the night wrapped up in their blankets along the streets they have occupied since the evening before, wake up and you begin to see the mothers and their children and so on. For the time being, my warmest congratulations for all the work done so far, and please forgive me, if in the notes Manolo and I drafted so hurriedly, while we were talking. There may be a few sentences which sound too critical. I know full well that it is easier to criticize than to act, but if we have been so critical, it is by virtue of the close friendship which unites us, and because of the time constraints that meant we couldn’t express some of our feedback other than in terms of a yes or a no. I hope to see you soon and you along with Manolo, in Venice, at the soonest opportunity with México mío. My best wishes, and keep up the good work.

3 Rome, 5 October 1958 Dear Velo,4 Barbachano is about to leave and I would like to add something to what I wrote the other day. This time, my meeting with Barbachano has been all too sudden and fast. Even so, I can assure you that it has strengthened our conviction that México mío is a worthwhile enterprise and that we must not delay in taking it into production and that you will make a film full of love and knowledge. You can therefore imagine how pleased I am that you will be coming to Rome for the final exchange of ideas on the written material you are working on with so much acumen. We will contrive to do a preliminary edit on paper to shape a sense of pace and content, and mark a limit to the vast, almost endless, bulk of material.

4

Zavattini, Letter to Velo, 5 October 1958, acz E/72, fol. 28.

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When I speak of content, I refer especially to that feeling for Mexico we both share in the same measure. I am referring to a sense of a grand Mexico and, of course, a marvellous Mexico, but, above all, an everyday and popular Mexico, which works, sweats, struggles and in which, as in other countries such as Italy, for example, visions of power and progress alternate with visions of backwardness. I don’t think that the desire for truth that inspired this film will lessen in any way the spectacular qualities this film needs. It will find them instead on a deeper level, a more human one than is conveyed by routine exotic films. We shall endeavour not to attenuate the colour nor the poetry, which are so often present in Mexican imagery, but always aim to keep in mind the purpose of what we are saying, the purpose of the overall vision, which comprises a whole day, from the stars to other stars, as a peasant from Calabria once wrote, in which a man’s life and the life of the heavens are fused; but we are talking about the life of a man with its births, its deaths, its weddings, its funerals, its struggle for food, for health, for a roof over one’s head, with its entertainments and even its magic. I am fully aware of all the political and commercial difficulties a film of this kind could come up against and I have no intention of leading you towards an adventure which would, from the outset, be disastrous, by aiming for a film, all things considered, made exclusively with the select few in mind, and thus tendentious, and not suitable for the markets. But, as I said to Manolo, who carefully explained these difficulties, without, for that matter, giving them excessive importance, we should aim to represent a Mexico that, while never offending the considerable sensibilities of our Mexican friends,5 is aware that showing only its positive aspects to the world, as if all the routes which the Revolution once indicated had already been followed, would be as bad as reducing the portrayal of the country to a cultural role, one confined to exterior propaganda and tourism. Whereas, we hope to carry out real propaganda for this, such that the timescale of a day really does take on an emblematic meaning, aimed at expressing the wealth of universal and contemporary themes existing in this Mexican day in the life. Keep going, dear Velo, with the help of your most daring, excellent, Mexican collaborators.

5

A subtle reference to Mexican government censorship.

37

Scenario Diary of a Woman (1959)1

Context The first version of this scenario, more of a sketch than a fully worked-out script, as he says towards the end, is dated 8 June 1959, the same month of the year in which, twenty-three years earlier, Mussolini had appeared at the notorious balcony of Piazza Venezia to announce that Italy was siding with Nazi Germany and declaring war against Britain and the United States. Its terse, condensed, writing, certainly Modernist, appeared in his public diary, the site or the crossroads of many ideas and interventions, including proposals for scenarios, descriptions and experiences. The initial idea was to set a private moment against a momentous public event, which is kept in the background, but is still there nonetheless: ‘the small story against the background of the great story’, as De Sica, who was keen on the project, described it to an interviewer in 1965.2 Zavattini returned to the idea in 1963, in 1968 and 1971. The changing scenario became more and more elaborate, as it developed, and changed hands, from director to director, and from producer to producer. Among the producers who read the script were Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, who produced a memorable film Una giornata particolare, directed by Ettore Scola which closely resembles Zavattini’s final version. Needless to say, Zavattini was not credited or acknowledged in any way. Incidentally, it seems less of a coincidence that among the actors who had read Zavattini’s script and expressed an interest in making the film were Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren, both of whom feature in Zavattini’s story as its two main protagonists. A great deal of work and thought went into this diary film which reflected a continued interest in experimenting with the diary and the confessional mode, as a film form. Diary of a Man and The Guinea Pig were also part of the same 1

Zavattini, ‘8 June 1959’, Diario cinematografico, Zavattini, Cinema, 437–8. Vittorio De Sica interviewed by Giulio Mazzocchi, ‘Domande a Vittorio De Sica per Un mondo nuovo’, L’Europa letteraria, vi, no. 42, May 1965, cited in Zavattini, Uomo, vieni fuori!, 321.

2

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seam. When he worked extensively in Cuba in 1959 and 1960, he also brought with him his ideas of making films as diaries, where the personal, subjective point of view features against the backdrop of contemporary historical events.

Text While I was in a car, I thought over a plot. I’ve narrowed it down to a single day in Rome on 10 June 1940, with Mussolini’s voice in the background, making the fatal announcement.3 That morning didn’t seem so different from many others. I was there, in Rome, that day. I was lodging in a room with my open suitcases facing me, ready to return to the North. So, in an apartment in the centre, live a teacher, his wife and little girl. He loves his wife and believes she loves him and on that very day he has found a note which makes him wonder about his wife’s fidelity. That evening the sounds of footsteps echo along the stairways. People are making their way down to the basement, to the air raid shelters, while the antiaircraft guns are shooting at the French who have flown over at once. He had talked about the Duce’s speech in class. What was Mussolini going to say in the afternoon? From the conversation between him and his students, you get an idea of what the Italian family of the time was like. The press was very convincing, and most people were only too happy to let others take care of everything. And what about the woman? Perhaps she is an honest person, someone who says what she feels in her heart. How can anyone love a person who doesn’t love himself? All it takes is having different skins. I need to go deeper into these problems on this crucial occasion, and anyway, there was lying, thieving, good actions, babies were born, babies died. There were baptisms, arguments, embraces, tears, prostitutes, pimps, adulteresses; virgins lost their virginity; delicate love stories; dreams. Hard to find a thread. That day is emblematic, as if, from one moment to the next, there is someone in uniform, and just when he is making the fascist salute in the square and the troops are filing past, his trousers fall down. Perhaps our man was only fascist out of laziness. His entire life has been one long habit. Why did his wife betray him? After a tentative silence, she begins to talk and answers all his questions. Fortunately, shame doesn’t come into it. She has crossed the threshold into another dimension and calmly explains that she stopped loving him, soon after the first few months of married life. He was almost beside himself with anger. How could that be? Everything seemed so straightforward. Didn’t his wife moan when they made love? She now confides in him, with a new-found candour, how it can happen and, anyway, what else can you do in Italy? We’re obliged to lie, to adapt, to delude ourselves.

3

Zavattini, ‘8 June 1959’, Diario cinematografico, Zavattini, Cinema, 437–8.

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In certain moments, they seem like two Cartesians. Beyond passion. But he can’t contain himself. The more she reasons, the more she adduces arguments to prove her point, the more his feelings fester. He then explodes and beats her up. The scene takes place in the air raid shelter. Later, he goes out into the open air, where a couple of wardens spend their time warning people to turn off their lights. They stop him and are on the verge of placing him under arrest, because of how he is behaving. He hurls his exasperation against them, against fascism; he is not making any sense; he is talking at random. And yet, there is something alarming about what he says and, anyway, they also feel sorry for him. He and his wife in bed. Her eyes are staring in the dark. Noises give away what they’re doing. In the past, there is nothing but the error of her ways. You should have done this. You should have done that. Is it really necessary to go over things again and again? If you want to grasp what it is, you can, but be quick. No, it’s too exhausting. It is easier to be unfaithful. That is what nearly everyone thinks. No, they don’t think. It is more like a form that resembles thought, an aura. Nothing but auras, nothing specific, sketches, nothing more, and God always helps them, they believe, to keep it vague.

38

Scenario Revolución en Cuba (1960)1

Context The text for Revolución en Cuba appeared in Zavattini’s published film diary, in Cinema Nuovo in 1960. It was later excised from the collection of diary entries first published as Straparole.2 It was written with a documentary in mind, of several episodes, based on real events which took place during the Cuban Revolution. The plan was that these would be brought to life through interviews with eyewitnesses, who remember the events and tell their stories, following the same approach used for his prototype Italia mia, later rethought as the revolutionary Cuba mía, tracing Revolution in an exploration of its sites. Zavattini mentions the scenario in a letter to Alfredo Guevara in which he describes it as ‘a genuine reportage film we should have made first’.3 As often occurs, his published diary often switches from one function to another, and from one linguistic register to another too, so that, in each case, it can serve as a site for a workshop of ideas and possibilities, suggested by his direct contact with ordinary people. In the imagined geopolitical journey across Cuba, recent chronicle and oral accounts transcribed by Zavattini cross paths, suggest new ideas, brought together in the scenario. He envisages an episode-based documentary film, structured around a dialogue with ordinary people, met on location, at the scene of an event, retold or reconstructed first by them, then by Zavattini, following the testimonial ethnographic approach he had already established and practised in Mexico and in Italy a few years earlier, ultimately derived from the Italia mia project, rethought and adapted, as an up-to-date, revolutionary, Cuba mía, to retrace the steps of the Revolution.

This brief scenario appeared in Zavattini, ‘Cuba 1960. 11 gennaio 1960’, Zavattini, Cinema, Diario cinematografico, 457–8. 2 Zavattini, ‘Il vecchio e il nuovo nella Cuba di Fidel Castro’, Cinema Nuovo, January– February 1960, 32–5. 3 Zavattini to Guevara, 12 October 1962, acz Corr. G 583/25. Unpublished. 1

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The first section is drawn from a letter to Zavattini’s publisher, Count Valentino Bompiani. The rest of the text was published in Cinema Nuovo, but was not included in the two subsequent book versions, Straparole (1967) and Diario cinematografico (1979). Referring to Revolución en Cuba in a letter to Alfredo Guevara, Zavattini described it as ‘a field-researched documentary that was meant to begin with Fidel Castro and me in his helicopter to then trace the development of the Revolution right up to the arrival of the barbudos in Havana’. His conclusion was that Perhaps this is the film we should have done first; as I’ve written to you so many other times, I have a feeling of remorse, for not having singled out, among so many projects, the most expedient, in terms of urgent propaganda the world over.4

He wrote these words in 1962, but in 1959 and in 1960, he had argued forcefully against propaganda. So, in mentioning propaganda, he had his own version of it in mind, effective communication, through filter of art and poetry. In any case, the ethnographic field approach could hardly be propaganda, in the normal sense of the term. Most likely, Zavattini meant that at the height of hostilities and tension between Soviet Union and North America, in which Cuba was caught up, even an ethnographic approach could serve the purpose of furthering understanding in the West. But the Cuban state film organization, icaic, was pursuing two different and entirely separate objectives: non-fictional direct propaganda and fiction.

Text Among the various projects I valued the most, I was planning a documentary on the Revolution (an investigative film I would so much like to make – remember Italia mia? – but no one lets me make it). However, never for a single moment did I give up the idea that I would do it my way. I embraced the theme, became totally involved in it, and this never resulted in any surrender on my part, neither of the writer nor of the filmmaker. I kept saying to those young people that the Revolution demands its own stylistic form and my dream was that the radical sense of rebellion and change of any political revolution would be transferred across to its poets, to the point of experimenting – we can make do with this verb – and to taking this much further than others have done, by translating the apparent initial hesitation of vulgar politics into a more vigorous and total dynamic of change. At the same time, it should be grounded in the political, to say the least. I do think that it

4

Zavattini to Guevara, ibidem.

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would be a mistake to reject all this out of hand; it would demonstrate a lack of generosity and would be out of step with contemporary events.5 * I arrived here on 20 December. The plane’s final destination was Santiago de Cuba. I immediately have the sense that here in Havana Christmas is imminent: people are decorating trees with aluminium foil, multicoloured and ubiquitous: homes are bursting with aluminium foil, Christmas decorative lights and nascimientos, or Nativity scene mangers. I’m writing up these short notes of mine. In a ‘Revolutionary Office’ there’s a yard littered with broken toys, baskets full of dolls, broken toy automobiles that have lost their wheels, toy rifles minus their barrels. They are being fixed so that they can be distributed to the children of the campesinos. A woman who fought with a real rifle on the Sierra Maestra mountain range is in charge of all those hands, busy sanding, glueing and painting. Frank País was from Santiago. The police killed him on 30 June 1957. He was twenty-three years old and had been plotting against the regime ever since he was an adolescent. I make a visit to the street where he was killed. It’s dusk. A woman saw everything. She tells me the story from behind a window, while I’m standing outside with some friends in the street: He was walking down that street and the police had been lurking around the place for hours. He’d been warned. He was staying in a house some thirty metres up the road. Suddenly, a jeep carrying the Police Chief Cañizares appeared from nowhere: ‘It’s him! It’s him!’ he screamed. This was immediately followed by the sound of a machine gun. He ran down that way over there, but they still shot him and dragged him to that wall there and left him. They placed a revolver in his hand.

It got late and we went to the Plazita, a small square with benches and the sort of noises you hear in small, enclosed squares; the sound of some youngsters playing, and of a couple of lovebirds laughing. Frank País and other young people used to meet here and talk about Batista and Fidel. In 1956 they attempted a coup. That was the time of Fidel’s Granma expedition, but it didn’t succeed. In this very square, with a memorial stone dedicated to the memory of young people assassinated by Batista, I thought I should make a film: Revolución en Cuba. It would tell the story of the Revolution, retracing the main events, and reconstructing them, just as that woman has done a short while ago. Would the woman’s story, featuring her recounting the events, be, perhaps, less moving, less interesting, than a film in which you saw an actor impersonating Frank País? I was completely enthralled by that calm, sincere voice, and by the

5

Zavattini to Bompiani, 7 March 1960, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 221–5.

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others all round us, explaining, adding to the story. One was pointing at the wall, another acted out the part of Frank País coming down the street. A reportage film featuring a foreigner like me, who comes to Cuba, and begins his journey in the capital city and then goes to Santiago de Cuba, to the Moncada Barracks, and begins his journey from there, and pieces together events with the help of ordinary people. Where to go? I’ll know exactly where, in a month’s time. But it will include Fidel’s arrival by sea, on 2 December 1956 at Niquero, that dark night; Fidel’s first armed combat; Fidel at La Plata; the attack against the Presidential Palace in Havana, a wonderful, mad, exploit, headed by Echeverría; Frank País’s death; Cowley’s assassination in Holguin, where I’m going tomorrow, to reconstruct the event. Cowley was a brutal man. He used to slap anyone who dared to so much as even look at him and he was always dressed in white. People lived in a state of terror, and, for as long as he was still alive, it was very hard to open a second front. After months of stalking him, some young men shot him dead. He was buying an oxygen cylinder for his avioneta (small plane) and was just in time to turn around, when they shot five or six rounds in his head. We even got to know the protagonists and we watched them recreate the scene in the garage with the lightning speed shootout, before our very eyes;6 the Sierra, the Invasión (Invasion), of August 1958, Fidel promulgating the Agrarian Reform Law in October, while the struggle was still on; the Battle of Guisa, the capture of Batista’s bullet-proof train; Batista’s flight, 1 January 1959, 2 January; and, why not? Solas Cañizares, who, in 1956, led an attack against the university campus with the police in train, a university which, like no other university in the world, has always been at the forefront in the struggle against tyranny. Or what about the death of this big and violent man, Solas Cañizares, when he burst into Haiti Embassy, where opposers to Batista’s regime had been given refuge and he was the one who killed them? Or the Santiago uprising and the martyrs who died then, and there’s a blood stain in the concrete. Three died there and they say that the blood stain won’t wash away. I’d like to let the people’s comments be heard, pointing and explaining, and bringing those events back to life. And at the same time, you see the other side of life, the economy of sugar, coffee, tobacco, life in the fields; and Batista among ambassadors, loads of North Americans coming over for the week-end, and mixing in gambling casinos, and places where you drink and where you make love. In other words, this is a point of departure, and I’ll try to concentrate everything I see into this framework. Maybe it’s more suitable for television. This is the point at which cinema gives way to the broad scale of possibility that television can encompass. What does it matter, provided it goes ahead? The point of departure is the camera. Is it the case that cinema would require much

6

In the text: avioneta is Spanish for ‘private light aeroplane.’ Zavattini to Guevara, 12 October 1962, acz Corr. G 583/25. Unpublished. This description refers to the successful assassination of a plantation manager, Cowley. As Zavattini put it: ‘about the assassination attempt aimed at the man from Holguin all dressed in white.’

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more involvement to develop such a theme? But why shouldn’t there be an equal level of commitment in tackling the topic, using television as a medium? These are not worthless thoughts. I’d like to seriously reflect on what attitudes make the cinema discard, more often than not, whatever isn’t based on fable. I’m not talking about commercial criteria of exclusion. I’m aware of those. I’m referring to deeper ones – I’d call them literary.

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Scenario Anti-racist Film (1960)1

Context Zavattini became aware of the racial conflict between races in Cuba in 1953. In Mexico, independent Producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce’s very first suggestion for a scenario was the problem of racial integration. This same issue of the difficult coexistence of Blacks and Whites existed in Cuba and Zavattini commented on it several times in his public diary. In Cuba, before his arrival in December 1959, the recently established icaic suggested a film addressing racial segregation during Batista’ dictatorship. In their correspondence with the Italian screenwriter, prior to his arrival in November 1959, they proposed Romeo y Julieta, a modern version of Shakespeare’s play set in Cuba, which was to be a vehicle to address racial segregation. The story had already appeared in Alfredo Guevara and Zavattini’s 1955 scenario Cuba mía. But, when Zavattini heard eyewitness accounts about a crime bringing the racial issue into sharp focus, in concrete, if paradoxical, terms, he discarded it. In this second story there was a twist. A dead body is discovered in a manhole, but its race is unclear. The beginning of the story creates a detective-style doubting, which serves to problematize the onlookers’ attitudes, since over and above the primary issue of identification, there’s the realization that death makes no racial distinction, which latter is a purely cultural attitude. In Zavattini’s alternative scenario, the story ‘was supposed to take place in the street from beginning to end, in the space of two hours, around the manhole where the body of a black man had been dumped after the police murdered him’, as he later explained to Alfredo Guevara in a letter.2 Zavattini’s alternative proposed an oblique approach to the problem, one closely related to the Revolution, addressing racism, by drawing attention to a recent event in the news, which everyone knew about. In his public diary, he relates the event, his narrative serving as a scenario in fieri, and, perhaps unwittingly, he relates it twice, with minimal changes, in separate entries. The scenario appears in Zavattini’s published diary, ‘Roma, 14 aprile 1960’, Zavattini, Cinema, Diario cinematografico, 461–2. 2 Zavattini to Guevara, 12 October 1962, acz Corr. G 583/25. Unpublished. 1

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To establish the text, the two extant versions have been compared. One has been selected as the base text, with some additions from the other version, signalled by angle brackets.

Text One of the themes the young filmmakers from the Instituto had already prepared, before I arrived there, was anti-racist, featuring a white Romeo and a mulatto Juliet. We then worked for several days on the idea of a body that had been discovered purely by chance by a child in a manhole in the middle of the road; and you could see down the narrow hole that there was a body in there: but was it a cino (a Cuban of Chinese extraction), a mulatto, a white man or a Black person? People flocked to have a look, as did the police. This happened two or three months before the Rebel Army or Ejército Rebelde arrived. The event was slowly pieced together, not without the fear and the courage of the people present. This took place in the middle of the road, in the heart of the capital, before the body was extracted. They learned that during the night, someone, walking past the police station, had shouted the word that begins with m and ends in a.3 This person then ran away, but the perseguidora, that is to say, the police, caught up with him and threw him down the manhole with several bullets lodged in his head. Naturally, the police pretended not to know anything about what happened, claiming that they had nothing to do with the incident ‘prowling around what the crowd was saying, making comments, alternating between brave and tentative, giving a sense of the feelings and competing interests during that vigil’.4 Only later, when they finally managed to drag out the body, after the cadaver resembled now this person, now that one, now a student, now a manual worker, then a young person, or an old one, and after the families from different racial extraction had made their comments, expressing their doubts, their terror, and the desperation ‘believing to have identified in that body a family member, or a friend, alternating with their hopes’, it became clear that this nocturnal hero was a Black youth. I can’t remember why we dropped such an inspiring topic, both in terms of content and form. We would have produced it in real time, and we had already identified the location for shooting, a crossroads near the harbour, where you can hear the constant sound of a Tannoy calling out the stevedores by name and surname. [...] We wanted to show clandestine life (clandestinaje) and the slow development of a sense of solidarity, of unity. ‘On whose remains do I owe my life?’, Ratemar asks.5 This base text a appears in Zavattini’s film journal, ‘Roma, 14 aprile 1960’, Zavattini, Cinema, Diario cinematografico, 461–2. Variants appear in a second version, b, in ‘Cuba 1960. 11 gennaio 1960’, Zavattini, Cinema, Diario cinematografico, 456, in version b this is explicit: ‘He shouted: “shit!”.’ 4 Addition in variant b: ‘Cuba 1960. 11 gennaio 1960’, 456. 5 Variant b: This paragraph appears only in ‘Cuba 1960. 11 gennaio 1960’, 456–7. 3

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Fernando Birri, Letter to Zavattini, 9 March 19571

Context For a historic reconstruction of the transmission of Zavattini’s Neo-realism to Argentina and Latin America, the reader is directed to my Intellectual Biography.2 What follows serves only to sketch out the background to this important letter. Its tone is consistent with all the letters Birri wrote to Zavattini, whom he refers to here as ‘my friend and teacher’. This says a great deal about the type of relationship between the two. He considered him not only the father of Neorealism, but also the theorist of the best model of contemporary film practice, as all the letters and indeed the films Birri subsequently directed in Argentina attest, especially the collaborative student documentary Tire dié (Throw me a Dime) (1960) and Los Inundados (1962) (Flooded Out). Zavattini’s letters are always short, by comparison with Birri’s very long, revealing, missives. The full correspondence is in print, and has been published elsewhere, so far available only in Italian.3 Fernando Birri is a key figure in the history of Latin American New Cinema. He studied filmmaking in Rome in 1950, after discarding idhec (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques) in Paris. The Rome Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia was a better bet, since the New Italian Cinema was ‘conquering the cinemas of all over the world’.4 In 1955, he played a role in Gli Sbandati Fernando Birri to Zavattini, 9 March 1957, acz 901/6. On letterheaded paper: ‘Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto Social. Instituto de Cinematografia’. In Italian. Now in David Brancaleone, Cesare Zavattini, il Neo-realismo e il Nuovo Cinema Latino-americano, vol. 2, Parma: Diabasis, 2019. 2 David Brancaleone, Cesare Zavattini’s Neo-realism and the Afterlife of an Idea. An Intellectual Biography, New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. 3 Brancaleone, Cesare Zavattini, 2019, now in its first reprint. There are plans afoot for an English translation of this two-volumed study of Zavattini’s involvement in, and influence on, Latin American New Cinema. 4 Birri in Julianne Burton (ed.), ‘Fernando Birri, The Roots of Documentary Realism’, in Cinema and Social Change in Latin America. Conversations with Filmmakers, Austin: University of Texas, 1986, 4. The interview was translated into Italian in Julianne Burton, ‘Fernando Birri: Pioniere e Pellegrino’, in Fernando Birri e La Escuela Documental, 1

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(The Disbanded) (1955), the first feature by Citto Maselli which brought up the taboo subject of fascism within the Italian middle class, a film which saw Zavattini’s close involvement.5 Birri was crucially interested in Zavattini’s work, singling out Love in the City (1953) as the key Neo-realist film which, he later claimed, was ‘the most advanced film within the contemporary Neo-realist school of cinematography’.6 Zavattini was ‘the leader of the artistic revolution and its major exponent’.7 That same year, Birri asked Zavattini to put in a good word with Vittorio De Sica, so that he could take part in the production of The Roof (1956). He met De Sica during the casting at Titanus, on 26 September 1955, shortly before the film went into production in October, and, thanks to Zavattini, he was hired as an assistant on the set.8 Filming The Roof almost coincided with the fall of the Perón dictatorship on 16 September 1955, during the Revolución Libertadora.9 The earliest concrete proof of a face-to-face encounter between Zavattini and Birri dates from 21 May 1955, when Birri congratulated the screenwriter for being awarded the Lenin World Peace Prize (jointly with filmmaker Joris Ivens), but clearly the two had already met.10 When Zavattini was still writing the screenplay for The Roof (Il tetto), Birri phoned him again and again, to plead with him to intercede with the director of the film, Vittorio De Sica. Zavattini did so, and Birri was allowed to work on the film as an assistant, or, as he told me in person, ‘the assistant of the assistant of the assistant director’.11 At some point, Zavattini also agreed to an interview for an article entitled: ‘Italia oggi. Quattro domande’ (‘Italy Today. Four Questions’), to be published in an Argentinian cultural magazine. Birri’s stated intention was to catch Zavattini’s thought ‘red-handed’, as he explained in the interview.12 Soon after the fall of Perón, Birri returned to Argentina. He founded the Escuela Documental de Cine of Santa Fe, in Argentina (soon renamed the Instituto de Cinematografia de Santa Fe) and continued to stay in contact with the Italian screenwriter, though, despite Birri’s invitations, the two only met each other again in 1959, in Rome, to screen the hour-long version of Tire dié, which underwent a drastic cut to less than thirty minutes, under the screenwriter’s guidance.

Pesaro: xvii Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema (June 1981) edited by Lino Miccichè. The English version excludes the section where Birri discusses Los Inundados. 5 Birri in Burton, ‘Fernando Birri. The Roots of Documentary Realism’, 3. 6 Ibidem. 7 Ibidem. 8 Zavattini to Gamboa, 31 May 1955, 65 and 16 September 1955, in Cartas a México, 69. He also told the author as much at the end of two filmed and recorded interviews in his home in July 2015. 9 Thomas E. Skidmore and and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1997, 92. 10 Birri to Zavattini, 21 May 1955, acz 901/2. In Italian. 11 Birri, in conversation with the author, Rome, summer, 2015. 12 Birri, ‘Italia, Oggi. Quattro domande e una confidenza’ (Interview with Cesare Zavattini), 1955. acz 901/1.

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From 1956 until the mid-1980s, a steady stream of letters made their way to Rome. Zavattini’s letters are mostly short replies to long accounts of his activities and detailed reconstructions of events. Could Zavattini convince De Sica to write a testimonial, proving that Birri really had been a member of the film crew of The Roof? Could Zavattini come to Santa Fe and discuss his idea of cinema for the benefit of his students? As late as the 1980s, Birri was asking him if he could agree to Birri’s adaptation of the writer’s 1930s and 1940s raccontini (absurdist short stories)? In later interviews, Birri was always vague about his contact with Neo-realism and did not mention Zavattini, in what could be considered a form of cultural laundering, which was borne out in his interview with the author, in which he categorically refused to discuss his personal connexion with Cesare Zavattini, the 1955 published interview with him, let alone his activities in the 1950s to further the cause of Neo-realism in Argentina. However, the exchange of letters tells a very different story. In his 2015 interview, he pointed to the positive influence of the 1950s New Argentinian Cinema. However, his revealing essay entitled ‘A very short Theory of the Social Documentary in Latin America’ (1962) attacked that same Argentinian New Cinema of the 1950s, for having been an elitist cinéma d’essai. What had it achieved? Who was it for? He told his readers it was bourgeois, made for a cultured and colonial audience and thus, underdeveloped.13 He also accused it of producing ‘a false image of this society, this people, one which falsifies the people’.14 Was there an alternative? He argued that there was ‘The revolutionary function of the Social Documentary in Latin America’. He called it ‘revolutionary’ because, ‘by bearing witness to the ways in which this reality presents itself, this sub-reality, this unhappiness – it denies it and denounces it. It unhinges and denounces injustice; criticizes it’.15 Birri’s parting shot was to claim that ‘cinema which is an accomplice of this underdevelopment is undercinema.’16 Why this interest in Zavattini? What does this letter tell us about Zavattini and this towering figure in the history of Latin American Cinema, especially of that cinema’s new form of documentary, or non-fiction? This second volume of Selected Writings includes a polyphony of voices which revolve around Zavattini, and Birri’s voice is part of that. This long letter acknowledges the direct transmission of Zavattini’s idea of a new ethnographic documentary film, which Birri refers to as fotodocumental, following the publication, in February 1955, in Cinema Nuovo of a selection of texts and photographs, as an illustrated scenario, a visual or photographic script for a film, with the title ‘25 persone di Zavattini e Strand’, Cinema Nuovo.

Birri, La Escuela Documental de Santa Fe, Santa Fe, Argentina: Instituto de Cinematografia de la unl-Instituto Social, 1956, 29. 14 Ibidem, 30. 15 Ibidem. 16 Ibidem. 13

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It was Zavattini’s published article in this prestigious illustrated film journal, accompanied by Paul Strand’s photographs, that provided the model of practice for Birri’s photo-documentary or foto-documental. That article was a sneak preview of Cesare Zavattini’s and Paul Strand’s book Un paese, about Luzzara, Zavattini’s hometown in Reggio in Emilia.17 The article included a selection of the interviews with ordinary people which later appeared in the book. The photo-documentary form is central to Birri’s teaching at the Escuela Documental as it provided a model of film practice for the new documentary, the ultimate development of Zavattini’s Neo-realism, as he told Zavattini: We will start adapting those photo-documentaries carefully, which already constitute a model of film documentary and the best of the scripts based on these will be selected to make actual film documentaries at the end of the year. And if next year everything goes ahead and all goes to plan, I shall use the same method to teach feature filmmaking: we will rely on investigative research, on photo-documentaries and documentaries to make features about reality all around us.

The adoption of Zavattini’s Neo-realist ethnography in the form of the photodocumentary for Tire dié was the first stage of transmission. The second, took place a few years later, when Birri and his students had the means to develop it into a medium-length film. On 27 July 1960, Birri confirmed to Zavattini that he had carried out point by point all the suggestions the Italian screenwriter had made.18 In private, Birri was willing to recognize Zavattini’s legacy and direct influence, including on Tire dié, telling him that the film would serve to show that Neo-realist ethics had survived the passage of time and stating ‘Tire dié was directly connected (se vincula directamente) to Un paese and the Cinema Nuovo photo-documentaries which sought to develop the Neo-realist experience at a time when it was no longer possible to do so.’19 Birri’s dossier, the above-mentioned La Escuela Documental de Santa Fe (1964), was also an open acknowledgement of this influence, direct transmission and legacy.

Text Dear Zavattini, I received both your letters of 6 November and 18 January at once. What joy after your prolonged earlier silence to hear you speak, joy and more besides; confirmation too that all the faith, all the affection I feel for you acquires greater truth, validity and clarity with the perspective generated by distance and the passing of time! You tell me that after this lapse of silence you hope that you will Zavattini and Strand, Un paese, 1955. Birri to Zavattini, 27 July 1960, acz 901/14. Unpublished. 19 Ibidem. 17 18

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be understood; but of course, dear Zavattini, I understand you! Distance only makes me want to help you even more in whichever way I can and to combine our forces. Perhaps the one simple reason why at times my friend and teacher’s silence can make me feel mortified is that since I ignore which direction his thought is taking and to what actions or to which people he is devoting his efforts, I am unable to contribute even remotely within my own social environment by carrying out a lateral activity aimed at the same, real and common objective. But now that your letter has arrived at last, I feel doubly reassured for having maintained my persistence and resolve, in fidelity to your teachings, not only poetic, or cinematic, but above all ethical (encapsulated in your inexhaustible concrete enthusiasm). I also feel reassured by a renewed commitment with myself to do more than I have done, in the next few days, tomorrow, this evening, now, immediately. Precisely because our crisis, let’s call it universal, is, as you say, the outcome of that crime of imbalance between what is done and what could be done and that must be done, what we cannot help but do. This critical awareness for what has been done and above all for what has not been done can be clearly seen today – manifestly so in some already – among young people in Argentina, my country. These new lands, so large, so unexplored still to this day, where there is so much soil that is unfamiliar with human labour, where there are so few people in relation to what we need, where loneliness is no metaphor, no individual attitude, but a geographical and social reality. These lands, I say, dear Zavattini, remind me perhaps more acutely than other places, of what still needs to be done. As to the social context, I say that on the one hand, the last decade of the Peronist rule, leaving aside its many negative aspects, made it possible for the population to realize that it had human rights, the human right of living together with others, the right to be treated as beings, not statistics nor simply instruments (as if they were nothing more than cows or sacks of maize). On the other hand – and this goes back to what I was saying earlier – I also have to recognize that there is a generation of young people who were silent in recent years, who were dissatisfied with what had been done – and I am telling you this in strict confidence too – and with what is being done at the moment, as if the present revolution were nothing more than a throwback to the conservative past. Above all, there is discontent among these young people for what has not been done. I can relate to them, I have conversations with them and together we try to understand the nation’s current state of affairs, our problems and where they overlap with each other’s problems, we are studying and are willing to place our poetry, our philosophical essays, our literature, our painting, our cinema at the service of effective action, mutual understanding, economic and spiritual betterment of society. As for what concerns me, I have to talk a little about the overall situation of Argentina’s film industry. After a year and two months of no legislation, neither old nor new legislation to regulate the film industry, we finally reached the point of making them give us one last January. I say ‘reaching the point’,

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because that is still the situation: the industry still lacks any protection, now that we have lost the Peronist-era legislation (which was both arbitrary and only designed to enable the enrichment of the larger production companies within the industry which were not only dishonest but generally mediocre too). There were even some who produced films only to get the advance payment from the Banca del Credito, with no concern as to whether their ugly footage was to go into distribution or not. When this Peronist law expired, our industry was left without any protection. At this point, a combination of three factors came into play: first, the government’s attitude, having so many other organizational problems to deal with in addition to the film industry (and here too, out of a lack of perspective). Second, a very hostile attitude within the cinema profession between Peronists and anti-Peronists (such a distinction is confused and confusing, with only a few good exceptions). This is unfortunately mostly caused by personal interests, personal success, economic gains, rather than due to genuine intellectual interests, be they of political or pragmatic expediency. Third, the direct or indirect intervention of the dollar, in other words, the influence of the North American market which, while seeking to maintain an economic domination over Argentinian viewers, has used all kinds of subterfuges, from friendly advice coming from the Embassy directed at the officials in charge of deciding the new film legislation, to the constant obstructionism among distributors and cinema proprietors who have every interest in screening Hollywood goods, because they cost less and are more profitable. This was the situation as it presented itself. And I cannot help but recall once again that phrase in your letter stating that the worse things are around us, the more our responsibility grows. How timely and accurate and how much strength it gave us! I did all I could, with the help of other five colleagues, to get the representatives of different professions within the film industry around a table. This was the first time after the Revolution. We succeeded. Our collective action also succeeded in getting the government to understand that there was a need for new legislation promoting the film industry. Some of us wrote a detailed draft, using the best practice model of Italian, French, British and other existing legislation. We even decided to organize a demonstration, following your example once in Piazza del Popolo. But this wasn’t necessary. The law was approved in just the form we wanted (I’m attaching it to this letter). There’s even an article (the fourth) that is unusual in this kind of legislation: ‘Freedom of cinematographic expression is guaranteed in conformity with the freedom of the press: it is forbidden to ban or mutilate a film without the approval of appropriate judicial powers.’ What happened at this stage? What happened was that because filmmakers had obtained the legislation, they assumed they had won. But they forgot that there was no set of procedures to accompany it nor was there a Directorship of Cinematography (in the legislation it is called Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía) to put the legislation into practice. How depressing! The very same afternoon the legislation was approved we reverted to infighting among

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ourselves, each putting forward different candidates and a separate draft for the article, forgetting that you need essential unity, at least in principle, if a plan is to go ahead. This is the situation today, with 100 per cent unemployment in the film studios. The day before yesterday, Rosaura a las diez, a film directed by Mario Soffici for Argentina Sono Film had to stop halfway through production.20 And this was the only film that was approved the day after the law was passed. However, despite this deadly desert, we never stop protesting, shouting, demanding and hoping, in the face of all the general confusion and improvisation that surrounds us all, which many of us are opposing day in and day out. However, I have been doing my best to oppose this general state of affairs ever since I arrived. Above all, I have tried to explain and convey to our film crowd the lively, collegial (notwithstanding all the obstacles) and also polemic intellectual climate existing among colleagues working within Neo-realism in your cinema. I have done all I could to propagate or, better still, contaminate our milieu with that same honest atmosphere, that same urgent need to say things, that same obligation to look around us which is at the root of your vibrant contemporary ethics, that is, in relation to cinematography. Which is why those who were so amazed by your cinema of the past few years and who were seeking the magic formula behind your film style have finally understood that it wasn’t only a matter of using a good recipe, but of an entirely new sentiment. At last, by Jove! There is no question that the younger generation completely understood it, as if they had sensed its proximity, as if all they were waiting for was the confirmation of an eyewitness to jump into the foray and fight for these principles from within their film clubs, their independent cinema societies, their short film societies. Instead, there is a possibility they might come out on top, partly, at least, and win their battle, of which they realize the significance, no matter how small the battle might be. Even if the situation changes for the better, I don’t actually think there will be a better Argentinian cinema for at least two or three years, but equally, I can confirm that today people exist – especially young people who however much they lack a technical preparation, are full of intention and enthusiasm to learn and learn well – that makes it realistic to expect that new cinema which we keep demanding. I’ve given talks in those film clubs, before Neo-realist film screenings, among such people, in bars, at home, in the university, talking in the street all night long until dawn. They wanted to know absolutely everything and in detail. Is it true that Rossellini writes his dialogues on little bits of paper? Is it true that Zavattini doesn’t have a car? Is ‘La Lollo’ [Gina Lollobrigida] real or fake? Do skilled workers in Italian cinema really feel personally involved in any way in the production of the films they make? Do they really exercise great care and have an emotional stake in what they do? Moreover, is it true that the first, great The film, Rosaura at 10 o’Clock, is an adaptation of a mystery novel by the Argentinian writer Marco Denevi published in 1955.

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Neo-realist films were made with only a couple of nails, a hammer and a lot of good will? I’m attaching some clippings about all my initiatives, including a few concerning The Roof. Talking of which, I was asked to reveal all the details on the radio and in the press. What was the production like? What wasn’t it like? How did the screenplay come about? Were the actors real working-class people? How was it possible to make a film out of such a simple storyline? How was it possible to put across such feeling with such straightforward episodes? With people totally lacking experience as actors? I replied that there was no secret. Instead, there was conviction, effort, hard work, awareness. In Argentina everyone is dying to see the film, not only the specialists, but also the man in the street, the man who reads the paper after dinner, the woman who listens to the radio. In my view, at this stage of our cinema, the screening of The Roof will be like casting a seed in fertile land. It will serve to guide us, to give more substance to concepts and discussions of a certain kind through sight and sound. I shall keep you informed about everything. In a word, I answered all the questions as best as I could, I talked a lot, dear Zavattini. I think I spoke more than I managed to do in practice. But this too was a valid approach and a particular mode of action, for the time being, at least. Finally, I wrote a screenplay inspired by extensive investigative research about a very brief sentimental story of a girl in an Argentinian refrigerator (our slaughterhouse is known as the refrigerator, where forty animals are killed every minute and which employs thousands of men and women). The script didn’t go into production for the very reason that there is no law and accompanying practical guidelines for the film industry, so at last I ended up creating the Instituto de Cinematografía de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Now this is likely to be a really good thing, dear Zavattini. I went to Santa Fe – my Luzzara – and there, under the auspices of the university, I ran a short course in cinematography. I was expecting twenty students. But 130 came. On the first day, after the theory class in the afternoon based on the first chapter of [Luigi] Chiarini’s book Il film nei problemi dell’arte [Film and the problems of art], I organized a night class in which with the help of a magic lantern I showed these young people, young men and women – students, social workers and teachers – transparencies and translated texts from Un paese, yours and Strand’s, and the photo-documentary ‘The children of Naples’ (I bambini di Napoli) by [Chiara] Rea and [Domenico] Samugheo.21

Chiara Samugheo and Domenico Rea were the authors of ‘I bambini di Napoli’, Cinema Nuovo, iv, no. 63, 25 July 1955, 57–64. This was photographic field research in Naples. Samugheo took the pictures, while Rea wrote the accompanying text. The article and type of editorial project was directly inspired by Zavattini. The magazine ran a whole series of what Birri refers to as fotodocumental. February 1955, saw the publication in Cinema Nuovo of a selection of texts and photographs later published in Un paese, with the title ‘25 persone di Zavattini e Strand’, Cinema Nuovo, 4, no. 53, 25 February 1955, 137–44. Later also collected in the book: Guido Aristarco (ed.), I fotodocumentari di Cinema Nuovo, Milan: Cinema Nuovo, 1955.

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Fernando Birri, Letter to Zavattini, 9 March 1957

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The session was supposed to end at ten thirty, but it lasted until after one in the morning and there we all were, still, looking and discussing, and making plans for the next day. And the very next day, these kids along with the photographers of the Foto Club Santa Fe, went off to discover their own town. They went to the most humbled and forgotten districts of our region. A week later, the very day the classes were ending, that same Monday evening, with the very same magic lantern we projected your call for humanity and dialogue, we projected the first photo-documentaries made by our young people, still incomplete or half finished, still imperfect, still not quite right, but totally sincere. The university is going to publish them in a few days’ time in a journal format and I’ll post it to you. As a consequence of such enthusiasm affecting a whole town situated in the interior of the Republic, the university has decided to create the Film Institute, in the department of the Instituto Social of the same university. I have been appointed organizing director of this institute. I only accepted after making it clear that I would not be running a school in the academic sense of the word, but a workshop, an incubator, an équipe of future filmmakers who will begin their first abc, one step at a time. Consequently, this year when we begin class in April, we will start adapting those photo-documentaries carefully, which already constitute a model of film documentary and the best of the scripts based on these will be selected to make actual film documentaries at the end of the year. And if next year everything goes ahead and all goes to plan, I shall use the same method to teach feature filmmaking: we will rely on investigative research, on photo-documentaries and documentaries to make features about reality all around us. The first and last lesson will be this one: to teach the real, to learn from it and to change it for the better in a more transparent and equitable way, having learned how to get to know it. Dear Zavattini, if you can get an inkling of all the things I’m trying to say in such a confusing way, it would be good to know what you think and to have your advice about it all. Well, I shall bring this Bible-length letter to a close with the promise to keep you informed about the progress of all these projects, as and when they develop. We are very hopeful that the realist approach to our work is not going to be hindered and I have gone into such detail about everything that has been done and what still remains to be done, particularly for this reason, and because of a natural and real need for a personal conversation, so that you, in your role of teacher and fighter, will have confirmation of the potential power [in the knowledge] that here, as everywhere else in the world, there are people willing to become active and struggle for common goals, in terms of ethics and cinema. Were you and De Sica to make a trip to Argentina, for various reasons, you would find a mature audience willing to learn your lesson of personal and professional conduct. I hope you do. When Vittoria Ocampo gets back from Mar del Plata, where she is spending her holidays, I shall pass on your regards. My God, once again, I must say ‘enough’. I’m off, but not in such a hurry that I fall into the trap of not saying what remains to be said between us. Not

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before saying that I am expecting a letter of yours, a few lines will suffice – but at least those – to let each other know that we are still alive, though we can’t see each other, though we can’t hear one another, both in agreement on what is to be done, both here and there. Yours, with brotherly and filial affection, Birri

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Scenario The Little Dictator (1960)1

Context This very short scenario appears in Zavattini’s published diary. It was for ‘the film about the last days of Batista. The treatment had several pretty satisfying gags in it’, as Zavattini described it in a letter written long after his departure from Cuba.2 The earliest synopsis contemplated using satire and predated Zavattini’s arrival on the island in November 1959. The title was The Little Dictator, ‘a satire on the Latin American dictator’. There is clearly an intertextual reference to Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). Strangely enough, the Cubans were not planning to send up their own dictator, Batista, but Trujillo, the San Domingo tyrant, ‘the bloodiest, the most “feudal” and moreover the most ridiculous’, as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea told Zavattini in a letter of October 1959.3 But Zavattini, during his icaic-writing Seminar, argued that it would be better to replace Trujillo with Batista. In this briefest of outlines, the plot is limited to the dictator’s farcical flight from Havana, in the company of his family. It was later developed in the treatment, also published in this edition, to encompass the years leading up to his defeat and ousting. The original text is to be found in the Zavattini Archive in Reggio Emilia: Zavattini, El pequeño dictator [Treatment], ‘Soggettini cubani’, acz, Za Sog NR 27/7. It was published in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori! Soggetti per il cinema editi e inediti, Orio Caldiron (ed.), Rome: Bulzoni, 2006, 374–91. The Italian translation published by Caldiron is by David Bruni and was first published in Stefania Parigi, ‘Dossier Zavattini a Cuba’, Bianco e Nero, no. 6, November– December 1999. This English translation is based on my translation from the original typescript in Spanish, in Zavattini, El pequeño dictator [Treatment], ‘Soggettini cubani’, acz, Za Sog NR 27/6-7. The Bruni translation omits the numbering of the scenes of the original, which has been reinstated. ‘Cuba 1960. 11 gennaio 1960’, 457. Zavattini to Guevara, 12 October 1962, acz Corr. G 583/25. Unpublished. 3 Letter from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea to Zavattini, 14 October 1959, acz E 2/7, fols 25–7. 1 2

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Text Batista had a silver chamber pot and a gold bed and was one of the shrewdest men in the Caribbean. He practised his escape using the speedy escape methods adopted by firemen, always on the ready to pick up his packed suitcases and leave. Imagine him jumping off his bed, quick as a flash, putting on socks, underwear, shirt, trousers, and a jacket. In the end, there was a minister and a crate full of dollars. Having to choose, to avoid exceeding the weight restrictions, as we well know, he left his minister behind. Trujillo was rude to him the night Batista alerted him that he was about to fly over to seek refuge in his country. Batista trying to soften up Trujillo, by making his wife and sons talk to him over the phone. Batista’s wife was probably a decent person, but that unhappy woman had an illness, whereby, unless she gave birth to a child once a year, her body would swell out. This is, though, the only biographic element concerning Batista which is not suitable for satire. (Considering Batista’s biography, this is the most human and touching element).4 He used a lot of esses in his speeches, because he knew that educated Spanish has more esses than working-class Spanish.

4

The sentence appears only in the original version, published in Cinema Nuovo, Zavattini, ‘Il vecchio e il nuovo nella Cuba di Fidel Castro’, 21–35; 24. It was subsequently toned down in the anthology Straparole.

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Treatment The Little Dictator (1960)1

Context The brief outline of the story of Batista’s flight from Cuba was developed in the treatment produced in collaboration within the Zavattini Seminar for icaic and is translated in full later. The time frame encompasses the final phases of the guerrilla war against the Cuban dictatorship (including the Battle of Santa Clara), seen from Batista’s viewpoint, as well as the dictator’s flight, after his military defeat. Batista is placed within his social milieu, surrounded by his colonial entourage, shown to be entirely estranged from the life of the people. His leisurely life is increasingly challenged by the mounting success of the Rebel Army. Satire replaces propaganda in a treatment full of gags and insights, based on a deep understanding of the machinery of pr and mass media. El pequeño dictator opens with a film within a film, a ploy aimed at demystifying the regime’s propaganda and exposing its techniques. This closely imagined newsreel is so detailed that the reader can visualize it. The last scene contains Batista’s flight. After Zavattini’s departure at the end of February 1960, this brilliant counterpropaganda farce was ditched.

Text Plan for a film scenario by Cesare Zavattini for a satirical film that could be produced in colour and in Cinemascope by a film director working in the style of [Luis] Berlanga or someone like [Mario] Monicelli. Written in collaboration with: José Massip, José Hernández, Héctor García Mesa, Oscar Torres, Manuel Octavio Gómez, Mercedes Cortazar.

1

Zavattini, El pequeño dictator, acz, Za Sog NR 27/7, 1–36, is described in the Zavattini Archive as a scenario, but is in fact a thirty-six-page treatment.

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1 We are in a large film studio in the capital city of a Latin American country, which shares all the characteristics of Cuba. The year is probably 1957. On the screen, you can see one of those typical government newsreels, always featuring the Head of State. He is middle aged, medium height; his facial features are coarse, and wears a cunning expression on his face. He feels comfortable in front of the camera and he gloats at the sound of the words he utters. Now he’s inaugurating a new street named after him. Now we see him receiving ambassadors from different nations. Now he’s reviewing the Army; and now he’s inspecting the new weapons issued to the Police; and now he’s at the History Academy, where he’s received as if he were an ad honorem academician. In a sugar cane field, he’s launching the harvest, surrounded by the authorities (he’s wielding a machete and cutting the sugar cane in short sleeves, as if he were a peasant machetero, to the sound of the onlookers’ clapping).2 Now we see him giving a political speech in which he is giving assurances, in passionate words, that, by 1965, all Cuban citizens will be rich. But after a moment of hesitation, like someone making a momentous decision, he claims that everyone will be rich sooner still, by 1964. The newsreel ends, we note, with a shot of the printing press of an important daily newspaper. The Head of State hands over the prize for the best press article of the year to the Great Journalist, author of The Leader’s Heart. The Great Journalist, a tall and slim man, is overcome by his feeling and kisses in a servile way the decoration he has been given and pins it to his chest and offers the first printed copy of the newspaper which, at that very moment, rolls off the rotary press. On the front page, the headline ‘this is the man’ in block capitals is illustrated by a giant portrait of the Head of State. When the newscast is about to end, the words the end appears right across the screen, and suddenly, in the midst of all the silence in the hall, we hear the resounding sound of a hostile catcall. The lights are switched on again and a pack of furious policemen spread across the hall looking for the person to blame for such an insult to the Head of State. As it so happens, the Head of Police is in the hall, a cruel-looking man, in his early thirties. He orders his men to bar all the exits and to stop anyone from leaving the hall, until the culprit is identified. He forces every single person present in the hall, to whistle, to expose the author of such a sacrilege. The police are carrying out their investigation all over the cinema theatre. Having to contend with the police, the spectators have no choice. They must carry out the order. In each part of the cinema you can hear a broad variety of whistles. One member of the audience is so frightened that, try as he might, he will be unable to produce a whistle. He keeps trying, but all that happens is that

2

At the time, there were photographs published in the Cuban press of Fidel posing in exactly this way, wielding a machete and smiling for the camera. Perhaps, Zavattini’s satire, in its exposure of media know-how applied to propaganda purposes was too close for comfort.

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his breath issues from his lips, without making a noise. In the end, he manages to make a weak whistling sound, and the police allow him to leave. Suddenly, a long, powerful and melodious whistle echoes across the musical whistle concert, comparable to an orchestra of nightingales. Little by little, this magisterial trill which appears to come from an extraordinary canary, overcomes all the other whistles, so that after a while it’s the only one anyone can hear. Everyone in the picture hall, including the policemen, are fascinated by the sound of this mesmerizing whistle. Its author is a very friendly young man with lively eyes. The whistler emits a final whistle, to mark the imminent end of the concert. Everyone, without exception, is about to applaud, fully entertained and inspired, when the young man suddenly and unexpectedly shouts in a shrill voice: ‘down with the dictator!’ The policemen, now in a frenzy, jump on him.

2 We are in the palace and the Dictator is having his bath. Just when the Dictator is getting out of the bathroom, his personal valet – dressed in the style of butlers in the service of English lords – dispenses large quantities of talcum powder, so large that a big cloud of talcum powder fills the whole room. The Dictator coughs and tries to escape the asphyxiating cloud. In the luxury office in the Palace, the Dictator listens to the daily reports of his closest associates. When the Army Chief of Staff speaks to the Dictator, he paints a luminous portrait of the country’s military situation. This is someone who is constantly smiling, even when there’s no reason to do so. At one point, he gives the Dictator a friendly pat on the back, which releases another cloud of talcum powder which makes him cough, while the Army Chief of Staff continues to smile, as if nothing had happened. Now he shows the slides of the Rebels hidden in the Mountains taken by the Airforce. He laughs, adopting the attitude of someone who’s trying to convince his boss that this doesn’t matter at all; such is the power of the Army that no one would ever dare to oppose it; no one would dream of it. In the hall reserved for screenings, the Dictator and his associates look at the slides. First, they see panoramic shots of the Mountains, then photographic enlargements sufficiently magnified – it hardly seems possible – to show even the most insignificant details. This way we begin to spot a group of thirty ‘Clandestines’ on a hillock. The Army Chief of Staff, still constantly smiling, claims it would only take a platoon of his men to kill them in a mere matter of days. The Clandestines are armed with old rifles and shotguns; they have beards and long hair and are barefoot, wearing beggars’ clothes. ‘You can tell they are enemies of the Fatherland, obviously,’ the Great Journalist assures him. The rest of the enlargements home in on the faces of some of the long-haired bearded men. ‘They are uncivilized!’, someone is heard saying. ‘They don’t shave and there’s no knowing if they wash.’

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The enlargement is so extraordinary that you can even spot the detail of a banana skin. ‘They don’t even know their table manners!’, claims the Ministry of Education. We then see on the screen all these hands reaching out, as if they were trying to get hold of the piece of banana. Now we see huge close-ups of noses, eyes, and mouths, belonging to the Clandestines, before a bare foot fills the entire screen. This provokes revulsion in everyone watching. ‘Their weapons are worthless’, says the Army Chief of Staff, never for a moment interrupting his smile. On the screen we see an old nineteenth-century blunderbuss. A fresh shot frames him in close-up, and greater and greater enlargements, edited in such a way as to produce a frenetic rhythm, reveal more and more details in close-up. The old rifle barrel fills the entire screen. The Dictator starts worrying at the sight of a weapon facing him, seemingly getting closer and closer. The Army Chief of Staff, with the fixed smile tells him: ‘It’s only an enlargement.’ But you can tell that there’s a growing sense of despondency and concern in the Dictator’s expression. He gives the order to deploy a large force of troops, tanks, fighter planes to the Mountains and demands that not a single Rebel be spared. When the lights are turned on, and the camera singles out the Great Journalist, he immediately states that he’s ready to publish the news that a few dirty, miserable, barefoot, enemies of the fatherland and their families are hiding in the Mountains, but that soon they will be liquidated by the brave government forces. But the Dictator interrupts him and tells him that no, they can’t mention the Mountains. – Until I say anything to the contrary, there are no mountains in this country; for the time being, our entire country is flat. – What a brilliant idea! This will facilitate communications, says the Great Journalist. Now it’s the Chief of Police’s turn to inform, not without pride, that the day before, when they screened the official newsreel, someone had whistled, but that he had immediately identified the culprit, a student who, for this reason, has been interrogated and placed under arrest. The Dictator reacts by showing a great deal of attention to this incident and wants to know why he was catcalled. The Chief of Police turns pale; he feels very embarrassed and lacks the courage to explain the reason for the whistling. When the Dictator insists, the Chief of Police reveals that the Dictator has been whistled at because the student finds him unfriendly. Listening to these words of the Chief of Police, the Dictator reacts as if he had had an electric shock: – Unfriendly, me? He says in a surprised and incredulous tone.

3 In the Police Headquarters, the Dictator is in the cell of the arrested catcaller. The Dictator is in the company of the Chief of Police, other officials and the

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Great Journalist. The Dictator is so beside himself with fury that he shouts at the student: – Why? Why? I want to know why you dislike me so much. But this doesn’t faze the young student. He has the kind expression of someone who can say the worst possible things with candour, without even realizing it. He replies that not even he can explain it and that ever since he was a child, it irritated him to see the Dictator’s face in the newsreels. Once he told his father who immediately gave him a slap. – And where’s your dad? The Dictator asks. – He’s dead, answers the prisoner. The Dictator changes tactics: he is now striving to be friendly and considerate, sitting next to the prisoner and saying to him in a reasonable and affectionate tone: – Why don’t you like me? Tell me, please ... . Do I look ugly, is that it? My nose is flawless; my teeth are regular. He shows his teeth. – My body is in good shape ... (He does some press ups) – I’m strong ... . (He touches his biceps) ‘I’m in good health ... . Is it to do with my physical appearance?’ – It’s difficult to explain, objects the prisoner. There’s something about you I don’t like ... . Every time I see your portrait somewhere, the catcall crows outward from deep inside ... . I can’t help it. What am I to do? – Dictator: (pathetic): But why? Why? – Student: I don’t know. I don’t know. – Dictator: Think it over, please, think it over.’ – (The student thinks about it) – Dictator: Am I evil, perhaps? – Student: No, that’s not it ... . I regret to say that I don’t like you, I just can’t help it. The Dictator loses his patience and becomes frenetic. Snatches a newspaper from the Great Journalist’s hands and whacks it over the Student’s face. – Dictator (shouting): Take a look at what this paper has to say: I’m a friend of Presidents, of ... . Not a day goes by that I don’t receive visits from Ambassadors representing the greatest Powers of the world ... . Look, here is a photograph of me in the company of Ambassadors, in the company of the most important figures living in this country ... . And you, who are you? Who do you think you are? You dislike me of all people, me, the very one who has been decorated by all the nations! And you? Mr. Nobody! This is all I need! – [Dictator] (Hysterical, furious): I want to find out why you dislike me! (Shouting). * The Great Journalist comes over to the Dictator: – In this entire island, there’s only one person who is against you. Would you like me to write an Editorial piece against that person?

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The Dictator is almost hysterical: – ‘But I don’t want a single person against!’ (Turning to the policemen): – Make his talk ... . Make him talk! The Chief of Police makes a gesture at the Dictator to assure him that he will make the Student confess. He begins torturing him: at first, by tickling him, before resorting to more brutal methods. The Student begins to scream but doesn’t confess. The Dictator realizes that his screams can be heard outside and orders all the policemen to sing as loud as they can to drown out the screams. The Dictator tells the Chief of Police: – The catcaller is a university student ... . That vipers’ nest, the University ... check to find out if the students who attend dislike me. The Dictator leaves the barracks. His escort is singing to their hearts’ content to the rhythm of his song. In the barracks the police chorus still lingers. We are led to understand that the Student is still being tortured.

4 In the capital city university, in a grand, classical looking amphitheatre, a history lesson is underway, attended by a large number of students. We recognize some of the policemen in the auditorium. We’ve met them before, and now they’re pretending to be students. The history professor is discussing heroic moments of the country’s history, and names the great national heroes, including the most important called Apostole. At that same moment, a policeman nonchalantly pulls out a newspaper and casually shows the front page with the true likeness of the Dictator to the student sitting next to him. The student is irritated by the interruption, never for a moment realizing what the policeman’s intentions are, and hardly glancing in his direction, tells him, in a sharp tone of voice, to continue to pay attention to the lesson. The policeman digs out a notebook and writes something down. Elsewhere in the lecture hall, speaking in a low voice, another policeman expresses his admiration for the Dictator to a student who responds showing all his hatred of him, having no idea that this man is a member of the police force. At that point, the policeman, feigning friendship, asks him for his name and surname, and writes them down in his notebook. Yet another policeman shows a student a portrait of the Dictator, while saying: ‘What a smile, eh!’ The student responds with hostility and the policeman asks him for his name and surname which he writes down in secret, in his notebook too. While the police investigation continues, the Professor, faced with such enthusiastic and attentive students, calls out the names of the famous men who fought for freedom and the good of humanity: Bolívar, Lincoln, Garibaldi. At that moment, a policeman interrupts him, to call out aloud the Dictator’s name, which causes general chaos. The furious students respond to the outrage by standing up, while the policemen feverishly write down even more names in their notebooks.

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5 The Dictator is lying on an imposing bed glowing with lustre since it is cast in gold. The headboard sports a design of rays fanning out, which is reminiscent of an icon of the Holy Spirit. The Dictator is speaking on his golden telephone in his Golden Room. He’s holding an icepack on his head, while he asks the Chief of Police if the catcalling young man has talked. Meanwhile, his personal doctor arrives and immediately feels his pulse. The Chief of Police tells the Dictator that the student hasn’t spoken. The Dictator puts down the phone in annoyance. He complains to the doctor that he has a sharp headache and that he can’t sleep, because he’s burdened with worries. The doctor, almost speaking to himself, says there’s no reason the Dictator should suffer from insomnia in such a gold bed. He taps the Dictator’s knee with his reflex hammer and then, while no one is looking, he does the same to the bed, which, being made of gold, produces a sharp metallic sound. At that moment, the First Lady, the Dictator’s wife, appears on the scene. She strokes his head affectionately, trying to alleviate his pain, while the doctor says the Dictator is bursting with health, but that he should take rest, suggesting that he go and spend time in his country estate. The Dictator is now very agitated and worried. He picks up the phone and calls the Chief of Police. – Dictator: Has the cat caller confessed? At the end of the line the Chief of Police puts the telephone next to the boy being tortured, who screams. – Chief of Police: He’s not confessing. – Dictator: Arrest the students. – Chief of Police: How many? – Dictator: All of them! – Chief of Police: We don’t have enough prisons! – Dictator: Then arrest half of them! Just then, the servant appears, to say that the screening is ready, the Army Chief of Staff has set up the projector. The Dictator gets up and rushes to the Projection Hall in his nightie. The Army Chief of Staff is waiting for him, smiling and smiling, as always. Some army personnel, the Great Journalist, and several Ministers are already there. While this is going on, the doctor lies down on the gold bed, not without a degree of caution. It’s glowing like a burning fire, and he plunges into a deep sleep. The Projection Hall. The Army Chief of Staff, smiling as usual, orders the projectionist to start projecting the most recent film about the military operations in the Mountains. We see disgust on the Dictator’s face and the Army Chief of Staff’s an embarrassed smile. A porn film begins, accidentally. So taken is the Dictator by its attractions, that his disgust turns to an enthusiastic absorption. And now, following immediately after the last sequence of the porn film, the film about the military operations on the Mountains begins. The establishing shot is a panoramic view of the region, then, most likely, thanks to the most powerful zoom lens available, close-ups of the campesinos’

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miserable lives come on to the big screen: their bohíos,3 the children with huge swollen bellies, the women who look as if they have aged prematurely. The Great Journalist exclaims: ‘Degenerates!’, covertly peeping across at the Dictator, knowing that he’s listening. ‘They take food from their own children to feed the clandestines!’ Suddenly, a terrified group of peasants flee, while the planes are dropping their bombs over their heads. Huge bombs, a loud explosion, a bohío is hit, a close-up of a very scared woman, cattle on the run, a crying infant. The Army Chief of Staffs, still smiling, as if everything were under control, but disdainful at the same time, informs the Dictator that these people who are being bombed are allied to the Rebels and, therefore, enemies of the nation and of democracy. Then other scenes of destruction and terror follow. We watch the Rebels befriending the peasants to try and help them out. The Great Journalist, who can’t stop himself, exclaims indignantly: ‘I am going to write an editorial against the peasants!’ On the screen, we then watch the bombs landing right on top of them. The Dictator is feeling good. He congratulates the Army Chief of Staff for the Airforce’s efficiency. He makes a friendly gesture, patting him on the shoulder, and asking him if now he can relax in peace on his estate. The Army Chief of Staff smiles, saying that he can go and not to worry, because nobody is going to bother him. The Dictator is happy now.

6 Bucolic immensity of the countryside. A party on horseback is making its way across the huge estate: the Dictator, his wife, his children, his closest associates (the Army Chief of Staff, the Chief of Police, the Great Journalist), as well as rich landowners. Behind this procession there’s a second party of owners, boot lickers, secret agents disguised as campesinos, and all pedigrees of dogs. On several occasions, the cavalcade comes across numerous signposts written in English and Spanish warning of the presence of large private estates: United Fruit, Compagñia Azucarera, Cuban Trading. Among these endless fields, some contain sugar cane crops, while other fields are left fallow. The party finds somewhere suitable for a picnic and comes to a halt. Everyone is in good spirits. Above them, the flight of birds in the sky is like a poem, while the secret police and the soldiers are carrying out constant, silent, surveillance. At the picnic all the luxuries of the city are available. Butlers wearing dress uniforms are serving the most varied and delicious food. The guests are smoking big cigars and expensive cigarettes. Lazy puffs of smoke wend their way up to the sky above. It all seems so idyllic. A landowner approaches the Dictator to introduce his son: – My son has just returned from abroad, he tells him. – Pleased to meet you, answers the Dictator. 3

bohíos: peasant huts.

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But now the young man is speaking in confused, incomprehensible words, words that sound like English phonetics. The Dictator doesn’t understand but pretends that he does. Another landowner approaches him and proudly states: – My son doesn’t speak Spanish. The boy, as it so happens, is dressed in a European style and speaks what sounds like French. – I made him study in Europe, the wealthy landowner remarks. From one minute to the next, a rural fiesta begins. The secret agents force a group of peasants to dance and laugh. The peasants begin to dance, but with no enthusiasm and against their will. The dance slows down, the beat drags on, and now the music is sounding more and more funereal. But the minute the agents strike them with blows, the dance picks up. The Great Journalist makes sure that someone takes photographs of the campesinos next to the agents. They are forced to smile. The Dictator notices: – Don’t they seem too sullen for their photographs to appear in print? The Great Journalist replies: – Don’t worry. We’ll print them in full colour and the colour will make them look more resplendent. Then professional dancers wearing peasant costumes replace the campesinos, carrying con machetes, sombreros, guayabera4 shirts and whatever else. So many photographs are taken during the picnic. The First Lady takes the opportunity to hand out cash to the campesinos in attendance. The Dictator has his photograph taken too, by a Polaris camera, in the company of his family. He compares the snapshots and selects the one he finds most suitable for the family album. Later, during the party, the Dictator and his wife walk off romantically arm in arm, surrounded by butterflies and birds fluttering all around. They reach a hill from where the entire estate unfolds below, most of it in a state of abandonment. First Lady (romantic): – All this must stay just the way it is for ever! It is so poetic, and to think that they’d want to change it! Plant tomato seeds, beans, rice and all those vulgar things, when there is so much poetry! Dictator (moved): – I swear to you that for as long as I am in this estate, I shall always defend this poetry! The couple embraces. She kisses him. But he breaks off almost immediately, worried as he is. Dictator (worried and resentful): – I would just like to know why he dislikes me! * At that point, a soldier sneaks a note into the lieutenant’s hand; the lieutenant gets worried and passes it on to a captain who’s even more nervous, when he reads it and hands it to the Army Chief of Staff. But not one of them has the guayabera: Latin American style shirt.

4

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courage to pass on the news to the Dictator. They draw lots using a handkerchief, to decide who will be carrying out this task. The lieutenant cheats (hiding one in each hand) and the Army Chief of Staff (tentatively, not knowing which hand to choose) comes to the realization that he is the one who has been chosen to inform the Dictator. The Army Chief of Staff sidles up to the Dictator laughing hysterically, interrupting his laughter to say: – The Rebels have abandoned the Mountains and are advancing across the plain. When he sees the Dictator’s amazement, he hastens to add, never for a moment ceasing to laugh, nervously and hysterically, in a patently forced optimism: – Don’t worry, Sir, we have the armoured train!

7 In the Palace. The Dictator and his Generals are kneeling in front of a miniature armoured train. The model train goes around and round and there are smallscale soldiers and machine guns. A General says: – General 1: We need 500 gallons of petrol. – Dictator: 1,000! – General 2: Let’s add 20 cannons. – Dictator: 40! – General 3: It’ll carry 100 machine guns! – Dictator: It’ll carry 200 soldiers! * The meeting comes to a close. The Generals are satisfied. They are convinced that the armoured train is impregnable. They leave and the Dictator is left along with the model train, in a deeply contemplative mood, only interrupted by the arrival of his wife. She is carrying the family photo-album under her arm. She sits lovingly by his side and shows him the album, which contains, in addition to recent photographs of the Dictator taken during the picnic, others showing moments of the Dictator’s life, from when he was a newborn baby to the present day. The Dictator puts down the album and calls the Chief of Police. – Dictator: Has he spoken? – Chief of Police: Do you believe in spirits? – Dictator: Yes. – Chief of Police: We’d need someone expert in the occult to make him talk. – Dictator: And you can’t? – Chief of Police: No, because he’s dead. – Dictator: Didn’t he say anything before dying? – Chief of Police: Not a single word. *

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The Dictator puts down the phone in disgust. He walks back and forth by the model train for a while. Then he rushes to summon his butler and ask him a question. – Dictator: How many suitcases do we have? – Butler: Thirty. – Dictator: Fetch another thirty. * A large television studio full of television cameras, photographers, generals, important officials, hangers on and journalists (among them is the Great Journalist).

8 The Dictator is getting ready to deliver an important speech. He’s in a good mood, optimistic, to an excess. But this is only an outward appearance. He begins by saying that the country is currently enjoying peace and tranquillity. He himself convinced himself of it the other day, during a picnic in the countryside, seeing campesinos dancing, laughing and singing. He has witnessed with his own eyes the happiness, the prosperity and inspiring poetry of the countryside. And should anyone doubt it, the footage he is going to show will prove that this is the most carefree nation in the whole world. On the television screens, viewers see the opening scene, presented by the Dictator. A comic character says: – ‘I feel completely at ease. Cut to a ballroom in a luxury venue. A group of beautiful, smart women say: – We are happy.’ Then an elderly man appears. He’s fast asleep. The Dictator’s voice-over remarks: – If there were no peace, this gentleman would not be able to sleep. Cut to an imposing Casino and a group of foreigners at a roulette table, gambling large stakes. The Dictator says: – If there were no peace, they wouldn’t be able to play. Now a tourist appears on the screen strolling through the city and dressed in outlandish clothes. The Dictator’s comment: – Thanks to the peace and quiet we enjoy tourists have finally grasped the authentic spirit of our country. At that moment, on the television screen, the same tourist is gawking at the opulent curves of a florid woman who walks next to him. The film comes to an end and the Dictator resumes his speech, saying: – It is a fact that there are criminals who have made absurd promises to the people, promises they cannot even hope to carry out. Such criminals are against that which is most sacred and created by God: private property! But I promise you that these criminals will be liquidated this very week and that you will never

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hear about them again. The Army will guarantee the nation’s stability. And all citizens should be duly grateful. * Every sentence the Dictator utters is considered important or illuminating by the Great Journalist who applauds and all those nearby immediately do the same. – The people can continue to lead a normal life – adds the Dictator – and continue to work in this beautiful atmosphere of peace and concord that even foreigners envy us. At that moment, there’s the sound of a terrifying explosion coming from the city, near the television studios. The reaction is chaos everywhere. The people who were applauding are now fleeing. Terror is written all over the Dictator’s face. The First Lady has fainted. The Army Chief of Staff, ever an optimist, carries on smiling, as if nothing had happened, telling the Dictator not to worry, there is no serious danger. While the Chief of Police tells him to consider his own safety, for the good of the nation. The Dictator is adamant, saying: ‘no!’ He will never flee, whatever happens, he is never going to abandon his people in the hands of the Clandestines. Rather than do such a thing, he’d shoot himself in the head with his revolver which, no one quite knows why, always is always loaded with one round in the chamber.

9 The Dictator is busy planning his escape. He and his wife and children are on full alert, listening out for the slightest warning signal. Meantime, they rehearse each step of their escape very carefully. As soon as they turn in for the night, the butler rings a bell and they get out of bed. The Dictator carries out the movements he has planned for an escape, just like a famous quick-change artist,5 jumping up to fall exactly into his shoes and using his body agility and, with the speed of an acrobat, he lands into a pair of trousers, then into a jacket and so on. The butler checks the time on his chronometer. When the Dictator and his family are all fully dressed, they slide down the kind of pole they use in fire stations and land in a car that heads for a road leading to the Airport. At the same time, by virtue of ingenious mechanical contraptions, their luggage is extracted from the wardrobes and taken to the Airport. The butler, who is checking how long they employ to carry out the rehearsal, is disappointed to find that it has taken them five minutes and that they might fall into the hands of the enemy, unless they can do it in four. They must do it again, but not before the Dictator phones the Central Barracks. He asks whether the armoured train is already on its way to attack

5

A reference to Leopoldo Fregoli (1867–1936), the most famous Italian quick-change artist, most likely the model Zavattini had in mind.

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the Rebels. They tell him that it’s still being loaded up, but that it’ll be ready to leave very soon. The Dictator is in a frenetic mood, insulting and threatening, left, right and centre, and finally hurling the phone to the ground. He wastes no time in getting ready to repeat the dress rehearsal for his escape. At that very moment, the Chief of Police suggests a different idea that has one flaw: it’s slower to carry out, though safer, in so far as it will prevent anyone from recognizing the Dictator on his way to the Airport. It’s only a question of getting hold of a funeral hearse, the ideal means of transport to hide an escape. ‘However,’ the Chief of Police adds, ‘what we require is a very modest-looking hearse, since in these difficult times, a luxury model would be a danger’. The Dictator puts this plan into action. During his journey across town in a hearse, he sees the extent of poverty in which ordinary people live and what miserable living conditions they must endure. The funeral hearse collides with another hearse. Both drivers climb down from their box, to argue over who is at fault, and, when they return to their hearses, because of all the confusion, they climb into one other’s hearse. This is the reason why the hearse carrying the dead body ends up in the Airport and the one carrying the Dictator winds up in the Cemetery. At the Airport, the Chief of Police is surprised at the sight of the dead man, when he’d expected to see the Dictator. In the Cemetery, the Dictator gets out of the coffin to ask if they’ve arrived at the Airport. The driver is dumbfounded. He’s speechless. The dead man’s relatives leave in haste, so the Dictator is now all alone in the middle of the Cemetery, at a loss as to what to do next. Just at that very moment, the Chief of Police appears, overcome by embarrassment. The Dictator embraces him. The Chief of Police delivers his important news in an emotional voice: ‘The armoured train has departed and is on route to combat the Rebels.’

10 New Year’s Party. The Dictator is wearing his best suit. He looks at himself lovingly in the mirror. Even his wife is looking beautiful for the party. The Dictator is in touch with the armoured train. He uses his earphones to listen to the sound of the moving train and a voice tells him everything is going to plan. Now he feels calmer. The Party has started. The Ambassadors and the Great Personalities treat the Dictator as if everything were normal, wonderful and no threats existed. In a special group of Ambassadors and Great Personalities, the Dictator deliberately starts a conversation, asking the Ambassador of an Important Power: ‘What do you think about justice?’ This has an immediate effect, leading to an extremely banal conversation. The Dictator seizes the opportunity to exit the lavish hall and head for his office. This is where he finds his wife keenly following the progress of the armoured train on a tiny television screen. The Dictator sees the train as all-powerful, mighty, majestic and inexorably ploughing through the beautiful rural landscape. The

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soldiers on the train are singing, filled with hope and optimism. The Dictator’s wife is in ecstasy: ‘Oh, isn’t that nice; they’re singing, they’re singing!’ The Dictator returns to the lavish saloon by a special door. He gets close to a different group of Ambassadors and Great Personalities who behave as if everything were normal, as if everything were marvellous and peaceful. But the Dictator is not feeling as peaceful as he’d like and, after a while, he turns to a Great Personality and asks: ‘What are your thoughts on democracy?’ This immediately triggers a new conversation, as banal and full of stereotypes as the previous one. The Dictator takes advantage of this to leave the saloon very smartly using a special exit. In his office, his wife is euphoric: ‘They’re dancing! They’re dancing!’ On the small television screen, you can observe that, without a doubt, the soldiers on the armoured train are dancing with joy. The Dictator goes back to the hall, using a different door. As soon as he joins the Great Personalities and Ambassadors, his wife secretly opens one of the concealed entrances to the saloon and attracts his attention in a low voice. The Dictator asks an Ambassador: ‘What do you think about peace?’ This leads to a new conversation, as superficial and stupid as the previous ones, which allows him to abandon the saloon. When he steps into his office, his wife says in a slightly nervous voice: ‘The Rebels! The Rebels!’ Now the small screen shows a dreadful battle taking place. Frightening gunshots from the train, using all available weapons, while it is under attack from the poorly armed Rebels. There is no reason to suppose that the armoured train is not going to win. The Dictator and the First Lady are very enthusiastic. But at one point the unexpected occurs. The Rebels launch an assault on the train from all sides and, from one moment to the next, set fire to it and destroy it. They are joyful and victorious as they dance all round, chanting: – ‘Forward march! To the Capital ... To the Capital!’ The Dictator is a tragic figure, burdened by anxiety and desperate. He goes back to the hall where the Ambassadors and the Great Personalities are behaving as if everything was normal, as if there was nothing but wondrous peace and quiet everywhere. The Dictator approaches the Ambassador of the Great Power (an English-speaking, fair-haired sun-tanned man). – Dictator (desperate, turning to the Ambassador): Let me have the Atomic Bomb or my enemies will win! – Ambassador (standing on ceremony): But the Atomic Bomb is a very delicate issue. – Dictator (begging): Just give me one, a tiny one will do. – Ambassador: I would have to request permission from my Government. – Dictator (indignant): In writing? Forget that! Just get them to ship one out immediately! – Ambassador: I’m sorry, but I must consult with my Government. – Dictator (begging, once again): But all I need is a tiny one to blow up the whole Mountain!

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* The Ambassador’s response is no more than a shrug, which is when the Dictator realizes that this is a lost cause and walks off. Now he calls his colleague from the Nearby Nation, on his telephone made of solid gold. He lets him know that he’s about to escape and to arrange his reception. The Dictator of the Nearby Nation is intransigent, stating that the Dictator’s flight is a disgrace for all Dictators. While this is going on, the First Lady is packing her bags. She tells her Best Friend that, since she has no choice but to leave, her preference would be exile in Venice, which is such a romantic city. She would also consider Spain, but her Best Friend warns her off, since the situation there could change at any moment.6 Meanwhile, the Dictator does his utmost to persuade his colleague, the Dictator of the Nation nearby. But he’s adamant. Obstinate. The Dictator then summons his small children, to get them to beg the Dictator of the Nation nearby. But this doesn’t work either. At that point, the Dictator tells his colleague that his luggage contains millions and millions of dollars and a great number of Napoleonic relics. No soon as the Dictator from the Nation nearby hears the words ‘Napoleonic relics’ he agrees. The Dictator and his family are preparing to carry out their escape which they have rehearsed again and again. In the great hall, Ambassadors and Great Personalities continue to converse mechanically, idiotically, about trivialities and absurdities, taking the cue from the Dictator’s topics.

11 At the Airport, the Dictator bumps into the most varied mixture of characters who make up the regime: capitalists, high-ranking military, prestigious journalists who have beat him to it. Most of them are dressed in the strangest of costumes: dressed as firemen, women, shoeshines, and so on. The Dictator is surprised and asks the Great Journalist: – How did you manage to get here before me? – The Great Journalist replies: We have been preparing for the last three years ... In our spare time, you know. At the weekends ... and without taking time off work. At the Airport, there’s a problem: there’s only a single plane and not enough seats for so many people. A large group of people surround the Dictator, begging him for a seat. A policeman deftly gets very close to him and says with great feeling: ‘Let me come, I killed one of them.’ Another man just as quick off the mark says: ‘I killed three of them.’ And another: ‘I killed four.’ Yet another: ‘I killed ten.’

6

In 1960, Spain was still a dictatorship under Franco’s rule.

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The Dictator walks away from this group and bumps into the Army General in Chief who’s laughing, but with a sad expression on his face. The Dictator gives him a medal and, in a trembling voice, tells him: ‘You were the most valorous of all my men.’ The Army General in Chief is moved. The Dictator: ‘The honour of replacing me is yours and yours alone.’ Now the Dictator is just about to climb onto the plane. He does so, walking backwards and remarking: ‘Despite this situation, I don’t feel like turning my back on the people.’ When he reaches the hatch, he’s level with the Great Journalist. There’s only one seat left in the cabin, for the Great Journalist or for the heavy suitcase containing Napoleonic relics. At this point, the Dictator takes a ball from his son’s hand and throws it far as he can and says to the Great Journalist: ‘Please can your retrieve the ball for me.’ The Great Journalist, as servile as ever, races off to look for the ball. The Dictator takes advantage to climb into the cabin, carrying the heavy suitcase with the Napoleonic antiques and slams the hatch shut behind him. The Great Journalist is gobsmacked. The plane’s engines are now switched on and it’s just about to leave. At the last minute, the Dictator looks out of the window, lifts his head and says: ‘Don’t worry ... I’ll be back ... prepare my reception for when I do’. The plane begins to move. Then it lifts off the runway. The look on the Great Journalist’s face registers surprise and amazement, while the plane becomes smaller and smaller in the sky and he is still holding the little ball in his hand.

43

Scenario Colour versus Colour (1960)1

Context Colour versus Colour (Color contra color) was Zavattini’s last creative offering while teaching and writing in Cuba, written in collaboration, before he left at the end of February 1960, and written up by José Massip and the other icaic filmmakers who took part in his Zavattini seminar, ‘those ten or twelve young people crowding my hotel room talking about it in very loud voices’, as he reminded Alfredo Guevara two years later.2 In this scenario, the Revolution is only the backdrop. It features two visual artists, one who makes abstract paintings, the other, figurative ones. It stages the reasons for their aesthetic choices and the doubts surrounding action versus artistic contemplation, in a given situation. Zavattini himself is challenged by the publisher Bompiani who argues in a letter of 7 March 1960 that art should be autonomous, art pour l’art. But, as the Cubans were to claim later, the situation left little choice, but to opt for socially engaged art.3 The first part of the text is from Zavattini’s letter to Bompiani, in which the framework and justification for the scenario is explained. This forms a preface to the second part translated from the Spanish typescript.4

Text There is something that makes me go on looking and continue to hope that the Adam and Eve who are inside each one of us might form a union and become one and the same being.5 The problem has followed me all the way to Cuba

4 5 1 2 3

‘Color contra Color’, Soggettini cubani, acz Sog. NR 27/6, fol. 19. Zavattini to Guevara, 12 October 1962, acz Corr. G 583/25. Unpublished. Zavattini to Valentino Bompiani, 7 March 1960, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 278–80. ‘Color contra Color’, fol. 19. Zavattini to Bompiani, 7 March 1960, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 278–80.

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where, the day before I was due to leave, I traced the basis for a story: Colour versus Colour. Its protagonists, more specifically, painters, belong to various art movements, while at the same time being involved in the struggle against Batista. They are also desperately debating among themselves to try and figure out the relation between politics and the world of art, between freedom and artistic freedom, between a given colour and a specific mark, in relation to the ‘Agrarian Reform’. It is not a matter of finding out the truth, but to convey a passionate and furious debate that seems so laden with potential, even on a purely expressive level: an almost completely grey film with colours on canvases that become dramatic experimental surfaces. The real challenge, then, is to find a way of translating into narrative form an intellectual problem of this kind, and to do so, moreover, in an accessible form, that is to say, to ground it in what underlies even the most ineffable states of mind. *

The Film Colour versus Colour (Abstract Painter vs Figurative Painter). A drama on canvas We are anywhere you like in the world. There are two painters, one is a figurative artist, the other abstract. These two painters go on a journey together, either across the world or across their own country. They come into contact with things and people, and experience completely different emotions. We are in Cuba, during the last year of Batista’s dictatorship. The two painters are plotting. One is abstract, the other figurative. They discuss their different ways of understanding art and how they are subsumed into the political struggle. The figurative artist is anxious to make the ethical and political world coincide with the artistic world, whereas the abstract artist is keen to keep the artistic sphere independent from the social. This latter argues that beauty and the right to be inspired are separate from everything else. And anyway, art is born from a feeling for beauty which is, by its nature, always positive. The discussion gets heated to such a point that it threatens to compromise their friendship. In the meantime, they carry on their love affairs with certain girls and bring this too into their conversation. The camera follows them. It must be made clear that, although they are not aware of it, there is a sense of unity in mankind, a principle that determines that whatever we do, in whichever field, can either tend towards good or evil; in the direction of harmony, or of destruction, and that artists always seek to tame their internal powers, their instinct, to serve such a positive dimension. However, it is not a question of making one theory prevail over the other, in a schematic or unsubtle way. Rather, what counts is to feel the dialectical complexity and potential of this situation, by means of an appropriate language;

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to convey dramatically this growing need for an artist’s participation in the life of the world. Based on this theme, the feasibility of a low-cost film Three young men are being hunted by the police for having taken part in a bombing attack the day before, on 1 January 1960. If they are discovered, they’ll be killed. They’ve found shelter in a house and spend their time holed up in a room. One of the windows faces the sea, another the street. They have paints to paint with, so they paint and argue while they do so. There’s a third person who is a labourer. An old woman looks after them, because somehow, in a confused sort of way, she feels it is right to do so. She brings them newspapers, colours and food. They have a transistor radio. The girlfriend of one of them comes to visit, but she sometimes puts everyone’s life at risk. Out of what? A personal, even selfish, impulse. Sometimes their discussions reach fever pitch. So loudly do they talk that they’re almost shouting at the top of their voices, completely oblivious of the situation they’re in. Their arguments are so implacable as to become wounding. Each of them analyses his own mood and everyone else’s. You can just sense the atmosphere of the Revolution, the need for change and sincerity it expresses; the desire for a radical critique and a radical examination of their feelings. Motivated by the desire to really understand their own creative process, they critique each other’s paintings, themes and their intentions, with such passionate, almost forensic, precision, that the canvas becomes the equivalent of a chemist’s problem, a biologist’s microscope, a psychiatrist’s Rorsach Test.6 The lines and the colours are scrutinized with such dramatic intensity as to translate them into movements of the soul. Under our very eyes, these marks and colours stand out in the most mysterious compositions, at the extreme limit of perception, where reason overcomes anarchy. This is the point when they experience huge contradictions, enthusiasms and reactions against existing stereotypes, experiencing moments of such doubt that even the Revolution itself is placed in doubt. But then, all it takes is a news story or the old lady bringing some food – anything at all – to give hope, courage and a tangible purpose to what they do and even to their lives.

6

An interlinear correction on the typescript reads: ‘de rotchschild’. Clearly, Zavattini was trying to remember the name of the Rorsach blots commonly used by psychologists.

44

Scenario Censorship 19601

Context In 1960, Visconti’s film Rocco and his Brothers faced censorship. It was by no means the only victim of the Centre Right’s hold on Italian cinema. Zavattini’s own work was censored several times. Over the years, the writer devoted part of his efforts to fighting official film censorship in Italy, by founding and building up professional associations to combat it. A new wave of censorship in 1960 prompted him to write this scenario for a twenty-minute film. This scenario was among the scenarios he selected for inclusion in his first anthology of scenarios published in 1979.

Text This idea came from the need to create an object, let’s call it that, which, in no uncertain terms, would serve as a focus for a freer cinematography and which would combat the worst cases of today’s censorship, be they overt or covert.2 For years, filmmakers have been fighting against today’s system of censorship, but have never reached breaking point. The system is a political system, in so far as it represents a specific interpretation of national life as it is deemed that it should be, in accordance with the views and the practical interests of the dominant class and dominant party. * The purpose of this documentary is to respond to the need for a text in which all the members of Italian culture, filmmakers included, can recognize the contingent

1 2

Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti!, 148–51 and 313–16. Zavattini, ibidem, 313–16.

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state of contemporary Italian cinema, while also using it as a common point of departure to put up a fight and reinstate the freedom of expression. The documentary is intended as a vehicle to facilitate discussion and create unity among filmmakers, by means of an effective rallying point to persuade them not to give up. The length will be somewhere between 600 and 800 metres. It should be made as soon as possible, and at very low cost. Three young directors are available to film it, on the basis of a detailed screenplay which will follow the following structure. *

Part one (Introduction) What is required at the outset is to pinpoint the specific moment when the news of a censorship scandal breaks out, and namely, immediately after the Venice Film Festival. The events should be narrated in the form of a list, spoken fast, alternating shots of censored films with photographs, news headlines, overlaying voices with images, even making them seem out of synch. It will be necessary to locate the newsreels about the Cinema Corso Conference on Censorship, organized at the Eliseo Theatre, organized by the Centro Culturale Cinematografico.3 Among the relevant press articles, there are those published in La Stampa by Alessandro Galante Garrone, Guido Piovene and the speech by Carlo Bo at the Eliseo Conference. There will be an emphasis on the parliamentary aspects of the problem. We could begin with the images of well-known ministers making their entrance into the seat of government at Montecitorio and then proceed to interview briefly members of Parliamentary Commissions charged with discussing the new legislation, or anonymous members of the public. In contrast with the parliamentary aspects and to integrate those sequences, there’s the governmental dimension. At 8.00am in Via della Ferratella, following the bureaucrats’ entrance to the Ministry, we walk in and get as far as meeting the minister, the undersecretary. Alternatively, we could use news stories. Relationship between cinema and the general public: the Rome of film posters. We need shots taken from different camera angles, embedded in the traffic, from a window, from an empty corner, of the posters of the main censored films and shift immediately to the public who goes to see these films and then to the superimposed labels carrying the heading: forbidden to minors. As for the judicial aspect of the problem, the legal correspondence received by filmmakers is quoted, spelling out the charges. The faces of the Procurator Generals. Then the instructions are carried out: the cuts. To this end, a clear exposition of what all this entails, the cuts made in the editing suite, the range of

3

Cinematic Cultural Centre.

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techniques employed. What is cut ends up in the shredder. At this stage, we ask filmmakers their opinion. *

Part two (main body) The plan is that this part revolves around the confession ‘behind closed doors’ of the auteurs, key figures in Italian cinema. The proposal, open to change, is to limit participation to five names: Fellini, Visconti, De Sica, Antonioni and Rossellini. What is essential is the spontaneity of dialogue, which should stick to specific themes discussed passionately, in a personal way and with a dose of improvisation, prior to filming. Three cine-cameras, which should not in any way condition those taking part in the discussion, should be installed in the room. Rather, they are there simply to serve the participants, to follow what is going on, using whatever technical means are available and do so as simply as possible. The cameras will emphasize each participant’s ‘testimonial moments’. What should emerge is a judgement and an emerging plan, concerning the problem of censorship. For a period of five, ten minutes, even a quarter of an hour, the auteurs will become key figures, in an episode which has what it takes to become a narrative, and namely, human and psychological characteristics. The theme should be discussed in such a way as to avoid focussing on the status quo of censorship, to concentrate instead on the political, ethical, social, aesthetic, and psychological aspects of the problem. The behind closed doors discussion should also lead to an exchange with an invisible interlocutor, representing public opinion who makes accusations directed at the auteurs. They are asked to provide answers to public opinion, honestly, responsibly, and avoiding reticence or concealment. Clearly, it will be possible to edit the line of argument, without detracting from the autonomy of individual discussions. And furthermore, it must be obvious, from the opening credits, that these protagonists are the same authors in the film they’re taking part in. *

Themes for the main body The topics will be narrated and debated by the authors, but sudden cutaways will allow us to leave the enclosed space of the room and document a point emerging from the discussion. *

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1. Historic moment. When did the freedom of expression begin to be challenged? 2. Fear of censorship. 3. Propriety and ethics. What definition of propriety are the authors prepared to accept? 4. Violence and incitement to criminal activity. 5. Sex (understood as a real issue within social coexistence). 6. The ‘dirty rags in public’ aspect: Africa (though African cinemas tend towards light comedy). 7. A visit to the Ministry. 8. A film’s Calvary: from when an idea is born to when they force it to be aborted. 9. Occult persuaders: how censorship is carried out using mysterious channels. 10. Producers’ agendas: to what extent is an author free to choose? 11. Censorship as an alibi. 12. Themes: themes that no one takes on, without even realizing it. Themes that have never been tackled (the relation between Church and State, Divorce, the Family, and so on). 13. Banned films: films destroyed for ever that we’ll never make. 14. Relation between pre-war and post-war: two worlds, two interpretations of the life of the nation. The importance of the Resistance as a bridge between these two worlds. Why did it take ten years before the theme of war could be tackled? Where would we be without this delay? We are always too late when it comes to current events. 15. Denying the argument which claims that the lack of freedom is a stimulus for the artist. 16. Cinema and government. 17. Cinema as a stimulus, to interrupt the static relation between citizen and government, to propose instead a dynamic relation in which the citizen develops new forms of governance, including censorship. 18. To free citizens from a medieval outlook towards government and encourage them to make use of all the tools of democratic control. Why is it that some filmmakers didn’t take the matter to court? An ancient fear of the law. 19. A cinema which is conscious of cultural reflection on events and which coincides with the nation’s process of democratization. Such a cinema could gain an international reputation and become a source of national pride. *

Part Three (conclusion and perspective) In conclusion, there is a sense of a situation which is open to a broad range of possibilities: towards involution or freedom. For this reason, it is imperative

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from the outset to include viewers, given their responsibility in determining either of these alternatives. At the same time, it is necessary to react against fatalism. The existence and activity of filmmakers’ associations are a stimulating reminder of the opposite trend. The conclusion of Censorship 1960 is only the beginning of a dialogue. Italian culture meets in an assembly to explain the facts of the situation. As they speak, the various aspects of the problem show up on the faces of all those authors willing to participate and who are juxtaposed to intellectuals who apparently have nothing to do with cinema. They also point to a way forward: a Manifesto which this documentary elicits and promotes at the same time.

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Scenario The Newsreel for Peace (1962)1

Context In 1961, the year after his long stay in Cuba, where he could witness the Cold War climate and war of attrition directly and personally, following the victory of the Cuban Revolution, he set up the Italia-Cuba Committee, to help disseminate accurate news about the Revolution, in the Italian press. He also proposed an alternative source of information, as a first step in fighting Italian media bias. This was to be The Newspaper for Peace, ‘counter-information’ ahead of its time, in print format, focussed on the Cold War, and reporting initiatives of resistance and defiance. Zavattini had written the scenario and screenplay for War (Rat) (1960), directed by the Yugoslav Velijko Bulajić and made numerous interventions on peace and its enemies in his writings, public pronouncements and other initiatives in previous years, while the threat of nuclear war was growing after 1948 and polarization between the United States and the Soviet Union. His efforts, and those of the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, were officially recognized by the 1955 Lenin Peace Prize. He was not alone in Italy. A central figure in this new cultural intervention against the Cold War was his friend, Aldo Capitini, a towering influence in the Italian peace movement. Capitini was a theorist who had been advocating and theorizing non-violence in his university post and publications for many years. There can be no doubt that it was an ambitious project, intended to have a an extent of sixty-four pages, to which major Italian writers had already agreed to participate, including Einaudi editor and author Italo Calvino, Carlo Levi, Elio Vittorini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Zavattini himself and many others. When it stumbled, despite the goodwill of the intellectuals, the screenwriter and theorist came up with a cinematic equivalent, The Newsreel for Peace.2

Zavattini, ‘Il cinegiornale della pace’, Rinascita, 1962, then in Neorealismo ecc., 1979, 236– 41. 2 Zavattini, ‘La pace, la pace, la pace. 9 giugno 1962’, Diario cinematografico, 1979, 354–7. 1

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This project found a sponsor in the communist current affairs weekly Rinascita, which had replaced Cinema Nuovo as publisher of Zavattini’s published cinematic diary. Cinema Nuovo had stopped publishing a large format, illustrated fortnightly journal, moving to monthly publication. This created too long a gap between diary entries for Zavattini. Zavattini’s appeal, in the form of a scenario, met with general indifference from Antonioni, Rossellini, Fellini and other filmmakers Zavattini had already worked with, but it generated interest among Rinascita readers. The readily set up news desk of The Newsreel for Peace received magnetic tapes, photographs, letters, but not the footage for making what he had in mind, a documentary. As a result, Zavattini’s inner circle of active, young, documentary filmmakers stepped in. Ansano Giannarelli and Mino Argentieri, who latter was the film editor at Rinascita, headed up the production (they became its production ‘editors’ or executive producers).3 The film critic Argentieri’s task was to coordinate the content, while Giannarelli’s job was to organize the shooting and relations with the various filmmakers, while Marina Piperno would deal with main production issues. Yet again, Zavattini replicated his news desk organizational structure, established before the war when he was a publishing director. The original plan was that ordinary people who use 8-millimetre portable cine-cameras would be involved. They would send in their footage on the overall theme, which would then be edited internally. The problem was that Italian amateurs were not that many, film stock and printing celluloid was expensive, and, besides, they were only interested in shooting picturesque photographic essays. In brief, a film culture was lacking and those who shared one were in the film clubs and mostly viewers. The very idea of a filmmaker, a low- or zerobudget artist with a camera did not yet exist, nor did the technology to support one in those days. It is not a question of Zavattini having utopian, unrealizable dreams, but being ahead of his time, as some Italian guerrilla filmmakers have recognized.4 One notable example, but not the only one, is the ZaLab collective, which built its programme of guerrilla filming and teaching independent filmmaking on Zavattini’s innovative ideas. They cite a story for a comic strip or fumetto, written in the late 1940s, and probably for Mondadori in Milan, where he had been the publishing director of magazines, in which the writer envisaged a world of the future in which ‘Anyone at all would own his phone or television which would be work on the wrist, like a wristwatch’.5 ZaLab itself has carried out, since 2006, the vision expressed in Zavattini’s interventions, beginning with The Newsreel for Peace, through their video labs, enabling those enlisted to Mino Argentieri, ‘Cesare e Ansano’, in Antonio Medici (ed.), Cercando la rivoluzione, Archivio Audiovisivo del movimento operaio e democratico, Annali, 15, Rome: Donizelli editore, 2013, 13–19. 4 Gabriele Cusato, Le teorie di Zavattini e i media contemporanei: inconsapevoli eredità e un esplicito richiamo, il caso ZaLab, Rome: University of Rome 3, dams, Unpublished dissertation, 2013. 5 The story is in the Zavattini Archive, acz, Za Sog. NR 3/4, cited in Cusato, ibidem, 119. 3

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work with camcorders, particularly people on the margins of society, to become filmmakers, and using participative techniques to teach them. The Newsreel for Peace was planned to be the first of a series of documentaries. It was an experiment. It served as a foundation for a further experiment, which blossomed into a movement, the Free Newsreels, and the Free Newsreels movement. The film covers many topics, including peace marches, interviews with high-profile intellectuals, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, and others, the theme of torture over the centuries. Another film within the film features the aftermath of violent police repression during a lawful demonstration, using live rounds, in aid of Cuba, in which Gianni Ardizzone was shot dead. The Ardizzone documentary is particularly interesting, because it comprises two films. The first narrates the events, through a series of interviews with eyewitnesses, including other students. Vita e morte di Gianni Ardizzone (Life and Death of Gianni Ardizzone) is particularly interesting, because it is an early example of self-reflexive filmmaking. It comprises two films. The first narrates the events leading up to the death of a student, shot dead by the police, through a series of interviews with eyewitnesses, including other students. The second comprises a filmed screening of the first and the discussions it provoked. Ardizzone’s friends, family and the general public become witnesses to his tragic death. The Newsreel for Peace also features the memorialization, through filmed responses of witnesses, to a wartime massacre at a place called Marzabotto. This short was entitled Marzabotto vent’anni dopo (Marzabotto, Twenty Years Later). It was filmed by Luigi Di Gianni who went to the village, adopting Zavattini’s shadowing approach, and interviewed three survivors. All three are lost for words in talking about their experience, living through a massacre by the German army in retreat, in which a whole town was executed, men, but mostly women and children, families. A woman remembers what it was like for her as a small child to survive mass execution, because she was hidden by dead bodies, a husband points to the very spot where he found a clue to identify his wife, her shoe. Marzabotto had been a taboo. So this was an early attempt at memorialization in Italian cinema, the earliest was a feature-length documentary Giorni di Gloria (Days of Glory) (1945), recently restored and now available on the internet. Memorializing wartime massacres in the early 1960s was also a sharp political statement, since no Italian de-Nazification or de-fascistization programme ever took place in Italy, just as it hadn’t in Austria. In the 1950s, fascism and even the Italian Resistance were a taboo subject.6

The Marzabotto massacre became topical after a recent discovery of wartime archives, which had been hidden away half a century ago, in a government ministry, having been censored from cultural representation. Giorgio Diritti’s film L’Uomo che verrà (2009) made sensitive use of recovered interviews to produce a sensitive reconstruction of events, mediated by a fictional treatment.

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The Newsreel for Peace was screened in Rome, at the Supercinema one morning in May 1963.7 Zavattini was satisfied at the time, as he told the editor, Argentieri, when the screenwriter saw his editing.8 Indeed, there are these exceptional investigative episodes, a shining example as to what high-quality television and investigative films could be like, ethical, political, socially engaged and still worth watching.

Text 1 Requests are coming in from several quarters about the nature of our Newsreel for Peace and how to participate in making it. It seeks to be an anthology of all our thoughts and feelings, which, we hope, will plan to address the serious problem of peace adopting a more reflective and organic approach than could ever be achieved on an emotional and sentimental level. The challenge is to create an awareness, a culture, of peace, and our Newsreel for Peace will be honoured if it can make a contribution in this direction. From a minimum of 20 to 30 metres to a maximum of 300 metres, you can send us your personal scream, or simply a set of statistics. Send us your proposals, your proposal. We are encouraging everyone to submit a constant flow of ideas which can materialize in a direct, or indirect, cinematic mode. All kinds of ideas are welcome, but carefully worked out and thought through, politically, socially, economically, culturally. We are not going to give specific examples for slavish imitation. The following examples are intended to show what freedom you have in choosing to collaborate in The Newsreel for Peace.

1) Investigative reportage on peace filmed in the most diverse social environments. For example, in schools. What do children know about peace? What meaning do they give to the word ‘peace’? The topic is banned from classrooms or treated with a very rhetorical or cursory approach, one that is remote from any real contact with life. Whereas, the kind of approach we are planning is to interview students on their way home from school, children from different social backgrounds, from different countries of the world. We will ask them a few questions. We are going to observe their immediate and spontaneous response to our questions on the theme of peace.9

The other filmmakers were Giuseppe Ferrara, Luigi Di Gianni, Luciano Malaspina, Massimo Mida, Jean Lodz, Luciano Viazzi and Marina Piperno. Twenty years later, Piperno produced Zavattini’s The Truuuuth (1982). 8 Argentieri, ‘Cesare e Ansano’, 14. 9 The lettering has been corrected (j and k omitted in the Italian version). 7

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2) We are going to stop men, women, children, adolescents and elderly people, to ask them a specific question: ‘War is going to break out in twenty-four hours. What do you think you’ll do?’ Each person will have a personal response, revealing a range of reactions, from fear, to indifference, hope, incredulity, to resignation. We wish to connect with the actual level of the general public’s awareness, faced with the one fact which will force them to face up to their specific responsibilities. 3) We are planning to interview a patient with only three months to live, asking questions about life and death; a young army conscript; two men who fought respectively in the First and the Second World War; a prison convict; a couple about to get married. 4) In every issue of The Newsreel for Peace let us interview famous people: [Charlie] Chaplin, [Pablo] Picasso, [Bertrand] Russell, and ask them to express their ‘ultimate’ statement of truth about peace. 5) Demonstrations for peace in the world. The Newsreel for Peace will report systematically on news of this nature. 6) The world, today. A large map will appear on the screen, showing all the continents. Then a hand will mark in red all the trouble spots in the world: a missile base here, a town there, where hunger creates countless victims every year; and here a nation under dictatorship. Any serious hope for peace – as always – rests on knowledge. It is necessary to break down the broad theme into each of its interrelated components; economic, political and historical. And this is only possible if we don’t settle for the short-term measures history puts forward, time and again, while, at the same time, making explicit, as bluntly and accurately as possible, the obstacles with which we are faced. 7) The ‘Our Peace Prize’ will be awarded to the person who contributes to increasing our understanding of peace, by means of a book or some other such contribution. 8) Archival footage. In each issue of The Newsreel for Peace we are going to select our ‘Minute of Silence’: we shall pick an image from archival footage which we deem suitable to take on an exemplary value, such as, for example, the figure of the mother of the young man from Milan who died during the Cuba demonstrations.10 9) Each number of The Newsreel for Peace will contain a news flash, focussing on the enemies of peace, by addressing a question to someone who made a public statement, whether openly or indirectly, against peace. 10) A three-way dialogue: a writer, a murderer and a war veteran, awarded the highest military medal for valour. The writer will ask them questions to ascertain their different reactions: what does the man who killed during wartime think? And the man who killed in peacetime? This is an

Gianni Ardizzone is the student who was shot dead by the police.

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opportunity to focus on violence, one of the key themes to be tackled by The Newsreel for Peace, as a matter of constant urgency. 11) Religions. In each issue, there will be interviews with people from different faiths. They will all be asked about how peace is understood within their respective religion. 12) A poem or a short story with an ethical twist developed into threedimensional works. For example: some people are cooped up in a nuclear shelter. They must decide whether to admit someone who has just arrived at the last minute. To let him in, might spell death for all; but not to let him will involve watching his lonely agony. An analysis of these last decisive moments. 13) Statistics. Shortcomings with dramatic consequences are brought to light which fundamentally corrupt life. Nutrition, health and education are the three basic needs which should be provided for by national governments in the modern age, guaranteeing equal and exhaustive provision across society. There can be no genuine understanding of peace, for as long as these three ideal ministries are malfunctioning: The Ministry of Nutrition, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education. 14) A critical analysis of their historic, psychological and artistic characteristics. 15) In a prenatal clinic, filming a group of pregnant women to ask them about their aspirations for their babies yet to be born. 16) A flight in a small plane. The two people on board are discussing the nuclear bomb. In their mind’s eye, they decide where to drop the bomb. A small circle marked in red on the map of Rome. The designated area is the district of Garbatella. They play out in their imagination the bomb site after the bombardment. There are people who live there and work there. What are their expectations? What do they hope to achieve in their lives?

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Scenario The Guinea Pig (1962)1

Context Zavattini devoted a great deal of research and time to this scenario, totting up as many as thirteen versions of The Guinea Pig and drawing on over 1,400 pages of field research, to produce a kind of ethnography of the cinema industry and its shortcomings, through the study of one of its victims.2 Zavattini met Maurizio Arena in October 1961. This Italian actor starred in the very successful Poveri ma belli trilogy (1956), directed by Dino Risi. For the Italian public, he had become an instant celebrity. But five years later Arena was no longer fêted by the Italian film industry and half-forgotten by the public. Arena approached Zavattini to invite him to work on a script, a proposal, which the film writer immediately turned down. However, Zavattini was intrigued by the person behind the mask and the personal crisis he caught a glimpse of. He wondered how a real person, not an imagined one, would face such a crisis. There was only one way to find out: by spending time with that person, not seen as an actor, but as a social actor, through what Zavattini often called ‘shadowing’. This prompted Zavattini to develop the diary film thread he had been working on before going to Cuba in December 1959. Zavattini’s son Marco helped him by interviewing Arena at length and producing a considerable body of documentation. The plan was that Dino P. Partesano, a young filmmaker, who was also directing an episode of Zavattini’s coeval Mysteries of Rome, would direct The Guinea Pig.3 The story of Arena the man and his troubles in the film industry fitted in with scenarios Zavattini had written a couple of years earlier, Diary of a Man (1959),

§1 [Zavattini’s Introduction] La cavia (1962), dated 30 November 1962, in Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti!, 188–9. 2 Caldiron, ‘La cavia’, in Zavattini, Uomo vieni fuori!, 251–3 and Caldiron, ‘Diario di un uomo’, ibidem, 440–2. 3 The following text is drawn from: Francesco Bolzoni, ‘Del film inchiesta, autobiografico e di altro’, 244–9. 1

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and, that same year, Diary of a Woman was to combine recent Italian history and the diary form, in which the protagonist keeps a diary at the time of the fascist alliance with Nazism. The scenario and screenplay were later rejected by the producer Carlo Ponti who several years later produced a similar film, clearly based on the same ideas, with his wife Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in the lead roles, Una giornata particolare (1977), directed by Ettore Scola, heavily indebted to Zavattini’s diary film or confessional film. But Zavattini is clear that The Guinea Pig was no diary film. Confessional, and personal, but no diary film. First of all, it wasn’t literary, pathetic, sentimental, nor trapped within the limitations of a predetermined ‘story’. Paradoxically, the film was envisaged as flexible, to the point that one could begin at any point of the subject and end at any other point whatsoever. What mattered, in Zavattini’s mind was what there was between the two limiting points, not ‘story’, but moods, revelations, insights, meaning and, above all, a series of stimuli for the viewers, to enable them to reach their own conclusion, and therefore, to think for themselves. Although the plan focussed on a single person, the film was not intended as a biography. Or, it could be envisaged as such, it would be, according to Zavattini’s notes, only in the sense that all the moments of Arena’s story, as conveyed by Arena the character, assume an exemplary, absolute, significance and resonance.4 In 1962 Zavattini planned to make a series of such films, autobiographies or confessional films; Zavattini planned a film about Danilo Dolci, the activist, sociologist, writer, poet and priest, Danilo Dolci, to be directed by Luigi Di Gianni and others, in what he calls ‘a cinema of cruelty’, where cruelty refers to an in-depth investigative style, carried out with the person’s full consent, where there is no intermediary: person and character coincide. In addition to The Guinea Pig.5 This section, dated 30 November 1962, appears in Orio Caldiron’s 2006 edition, as an endnote. Cfr. Zavattini, Uomo, vieni fuori! Soggetti per il cinema editi e inediti. Edited by Orio Caldiron. Rome: Bulzoni, 2006, 245; 252–3. §2 La cavia (1962), text dated 13 April 1962. Because it forms an excellent introduction or preface to the scenario, the English edition follows Roberta Mazzoni’s editorial choice in Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti! (1979), reinstating the opening paragraphs. The two texts belonging to different periods are signposted with paragraph numbers. Cfr. Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti!, Milan: Bompiani, 1979, 189–94. See also Volume 2 of this edition, ‘The filmconfession interview’ (1961). It only becomes clear that the opening paragraphs in Mazzoni’s 1979 edition are by Zavattini the author, when the text replaces the third-person singular noi (‘we’), with ‘the royal we’ or pluralia majestatis, standing for the voice or the pen of Zavattini himself.

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Zavattini, ‘Appunti per il film su Arena’, La cavia, acz, Sog. NR4, fol. 118. Unpublished. Zavattini, Letter to Enzo Muzii, 12 September 1962, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 295–6.

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Text 1 The idea for the film came in October 1961, when Zavattini met Maurizio Arena. On that occasion, Arena suggested he write a screenplay based on a story he’d written himself, but Zavattini wasn’t interested. He was able to glimpse, however, Arena’s critical state of mind and personal crisis. Here was someone who was out of work, whose good fortune had abandoned him, who still showed traces of the affluence he had once enjoyed wholeheartedly; affluence which had contributed to his lingering illusions, while putting across how much he had lost. Simply put, here was a man whose fall from fame and success did more than only give rise to anger and pathetic reactions. This was a person who was also embarking on a process of self-reflection about his situation. This gave rise to a possibility that Zavattini could make an investigative film in which the object of enquiry was no longer a city, or a given situation, but a man, a very young man, a celebrity with an identity, a real name and surname, embodying a typical aspect of our corrupt and corrupting society, itself, the cause and he, its victim; a man for whom the obsession of success and of wealth had led him to forget the existence of more serious, authentic, values. So Zavattini asked Dino B. Partesano and Marco Zavattini to live close to Arena for as long as necessary, so that they could carry out an analytical observation of the people, the places, Arena’s drives, and the way he chose to live his life. Gradually Arena began to make the film’s objectives his own. The film is a brave attempt to look tangible truths in the face, serious and unpleasant as they may be for Arena. Biography and representation will have to coincide in the film. That is to say that, while the film will conform to cinematic requirements, it will seek out emotions, by way of constant and critical sincerity, to the point of cynicism. Consequently, this actor’s days and hours will be scrutinized with all the necessary cruelty. We could define the film as the first of a series of films for a cinema of cruelty, in so far as it aims to express the growing need to convey, to as many people as possible, a particular kind of contemporary lifestyle and attendant behaviour, using new means of expression, in order to break the hard shell of hypocrisy and far too metaphorical and indirect modes of acquiring knowledge. A cinema of cruelty is only such when it brings to the large screen characters who are willing to make public confession directly, not through an intermediary. The pursuit of truth, however arduous, is never gratuitous cruelty.

2 We are in Maurizio Arena’s home. He is going to play the lead role in the film. A wall is covered in photographs of when he was very young, during the 6

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hard days of his debut, and pictures from when he became a success, as well as photographs of him as he looks today. He is so young in some, portrayed alone, while, in others, he is in the company of male and female friends. The director asks Arena, who is waiting to be interviewed, to show the viewers around his home which Arena proceeds to do.7 It is quite clear from the first shot and the subsequent ones, that this film is an explicit conversation involving the director, the actor and the public. This is, to all intents and purposes, an investigative film, which, following months and months of preparation, time spent recording private confessions, memories, gathering diverse statements on Arena and his life, unfolds before the public’s eyes, but only after everything has been defined and agreed, sometimes, right down to the smallest detail. The director is the speaker and the one who is orchestrating everything; the ‘magician’ of the whole composition, with all its multiple levels of significance, relating to the past and present, including the present of filming, and allowing the echoes of the outside world to be heard, be they from national or international news. The film does not only include a reconstruction of events, but also events taking place during the filming itself. Arena’s purpose is to reveal his growing self-awareness, as subject and object of the whole film. He sets no limit to his availability, to help make it possible to create a portrait – as accurate as possible – of himself and of the environment he frequented earlier, as well as the one in which he lives today. Only now can he step back, only now can he see himself in perspective, and make sense of the truth. Clearly, our objective can only be met if Arena is willing to cooperate with unfailing honesty. This film marks a clean break with his past, a break with the person he was and with the actor he was. He has no intention of trying to shock the public, which is why no damaging and offensive references to specific individuals will be made. Arena is looking for a saner contact with life, informed by awareness, and, consequently, more human. It follows that the success and vitality of our investigative film depend on, to a large degree, Arena’s degree of sincerity, especially towards himself, aided by whatever help we can provide. However, there is no reason to doubt his full cooperation, which was made clear from when he agreed with no reservations to this biographical, investigative film.8

3 The film is entitled Showing your Hand, because every aspect is open to view, or The Guinea Pig. The underlying principle is to show how a man willingly undergoes an almost scientific exploration of his life, even in its most secret expression, to trigger a useful experience for himself and for others.

The proposed director was Dino B. Partesano who, together with Marco Zavattini, had already spent time with Arena, in accordance with Zavattini’s pedinamento, or shadowing, principle. 8 These opening paragraphs, published in italics only in the 1979 edition, constitute Zavattini’s preface. 7

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The film can begin with Maurizio Arena standing in front of a blackboard. He spends five minutes writing down the essential numbers of his life, his accounts, simply, clearly and dispassionately, and adopting the unpretentious attitude of a person who is willing to play the human game, for the full length of the film. Arena’s confessional moments will alternate with investigative moments which issue from the revelations of this typical ‘Hero of our Times’. This man, a symbol, lost and desolate as he is, in every single shot, accuses us for being his equals, and no less guilty. The film takes place in a vacuum, a bell jar. There is nowhere to escape; it’s impossible to avoid the issues at hand; the less mystification in the film, the greater the ethical and emotional tension it will achieve. The reason I describe it as investigative filmmaking is that the film is set to assault the reality of the worlds and underworlds Arena has been in, such as, for example, the shady circles of financial sharks, of money lending, of people and places which have been crucial to Arena’s destiny. In Rome, all kinds of underhand, illicit dealings, high interest loans, reaching the limits of extortion, make for thriving business, in a shady world buzzing with criminal activity. And behind the appearances of ostensibly legal paperwork are selfishness and greed. The phones keep ringing, while the cheques bounce and stage payments are agreed, agitated voices shouting, begging for a reprieve, an extension, and sometimes ending in gun shots. Arena is in debt. He fell into debt as softly as if he were walking on velvet, with the carefree attitude of someone who was adulated for several years and venerated like an idol. We have made contact with a money lender who told us about the relation between the world of cinema and money lending in Rome. This opens up the film to an investigation about the cinema. There is such a volume of business and such an exchange of capitals that it is worth taking a closer look to see what’s going on. Hundreds of millions of liras, billions. Short-term loans. We’ll endeavour to track the production of a film, from the initial idea to the initial investment, following its economic pathway. How much money has Arena made from the cinema? The Tax Office is well aware of the size of his earnings. Let’s speak to tax collectors to find out more. The film will contain such sudden departures and developments to shed light on our hero, who knows we are determined to get to the truth and is willing to cooperate, nor will we hesitate to challenge him. As far as Arena is concerned, our film can make a difference. Even his dependence on us is dramatic. His hope that sooner or later he will be back in favour with the film industry is, in our view, one of the film’s driving energies. There is a crowd of characters we will call on to give the figure of Arena substance and meaning. Waiters and butlers of yesterday and today, ‘Morena’, a Garbatella man of honour, actresses and starlets, extras and several women from Rome’s aristocracy, ‘Buddha’, another criminal character from Garbatella, ‘Picchio Pallone’, the king of Trastevere, a doctor who specializes in back street abortions and drug detoxing, the underworld of light entertainment and its pitiful characters. For brief insights, we will enter their everyday life, their

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past and their thoughts, with the rough and ready approach of investigative filmmaking. Clearly, any qualms about Arena as an actor must be set aside. Arena will be himself, and the director will have to keep him within the limitations of a documentary. To give more of an idea about the film’s content, we are going to briefly mention a few sequences. The director-cum-speaker introduces what today’s cinema is like, crowned as it is by fake, and genuine, illumination, its national and international noises, as well as its authentic values. Then Arena comes in. Today, he has been defeated. Why? This question demands some answers from us. These are like a needle with which to thread the film’s necklace. And the director-cum-speaker will use any means to get some answers. Once he has them, he will approach fifty or so girls, to ask them what they think of Arena. What is their view of a handsome man who still has the aura of success, despite his downfall? These candid judges identify the relation between a film star and women, since they reflect contemporary public opinion. And women, don’t forget, have played an important role in Arena’s life. He has used them, and they have used him. Rather than chasing deep love, they were chasing something false, ephemeral, a mere illusion. Women have had a negative effect on Arena, increasing his vanity tenfold, and encouraging him to think like a Don Giovanni. And they were also deluded in their desire to live in the reflected glory of the man of the moment. We are going to meet seven or eight of Arena’s loves, among the many we have heard about, in which you see the void, the sense of confusion and even vulgarity, all dressed up in shiny clothes. Some of these affairs will be reconstructed, mixing what we might call an objective approach with a narrative reliving the story, under the guidance of the director-speaker. These ‘stories’ will alternate with actual investigative work which, as already mentioned, will lead us into his decisive years, though Arena himself won’t appear in them. For example, we are going to explore the aristocratic social set and a particular member of the aristocracy, who was in love with Arena, but felt divided between the shame of being seen with him in public and her irrepressible desire for the man. Arena was a typical product of so-called success. But what is success? To answer this question, our field research will focus on the anxiety which possesses people to run after success of whatever kind, so long as it enables them to be on the stage, and at the centre of everyone’s attention. Once again, we want to show the potential of digressions, of running a number of investigations along the length of our film, but which always feed into its central object, Arena, who triggers those digressions. We have pointed out that Arena mirrors a lifestyle and outlook which are very common these days. Greed, shared by most people, motivated his desires, as if wealth could be eternal. What do people want most today? We shall investigate what things people desire, and how they became Arena’s accomplices, by turning a blind eye. We

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will point out the material goods from his commercial exchange with life: from a precious tie to a certain car, a certain bar, to his use of the hours of the day and night, in other words, show what his lifestyle looks like. These investigations – it’s worth underling the point – will be meticulous, and carried out in all seriousness and thoroughness, to get to know a reality which will be revealed in all its alarming implications, constantly animated by Arena’s sincerity and dramatic presence. Right up to the end of the film we shall never sever the connection between the analysis of a society and that of a man – Arena – drawing attention to interrelated aspects, and faults in common. What lies in store for a man who has lived through the experience of making a film like this one, so intensely, and attentive to every aspect? We don’t wish to know. We’ll know the day Arena will have come through this experience, after he has appeared in the last shot. As for this investigative film’s technique or approach, I’ll provide an example to give a sense of the freedom of expressive language it embodies. At one point of the film, Arena, who is always ready to talk in general terms, as if he were constructing a theory, is leaning against a wall and there’s a woman next to him. The director has just finished ten minutes or so of reportage into the world of living on credit from ill-gotten gains. Arena has appeared as barely a pretext, not the central character. But now Arena begins to narrate two or three affairs which are typical. The director reaches beyond the details of the affair to put forward an opinion about Arena and his environment, in their mutual relation. The director claps his hands as if he were using a clapper board and begins a reconstruction, in which Arena seeks to act out the story in such a way that we feel we are taking part in it, being a different kind of actor, playing his role in a new way, with self-reflection while being the document, or object of enquiry, at the same time. The concept of reconstruction doesn’t necessarily require the people involved in the story to act out themselves, for example, Arena’s affair with the princess won’t have to be played by the princess herself, though, in other cases, the director will secure the collaboration of the actual people involved, who will take part for the same reasons and purpose Arena is taking part. Consequently, there will be various forms of reconstruction of life, and relived moments. In the case of the princess, of an episode which typifies Arena’s relations with the aristocracy, we will definitely go for a girl who resembles her both physically and in terms of social status. We will, however, never use shock tactics with the public. And the girl will be herself, while possessing some propensity for fiction (we hesitate to say recitation, to avoid confusion about the style of the film). She too will approach the film as a guinea pig, so that the director can interrupt her, whenever he feels the need to do so, or make her go over a scene again on camera, to emphasize a concept, something which is unheard of in a dramatization. In this scene, any experimental techniques and the potential interruptions of direct filming will be used to relate the story of how this princess was willing to sexually degrade herself by licking Arena’ shoes, while at the

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same time being ashamed to be seen with him in public, and thus acknowledge this friendship, and, when she was with him in town, how she would duck under the dashboard, so as not to be recognized. As to the ending, which I’ve already mentioned in passing, it is open-ended, until, that is, we reach the stage of filming the last scenes – which is feasible, given the film’s internal structure. This is not to be taken for a pointless, clever ruse, but part and parcel of the nature of the film itself. For all those who will be involved are assuming a new kind of ethical commitment, in the sense that the film represents an ethical journey, the pace of which coincides with the developing nature of the film itself, progressing and perfecting its purpose along the way. The ending and Arena’s role in bringing it about, may relate to a real biographical event in his life, such as, for example, a journey abroad, signifying a change in his life or agreeing to act a role in another film, with the kind of newfound attitude of someone just before his wedding or anything at all which might clearly indicate his moral condition at the film’s close. The narrative should have the same level of honesty as the rest, since there may be a divergence between Arena’s view and that of the authors. My hope is that there won’t be, since Arena’s attitude as he embarks on this enterprise is honest, but it may be that the psychological tension, generated by the pressure to maintain his honesty is such that ultimately it will fail him. Not that it matters; whatever Arena’s attitude, the conclusion will transcend Arena, while still using him as a guinea pig. One might come to the conclusion that the film is the vehicle for Arena’s emancipation from his moral bankruptcy, but it is, above all, a way out from a broader social problematic which Arena symbolizes. My direct contact with Arena and the director can never be diminished on an ethical level, not even for an hour, unlike what happens in other kinds of films, in which everything is resolved, from the moment the filming begins, or what remains to be resolved only aesthetic issues still need to be resolved. Whereas, in this case, while one part is clearly worked out and agreed, another part may vary, develop, under our watchful eye, not Arena’s, who may feel confused during his process of development. The director and I will have to ensure that we are following our line which is flexible enough to cater for any eventuality. The line consists in the rationale aided by intuition which gave the initial impetus to a film of this kind. In other words, the ending must conform to the initial idea. Arena talks about himself unsparingly, pointing out his flaws and his complacency from having become a myth. His way of criticizing himself is to show how he was, that is to say, by drawing a sharp distinction between yesterday and today. When he agreed to make the film, he also accepted to look at himself as he used to be, and with irony and depth. How profound his self-criticism can be is key here, since the film’s success and its intrinsic novelty depend on how sincere Arena is willing to be. At times, sincerity might manifest itself very briefly, at times, it will be the outcome of a long process of getting to know oneself. From the point of view of form and content, it will allow others to see, not so much what Arena himself is like as

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a person, but a typical man of our time. For there are typical aspects of his, connected with acting, but also other aspects which typify an entire generation and the kinds of relationships which are formed between the audience and a person who has been a success. Without such psychological investigations, the film runs the risk of becoming a schematic illustration of an exceedingly schematic conversation. Arena as a subject will help to avoid this, but also his relationship with the authors and the tangible exchange with the director who is no emotionless magnetic tape recorder, but a participant, in his dual function of constantly provoking the conversation and of making use of a host of other means, easily within his reach.9 Even the structure of the writing should help, in the way it constructs an overview, capable of revealing the nature of the film, its leeway for partial improvisation, its distinctive tone and rhythm, so alive, so alien to the sort of project which has been diligently carried out in every detail. We need Arena’s full commitment, since he will have to respond to unexpected situations, such as suddenly discovering that we have exposed a character trait which he was keeping hidden from us. These aspects, symptomatic of an overarching value system, emerging from close contact with the subject, are what animate the film and prevent Arena the man from descending into a hollowedout character or a caricature of himself, both equally despicable false portraits. Our point of view, as authors, is that Arena’s difficult circumstances reveal his naivety, in being duped by a mythology which the media and we ourselves have helped to nourish; which is something we consider to be the expression of a general situation. The problem is not the nature of cinema, but making a certain kind of film, the sort which fails to provide any benefit, while at the same time perpetrating its own illusory ghosts.

9

This paragraph and the ones following only appear in the 1979 edition. Cfr. Zavattini, ‘La cavia’, in Uomo vieni fuori!, 250–1.

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Scenario The Mysteries of Rome (1962)1

Context This non-fiction film about Rome belongs to the same period as The Guinea Pig, and shares some of the same preoccupations. The question is what goes on behind the scenes? Behind the appearance of the Eternal City, and its myths. Zavattini’s idea of making a non-fiction film about Rome originated in the early 1950s, experimenting, in fragmentary form, with several projects, most notably, Love in the City, The Roof and the fictional Termini Station, set in Rome’s central railway station. All three are listed in the ambitious Italia mia proposals, which could be considered alternative models to pre-war so-called ‘City Symphony’ films. When it came to produce it, in Zavattini’s words: Initially, Carlo Ponti was going to produce it, but Ponti gave up, because he felt it was too risky; it wasn’t spectacular enough, and I have to tell you, Fellini offered to contact Ponti through his production company, as a guarantee, ‘Because’, he told me ‘it seems to me that Ponti is bound to make certain demands, which would end up conditioning even Zavattini.’ At this stage, we were getting despondent, because it seemed that we would have to look for another producer, when we suddenly had this intuition: let’s make a really cheap film, a film shot in a single day, a 20 million liras film, and not something fictional and constructed after the event. So then, we worked out the film in a month, really going with the idea of filming it in twenty-four hours. Naturally, we needed quite a number of directors to glean this city from every possible angle, within such a limited time frame, and yet such a limitation might even turn into a positive quality: to see what fourteen young directors can come up with, once they are unleashed into the city space, on the assumption that the length of a day was to be a characteristic of the film, with its ethical and poetic underpinnings.2 Zavattini, ‘Dossier: I Misteri di Roma’, 13 March 1962, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 384–9. 2 Zavattini, Io. Un’autobiografia, 231–3. 1

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If, in a country which was still averse to feature-length documentaries, The Mysteries of Rome did eventually attract funding, it was most probably because of the success in France of the recent Chronique d’un été, written and directed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, which also applied, or rather, claimed to apply, ethnography to the West. Zavattini and his nineteen contributors, wrote a great many number of extended proposals for the film, which fed into the final preparatory texts, each envisaging a specific aspect of the city, or issue, or recurring situation. What lies behind appearances? Is there a hidden metropolis? Filming and planning would go hand in hand and filmmakers, all nineteen of them, producers and Zavattini, met on a regular basis in what Argentieri, working with Ansano Giannarelli, also one of the producers, described as ‘a permanent assembly’, a sort of drop-in arrangement, where individual filmmakers could go and discuss their plans, and refer back on how they were getting on.3 There are many photographs of Zavattini on set, as it were, or better, on location, showing his direct involvement. Argentieri’s memoir of the meetings includes a description of how the screenwriter would use maps, press cuttings, photographic location surveys, specialized sociological data, to inform and shape the shadowing of the real as it was unfolding. One maxim of his was to use the imagination as forceps to intervene on reality. On 10 May 1962, the fluidity of months of ideas and discussions among Zavattini and the other filmmakers were compressed into just two texts. One is a four-page script, for the producer, and a condensed version of the other (some paragraphs are verbatim), sixteen pages long, later appeared in book form, as part of a comprehensive study of the film.4 For reasons of space, instead of publishing the long version of the scenario, far too long, or the short version, far too short, this anthology offers sections of the long version, preceded, and followed, by other related texts written by Zavattini: a diary entry dated 15 October 1960, a three-page ‘Note’, in itself a brief synopsis or script, and parts of an interview with the editor of the book about the film. These are distinguished by an asterisk and their source given in the notes.5

Text How can I even think of a film about Rome, as I have been doing for a long while now, if I don’t get out of the house that often?6 I might infer Rome from Argentieri, ‘Cesare e Ansano’, 15–16. Zavattini, ‘Il progetto del film’, in Francesco Bolzoni (ed.), I misteri di Roma, Bologna: Cappelli, 1963, 13–29. Cesare Zavattini, I misteri di Roma. Progetto per un film-inchiesta di Cesare Zavattini, Rome: spa Cinematografica s.r.l. 10 May 1962, acz Sog. R38/4. 5 Zavattini, ‘Nota’, in Bolzoni (ed.), I misteri di Roma, 30–2. The interview also covers the diary form, and cinematic autobiography, which Zavattini, together with one of his sons, Marco Zavattini, were experimenting with for a separate film project, La cavia (The Guinea Pig) which appears above. 6 Zavattini, ‘Roma. 15 October 1960’, Diario cinematografico, in Zavattini, Cinema, 475–6. 3 4

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my mind or rack my brains to remember lived moments, but such self-confidence is insidious. Furthermore, I have no intention of making a historic film about Rome. No, the idea is a film about contemporary, everyday Rome. There is far more material available to film Rome than most cities; a film about a day or a year. The producer would prefer the film about a day, but it could revolve around the seasons, with their distinctive winds and different events. Then again, there are seasonal moments of winter, spring, summer and autumn compressed in the course of a single day. You can be sure that there would be obstacles. If I say: ‘Will you let me in to Parliament or into the Vatican?’, I would be only met with diffidence. It doesn’t matter, we can do without. * What does a city dweller want today?7 Rome is the frame to answer this serious question, but it could equally be New York or Paris, that is, huge conglomerations on the threshold of the year 2000, in the space age. This is a time when humanity is still not in charge of its own material destiny. Just as fear, not conscious choice, informs its hopes of averting nuclear disaster, equally it keeps putting off those social reforms which, unfailingly, the newspapers and their sensational events, remind us of, reforms which should be carried out without delay. We are going to traverse Rome during the day and during the night, aware of such crucial, sometimes tragic, misgivings and conflicts, finding them in the face of a person, in a snatch of conversation, certainly not in an exceptional event. Nor is the plan to deal exclusively with the formless, with loneliness, with confusion; but, also, the struggle, be it a conscious decision or not, to give a sense to life, in other words, to make history. If, at times, we are prevented from filming a particular shot or a visual documentation we are looking for, but can only capture sound, then sound will have to suffice as a document. No one knows how many obstacles we are going to have to face. And yet, an obstacle can be transformed into a revealing image or symbol. Remember my example of the embassies? Their gates closed shut against our investigative film, after a pedestrian was run over by that car with cd plates. Be that as it may, we will move with feline grace. Not with heavy and cumbersome noisy equipment of technology of the cine-camera, but as if we didn’t have one, doing away with the mechanical weight of a film-crew operation, with traditional lighting equipment and working methods. Only then will we be able to get close to people. If you turn the pages of all the Rome daily papers, you will see how helpful they can be, in terms of our plans. Today, for example, I noticed for the first time in the listings page, the bailiffs’ judicial auctions. And so, it will be worth our while to attend a few of them. Only when you see it with your own eyes, do you realize the potential of a given situation. 7

Zavattini, ‘Dossier: I Misteri di Roma’, 13 March 1962, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 384–9.

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You know that I have always considered cinematic reconstruction really useful. It isn’t easy to persuade people, especially those who were directly involved, to reconstruct, patiently, accurately, and with awareness, crucial events of their lives. You need to get to know them well enough to become familiar with the event and its genesis. As I have said before, in situations such as these, the director must be a human being first, then a filmmaker. But there is plenty of time to probe the less apparent aspects of individual cases. Sometimes, the reconstructive method might seem nothing but heartless, and yet, it allows one to explore the wider ethical implications of an event, by researching its genesis. * Our investigative film, roughly about 4,000 metres in length, intends to provide a portrait of Rome, this extraordinary metropolis. Just the mention of its name alone immediately generates deep curiosity and sympathy the world over.8 It’s such a mixture of so many different, and indeed, contradictory aspects – as is the case for all major cities, although each has its own peculiarities. There’s its ancient calm and its modern anxiety; its faith and its cynicism; its opulence and its poverty; the gloom of loneliness and the warmth of generous conviviality. It isn’t our intention to film this Rome of ours, twice capital city, in its official moments, but in its more fleeting moments, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute. The cinematic Rome worth filming is populated by the heroes of chronicle, not history; though history will figure at times in the background of our daily events. We don’t presume, however, to produce complete and definitive research for such vast and complex matters. If we manage to contribute insights about the human, and even humanist, dimensions to what is known about a key place like Rome, then we will have fulfilled our purpose. This underlying framework, which aspires to creating poetic and ethical filmmaking, is reflected in the title, in which the word mystery expresses our constant, anxious intention to discover a few more useful secrets about the lives of the inhabitants of a big city. The film will be directed by fourteen young filmmakers and Zavattini’s role will be to coordinate their work and take responsibility for the definitive editing of the film. Each director will film a part of The Mysteries of Rome, and is already working on interviews, location scouting, and any contact deemed necessary for an in-depth and direct understanding of themes, some of which have been put forward by the directors themselves. But this is not an episode film and the number of filmmakers involved is a confirmation of this. Our film plans to be as sincere, free and as flexible as a diary, so that it can easily adapt to different situations, varying language and technique, in an unprejudiced way, every time it meets the real. We envisage using zoom lenses,

8

Zavattini, ‘Il progetto del film’, 13–29.

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and hidden recording equipment as traps; 35- or 16-millimetre cameras and even still photography may, in very exceptional circumstances, provide useful data and make images available which would not be otherwise accessible, which, however, may be essential, within the overall scope of the film. Sometimes, we may need not a single cine-camera, but ten, twenty even, to shoot a single event, and require the involvement of all the film crews. A binding contract with ourselves and the general public will guide us from the first to the last shot: we shall never use tricks of the trade or the deceptions of stereotypical reconstructions to generate an emotion or develop an argument. Instead, we are going to use discretion, even though that will require far more time, patience in situations, and patience with people whose lives and stories with which we wish to engage. We are going to cross the thresholds of homes and of places which are out of bounds, or where secrets – not state secrets, it goes without saying – are kept. The aim is not to cause a scandal, but to break down stubborn conformist barriers and to do so without breaking any laws or the spirit of democratic living, never violating biographic privacy and always respecting a person’s rights. A helicopter will show us what our city looks like from above, at the beginning and in the most typical hours of the day, at midday, then in the evening, when all the electric lights are switched on, in the darkness of night time, and the dawn of a new day, equally humble and solemn, solitary and amazing. Good morning Rome.

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Scenario Assault on Television (1962)1

Context In Assault on Television, a young man travels to Rome to sit his entrance exams at the national broadcasting company, the rai, for a job as trainee newscaster. He fails the test, commandeers a rai sound and camera truck, and decides to interview people in the street all over Rome. His plan is to find out what they really think about major political events which, according to Zavattini, are always present in the background of our lives. Enzo is a hero, a modern-day Don Quixote who embarks on an impossible mission. His ultimate plan is to launch a new channel, the ‘Channel of Truth’. He goes to a primary school and shows the children that their history books are full of lies and that the school fails to teach the meaning of freedom and democracy. When the police finally catch up with him, the police inspector asks what it is he wants to achieve. His answer is a radical change of regime and government. Although they burn his footage, they let him go free. In his first re-write, Zavattini makes the impossible nature of the enterprise explicit in the title: Don Quixote ’63. This title was dropped in later versions, in which he kept adapting the idea to a constantly changing country in which, despite the student and worker protest of 1968, and significant changes in the film industry, very little seemed to change in any substantial sense. In 1977, he framed the story in the context of contemporary society, while revising the scenario for publication in an anthology of a selection of his screenplays. The final version was made for television and broadcast in 1982. The title, Assault on Television, might suggest a link with Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s contemporary cinéma vérité ‘assault on television’ Chronicle of a Summer (1961). Yet Zavattini’s black, or satirical, humour and use of comic invention, distinguish it from the French documentary. In its original conception, and even in the final result, The Truuuuth of 1982, directed by Zavattini himself,

1

Assalto alla tv, in Zavattini, Basta con i soggetti!, 162–72.

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Zavattini’s story subverts the objectivity of filming, as proposed by Rouch and Morin, to foreground clowning, and breaks an impossible, unsustainable, fragmentation of plot into miniature sequences, too many and too chaotic. Yet somehow it works. Interestingly, in Chronicle of a Summer, only the filmmakers’ circle of friends says what it thinks. Passers-by, the strangers who are interviewed, respond with indifference, saying nothing.

Text The protagonist of this film which should, at least in the authors’ intentions, unfold at breakneck speed – as would be fitting for an escape and a pursuit in the heart of Rome – is a young man from out of town, who has come to the capital for an interview to become a television journalist. His name is Enzo and he is convinced that it is a simple thing for him to change the world with the help of television. He has reached the conclusion that the world is going to pot because everyone lies. What we need is truth, or rather, ‘the truuuuuth!’ he bellows at the authoritative and illustrious examiners of rai-tv. In his somewhat naïve excitement, he says: Let’s free ourselves and our neighbour from the fear of saying what we think. Then the wickedness and hypocrisy will come to end, and the world will open itself to peace, like a ripe pomegranate.

* He challenges the board of examiners with his views, asking them the most shocking questions: ‘Would you be willing to give up your jobs and your salary rather than betraying the truth?’ As the reader will have guessed, Enzo flunks the exam. But our hero’s despondency lasts no more than five minutes. After that he drags off Rocco, another competitor for the job who, having witnessed Enzo’s failure due to his outspoken attitude and his honesty, went the other way, in an excess of servile behaviour and conformism. He climbs into one of the rai-tv vans, equipped with all the latest technology, microphones and cameras, and drives off towards the town centre. This is how Don Quixote and Sancho Panza begin their hurried adventure. What is it that our Enzo wants to achieve? He wants to take this wonderful opportunity to do something extraordinary: carry out research into what people really think about major political events which raise ethical issues, and which frame our lives dramatically, and in contradictory ways. And then, before the police can catch up with him, he plans to slam the report on the rai-tv editorial desk, to prove that he is the man destined to launch a new tv channel, ‘the Channel of Truth’. He is convinced that under pressure he will succeed in getting

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everyone to say what they think. And what is it they think? The very opposite of what they have always said, out of opportunism, cowardice and ignorance. When he gets to Piazza del Popolo, he feels like a crusader who has reached the Holy Land. He jumps off the van with its well-known intimidating tv logo, wielding the microphone, while Rocco is holding the camera: poor old Rocco, torn between generous feelings for his new friend who is so inspiring, and his own fears! Enzo gets right to the heart of the matter, intercepting passers-by, sometimes pleading, and sometimes challenging them. He takes on the role of a person with a historic mission, and an extremely urgent one at that (as we know, the police could turn up at any moment). Go on, say what you think, express your views. Those you have been suppressing for so long; on life, death, the world, children, parents, the Pope, the government, on divorce, abortion. Let it all out, a new life begins!

* He even dares to shout that the revolution has started, because of rai-tv. At first, people are a little uncertain, taken off balance, but Enzo’s overwhelming passion is such that he attracts more and more support. Many agree that yes, there is a need for change, within and without. ‘Hurray, hurray!’ Enzo exclaims, ‘We’ve broken the ice. Speak out, let off steam, admit that up until now you couldn’t care less about your neighbour’ – that’s what he says – ‘let alone about Jesus, his Cross, and even less about those who are starving only a few kilometres from here or dying in one of the many wars which go on for ever which we’re supposed to believe are not happening. We’re all accomplices, assassins, hypocrites, and fools!’

* Faced with Enzo’s apocalyptic threatening tone, there are those who abandon the scene and those who faint. He who does not tell the truth will go to Hell, and if Hell doesn’t exist, to prison. Citizens, the Committee of Committees has promulgated a decree! The choice is: either the truth or imprisonment. Will you confess, at long last, that you vote for people you don’t respect, that you wish the worst for your nextdoor neighbour, that you have stolen and that you are thieving every day?

He makes specific accusations to people of all ages and social background (including a general), as if his knowledge extended to what he doesn’t know.

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Be that as it may, you can hardly ever go wrong, when you’re pessimistic about people’s actual behaviour. He brings large trucks to a halt, accusing them of transporting rotten or poisoned goods, and marked up in price. He brings cars to a halt, asking for an explanation: ‘But where do you think you’re going? And why? And how?’ Actions which people were carrying out, never stopping for a moment to reflect, to entertain any doubts or regrets. Enzo exposes these as pitiful and laden with guilt, and shows up their hard-hearted, self-serving context. He cuts off a man’s tie, after making him say how much it cost. He forces someone else to take out his wallet and then he studies its contents carefully, until the owner falls to his knees, asking for forgiveness, for having the money he was enjoying thoughtlessly. He manages to ring a confession out of a beautiful lady that she was on her way to see her lover. ‘Nothing wrong’, he shouts, ‘provided you tell your husband and divorce.’ He becomes so frightening that he makes the lady describe the love scenes with her lover and alternate them with descriptions of the pretence with her husband. Meanwhile, there are lots of people all around them, a growing crowd, watching with curiosity and fear. ‘Where are you escaping to?’ he shouts at someone running away. It’s a priest. Now he takes it out on the priest, vicariously putting on trial all those Christians who, in the belief that they are better than anyone else, offend other people. He shouts: ‘We’ve had enough of the same old words from the Gospel. Time to find the guts to resist them, since they’ve been useless for the past two thousand years.’ He brings Jesus into it, acting out the Via Crucis (the Way of the Cross), going faster and faster, as he thinks he’s heard the sound of the police approaching, but no, it’s only an ambulance. People are touched by his actions, so he cackles suddenly: ‘You couldn’t care less. You will all be crucified.’ He forces someone to sing; he organizes other people to sing in chorus; he makes some weep and others laugh loudly at themselves. Many are frightened. Word spreads that Enzo could be Jesus in person. He looks like an image of Jesus in a painting, they say. Rocco looks at him. They look at Rocco and think for a while that maybe he isn’t Jesus, but someone important, nonetheless. Then a wedding cortège goes by, on its way to church. Enzo confronts the bride and groom, asking them on the spot, if they’ve ever had sex. ‘Before you get married, you should know each other in a Biblical sense, to avoid nasty surprises. The more time in bed before, the fewer lies later.’ The in-laws faint while Enzo invites the two into the van to experiment, just when the sound of the siren gets louder, and this time it is definitely the police. They’re off, making their escape as fast as they can. They go on confronting people in the street: ‘Fools, you let them swindle you; it’s not true that it washes whiter!’

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Scenario Why? (1963)

Context In January 1963 Alberto Grifi and his friend Giorgio Maulini called on Zavattini at his home, hoping the writer would finance their film project. Zavattini came up with an alternative: he proposed the documentary film Why? The plan was to make an investigative film collaboratively, which would be the outcome of interviews with people of the same generation as Maulini and Grifi, about their relation to the older generation. It was never produced, but Grifi, Maulini and some other youngsters collaborated to produce a script, working collectively with Zavattini. Excerpts from this script appear later accompanied by excerpts from Zavattini’s public diary (published only a few days later, in the communist magazine Rinascita). Two months later, the scope of the project had grown. Zavattini published a second article in Rinascita, to report on its progress. Why? sought to discover the nature of the gap between generations, specifically within the Italian context of the early 1960s. Was it only down to age difference? How did young people view the war generation? Had it kept faith to its promise of social and political renewal? Could it be held responsible for not having delivered radical change to Italian society after fascism? This, essentially, was the thinking behind the project, stemming partly from Zavattini’s direct contact with a younger generation of filmmakers and partly from a quarter of a century of experimental thinking.

Text 21 January 1963. The day before, I spoke to two youngsters who are about twenty-three years old and looking for money to make a short of around 7 metres about housing problems. They had some pretty sharp ideas on modern trends of all kinds which I’m not really in a position to elaborate on. I observed

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them; and, to me, they seemed one big question mark. At one point, I said: ‘Let’s make a film called: Why? with you, and a few others, all about twenty to twentyfive.’ The inspiration (what else could I call it?) came to me from their eyes; from how they were judging me. There are so many documentaries about young people and so few on the old; on the older generation, seen from the point of view of the young. The way they see us, how they listen to us, how they interpret us. But we’re afraid to get to know how they judge us, out of fear. The world is in our hands, we run it. Yet, why do we govern it the way we do? With the tone of Ministers speaking into a mike, just after getting off a plane. Why have we let the world get to the edge of the void? Why? Why? Why? Worn out whys, and yet, they are new ones, if they come from the new generation and I would be wary of suggesting even a single one. We won’t give them a single metre of film, until they have collected sack loads of whys among their peers and emptied them out in front of us. We’ll listen, alternating despair with the sudden pleasure that a genuine discovery brings; even when it hits us with its violence. It might also happen that by the end of the process, they will grow old and we will grow young. I would like to get thirty or so of them together, in a large room and eavesdrop on them. (Inevitably, if I were in their midst to hear their conversations, the conversations would change.) We tried to work out some rough costs. Maulini and Grifi were saying: ‘We’ll eat in any old place. We’ll sleep in the fields.’ But you need eight or nine million liras. Maybe we are going to succeed and beat the record for the lowest budget film. Is there a madman willing to take the risk? The two had just left when A. T. turned up. I mentioned the pressing questions; outspoken; sounded like a trial in a court of law; an assault, which I thought would come from these youngsters. Those two youngsters have become five already, and while I write they’re in a coffee bar talking and blaming us. * Rome, 26 March 1963. I have already published the news in Rinascita about a film some young people are working on, a film which is the outcome of their questions and those of many other young people whom they interviewed in Naples, Milan and other places. I spent a few evenings happily surrounded by the heat of their questions and making some measure of progress in the harsh discipline of listening to other people. I must remind my readers that these youngsters want to use this film to put on trial the generation of twenty-fiveyear olds and older, whom they will soon join, and probably having to sacrifice the surprise and indignation that animates them at the moment. Thus, they intend to take advantage of this incandescent moment to throw their interviews and related questions into the pond, all undoubtedly useful, because they’re genuine. Although, I do wish to point this out at the outset, what emerges is not something quarrelsome and presumptuous, nor the usual finger pointing at the older generation out just for the sake of it, or out of

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intellectual laziness, or transient fury. There is, rather, at bottom a bitterness, which stems perhaps from feeling that all the mistakes of this era are so vast, so all-embracing, that they grow in size and envelop them at one and the same time that they are in the act of judgement; for which reason, although they began as judges, they are aware of the fact that by the end of the trial, they could be on the opposite side. But I don’t wish to anticipate these young people’s ideas, first of all, because, in seeking a specific cinematic form of expression, they are the ones who are going to shape it and give it deeper significance; and second, because I’d risk confusing myself with them, when what I’m most interested in – and this is exhilarating – is taking the cue from them, if anything, not anticipating their moves, and making a note of their experience; and this is possibly the first time in my life when I try not to interfere too much with the autonomous unfolding of other people’s ideas. I heard some whys as ancient as mankind and whys linked to the most ephemeral casuistry; some are unrivalled in their naivety and others alarming, poignant. I am going to cite a handful. They have collected about a thousand whys among their peers from all social classes, and now they’re working through them, with a view to select those which, taken as a whole, sum up our era. But since I haven’t got all the papers to hand, I shan’t quote verbatim, their precise words, the language, which is so important. * ‘How can you speak of disarmament in an environment in which there is so much mutual diffidence and dread dominates?’ ‘Why is it that your education system, both public and private, having pointed out the evil, implicitly or explicitly, tends to educate us in defending that evil and never to struggle to be rid of it?’ I could go on for hours. I’ve noticed that the theme of cinema is quite rare (but I have yet to work through a pile of papers). I do think, though, that the concept of cinema, no longer in the sense of a history of cinema, but of a history of culture, is not easy to disseminate. Allow me to elaborate. We should not consider new issues in cinema as a problem. The question is asking how much or how little cinema engages, or fails to engage, with them. For they really are a new phenomenon, in terms of culture. This involves far too radical transformations in our customary relation to the sphere of entertainment in general terms, and with its economic and management structures, as has already been pointed out.1 In a society in which group collaboration supports all kinds of activities, a group of young people seeks to make a film entitled: Why? They agree, essentially, as to which themes to include and as to their interpretation. A film in which one generation, today’s youth, challenges another, the one they issue

1

Zavattini, Diario cinematografico, 386–90.

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from, engaging in questions which are either forgotten, or buried from view, by a historic context which coincides with the events of our century and two world wars. This vital relationship with the real protagonists of human experience, in diverse locations does not wish to form an ill-defined protest or a cold document of casual improvisation; rather, it seeks to capture the contemporary event of the human landscape in Italy, both logically and organically and intended in its social, political, cultural and ideological aspects. A dialogue between two generations which coexist, filtered by independent reflection. * Some of the questions collected in the streets: Why is so much money spent on publicity? Why do people on trams and buses always take out their frustration on the drivers and the ticket collectors of an inefficient transport system? Why does television dish out nineteenth-century drama and refuse to bring to our attention the most significant works of our time? Why have you never read a book? Why did you do exceptional things during the war, but then you returned to the daily habits of your petty, living, death? Why didn’t you say to me: ‘It’s like this for these reasons’, instead of saying: ‘This is how it is?’ Why do you compromise? So, the war failed to resolve anything; you speak of war, of death, of fascism, of Resistance, but then you failed to uproot the ills of society. Why, after the tragic experience of the war, and the moral values of the Resistance, the economic recovery, does the Mafia still exist in Sicily, adultery still exists, class divisions, illiteracy, scandals? Why is there as much censorship as there was before the war? Why does racism still exist? Evictions of the elderly? Why are the sick abandoned to their own devices? Why does stinking housing exist? Why the abysmal divide between North and South? The film will have two sides to it; the first will show the official story of the real; it will be organized cinematically using archive footage, photographs, speeches and so on; the second will clash dramatically with the first, its anatomy being the end result of significant events intervening. Focussing in on a train in the South and a family of emigrants, we begin a friendly conversation. Why have they left their village? What does it mean to face this journey? They tell us about the places where they have lived, about their luggage; tell us how people look at them; the ticket collector; the relationship between them and the bigger problems in Italy, the question of war. An investigation about an investigation. A television crew decides to make an investigative programme about the conflict between private property and the working class, such as the conditions of miners in Sardinia who, in a landscape bleached by the sun and surrounded by luxury homes of the mine’s owners, blocked the road with their bodies during the Giro di Sardegna bicycle tour as a form of public protest. Seeing the crew in action. The criteria for choosing interviewees; the most poignant cuts to filming; how the interviewees behave, when they see themselves in the broadcast programme; especially when they realize that part of what

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they said was edited out, obviously considered compromising. We will film these parts of the dialogues which television censorship will interrupt. We will continue with what television has failed to do; go deeper into the issues of the working class in its genuine and tragic aspects. 2

Cesare Zavattini with Francesco Aluffi, Roberto Capanna, Alberto Grifi, Giorgio Maulini, Umberto Monaci, Pier Luigi Murgia, Andrea Ranieri, Vittorio Armentano and Marcello Bollero, ‘Perché?’, in Roberta Mazzoni, ‘Introduzione’, in Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti!, 152–8.

2

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Scenario Free Newsreels (1967)1

Context This text is a formulation defining the stage before a programmatic Manifesto. It also encapsulates a generic scenario and the earliest description of the Free Newsreels project, following on from a project Zavattini had launched in 1963, The Newsreel for Peace, as he states in the opening paragraph. There is also careful attention devoted to the organization and the practicalities of setting up and spreading a grassroots movement, formulating low-budget, guerrilla filmmaking by non-professionals, emanating from a new conception of cinema as alternative, critical, counter-hegemonic, pitted against mainstream cinema, and seeking alliances in an expanding network of filmmakers to resist it, creating new geopolitical spaces for cinema. The text provides a full context, making any further details unnecessary. In the event, between 1967 and 1971, a movement did exist, participation grew, and the Free Newsreels outlived attempts at independent political student filmmaking, and had a say and a purchase on socially engaged cinema and particularly defined parameters for guerrilla filmmaking. To cite Zavattini directly: We have used the guerrilla cinema definition, not because we follow any nineteenth-century idealist notions, but in order to point to specific obstruction the film industry sets up, against any form of cinema which doesn’t coincide with its lucrative finality. Guerrilla cinema, we say, because, at the outset, we lack the weapons or the tools to compete with the weapons of the film industry which has absorbed first, then conditioned, all cinematic activity. 1

Zavattini, ‘I cinegiornali liberi’ (1967) in Roberto Nanni (ed.), Una straordinaria utopia: Zavattini e il non film, Reggio Emilia 6–7 March 1998, Reggio Emilia: Archivio Audiovisivo del movimento Operaio e Democratico and Comune di Reggio Emilia and Archivio Cesare Zavattini, Roma-Reggio Emilia. [facsimile, n.p.]

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Text In 1962, I put forward a proposal for The Newsreel for Peace. It was a typically collaborative work on a theme which had to be verified: learning about something in order to act on it. Rinascita was our headquarters and the focus of the editing stage. We used orthodox and unorthodox distribution channels. There was an absolute shortage of resources to put together the first issue, a lack of organization, a lack of real direction and our unheeded requests to let us continue, making use of the experience gained in producing the first issue, including the negative aspects. Five years later, in 1967, there is every reason to put forward a new proposal: The Free Newsreels. The intervening five years are proof positive that that original proposal was along the right lines, forecasting as it did a standstill. For the most to which cinema could aspire was stasis. By now, cinema is sclerotized into an industrial structure which only allows individual expression towards the construction of a certain kind of culture and its identification as a phenomenon, which is, however, ineffective, having no purchase on reality and its needs. We have reached the stage at which culture is reduced to a spectacle, orchestrated by anchors and presenters, within a bourgeois system. It points to a refusal to use cinema for a collective enterprise, for struggle, to reconnect with the values of Neo-realism, which was betrayed. The Neo-realist line was critical, and of continuous alignment with social facts. The reasons for its failure can be identified with the failure of any effective reform of the film industry at a political level. This has been adopted as an interpretative criterion of an entire era, at least, on a cultural level. That is to say, this state of affairs was not one we sought to achieve. It was forced upon us. The failure of cinema consisted in a return to order, to get back in line within the dictates of general culture, and denying any specific function to cinema, at a specific historic moment in time. In the meantime, the potential of the cinematic medium has greatly increased. But this has been of no benefit whatsoever. On the contrary, the majority of home movie makers only repeats on a smaller scale the errors made by cinema on a large scale, to achieve an assumed freedom of sorts, for which it continues to seek artistic expression which is entirely divorced from any social engagement, and viewing commitment as a limitation. There are so many ways to respond to this breakdown in understanding. Using film is still the most appropriate. We realize that we haven’t used it. That we interrupted the thread of logic we were pursuing. But we are faced with it once more, at a critical time, when enthusiasm is less spontaneous than after the war, but no less legitimate. We were on the cusp, then. But now, we are subjugated. Even the word critique has been devalued and elicits only boredom. To even mention the Resistance risks provoking ridicule. This is the context in which the Free Newsreels are coming into existence. They do not engage with filmmakers. One could say, in the spirit of polemic, that they are pitted against filmmakers. Today, we can list at least twenty

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filmmakers whose work is informed by a critical conscience. But this is in the context of creative and commercial modes and timing of practice which, leaving aside individual exceptions, settle for a pace of struggle, development and dialectical engagement which has been imposed by power. It is not a question of using improvised statements of rebellion to supposedly deny, ignore, or overcome these obstacles. These cinematic expressions will continue to follow their own trajectory, but one thing is certain: they will benefit from the experience of Free Newsreels which are born and are developing outside the organizational structure of the film industry, both in terms of its creative and commercial workings. Free Newsreels are implicitly in opposition to professional filmmakers, since they continue to be an élite, so that, despite their intrinsic value, ultimately, as far as they are concerned, cinema is a one-way form of communication in which the few address the many. For them, the concept of caste survives unscathed, with all the economic, organizational, consequences, including the impact on content which such an outlook engenders. We have been saying, using a slogan, if you will, a cinema by the many for the many. But an approach of this kind subverts the status quo. And there’s a need to bring about radical change, by empowering once again cinema’s primary potential, freeing it from all the layers of incrustation which are the deposits of malpractice carried out by the few. A practice based on the few always already meant restricting the potential of cinema. Developing investigative cinema, or a cinema of truth, produced promising results, informed by an underlying plan to take development beyond new subject areas and even beyond new modes of filmmaking, reflecting a vision of a film practice which had no truck with the current normalization of cinema. Eventually, this latter was to absorb even cinéma vérité, restricting its scope within a niche, of apparently different films, but which were, in reality, similar to all the others. This was, in other words, a revolution which had been officially sanctioned. We have settled for a few meteors and today they say that in Italy at least twenty young filmmakers are going in the right direction; it’s true. They say that there’s a free cinema in North America. This is true. They say that in Brazil there are other young filmmakers who are also making a difference; true. But it has always been the case that something gives, even in the darkest times. I think this is in the nature of things. Yet, we may seek to intervene, and change the nature of things, or rather, correct the course of their inevitable unfolding, when we come to realize that the pace is too slow, and that change takes the form of multiple interventions, carried out over the short term, instead of settling for the long term. Free Newsreels aim for the short term, with the intention of bringing about radical reform. Rebellion can no longer be postponed by a cinema which is reduced to nothing but a series of dazzling films, and to anecdote prevailing over history. It seems bizarre, at this point, that the film camera should be used exclusively for adaptations of novels and for telling stories. It’s hard to believe that it has

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been identified with a genre, and that so many people, intellectuals and many others working in the cultural sphere should be excluded, when they’re keen to express themselves, yet are denied the medium of cinema and barred a priori from experimentation and critique. And moreover, it is strange to say the least that the Left has always shown acceptance towards hierarchies within the film industry, as if they belonged to the most efficient system and are indisputably the only way to have a presence in cinema. This outlook has cost the Left a loss of autonomy and of flexibility to effect change, against a backdrop of willing acceptance of the cultural geography, which is not determined by any intrinsic nature of cinema, but by specific choices in how to make films, how to run their production cycle, including how to organize festivals. The reason they are called Free Newsreels as opposed to a more generic ‘free cinema’, is that we are pursuing a socially engaged and dialectical line, translated into interventions and relationships. A strategy of this kind allows for any number of interventions, expressions, and any form of cooperation, individual and also collective, which, in any case, are bound to alternate and cross fertilize. Free Newsreels are flexible. They can be the expression of a single voice or of ten, or even a 100 voices, concentrating on a single theme, or several themes, indirectly converging on an overarching subject, or even diverging, but sharing the same critical, informative and explorative thrust. They’re not predefined in terms of being extroverted or introverted, they’re not documentary in a strict sense, nor are they autobiographical, nor biographical, nor lyrical, nor characterized by a third-person narrative. It’s the material itself which is going to dictate what form they take, bearing in mind the objective which is to inform as effectively as possible, making use of whatever is needed to achieve this purpose. It may be that some of these newsreels will work out better with a focus on small towns, rather than on a city. In such cases, the cities will gain from the experience too.2 In any case, there will need to be a national collection centre to coordinate and edit the footage coming from different parts of Italy, in a mutually fruitful cultural exchange. These centres of collection, editing and production could even be set up on a regional basis. There will be a natural creative process in the making of these films, with high and low points, in the course of which individual and collective experience will be developing and will be shared around among those involved. And a centralized bulletin will collect and publish accounts in small towns or big cities alike, of the work carried out, the themes, and whatever else is relevant. Some of these films will be a disaster from the beginning. There is no point in concealing the fact that the percentage of good quality work will be very small. Not so 2

This is true of a film made a few years later by one of the early participants in the Free Newsreels, Matti da slegare (Fit to be Untied) (1975), Directed by Silvano Agosti, Marco Bellocchio, Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli, Cf. Silvano Agosti, Marco Bellocchio, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, Matti da slegare, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. The film was about a topical theme, the psychiatric hospital system in Italy, prior to reform, grounded in a provincial hospital and some of its patients.

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much because of technical shortcomings, as for a lack of maturity to take on responsibility on a public level, among individuals and groups, beyond the scope of home movie making. The lack of maturity is part of today’s immaturity in terms of citizenship, in recognizing one’s individual sense of responsibility, and applying it in a creative and original way to the current situation. The last fifteen years have impacted heavily on the autonomy of each one of us. The success of just one film will be enough to cast a positive light on all the others, as a model of practice and intervention available to all. Those groups of people or individuals who wish to embark on what is, essentially, a collective enterprise, need to be clear that even 10 metres of footage can be all it takes to make a useful contribution. Contributions can vary from a straightforward, focussed, critique, to a one-dimensional news item, to a critical review of data, to a stand-alone fictional project. Clearly, we’re not rejecting out of hand the positive contribution of cinema up to now. But the context of viewing is going to change to one in which such expressions will be confronted by new tensions and a new dynamic in terms of speeded up production cycles, collective interventions, private ways of seeing, which can become public and be generalized. Actually, bringing each event or phenomenon to public attention will be par for the course, and it will be vital to do so without belittling in any way the depth of analysis or the filmmaker’s individuality, as constructive as it is precious and undeniable. It is not important to emphasize the freedom involved in choosing themes and how much footage to shoot. Bear in mind that a ten-minute newsreel may have more value than one lasting over three hours. That humble short message could travel the length and breadth of Italy and take on a life of its own. Or it could be included in a longer newsreel. Regional newsreels could be the outcome and focus for work carried out on a local level. Also, this or that region may supply newsreels of varying footage and length, short and long alike, which will then be edited into a project of national resonance. It might happen that some themes will are suggested at national and central level to then concretize in a specific newsreel, as a one off. Whether it is a current event in the news which has taken on more weight in public perception, or a person, or a cultural event, the criterion in common is urgency. But urgency doesn’t exclude an analytical approach. Themes are going to vary. Vietnam, divorce, the crisis of cinema, the family, democracy, God, atheism, public intellectuals, poetry of the past two decades, Christianity today, alienation, defining what people aspire to in today’s world, or the relationship between thought and action. But what matters is that each of these topics is neither introspective nor the opposite, neither urgent nor requiring more time for reflection. The overall shape and the timescale these topics are going to take in the course of their production cycles is not a given. Genre categorization is superfluous. What defines Free Newsreels is the avoidance of categories of this nature and of definitions such as investigative filmmaking or psychological, scientific or poetic filmmaking. Instead, Free Newsreels act as a stimulus to come up with unthinkable terms, through the creative process which their making demands. This is something genre-based cinema is too slow to put into practice, for the reasons mentioned at the outset.

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There is absolutely no need to freeze filmmaking into genre and repetition. Allow Free Newsreels all the flexibility and all the freedom to be indefinite they need. Call it an absence of style, as a deliberately provocative act, aimed at generating interest in a variety of topics and issues involved, with no concern for style. The more they develop, the more they will find their own growing measure of internal structure. There is no call for heavyweight, bureaucratic organization. The abovementioned functions can be carried out by centralizing coordination, and then, in the event that the dangers of prevarication arise, peripheral Free Newsreels can deal with such insurgent attempts at consolidating power. Central coordination could follow the example of experiences made during the immediate post-war period, which are topical today within the same political sphere of allegiances, favouring collaborations, as in the case of the theme of peace. Let’s be clear about this. We’re launching these newsreels on the proviso that they stand for a real, tangible, need; one embodying a more critical, a more dynamic, a more specific approach than any vague revolt against habits, against the paralysis of political action, against the stunting or outright suppression of commitment, against participation in the struggle and against its side lining into parallel directions, and never brought to bear on the events themselves. This is a rebellion against a parallel culture, a rebellion which sets itself against sliding backwards into cultural practice, as it was once conceived. I have put forward the idea of an organizational centre which need not be only a notional entity, but an organism which can also facilitate networking and sharing contacts, by virtue of the flexibility of the technical medium, and with the potential of growing through fundraising to improve the quality of its activities. It’s no mystery that such an initiative will clash with obstacles, at local and national level, some petty, others not to be underestimated, some explicitly political in nature, others hard to pinpoint. There will be times when the law itself will be an obstacle. We can also be certain that in certain circles the resistance will be very stiff. Which is not to say that it couldn’t collapse, if it was faced with the strength of solidarity and of a collaborative approach elsewhere in the country. What is more, experience travels; it can be shared out, on a technical level and in terms of viewing the work, a key factor, which, in some situations and places will be a clandestine activity. This is why we have described Free Newsreels as guerrilla cinema, because, in addition to its production difficulties, there are also the distribution difficulties. Not that we rule out already existing distribution channels which, depending on the place and the situation, may be useable. But it would be a mistake not to seek out and use new channels, even modest ones, apparently inefficient, such as a room, a small coffee bar, a small square, any wall you can use to project what’s been done. There are going to be a range of obstacles and difficulties and all kinds of reactions to these obstacles, some successful, others not. The one positive element from which everything else follows, is this: production is possible. There are no longer unsurmountable economic issues or technical taboos. There’s a

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will to experiment and get involved in cinema. Cinematic illiterates break the spell and come to cinema through the main door, to make use of what it can yield here and now in this contemporary moment. It’s a quantitative expansion of interest which can become qualitative and include members of the middle class, of different social classes, and the political spectrum among Socialists. All these constituencies have one thing in common: a rejection of the so-called cinema Establishment, and all its attendant ethical, political, and social establishments.3 It’s a platform to aid the reconstruction of a unifying cultural dignity, to which other media – namely, magazines and dailies – are no longer able to relate. This has led to a state of affairs in which oppositional voices are isolated and unable to become a chorus. As things stand today, cinema is a private institution, and the Free Newsreels want to make it a public one, with a view to developing culture into a popular and avant-garde, dramatic and selective entity, through an ongoing and relentless, collaborative practice, involving even disparate parts of the country. The framework is not contradictory or, at least, has an inbuilt tendency to break out of any supposed antithesis. We have used the guerrilla cinema definition, not because we follow any nineteenth-century idealist notions, but in order to point to specific obstruction the film industry sets up, against any form of cinema which doesn’t coincide with its lucrative finality. Guerrilla cinema, we say, because, at the outset, we lack the weapons or the tools to compete with the weapons of the film industry which has absorbed first, then conditioned, all cinematic activity. * The first action we must take is to set down all the principles which are motivating us to get involved in a Manifesto format. In this Manifesto, the reasons must be set out very clearly, so clearly that anywhere in Italy, anyone will be able to appropriate them and act independently from any organization. At the same time, the Manifesto will mention an organization, a reference point, to facilitate exchanges of footage across the country, one of the main features of Free Newsreels. Each person should feel autonomous and, at the same time, be working in collaboration, targeting those situations which are most familiar, never for a moment excluding the ambition and the scope of cultural, geographic and know-how exchange, which may take on a broader significance later on. The Manifesto originates in Reggio Emilia where the signatories are the core group promoting it in Reggio. Additionally, it is open to twenty or so other names of those who stand for the main direction of new culture informing Free Newsreels. The second stage will require the promoters themselves to set in motion three or four experimental Free Newsreel centres, in three or four parts of the country. Actually, it would be better still, that this should be done

3

‘Establishment’ is italicized, to signal that it is in English in the text.

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first, so then the Manifesto could carry the authority bestowed by action, by setting in motion the wheels of change without delay, even though there will be mention in the Manifesto. This will give the authors and signatories a sense of purpose. The pilot places could be Reggio itself, Rome, a town in the South of the peninsula, even a tiny village in the South, provided that in each case objective conditions exist for a group or an individual to produce a newsreel and subsequently they can stay in touch with the organizing group. Rome might be more convenient, without taking away from Reggio its promoting role. The idea was born in Reggio, it will develop in Rome, where we set up a small committee to carry out technical and conceptual planning. We might wish to set a theme, to help these proposed pilot centres in cities and towns to get started, by providing them with a general framework. We needn’t worry that it would be a limiting factor, since a foundational attribute of the Free Newsreels’ outlook and a typical characteristic, is the subversion of themes, whenever themes prove to be restrictive of a dialectical approach. This shows that setting themes needn’t be a limiting, in terms of research. * The reason for mentioning 8- and 16-millimetre cine-cameras is that we want to give a voice to the many who are silent. But this doesn’t mean excluding normal cameras for those who have them. Nothing is ruled out. Even using stock photographs is admissible to make a newsreel, provided their use is justified by an expressive need. As to the frequency of Free Newsreels, it’s pointless at this stage to make any forecasts. Some will be monthly, some weekly, some annual, others daily, and their nature will vary from place to place. There are so many factors involved that we can’t possibly make predictions. It might so happen that monthly production is going to feed into weekly production and vice versa. In some areas, new contacts will be made, but not in others. Some centres may become more active than others. In other centres, output will be governed by the how often the collective is going to produce a synthesis of its collaborative work. It would be a mistake at launch to expect everything to be already planned out in detail for this wakeup call, this flexible and varied project, often subject to sudden change due to unexpected events. Obviously, we aren’t ruling out the participation of professional filmmakers. But we have every confidence in the insurgency of new filmmakers, who have nothing in common with the current profile of filmmakers.4

4

Two paragraphs of postscript have been cut, since they repeat what was said in the opening paragraphs about the production and organizational problems which meant that only one issue of the Newsreel for Peace was produced.

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Scenario The Seven Cervi Brothers (1968)1

Context On 1 April 1954, Zavattini’s public diary published in Cinema Nuovo included an account of a detour in a car on his way to his hometown, Luzzara, in Reggio Emilia.2 The detour was to visit a farm where a fascist brigade had carried out a dawn raid, on 25 November 1943 and burned down a haystack, to force seven farmers, the youngest, only twenty-one, the oldest, forty-four, and all brothers, to come out of the farmhouse. The young farmers were communists who joined the Resistance early on and were hiding large numbers of Allied prisoners of war, including British, Australian and Russian soldiers. The Cervi brothers were executed a month later, on 28 December 1943. The brigade belonged to Mussolini’s Neo-fascist puppet Republic, the so-called Repubblica Sociale or di Salò, set up after the nation changed its allegiance, on 8 September 1943, abandoning Axis to side with the Allies. In the early days of German Occupation, civil war broke out in northern and central Italy, between the Italian Resistance and the Neo-fascist brigades whose allegiance was to this so-called Salò Republic.3 Zavattini’s public diary, as it originally appeared in Cinema Nuovo in 1954, included photographs of the surviving father, Alcide Cervi, shaking hands with the president of the Republic, Luigi Einaudi, showing how significant this episode was at the time. It was memorialized, by the Left. Two magazines, Lo Spettatore Italiano and Ponte, had been planning to make a film about the Cervi massacre. Ponte published an article by a Communist Party member and former member of the Italian Resistance, Calamandrei on the episode, which explains the reason for Zavattini’s detour. Neither project went ahead.

Zavattini, I sette fratelli Cervi, acz Sog. R 52/1, fols 1-2. ‘Scaletta’, acz Sog. R 52/4, fols 1–9 and 10–15, dated 15 November 1965. Unpublished. 2 Zavattini, ‘Il film sui sette Fratelli Cervi’, Cinema Nuovo, no. 32, 1 April 1954, 167–9. 3 Ansano Giannarelli (ed.), Zavattini sottotraccia, Rome: Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio, 2009, 59–60. The film was produced by A.B. Cinematografica. 1

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Zavattini wrote two scenarios, the first in collaboration with Luigi Chiarini and Renato Nicolai, who also wrote the voice-over for the film The Seven Farmers (I sette contadini), a twenty-minute documentary in colour, and directed by Elio Petri. The second scenario was for The Seven Cervi Brothers, a full-length feature, directed by Gianni Puccini and made ten years later.4 The first consists in an interview with the father, Alcide Cervi, who relates the story of the massacre, preceded by shots of the wives and children left behind, of the farmstead and surrounding land, and where the brothers were executed and where they were buried. Zavattini’s approach to these projects was unique. In both films, he resisted the kind of glorification and martyrdom which had characterized public discourse on the Left, especially the pci, the Italian Communist Party. Instead, in the first, the medium-length documentary, his approach was a low key sermo humilis, allowing a minimalist simplicity of language to feature day-to-day life on a Reggio Emilia farm and making time for the personal testimony of the father. In planning out the second film, as he himself explains in the rationale given further, he chose to avoid and warns against what he calls ‘instrumentalization’, to be taken in a negative sense, that is to say, an avoidance of what he considered the root of the Cervi drama, not the persecution and execution of the brothers, as the orthodox Left sought to do, but instead, to address their intransigence and unwillingness to use tactics, which inflexibility characterized their politics and entire outlook and led to their capture and death. Following his subtler analysis, they were warned by the partisan leaders, and advised to leave the farmstead, yet they decided to stay, unwilling as they were to abandon their private world, to come to grips with the real one. Zavattini went even further, relating the Cervi episode of Italian history to contemporary Italy, to world affairs, to Vietnam, suggesting that slogans should be replaced with effective politics. A lone, unpopular voice, within the Left, who held the seven Cervis up as emblematic martyrs to the cause. He overturned such an analysis when one would least expect it: in 1968. There were other lessons to learn from that tragic incident, as, on a broader scale, he pointed out at the end of his Preface: We need to critically review how man, society, and power intersect. But this would take too long to discuss here, and already belongs to current advanced Italian discourse.

Text 1 Preface. The film revolves around two basic feelings which were crucial for the Cervis, and which today are very widespread among young people: autonomy 4

Possibly the only surviving copy of the virtually unknown The Seven Farmers was restored in 1995. The celluloid and digital copies are kept in a film archive, originally set up under the auspices of Zavattini himself, and of which he acted as its first president. Namely, the Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio. Cf. Zavattini sottotraccia, 59–60.

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and pride.5 These two feelings were to assume a strategic importance for the lives of the Cervis. They were combined with a monolithic approach to life characterized by impatience. Thus, the Cervi brothers, who spurned fascism and the war as inimical to those two feelings, were no different from young people today, in being unable to accept the tactics required, depending on the revolutionary circumstances, each plan appropriate in one situation, but, however suitable for that one, not suitable in a different context. Tactics might require advancing and retreating, offensives and long periods of simply watching and waiting. They were offended by attacks aimed at their independence, at their pride in different areas of their lives, which most people tend to put up with. For example, there was the offence against their personal dignity associated with the authoritarian context of military service, something integral to the system. Aldo rejects them, reacts and pays the price for his rebellion. From that first act of intransigent refusal the entire Cervi ‘sin’ unfolds, in the sense that they feel utterly alien, not a part of society, nor of all the compromises it demands of us. They feel strangled by the insult to mankind and want to free themselves of it without delay. They know their limits of tolerance. From their perspective, a clean break is best; the alternative is to die, if that is what it takes to free themselves from unacceptable conditions in which to live a life. From these attitudes stems their metapolitics: they follow the counsel of life’s natural rhythms, more intransigent and better defined than those pertaining to politics. And their working-class anarchism arises from such an outlook which leads them to make their ‘being seven’ and their home the hub of their inner strength. Their naivety makes them consider their homestead the shining ‘City of the Sun’, surrounded by fascist darkness. A naïve anticipation, albeit exemplary and touching, of the society they dream of, one in which there is no injustice. However, there are no pre-revolutionary examples, no islands created before total liberation can take place. Thus, even regards the Revolution to come, they become ‘a constant headache’, one which interferes with painstaking organization, methodical plotting, long delays and anticipated compromise. Why do the Cervis behave this way? Because they do. They say they want socialism, and they really do, but working patiently today, with simplicity, and making compromises, when needed, in order to make it happen tomorrow, is not for them, since their commitment is always overt, even in dark times, rather than being covert today, to build for the time when it can be more explicit, when, that is, socialism has become a reality. No, their drama consists in having to always feel, every day, and too intensely, the insult of living in these times, in feeling its effect on their relations with others. Consequently, their drama is, primarily, existential, a drama which wouldn’t have ceased to exist, in different forms, in their relationship with socialism. This explains why, as far as they are concerned, the test of time is right now, while they are alive or else it is of no use. Other resistance fighters are more 5

Zavattini, I sette fratelli Cervi, ‘Scaletta’, acz Sog.R 52/4, fols 1–3, dated 15 November 1965. Unpublished.

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patient and more ‘accepting’ than they are. But there has to be a limit, from their perspective. In the way they feel – this goes especially for Aldo – they resemble their mother, more than their father. After their deaths, their father will endure countless insults. He will still be able to go on sleeping and eating, in the context of the daily grind of everyday rituals. Whereas, their mother has seen too much. One year later, she will follow her sons into death. ‘Their father is strong and teaches his grandchildren’ – [Piero] Calamandrei has written, in connection with the Cervis’s mother – ‘After one harvest there is another, but I am only a mother, dear sons, I’m coming with you.’6 It follows that this scenario serves to identify a specific point of view, because the story of the Cervi, in this regard, being no different from a Biblical story, can be seen from different angles. Indeed, so far, the difficulty in visualizing the Cervi film has had nothing to do with relating the facts. There are simply too many of them and, what is more, they are thought-provoking, in terms of what they suggest. No, the difficulty has been how to frame the facts in such a way as to interpret the nub of their story and extract its contemporary validity. In this regard, the line we are following, after a decade of reflection and several changes of plan, seems the most authentic and most in step with our times. To elaborate: the conflict that I set up is in keeping with the modern world, and there is surely no need to dwell on this point, since it overcomes an epic or Georgic interpretation and challenges us to consider the relation between man and society.7 This aspect may seem exclusively existentialist, but it is not. We are now moving in this direction, after many years of instrumentalizing culture and it is the only way to make the shift towards a politics of humanity, in the era of catastrophe, pitted against its destruction; I am referring of course to atomic genocide. Adopting a Manichean stance in forming separatist power blocs, which is how the party in question acted, in no way lead to peace, but directly to atomic war. Just consider the stalemate in relation to Vietnam. Therefore, we need to critically review how man, society and power intersect. But this would take too long to discuss here, and already belongs to current advanced Italian discourse. Piero Calamandrei, ‘Ai Fratelli Cervi, alla loro Italia’, in Calamandrei, Uomini e città della Resistenza, Bari: Laterza, 1955. 7 (Zavattini’s footnote no. 1, handwritten in top margin of fol. 2): ‘As you can see [note addressed to the director, Gianni Puccini, also a Communist] this reference is not aimed at you, but at a common interpretation of the Cervis, which has always been part of the background context, for a range of approaches. Indeed, it marks self-criticism in respect of our movement, in the past, and the themes which interest us.’ His reference is to socialist, or Soviet, realism, and how it eschewed the anti-hero, preferring to exalt the ideal hero as typical. Zavattini always opposed such a stance, which marked a strong current, endorsed at the Perugia Conference on Neo-realism, by Umberto Barbaro and others, including Carlo Lizzani, but more influential by the time of the Parma Conference in 1953. One reason for Italian New Cinema’s spread outside national borders was its ‘third-way’ approach to commitment and socially engaged film, in open works. Zavattini elaborates on this point, accusing the orthodox communist Left of instrumentalization of culture which is not the same as opting for escapism. 6

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What is essential, after this Preface, is the episode selected for the beginning, when Aldo was drafted into the Italian army, because it sheds a new light on the whole sequence of events.8 He felt the full weight of the insult to his dignity and reacted to a provocation. He is barely in time to hear further insults about the war and fascism while he is incarcerated in Gaeta, in the company of other ‘political’ prisoners, before being freed, but already in a state of alarm. He is aware of one thing: that further insults will follow. He is not politicized, though. He has no one to guide him. His reaction, and his brothers’ reaction, is to be free from the loss of freedom they already anticipate. They are convinced that they are fighting a lone battle in accordance with what the Revolution requires of them, but when they are back in touch with the Revolution (in the form of Sarzi, a member of the cln [the Committee for National Liberation] when he insists they should abandon their homestead), they come to see that the rationale he represents is very different from the principles which govern how they live their lives. The orthodox rules of clandestine life, involving attack and retreat, at the opportune moment, are correlated with one’s relation with society, and with the offence that comes from it, since the Revolution, although it is diametrically opposed to the dominant system, inevitably issues from the same society, and, for this reason, demands a gradual approach, which is alien to their way of seeing things; it’s slower, more methodical than theirs, which is hurried, looking for shortcuts, typical of a farming mentality. Caught in this antinomy of positions, although they are sons of the Revolution, they are isolated, dramatically alone on their chosen path of autonomy, pride and outrage which, as they see it, must be immediately addressed without delay, which explains why they all share the same fate, and so soon. In other words, ‘The City of the Sun’ is raised to the ground. The Revolution will see to it that this ‘City of the Sun’ is rebuilt, within the limits of the revolutionary movement which sustains it after the Liberation. But let us never forget that the Cervi brothers were the first to die in the Italian Resistance, and that fascism developed far worse massacres later, when its brutality combined with German brutality. They fell, it is worth remembering, only four months after the 8 September.

2 The Cervi Brothers9 This story contains the essential episodes of the life and struggles of the seven Cervi brothers who lived and died for freedom and for the social progress of humanity. We have chosen this story because, in our view, it is a profoundly dramatic and poetic expression of what drives people to resist and which motives: human, emotional and political.

8 9

(Zavattini’s note no. 2) ‘In my first draft, it merged into the other episodes.’ Zavattini, I sette fratelli Cervi, ‘Soggetto’, acz Sog. R, 52/3 1968, fols 1–12.

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In the lives of these seven brothers, the Resistance is not an occasional event or an adventure out of the blue. It is the natural development of their way of living, feeling, loving and fighting, because they joined the Resistance with the same commitment they gave to improving the land, seeking technological and cultural innovation, to improve their family’s quality of life, demonstrating, moreover, that resisting is the natural condition of every man today, who wishes to live like a man. But when the time comes for everyone’s life and livelihood, the entire population’s, to be seriously threatened, the Resistance was born, a collective form of resisting, which is in keeping with each person’s private resistance. It is not enough, in such a situation, to fight as a united people, for each nation must join forces with other nations, and find in this international alliance the strength to save the entire human race.10 The Cervi brothers paid with their lives this need to join in the profound spirit of the Resistance. In their Campegine farm, they gave shelter to more than eighty prisoners of war, French, English, Russian, Polish, Americans, New Zealanders and South Africans, and this is the reason they were imprisoned and for this they died. But that farmhouse became a key meeting place for the European Resistance, and most of those pows joined the partisans on the mountains, each one defending his country and all of them defending the spirit of brotherhood among peoples. The film will provide a detailed description of this encounter and, through the news from clandestine radios, through the diverse former partisans’ interpretation of the news, they relive in the Cervi home the most luminous episodes of European Resistance. One morning, in Olmo, Reggio Emilia, we watch the Cervi brothers working the fields. The landlord comes to see them to enquire about how milk production is going. The Cervis explain to him that you could have more milk if the land weren’t so uneven, what with potholes and humps which makes rainwater collect in pools. Land in this condition provided meagre grazing and consequently the cows produced less milk and of poor quality. How to improve things for the better? By levelling out the land, but the landlord refused to accept such a risk. The Cervi, who had spent a long time working out their plan, told the landlord in no uncertain terms that ‘you haven’t a clue about farming. The rough terrain must be reworked and well cared for, if you are looking for a greater volume of production.’ The ensuing discussion wasn’t angry, explosive, but calm, their tone was very even. It ended with the Cervis’s explicit resolve to leave these fields. This was why they decided to move to another field. There was a long line of carts, bicycles and cattle on the road, in a festive atmosphere, while the farmers from the surrounding fields thought they were crazy, saying: ‘Where on earth are they going, with such bizarre ideas in their heads?’ They gain possession of the new field, even worse than the first, but at least they can level it out, thanks to the new landlord giving his permission, however begrudgingly. The whole family 10

Zavattini is making a link between wartime post-1943 Italian Resistance and the later international peace movement’s resistance, demanded by the nuclear threat during the Cold War.

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meets. They express the risks and the obstacle and come to the conclusion that the job will take about two years, and they all express their opinion, and they’re all in favour of going ahead with the plan. The women say: ‘Well at least you’ll have this satisfaction.’ And then the levelling begins. They hire a number of narrow gauge rail tracks and wagons from the Land Improvement Department and organize a feast in the farmyard and the mother says; ‘We’re the masters! We’re the masters!’ * Working on the land went on at the same time as they worked on the family. Ferdinando, Ovidio and Agostino get married, the new offspring are born, and more women join the family. They are the girlfriends and wives of the other sons. And yet, all this fails to create an island of peace and contentment, because all around them there’s fascism which detests new things, life, happiness, and therefore hates even the Cervis, persecuting them in a cowardly fashion, trying to wear them out with small provocations, since the fascists wouldn’t dare confront a family like theirs openly, so utterly life-affirming. * The war in Africa breaks out. The Cervis are against this aggression. One of the sons goes to confession and asks the priest: ‘Can you explain to me why a black mother is not the same as a white one?’ The soldiers leave, but the Cervis manage to stay on the farm, using several stratagems. And then they have an important insight. ‘The Fascists are preaching a war of aggression, whereas we’ – the Cervis say – ‘must preach progress and work’. They want to encourage the peasants to realize such aspirations, and so Aldo goes into town, buys a tractor, machines which were virtually unheard of in the fields, then he buys a globe and some books, and returns to the farm with these things, surrounded by peasants who are looking on in admiration. It’s a sign that he is in everyone’s heart. Then the Proclamation that Italy is an Empire is made and the local fascist official calls for a public meeting in the town square, the peasants ask the Cervis for advice as to what to do and they tell them to go, and stand in silence in the square. Sure enough, after the Proclamation has been broadcast from Rome on the wireless, the peasants evacuate the square, leaving the fascist official and his microphone just standing there on his own. The Cervi brothers have won this battle too. * The year 1940 marks Italy’s declaration of war. The Cervis would like to step up their political activities, and begin to look for new contacts, outside the Emilia sphere, but it’s no easy task, since so many have been arrested, anti-fascist organizing has been weakened and the fascists have increased their surveillance.

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Even so, it was possible to make new contact, but not in the way the Cervis had imagined. There was a travelling theatre company, the Sarzi Wandering Theatre Company, who were distributing clandestine news in print, and organizing shows, in order to fund their anti-fascist activities. Lucia Sarzi, so intent on her campaign of conscientization and sowing the seed of protest against the war, is the leader of their group. She finds a precious ally in Aldo Cervi who is willing to join her in carrying out her activities. But you have to practise what you preach, so the Cervis decide to knock out a high-tension tower. They work all night long, in the snow, with a steel saw, and when it topples over, there’s an explosion and then a fire breaks out. The fascists rush to the scene, and are adamant they will punish those responsible, but the only clue as to their identity is a number of footprints in the snow. The fascists measure them and go to the cooperatives and in the farmsteads to measure the size of peasants’ feet, just like in Cinderella, the fairy story. But their desperate search is inconclusive, since that night the Cervis wore oversized shoes. * On the 25 July, the Cervis find out the good news while they are working in the fields.11 They decide to organize the distribution of pasta to the whole town in the main square. They collect the flour from the Mill and distribute it to some peasant families to knead the dough and cook the pasta. Then a long cortège of carts, so laden with pots that they struggle not to spill over, make their way to the piazza in town, among the peasants’ cheers and hoorays. What a largescale collective banquet! Then they all go to Reggio, to ask for the anti-fascist prisoners to be freed. The factory workers at Reggiane demand the end of the war, but the army responds with fire, killing nine workers. * After the collapse of the Italian army on 8 September, the Cervi farmhouse becomes a refuge for soldiers. They find peasant clothes and food, even bicycles, to make their way back to their hometowns. * Foreign pows also find a safe haven in the Cervi farmhouse, just like Italian soldiers. The first to arrive is Castellucci, who is French, a painter and a writer, someone who would always stay in touch later, as a friend of the family. Then there is Anatole Tarasov, a Russian from Leningrad who gets to work immediately to help the Cervis in the fields, and then joins the Cervis in organizing the first partisan squads. Then an American arrives whose parachute fortunately landed

News of the fall of Mussolini’s fascist government and his imprisonment.

11

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in the nearby fields. He is wounded and the Cervis nurse him and go further, finding a professional nurse to take care of him and buying some chickens, to bring him back to full health and chickens were rare in those days. The first group of prisoners is joined by an Englishman, a Pole, a South African and a New Zealander. These former prisoners of war join in all the Cervis’s clandestine activities. They even bake bread, make butter for the partisans, telling stories and experiences about their own countries and all of them want to learn the others’ languages, and each of them wants to fight, running the risk each time that they will fall into enemy hands. * They listen to Allied radio stations: Radio London, Radio Moscow, Radio Warsaw, Free French Radio, and, from these broadcasts, each one of them gleans news about how partisan movements are developing, and in the evening the news is relived in discussions and fierce battlefields in different countries are described, so that all of them narrate the drama going on in their countries, based on their imagination and the snippets of broadcast information. This way, the former pows relive the massacre of Oradour sur Gland, the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. * Eventually, all the pows recover from their wounds and the time has come to make decisions. The Englishman, the American, the Pole, the Russian and the Frenchman all ask permission to stand and fight with the partisans. In the event, they join the Cervis in their sortie through the terrain of the Bassa reggiana.12 To recruit partisans and form combat squads. They load a lorry with clothes, maps, and food rations, and Lucia Sarzi joins them. The foray is fraught with risks and dangers. What is more, it takes place in the Emilian open plains. * Initially, the Cervi platoon is forced to live outdoors, in the woods, shelters, sleeping rough, more often than not. One morning, a strange character appears out of nowhere. He is wearing jodhpurs, a windcheater, and carrying a butterfly net. He is the schoolteacher from the village nearby. He has heard about the partisan squad and volunteers to act as a guide and a scout, willing to find out the size of local enemy forces so that effective, quick, relatively risk-free attacks can be carried out. They agree that whenever he wants to get in touch with them, he’ll place a letter in the hollow of a tree, near a drying rack. Thanks to the intelligence obtained by the teacher, they carry out several effective attacks

Bassa reggiana: A large plain in Reggio Emilia.

12

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and force the fascists to give up confiscating chestnut flour, a vital source of food for peasants at the time. In the meantime, vibrant, popular, solidarity forms around the partisan squad and even a priest, Don Pasquino Borghi, gives them hospitality. Don Pasquale shows loving kindness to them, nursing the Pole, the Russian and one of the Cervi brothers with ointment, to ease their aches and pains from the freezing nights and offers them comfortable sleeping quarters. In the meantime, Aldo and Don Pasquale become good friends, discussing theology and politics, and they often disagree. Little did they know that both of them would die in exactly the same way. Don Pasquale too was to be executed by a firing squad, only a matter of days after the Cervi executions. * Throughout the period of absence of some of the seven brothers, more and more prisoners of war were granted shelter at the Campegine farm, until this uninterrupted activity aroused the fascists’ suspicions. The Reggio branch of the cln ordered the Cervis to evacuate the pows immediately, but some were ill, and others wanted to stay behind and fight as partisans, so Aldo Cervi wavered for a few days and that delay was fatal. * Aldo had a premonition of imminent disaster, and in his last meeting with Lucia he asks her to teach him a song which he can sing to the people who are going to capture him. * The night of 28 November 1943, the worst happens. About 150 fascists in full combat gear surround the farmhouse. It’s pouring. Not a sound can be heard inside. Then a shout from the fields: ‘Cervis, surrender!’ Alcide, the father, hears the command and instantly understand what is happening. He gets up from his bed, calms down his wife, but then the order is repeated again and again, closer and closer, louder and louder, including death threats. Even the sons can hear them. The household wakes up, the women and children are in the corridor, while the men are spying through the windows. They don’t need to discuss what to do. Boxes of ammunition and machine guns, revolvers, hand grenades appear. The foreign partisans and the Cervis prepare to fight. Their mother appears. She doesn’t say a word, but comforts her grandchildren, while the women feed the ammunition to the men, running from room to room to lend a hand here, now there, and the shooting is intense, and goes on with only a few short lapses. The fascists are taken by surprise then, of course, their cowardice is their best counsel. They set fire to the barn where the hay is stored. And Aldo Cervi, as soon as he sees the flames, tells the others: ‘That’s it, the barn is burning. We can do no more.’ Alcide replies: ‘Better to be killed than to surrender to those

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dogs. Let’s get the axes and the buckets and go out into the yard’. But Aldo replies: ‘What about the children. We must surrender. But first, listen up. In the interrogations, only Galindo and I will take the blame for everything – got it? You know nothing.’ So then they go downstairs, the women stay close to their husbands, the children are crying, the mother is silent and seems absent. As soon as they open the door leading to the yard, the Cervis raise their hands, the Russian, the Pole, and the Frenchman try to take the blame and defend the Cervi family. Alcide runs to the barn to save the cattle from the flames, but a fascist stops him in his tracks, and he says to him: ‘Coward! Don’t you have any pity? Not even for those poor beasts?’ They’re all standing there in the yard with their hands up in the dark, against the reflections of the flames. It’s raining hard and here and there you can barely pick out the faces of the fascists and their helmets and two trucks near the small bridge leading to the main road. Final farewells to the children and the wives, then they all give their mother a long hug. ‘We’ll be back soon, rest assured. And you children be good and don’t make grandma angry.’ Their mother screams, when Alcide is also made to climb up on the truck. Along the way, a truck breaks down and sinks into the mud, and so it can’t be pushed aside. Then a couple of steers are put to work to tow it out. At the Reggio-Parma crossroads, the Frenchman, the Russian and the Pole are separated from the others and taken to Parma. They exchange brief and moving goodbyes. Whereas, the Cervis are taken to the Servi prison, and interrogated here with the ‘climbing the stairs method’, a Via Crucis of sorts. As they descend, they have to walk between the fascists standing on both sides of the staircase who kick, deride and slap them in the face. None of the Cervis says a word. So then all seven of them are led into a room, where they’re told that if they join the Republican National Guard, their life will be saved. One of them is the spokesman for all of them: ‘We would be besmirching ourselves’, he says. So then the fascists give up the interrogations. * Old Alcide feels as if he is suffocating in the prison cell full of sawdust and asks if he can go outside in the fresh air. When he is outside in the foggy courtyard, he thinks up an escape plan, and while he is walking up and down, he hears something clattering on the ground, a spoon handle Alcide picks up. He spends all night picking at the wall, until a large stone comes off and the escape route is ready for the next day. But the next day they’re transferred to the prison of San Tommaso, from where, thanks to the head prison warden Pedrini, they can get in touch with home, Castellucci and the Pole, who have escaped from the Parma concentration camp. The escape is scheduled for Christmas Day, but the military police uniforms of the Carabinieri they need for the escape can’t be found, so the plan is put off until early January. *

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But this time they are out of luck. On 28 December, the fascists come and get the Cervis for their execution. The old man is pushed back into the cell. ‘You’re too old’, they tell him, and reassure him that his sons are being taken to Parma for the trial. Instead, they are taken to the shooting gallery and shot. The old man stays in prison and tells his cellmates: ‘I tell you that these walls will fall down and the tormentors of the people will take the place of the tormented.’ Sure enough, on 7 January 1944, there’s a heavy bombardment and the prison walls do collapse. The old Alcide escapes through the cubbyhole for the delivery of parcels, runs down by the river Costolo, heads for the Garavelli family’s place, borrows a bicycle from them, and makes it back home. Along the way, he meets groups of people looking at the orange sky in a night full of explosions. Some people recognize him and greet him. They ask him what has been destroyed in Reggio. ‘The prison has been demolished’, Cervi replies, presses on, cycling and saying goodbye at the same time. * He gets home around 11.00pm at night. Everyone is asleep. Alcide calls out to the household. The women come down, they embrace him, give him something to eat and he asks them: ‘Have you heard anything about my sons?’ ‘If you’ve heard nothing, neither have we’, replies his wife. ‘They were taken to Parma for the trial. They’ll survive. You’ll see.’ The mother and her daughters-in-law are silent, then choked sobs can be heard. Alcide looks up. It’s his wife who is crying in front of the fireplace, while pretending to prepare the dinner. Alcide gets close to her and asks: ‘What is it? What are you hiding from me?’ His wife throws herself into his arms and sobbing all the while tells him: ‘Our sons are never coming back. They’ve all been shot dead, all seven of them.’ Alcide stands stock still, speechless. He helps his wife to sit down, caresses her forehead, then, not saying a word, he walks out into the fields, feeling like crying and shouting. The bombing is over, the moon lights up a clear sky, but in the direction of Reggio you can see on high a red stain, full of striations, similar to what you see after fireworks have exploded. He stops to look at Antenore’s beehives, Aldo’s tractor, in among the blackened walls of the courtyard, but he doesn’t stop. Alcide takes the main path and looks at the small holes that stand out in the soft snow. He leans over one of these little pockets of earth and removes the snow with his fingers and finds the sprouting little grain leaves underneath. The moon lights up all the white fields and Alcide stops to gaze at that small plant, then, he covers the small hole with snow and resumes his walk, still in silence and always gazing at the fields. After one harvest comes another and we keep going. In the background, the sound of an international Resistance song, gradually increasing in volume.

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Scenario Revolution (1969)1

Context Revolution is one of several scenarios which Zavattini wrote, or almost always dictated, in the form of a letter, in this case, addressed to the ‘Direttivo cinegiornali liberi’, the team of organizers who set up the Free Newsreels in 1967, dated 20 June 1969. By then, over fifteen Free Newsreels were circulating in Italy, including Apollon, Free Newsreel of Rome no. 2, the diary of a factory strike which lasted a year, produced by the Free Newsreels organization in cooperation with the workers. Apollon soon became a very effective cinematic catalyst, shown in factories and elsewhere in Italy, to great popular acclaim. It could be done. The workers could win. This text comprises the introductory part of the letter, followed by the section containing the scenario. The theme was mentioned as early as 1967, as a suggestion, together with the theme of divorce. Both incendiary, both topical, they reappear in this text, but only Revolution is treated as a scenario, of the kind for a plan contemplating an open-ended documentary.

Text Dear friends of the Steering Group, During the last meeting, I proposed two themes for two Free Newsreels: Revolution and Divorce. Our task has not changed: triggering as many Free Newsreels as we can, in the shortest time possible. There is no doubt that our intervention is political. [...] There are no objective obstacles, apart from a lingering hesitation and some uncertainty of a technical and psychological nature, which can be easily overcome. In brief, we haven’t set in motion anything

1

Zavattini, ‘Agli amici del direttivo cinegiornali liberi’, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille, lettere, 448–55.

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utopian, we have shown ourselves to be at the very epicentre of the struggle. The Apollon experience has, above many other positive aspects it has, is a demonstration that we weren’t mistaken in considering a free circuit viable. The circuit urgently needs Free Newsreels, from whoever is making them, provided they are a response to questions that current issues will provoke.2 The Centre needs to be more active than it is. It needs to be inventive, even to the point of constantly contradicting its own frames of analysis, as and when the frames come into contact with the reality of the moment. [...] If we are attempting to understand our activities, then we should be asking this political question: what should be done, today?3 The Free Newsreel units are interesting primarily as ‘commandos’, even if they are slow to learn how to use the camera well. Nevertheless, as a form of aggregation, they are the essence of what participation should be, in what is, primarily, a political event, and one with a precise goal, which is the subversion of the current state of affairs. I must say that a theme that interests me is Revolution.4 It might seem abstract. It isn’t a matter of saying that we are making the Revolution. The task in hand is to speak out, by coordinating an analysis which demystifies the situation as it stands in Italy, at all levels. [...] It’s a head-on clash. I seriously think that to clarify what revolution means in an Italian context, requires us to show what relation exists, or doesn’t exist, between an Italian revolutionary hypothesis and the Russian, Cuban and Chinese Revolution. Even if we only attempt it, this would amount to an extraordinary intervention. Is revolution necessary? Should it be understood as a change which begins on a given day, at a given time, and a specific moment, or should it be seen as an ongoing conscientization of the most urgent changes our country needs, accompanied by shouldering all the responsibilities attached to such questions? What obstacles exist in the path of change? Why doesn’t change to address proven needs take place, despite its urgency? Is Italian culture and Italian thought revolutionary or not, at present? Are the needs of the masses revolutionary? What needs to be done immediately? What is it that cannot be put off? What are the consequences of not being willing to give up? Why is power slowing down the country’s evolution? What does ‘power’ mean? What do we mean by ‘middle class’ or by ‘conservatism’? A Free Newsreel on the Revolution, entitled Revolution, is doubtless one of the most responsible kind of newsreel which we can make. This isn’t a philological or cultural examination. It seeks to be a cinema of action. [...] A Free Newsreel about the Revolution should be grounded in the clear understanding that the Revolution needs to be made. That the time is ripe for one. That there are objective changes which must be carried out here and now. Do I have to make a

The Free Newsreel Apollon (1969), directed by Ugo Gregoretti. In reality, as the Free Newsreel material shows, direction was a collaborative effort. 3 In italics in the Italian text. 4 In italics in the Italian text. 2

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list?5 The revolutionary sentiment expresses a mass need. We need to prove that whether it is the health service reform, the school reform or the housing reform, the demand is a popular demand, a mass demand. The purpose of revolutions is to respond to large-scale protest, mass needs, confronted by massive resistance from privilege within society. We must identify what it is, inside and outside, which resists the implementation of radical reforms. A Free Newsreel about revolution is not a literary text. It concentrates the effort filmmakers can make, in the first instance, to deal with their personal crisis (in a positive sense), through action and ensuing knowledge, so necessary to inform the daily struggle. [...] In other words, the old concept of critique, which many films of the past settled for, takes one step forward with Free Newsreels, which lead critique to a higher level of knowledge, one which is more collective and in touch with the everyday, as a form of struggle. This project hinges on a constant two-way rapport between filmmakers and the public, between an initiative from the centre and contributions from the periphery. A group of filmmakers convene and decides to make a film on this theme: The Revolution. The common denominator is that we use the cinematic medium to tackle the theme, and address it through research, and test what we learn by verifying it among ourselves and in communication with others. We share a consensus and an awareness regarding the need to adopt an antireformist stance, involving culture, politics and society; a consensus over not procrastinating, over identifying which actions are going to make this feasible. Revolution is the outcome of adopting such a position. These filmmakers are fully aware that it is not enough to make a closed statement about the revolution. It’s important to realize at the outset that, in embarking on such a project, it isn’t enough, to adopt customary approaches and methods. We’re not making a film, but making a revolutionary intervention prior to making the film, while we are making the film, and after we’ve made the film.6 Therefore, these filmmakers will convene to discuss which specific forms of collaboration to adopt. It’s a more complex and open-ended cultural intervention than the film made by Godard and fellow filmmakers about Vietnam.7 That film still involved the traditional figure of the auteur, however open to new cinematic forms. Whereas, here we must reach an understanding that there will be lived and organized connections among the range of episodes – we won’t refer to them as sketches. I think I’ve already made the point that this type of cinema is really flexible to editing and re-editing, with the inclusion of new footage, determined by input from the periphery, by events, and by unimaginable circumstances arising during the struggle. The sentence in Italian forms a statement, but there is no list. Consequently, it has been interpreted as a rhetorical question, as the sense suggests. 6 In italics in the Italian text. 7 Collaborative film directed by Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker (supervisor), Alain Resnais, Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam) (1967). 5

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I was talking about the situation in Italy. Mapping the current situation justifies in itself the enterprise we’re calling Revolution, which enterprise must be carried out in collaboration with the grass roots. One size of director doesn’t fit all. Each director will be inventing a personal approach. And everyone will benefit from drawing on shared knowledge and experience from those who have a camera or from the Free Newsreel centres, which have the equipment for making a film.8 The situation provides us with an opportunity for mobilization, our first. We ask the periphery, the base or grassroots, to name events, provide data. This will help to carry out a more focussed critique. They’ll provide plans for shooting sequences, acting on our request, but also select earlier footage, which was never used, or was badly used, since we aim to draw a substantial, live, map for Italians to see, making good cinematic use of whatever is available in film archives and whatever is happening in the real world. This is the only way to understand the need to distribute this work all over Italy, availing ourselves of the fastest possible route. In one fell swoop, we are going to be connecting all this cinema coming from the grassroots directly with events, and with a collective political campaign. The end product won’t necessarily be a film. We might condense everything into a film. Then again, we might distribute the result, episode by episode. We may end up with an organic series of screenings, all revolving around the theme, the campaign to reveal reality. I want to say that this is a project in which everyone can join in. And perhaps we have identified the collective and singular opportunity to communicate a history of contemporary Italy as it is unfolding, which coincides with the struggle underway. In short, the Centro dei cinegiornali liberi and the promoters, anac, join forces to launch this political-cinematic intervention on a national scale.

8

In this text, Zavattini refers to a prodotto cinematografico, a cinematic product, to distinguish these works from films, albeit non-fiction or documentary films. But for the purposes of this translation, it seems best to translate the phrase as film.

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Adapting The Children of Sánchez (1971)1

Context Zavattini returned to Mexico very briefly in the early 1970s, not in connection with his existing contacts at Producciones Barbachano, but to carry out location scouting for a film adaptation of The Children of Sánchez, a testimonial book by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1914–70). Lewis spent decades carrying out ethnographic research on poverty in Mexico, leading to detailed texts, based on recorded interviews, later transcribed and edited by the ethnographer into book form, such as Life in a Mexican Village (1951). The Children of Sánchez, Autobiography of a Mexican Family (1961) was aimed at a broader audience, based on voice recordings of a specific Mexican family living in extreme poverty.2 Lewis was a pioneer of community anthropology, a controversial theory of ‘the culture of poverty’, which put forward the theory that it was virtually impossible to come out of misery, due to social conditioning.3 Zavattini never liked adaptations, though, in this case, the ethnographic basis might have made this project more interesting. But the ‘the culture of poverty’ slant weighed heavily in the balance and was not a point of view to which Zavattini ever subscribed. The interviews presented a relentless, situation, a poverty trap which the family had indeed been unable to escape. Zavattini did what he could to redeem the material for the director Hall Bartlett, given that the screenwriter’s reaction to the book was: You find yourself in a circle of Hell, where you are surrounded by endless shouting, weeping, insults, the cries of new-born babies, funeral lamentations, maledictions, prayers.4

Zavattini to Massimo Ferrara, 18 September 1971, acz Corr. 69/3, fols 1–2. Unpublished. Ferrara was a lawyer acting as a go-between on behalf of the director Hall Bartlett. 2 Argentina Brunetti, ‘Con Cesare Zavattini. Ricognizione in Messico per I figli di Sanchez’, Il Progresso Italo-americano, Sunday 9 January 1972. 3 Oscar Lewis, ‘Culture of Poverty’, in Daniel P. Moynihan, On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, New York: Basic Books, 1969, 187–220. 4 Ibidem. 1

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He visited Mexico City with the director and Anthony Quinn, who played the father, Jesús Sánchez and spent two days talking to Consuelo, the daughter. He discovered, to his horror, that most of the family were still living in the same room they had shared for more than two decades.5 The screenplay was finished by 27 March 1972.6 In 1976, conacine, the Mexican state production house, allowed Hall to shoot the interior scenes in their Churubuseo Studios and to film the street scenes.7 The film was banned for years by government censorship. In Mexico, the same party, the pri (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) ran the country from the Revolution until 2000, in what was effectively a pseudodemocracy. A note on this text. Since his job was an adaptation of a novel, there is no scenario as such. But this text is indicative of the nature of the material that needed to be adapted and Zavattini’s critical response to it. He read the book in its Italian translation, and made the point that translation had flattened the voices and puts forward his proposal for how to deal with its adaptation. What he didn’t know was that the English first edition was also flat, from a linguistic point of view, since the liveliness of the Spanish voices is lost and neutralized into middleclass English. He was aware that Lewis’s ethnography stopped short of a linguistic sensibility to such nuances of language which might have added to its cinematic adaptation. He mentions that a ninety-minute film would necessarily have to be selective, but at the time of writing, he went no further. In the event, he decided to concentrate on the unbearable present, setting aside the equally unbearable past, because, presumably, it is more of the same. A different approach would have been to concentrate on the different voices conveying the same reality. But the problem was they were not different from one another. Nothing distinguishes them. It seems the screenwriter had thought of that, but discounted it, precisely because all the voices sounded the same and were telling a story by accretion of its linear elements. In fairness, the Italian translator conveyed what was already monotone in English.

Text The Italian translation is no work of art, because, instead of giving each individual, personal confession its own specific character, it makes them indistinguishable, in terms of linguistic voice. Somehow, the events, characters and meaning, in such patient and dramatic research, at the heart of a family, come through flattened, against the backdrop of the social and political context which fosters them.

Zavattini to Bartlett, 29 June 1977, acz Corr. Bartlett 611, fol. 6a. 29 June 1977. Zavattini to Argentina Brunetti, 27 March 1972, acz Corr. 69/3, fol. 5. Unpublished manuscript. 7 Ibidem, fols 7–8. 5 6

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You find yourself in nothing less than a circle of Hell where you can hear the incessant echoes of screaming, crying, invocations, the cries of newborn babies, funeral lamentations, prayers, insults; in short, the full range of the human condition, at its most intense, most contradictory, and even at its most mysterious, which, in Mexico, takes a distinctive imagery of its own. It should, however, provoke in the viewers, regardless of race, a deep process of identification, or, to put it differently, it implicates the viewer personally, dear Ferrara. I hardly think that the Mexico of 1971 will be so very different from that of 1961, the year Lewis’s book was published, despite the country’s growing, almost frenetic, economic development; yet, in terms of the demands of their Revolution, buried under half a century of institutional life, they are proceeding at a snail’s pace. Therefore, the theme is still topical. At a first reading, I found myself in a labyrinth. The sheer volume of the material, conveyed in such capillary detail by the five autobiographies, led me to think in terms of an extremely long episode film. Then the structure began to take shape in my mind, and I began to envisage a viable story, lasting an hour and a half. Perhaps I mentioned on the phone that my impression is that we should limit the action to recent years of the life of the Sánchez family, since the most important and typical features are all contained there, making them red hot. As for the approach and style, it’s too soon to say. What I can tell you is that I’m giving it some thought, between one gap and the next in my workload. I’d like to add that I love the Mexican people more than its government. I was there to write the story of the extraordinary and exhilarating episode of 1938, the liberation of the oil industry from multinational companies. The project ran aground, unfortunately, due to an exasperated nationalism which is pervasive and, indeed, ignores colour differences. I even suggested, for the same Manuel Barbachano, a trustworthy man, a Mexican day in the life, that is, twenty-four hours spent mirroring the daily toil of people in such a state of suffering. In a book of mine, published last year in New York by Prentice-Hall, there are several pages about all this. I’m drawing your attention to this to emphasize that my admiration, attention and solidarity towards the Mexican people is far from improvised. Never mind all their shortcomings, no less in evidence than their strengths.

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Scenario Italia mia tv version (1974-6)

Context In 1974, Zavattini returned to his Italia mia project, this time with a television audience in mind. Ever since the early 1950s, he had understood the potential of television as a medium, and repeatedly criticized its limited, escapist, use by Italian state monopoly. The director Santi Colonna and the Producer Franca Maranto got involved. This re-write followed on from his experience with the Free Newsreels. By comparison with the earlier, ethnographic versions, this version revolves around the idea of a tribunal taking to task intellectuals, including prominent filmmakers who had been part of the Neo-realist Italian New Cinema, in a dialogical film, based on discussion and argument, on the state of Italy after thirty years of Centre Right politics and the hegemony of the Christian Democrats. The film, which was to run over three episodes, would deal with the facts and their interpretation.1 The central idea was the paradox of Italian society, encompassed in the question: How did we get it so wrong? The theme had appeared in the scenario Why? Ten years later, there was the same sense of urgency, of the need to act, to challenge the status quo, in order to bring about change. It also informs Zavattini’s The Truuuuth (1982), included in this anthology, the final version of which was made for television, and directed by Zavattini himself. This scenario reads partly like a letter, which it was, addressed to Santi Colonna.

1

Cf. Zavattini, ‘Italia mia’, in Neorealismo ecc., 1979, 178.

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Text The habitual public outcry no longer suffices. We see horrors on television every day.2 There’s a war on, but peace, you will notice, despite all the diplomatic pledges, is never on, which is why it would be foolish to chart the statistics of the dead and of the starving. Pointless. The problem we face is how to communicate these ‘phenomena’, how to expose their nature more effectively, drawing on the audacity and the research of those who are involved in making the programme. By virtue of its courage and its approach in disclosing events within events, and their constituent elements, Italia mia should set the pace, in comparison with earlier attempts of this kind. Certain events might seem too commonplace, for example, the case of a student committing suicide. But they’re not. They conceal a nest of vipers, a series of related causes which expose an indictment of the state of education today. I think one could begin anywhere, with any single episode. It is not really a matter of where to begin, but of how to make the episode the hinge of a discussion which embraces the past, the present, and the future. The value of this debate is that it can also take unexpected directions, guided by an alternation and coexistence of emotivity and rationality. This is, after all, the secret of any art form, chancing on poetic thinking through a sudden, unexpected and out of the ordinary juxtaposition, which contains its own surprising inner logic, however, startling or anarchic it is in its implications, in what it suggests, and in what it brings together. If, for example, we were to begin with a reconstruction of the appalling massacre of Cannarozzo which took place twenty years ago in Bari, the aim would not be to justify Cannarozzo, but to show that losing one’s reason is something that can happen, regardless of predisposition, as the result of needs which have not been met, including basic, primordial needs for equality and justice. The result would be a portrait of the destitute, the notorious ‘rags’, neither a sentimental nor a pious one, but defined by their demands and their expectations.3 By contrast, what we propose is a portrait of Italians which aims to do more than express routine solidarity, the kind which runs out after a day. It is one based on the feedback from the victims, be they those of the Vajont or of

Zavattini, ‘Italia mia’, in Basta coi soggetti, 1979, 173–87. This version is dated 1974–6 and constitutes a selection from the scriptwriting produced for the director Santi Colonna, for a television version, which Franca Maranto was to produce. It was planned to run across three episodes, as Zavattini points out. Cf. ‘Italia mia’ in Neorealismo ecc., 1979, 178. 3 ‘rags’ (stracci). The reference is to Andreotti’s notorious and disparaging synecdoche of ‘rags’ for ‘poverty’ in an article targeted at Zavattini and De Sica. Stracci, incidentally, was the nickname Pasolini gave his character in the medium-length feature film La ricotta (1963), a starving film extra who dies of starvation. A similar synecdoche was used in the immediate post-war period in West Germany, ‘rubble films’ to indicate films shot on location, featuring war damage and ruins. For this reason, famosi is translated ‘notorious’. 2

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the Gibellina disasters, or of the relentless property speculation in Agrigento. Furthermore, and this is something which has never been ventured, the very people we call victims are given the freedom to move around, to ask questions, to display their most intimate thoughts. Clearly, the point is to create such an atmosphere of emergency – without ever overstating the case, though – that even the statistics, if we have any at our disposal, can become incandescent. Just how much the rent weighs on wages, for example, is important, no doubt about it. But I want to emphasize how disastrous it would be, if we gave up on demonstrating through images, sounds and reason that that fact is only a link in a chain leading to the root cause. To ‘cause a scandal’, is not our intention. That is something which belongs to commercial logic. No, it is the very subject matter which is scandalous, the more we endeavour to tackle it head on. I remember when another version of Italia mia was in the pipeline with [Lino] Del Fra and [Cecilia] Mangini, with a view to fighting prejudice.4 My immediate observation at the time was that an approach consisting in rethinking an event ten years on would also have to tackle the later growth in critical awareness. The same holds true in our case, as I’ve said before. We’re not interested in a scholarly revisiting of a past event, but in a record of what measures have not been taken since, aggravated by the weight of this knowledge in our hearts and minds. That is the meaning of the theme. Thus, the home reveals itself as more than: this is where we rest, to then go back to work in current conditions.5 We need to reveal the flow of practical issues involved, by considering the context of the internal and external environment. This is where the problematic broadens out, finding its expression in education, especially when you consider that the schools crisis, dramatic as it is, is not limited to a shortage of classrooms. You need these too, but it becomes an illusion to fixate on physical space. We’ve also got to tackle the current situation from a different perspective which cannot but be a new and immediate social interpretation of everyday life. The purpose of showing people living in insalubrious dwellings cannot be limited to eliciting a tear-jerking response. Again, our aim is to set up raw comparisons, some of which we will stumble upon along the way. Industrial homicide, which falls in the category of health and safety, is a phenomenon for which Italy is streets ahead of other nations (this was mentioned in The Mysteries of Rome).6 All you need do is compare the two moments in time to reach the conclusion that public outcry is only a beginning. You can appreciate A reference to an unknown earlier version of Italia mia, probably dating from the 1960s, centred on prejudice. Lino Del Fra was a documentary filmmaker, and his wife, Cecilia Mangini too. 5 Zavattini’s italics for emphasis. 6 The phrase omicidio bianco (literally: ‘white deaths’) refers to industrial deaths which take place on the job, officially recorded and reported by the press as: ‘accidental deaths’, but, generally, not caused by accident, but the result of lax health and safety measures. I misteri di Roma (1963) is a collective documentary episode film which Zavattini scripted and was involved in at every stage, including, and especially, the editing. It is to be considered a part of the Italia mia overall project. 4

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how our conclusion tends towards a different approach to humanity, whether we deal with matters of health, housing or education. This mustn’t be reduced to a ‘reformist’ perspective. It’s not. It would be belittling at this point to have a reformist conception of mankind. By using the kind of musical instruments that we play best, we must succeed in a portrayal of contemporary humanity which automatically generates the need and the urgency and the novelty for certain social services. Ultimately, but not in any remote sense, this was the logic of Neo-realism. On one account, it was taken to mean coming to grips with recently occurred events; on another, more serious understanding, it comprised events which were taking place, thus requiring a different technique, a different language, since you couldn’t attack the system using the means of the system. This was, I insist, its intuition and hope of being in tune with the shift from dictatorship to democracy, documenting its needs, concrete, tangible ones, situated in historic time. Neo-realism was the development, even before its time, of a society-wide outlook, which was far from hierarchical, in Italy too, looking ahead at a type of society in which anything could happen, except restoration of the old order. This is what engendered a fearless encouragement to acquire knowledge, because this is what was at stake. When Neo-realism accepted and settled for industrial cinema, it failed to free up an alternative cinema. That was the end. To make the shift into democracy, from fascism, required a genuine revolution. This is the reason why, in terms of timing, of implementation, the process of putting into action profound changes which a democratic state demands, was compressed into the short term. Committing to a fast pace in carrying them out is not a superficial aspect of democracy, but its very raison d’être. Even its intimate connection with the Resistance, beyond any lingering commemorative traces, produces an entity which, from the beginning, was identified with the future of the nation. And yet, although that aspect has been totally ignored, its spirit is still valid and therefore concerns the future. The twenty years which have elapsed since then form an imposing backdrop. What we see and hear acquires a further dimension, by virtue of this fermentation of time, making the demand for radical measures an absolute deadline which cannot be postponed. No one can make the claim that it is only a question of gradual measures over time, which is why our television programme could set itself apart from previous programmes which dealt with the evils that afflict our society in a descriptive way. The example of the three eminent artists we wish to summon, [Eugenio] Montale, [Giorgio] De Chirico and [Luchino] Visconti, suggests one of the ways we transcend description to cross the threshold of analysis and reflexivity, which is feasible with a cine-camera, rooted in a critical analysis of findings to then engage, without delay, with what they signify, by scrutinizing them ourselves. To put this differently, the aim is to bring the event into visibility and then reflect on it, refusing to settle for verbal excuses or projections into a distant future. Instead, we set an ultimatum, creating a climate of emergency, in which we challenge these figureheads of Italian culture and ourselves.

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Why didn’t we do what we resolved to do thirty years ago and why don’t we go ahead and do it now, when we’re still claiming that there’s a pressing need to do it? [...] We should acknowledge that what denotes our society after fascism are the most tragic sins of omission. [...] This is the key question, the recurring question, however naïve it might be, which will get a response from each of the people with whom we have a conversation. We feel that the contemporary moment should be considered a betrayal of the recent past, a void which could lead Italy to more suffering, more defeat and more criminal procrastination. [...] It is well known that Italy is not the worst country in the world. There is no shortage of crimes, flaws, cynicism and frightening contradictions: one could put the whole world on trial. But we prefer to choose our own country. If we would rather work within its boundaries, the reason is neither to isolate ourselves nor to attribute to it a monstrous singularity, but because we are better equipped to conduct our analysis right here. This is where we live and this is the place we know, closest to us in every sense. The results, we hope, will constitute a tangible support for further projects like this one, and interpretations of the real which can also be shared further afield. Italy, then, is the place we choose to attempt to understand the formidable crisis we are living through and to answer the question on everyone’s lips: which occult and manifest reasons are making it impossible to do what needs to be done? The man in the street is unable to give an answer. He is, however, anxiously waiting for a reply. The media he can access only provide a partial response. Yet he lacks the means and the authority to ask his pressing question to those he supposes could give him an answer which would restore his dignity and confidence to inspire a new course of action, a new understanding and set of choices, given that the past must be considered a failure, provoking only more and more questions. If we go down the path of the document and its interpretation, simultaneously, given the dramatic reality of what we now know, we are then obliged to bear in mind the attitudes within so-called contemporary culture and its blatant indifference. This may be the first time the epigones, the idols, and the heroes of this culture are being asked to account for their role and are being held responsible for alienating themselves from such events. Conversely, if they claim not to have alienated themselves from such events, we will find out their reasons, which will make the investigative programme more functional, tangible and pressing. Doubtless, television creates a dampening atmosphere, which flattens any clashes; it favours a kind of self-censorship in participants which is misunderstood as healthy caution and as a sense of measure. But this is how you never get to the heart of things. You always stop short at the threshold, as if the daring to extricate oneself from customary rituals of discretion were lacking, as is, in fact, the case. We plan to seek out collusion. We began by realizing that we find ourselves in an extraordinary situation, an emergency and that a hierarchy of power, privilege and arrogance, and a command structure have been set up, and an

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ensuing paralysis of thought, understood as a dynamic process, which embraces the contemporary and seeks to bring about a new state of affairs. One morning, we might wake up believing the mystique of this or that Leader, hanging from his every word, as if it were sacred, and going back to work, cradled in a feeling of confidence in him. But then we experience a growing sense of mistrust, as the hours go by with no sign of revelations or of resurrections. Ultimately, inertia and resignation insinuate themselves once more. So, what do we want to do now? To express this moment of evident crisis and confession onto the small screen. Those in power may well go on temporizing. But that is no reason why we ordinary people should. We want to call on some of the public figures who control the nation’s future and have a conversation with them. Taking a new direction involves denouncing the general complicity, from which no one is spared, not even us. Television viewers feel free of any responsibility because of the ways in which current investigative programmes, seeking to generate their interest, are framed. We’ll try to engage them more directly, even if this means nothing more than interrupting the flow of information to address the viewers directly. [...] Our enterprise is carried out by Italians against Italians, a collective example of self-criticism which will validate the public outcry and the need to act. There is no intention of political manipulation of the material. At the same time, we shan’t hesitate to call this a political programme, which is neither planning to make a public display of a shared responsibility, nor embark on a totally anachronistic political scepticism.7 The plan is to bring to account the ruling class and its representatives, while also pointing out a collective civic responsibility which is shirked, as a rule. We are not only seeking out an Italy in ruins, we also feel the compulsion to highlight some of our amazing qualities, such as the imagination and genius of Italians, to make what statistics demonstrate (that we occupy the first place in industrial homicides) even more absurd and inexplicable. To argue that although we are the seventh industrial power, we are near the bottom, when it comes to health care, education and the protection of citizens’ rights.

7

Zavattini uses the word qualunquismo (‘the views of the man in the street’) which originally (in 1946) referred to a Right-wing political party called ‘Il Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque’ (‘The Front of the Man in the Street’). It appealed to the fascist and post-fascist middle class, claiming to stand for the values of the everyday man who habours a distrust for elected politicians. It was founded by the playwright G. Giannini who published an anticommunist satirical magazine by that title L’Uomo Qualunque (1944) targeting the Left and the Resistance coalition (cln). After the elections of 1948, the party disappeared without a trace. Cf. http:​/​/www​​.trec​​cani.​​it​/en​​ciclo​​pedia​​/qual​​un​qui​​smo/, accessed 4 August 2017.

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Scenario Aldo Moro, Before, During, After (1978)1

Context Aldo Moro, Before, During, After was written for a documentary about the kidnap and assassination of the Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades, in their worst and most traumatic act of terrorism. Moro’s escort of five men was shot dead and the prime minister held in captivity for fifty-five days and sentenced to death, by their puppet tribunal, while the nation – and the whole world – looked on in horror. The Christian Democrats and the Communist Party advocated a hard line, refusing to negotiate Moro’s release. While the Socialist Party and others tried to mediate. The president was shot dead in an underground car park and photographed in the boot of a car, symbolically parked between the party headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the communists, as if they were to blame. His state funeral was on 9 May 1978. The basis for the scenario was written barely twenty days after the funeral and the scenario was completed ten days later, for a Swiss producer, Lazar Wechsler, who commissioned Zavattini to make a documentary about it.2 It has appeared twice in print, first, in Giacomo Gambetti’s book of interviews with Zavattini, published in 1986 and again, in 2011, in identical form. During one of the many interviews Zavattini gave the film critic and author Giacomo Gambetti, Zavattini told him about this scenario and gave him the only existing copy he had, which Gambetti subsequently published. In the interview he told him:

The scenario was first published in Gambetti, Zavattini mago e tecnico, 311–19 (cf. no. 2 below). The first part (cf. no. 1, below) appeared in a letter to Lazar Wechsler, 29 May 1978, in Gambetti, ibidem, 309–10. It was published again in Christian Uva (ed.), Strane Storie. Il cinema e i misteri d’Italia, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2011, 87–94. 2 Stefania Parigi, ‘Cesare Zavattini: un lampo sul “caso Moro”’, in Uva (ed.), Strane Storie, 79–87. 1

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You [Giacomo Gambetti] know that a producer from Zurich, Wechsler, who has shown his high esteem for my work on several occasions, has asked me to formulate a film proposal about the Aldo Moro Case.3 This is something I have kept under wraps. I immediately asked my old friend Enzo Muzii to be involved, and we came up with ideas and some writing, which Wechsler rejected out of hand. The whole thing was a flash in the pan. Here is my letter to him, dated 29 May 1978 and a scenario, entitled Aldo Moro, Before, During, After, completed on 10 June.

Before, During, After was to consist in a film in which the director and the writer are filmed in discussion, while they are sifting through recent news footage about the case, from national television, the rai, from private television stations, from radio broadcasts, books and photographs appearing in the press. They were to be filmed while selecting and discussing all the raw material, to attempt to piece together an interpretation, a reflective critique, to try and make sense of the events and their causes, in their own subjective take, combined with the objective reality or ‘social facts’: death, violence, ideology, almost trying to historicize and memorialize the contemporary moment, and going beyond the initial coverage in media reportage to do so. Such a cinematic intervention, fitted in with Zavattini’s documentary aesthetic, developed back in the 1940s. Its first formulation appears in the earliest 1944 prototype of Italia mia. He proposed then to report the war and its effects in Italy, while the country was still under Nazi and fascist occupation. Later on, salient examples include films such as The Story of Catherine, an episode of Love in the City and Rome, 11 o’Clock. In both, Zavattini was personally involved in planning and carrying out extensive interviews with witnesses, to serve as a basis for the relevant scenarios and screenplays. His idea of the documentary was that it should be integral to mainstream cinema, understood as a contemporary intervention on events, soon after they take place, or, better still, while they are taking place. The advantages would be that the contemporary moment could be immediately historicized, framed and interpreted to become a vital source, feeding into social and political debate immediately, hence his ‘urgency’ theme, running through so many plans for nonfiction films. What was at issue was extending the scope of newsreel reportage, by incorporating analysis and interpretation, turning non-fiction cinema into a timely media critical intervention. This entailed creating a new cinematic space, one animated by discussion, by engaging phenomenologically with events, as well as intellectually. But such an approach should not be confused with television-style programmes. Thus, an event in the flow of time would be freeze-framed, as it were, and given the critical scrutiny it deserves. The work on this scenario and the ideas informing it should be seen in the context of Zavattini’s experience initiating and participating in the Free 3

Zavattini, in conversation with Gambetti, 31 August 1978, ibidem, 308.

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Newsreels movement, such as it was, beginning several years before the political sea change of 1968, in the writing and production of his The Newsreel for Peace (1963) and, from 1967 until 1973, the Free Newsreeels proper. The theory for the Newsreels translated into straightforward catchphrases such as ‘immediate cinema’, ‘cinema during’. Indeed, this last expression appeared again in his proposed title for the Moro Case film: Aldo Moro, Before, During, After. The whole experience of the Free Newsreels, culminating in the interventions leading up to and during the 1968 Venice Biennale and Apollon (1969), a film about a successful factory occupation, initiated, produced and crewed by the Free Newsreels Collective, revolved around how to develop effective counter-cinema alongside mainstream cinema, but drawing on grassroots and participation, towards an authentic cinematic political practice, a socially engaged cinema, which sought to be a cinema of urgency, a continuous cinema, an immediate cinema, a guerrilla cinema, to repeat some of the phrases adopted by the Free Newsreels movement. The scenario consists in two parts. The first, contained in a letter to the producer, introduces the subject and explains its organizing principle. The second places the event in perspective, arguing that terrorism feeds on the shortcomings of capitalism. At the time, the Left, referring to the psi socialists and pci communists, argued that the cause of the Red Brigades’ terrorism was infiltration by foreign secret services into Italian society, and that it had nothing to do with the social and political context in Italy and nothing to do with Italy’s own far Left, although there were plenty of signs that it did. For example, the founder of the Red Brigades, Renato Curcio, had been part of the student movement in Trento in the 1960s, and other members were from a similar background. Zavattini adopted an unusual position, arguing that, while their actions should not be condoned in any way, one had to consider the social, political and economic context of the country which had so many unresolved contradictions, left to fester since the end of the Second World War. This was genuine historical materialism, worthy of the best Marxist tradition, of a man who had voted for the pci since 1946, while maintaining his own critical position on many issues. At the same time, to avoid any ambiguity as to where he stood, his scenario clearly states that Zavattini in no way condoned such an act of violence. In his later work, The Truuuuth, which he wrote and directed, there is a passing mention of the Red Brigades which also does not condone their actions.

Text 1 This is the narrative idea structuring the film: two people are sitting before a moviola, Enzo Muzii, who is directing, and Zavattini, whose concept they are developing. For the film will also be the outcome of a dialogue between

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Zavattini and Muzii, commenting on technical aspects and issues of content, while editing on the moviola. Dear Wechsler, let me summarize the situation, in preparation for our third and last meeting (for the time being, obviously) scheduled for today, at 2.00pm. In our first conversation, on Saturday at Hassler’s, you suggested making a documentary film on Italy today, in its political, ethical and social context, in respect of the Moro Case. You told me that you came up with the idea, after reading an article in Der Spiegel, which, in your view, puts across a clear and objective analysis of this dramatic sequence of events. My response was that, in principle, I would be interested in working on it, provided that my input would not be limited to just collating stories from the press, with the added proviso that it would extend to my putting across a responsible point of view, devoid of prophetic statements or ineffable pronouncements. I briefly summarized the gist of my own outlook, which always tends towards attempts, within my possibilities, aimed at making a contribution to communicating the concept and spirit of democracy. We met again yesterday in my house, and you brought a translation of the Der Spiegel article which, at a first reading, seemed well informed – too well informed, I would add. But, from my point of view, at least, the challenge is how to interpret the facts, in the context of the reality of my country. I am not a foreigner and, for years, have engaged with the events taking place in my country. Yesterday, I tried to explain my point of view to you, regarding a potential film, in terms of my abilities and my ethical stance. I said, partly out of instinct, partly on reflection, that I would structure the film around three specific moments. To reiterate: it would take the form of a reportage, which would be no shorter than forty-five minutes and no longer than ninety minutes in length. This provides you with a general idea to be firmed up at a later stage, when the film’s content and style would be established. Three moments, then. The first covers Italian history from 1870 to the fall of fascism. The second, covers the period from the birth of democracy up to the Moro Case, taking into account its contradictions, sometimes serious, at other times, tragic. The third moment covers the aftermath of the Moro Case, that is, the present moment. I have conveyed to you the organizing principle as to how to measure past and future, by concentrating on the present. How is democracy going to get out of the labyrinth? Indeed, can it extract itself? Does it have the means and the resolve to oppose the Red Brigades with legal instruments and decisions which go beyond juridical and security-based measures? I don’t know if I have succeeded, but I have tried to set out a specific idea of democracy which is not, all things considered, that exclusive or personal. The idea comes with its own legacy and, fortunately, some empirical examples here and there. Italy is in such a desperate condition that only democracy can save it, enabling the country to discover for itself and for others what it means. For it is no longer enough for a single nation to live by democratic values. It is also necessary to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that an individual-based world

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view still prevails, one which cannot lead to a real transformation to benefit society as a whole. For this reason, what is key is to be willing to expose the absence of culture and the deep-rooted flaws within culture as it presently exists – along with its profound complicity with various forms of violence. Ultimately, I would like to interpellate influential figures, not to discuss the current system, but calling each of them to account, demanding self-criticism, something without a precedent, perhaps. Italy, I insist, can contribute a method and mentality which compounds science and sentiment, deployed in such a way as to shock our business-as-usual attitude and establish a broader framework of reference. Indeed, this happened for too short a period in the cinema, when Italian cinema reflected on suffering, drawing a few insights as to what a new humanity would be like, along with a foreshadowing of an entirely different kind of knowledge. This has been the main point of my confidential communication with you. Providing access to so many excluded minds, so that thought can go on addressing values which were invented and are administered by the few, who pretend there has been progress, when there has been none. When, on the contrary, there has been no development to speak of; when, instead of progress, there is nothing but a repetition of an idea of false democracy. ‘In the name of the people’, the notorious Red Brigades said in their ‘Sentence’. Which people? The Italian people were taken by surprise, astonished. Their natural consternation in the face of such ruthlessness, never for a moment having forgotten the tyrannies suffered in the past, did not prevent the instinct associated with masses from siding with justice, refusing to allow the Red Brigades to speak in their name.

2 1. This documentary film of ours about terrorism concerns above all the appalling Moro Case, the assassination of his escort, kidnap, followed by the murder of this high-profile political figure. The length of this on-screen report, filmed in 16 millimetres and in colour, will be ninety minutes. We have on the table in front of us the huge amount of material the media produced, creating, perhaps, a new precedent, and succeeded in communicating, minute by minute, with Italian viewers, first, and later with worldwide viewers, who were distressed, at first, then astonished, then responded more and more responsibly. We are certain that, even at the point when we are on the verge of releasing this work of ours, we will still be adding new sequences and more news about this criminal attack against democracy. In their so-called ‘Sentence’, they wrote ‘In the name of the people’, the notorious Red Brigades. But which ‘people’ do they have in mind? The Italian people have been taken utterly by surprise by events. The understandable shock in the face of such brutality, alongside the memory of not so remote overwhelming abuses, has not prevented the collective instinct of the people to

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side immediately with the just, refusing to allow the Red Brigades to speak in their name. * 2. We would like the documentary – our ‘Report’ – to start barely a matter of minutes before the ambush, the slaughter of Via Fani on 16 March 1978. It is not quite nine in the morning. How was political, social and economic life at that time? We know, by turning the pages of newspapers, weeklies and listening to radio broadcasts. The voice of the speaker, who is going to lead the reconstruction of the event from the beginning to the end (that is, in the small cemetery of Torrita Tiberina, where Aldo Moro is buried), goes as far as informing us about what the weather was like in Rome, and the Bulletin of births and deaths. Image follows image, mixing large-scale events and small events, public ones and private ones, Ministers with actors, prize-winning athletes and unknown figures, acting out ephemeral, strange, pathetic or even amusing events. But the headline which stands out the most is this one: The Andreotti Government will appear today in the Chambers

Even the radio makes the announcement, during one of its usual news bulletins, followed by litanies of advertising, communicating their illusion of prosperity, and putting forward an even greater illusion of a frame of mind of superiority over everyone else. At one point, at two minutes past nine on 16 March, the radio newscast, which we scrupulously re-recorded in its entirety for our narrative, is interrupted. There is a moment of utter silence, followed by a sudden extraordinary announcement on Channel One, an announcement which could change Italy’s destiny, like thirty years ago, when the assassination attempt against Palmiro Togliatti was announced: ‘Minister Aldo Moro, President of the Christian Democratic Party, has been kidnapped. The five men who were his escort have been shot dead.’ * 3. Then we immediately see the bodies of the five victims who were carrying out their duty, riddled with holes, twisted in their squad cars, and one of them in a pool of blood on the tarmac in Via Fani. In our mind’s eye, we can’t help seeing extreme close-ups of the five photographs of these five dead policemen, blown up to full size, and glued to cardboard cut-out targets from a shooting range. A rain of bullets from semi-automatic P38 pistols hit these defenceless targets. A flash and it’s over. Then we sidestep conjecture to get straight to the facts. Expressions on people’s faces, television journalists rushing across the city, hurried statements from politicians, Andreotti’s speech in Parliament, the victims’ homes, police stations, weeping, screaming, mothers, sons, wives, flowers, special editions of

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the dailies. The confusion of words grows and grows; from simple ones, such as peace, justice, freedom, to more sophisticated words, such as hegemony, political situation, pluralism. Different languages which confirm, even in such dreadful circumstances, the separation between government and the governed; between the powerful and the dispossessed, between number ones and twos, threes and fours, nine hundred and ninety-nine and the numberless million. And what about the Red Brigades? They are silent. This makes the situation even darker and indeed inescapable. But they spoke for a few short minutes that morning, which can be considered the culmination of many other actions. This is the point at which we retrace the history of Terror in Italy, however briefly. A chilling sequence of men aiming their weapons at other men, clutching their handguns with both hands for an accurate strike at the heart. Italian cities loom large with their history of carnage: Brescia, Genoa, Turin, Milan, Rome. Even the foreign press and foreign television broadcasts publish such shocking photographs which look like feature film stills, like the outcome of fantasy, not reality. If we had to compare film and reality, we would have to acknowledge that reality rivals the macabre, invented, cruelty of feature films. * 4. Meantime, words grow and grow. So many! On posters, on the radio, on television, uttered in the most ‘authoritative languages in the world’, in English, in Russian, in German, in Chinese, in French and in Arabic. Here is the biblical ‘Shalom’. Peace?! All you need is a map and a coloured pencil to remove the veil from our eyes: let’s circle a number of place-names, which are as exotic to us as they are distant; in Africa, Asia, Latin America, where there are reasons for ongoing wars and future wars. Haven’t we already seen on the screens such frightening documentaries which we never thought would repeat actions and words once again, which triggered more concentration camps, the exodus of entire populations and mass graves? Furthermore, one day in April 1945, hadn’t we believed that there was to be perennial peace? Instead of which there has been permanent bloody conflict, pitting man against man, for the only objective recognized by today’s scale of values: power. If power is the ultimate objective, then violence must be its necessary means. Power, as ultimate aim, legitimizes violence. In among the flow of such horrendous photographs, in which humans are treated – if I may be allowed to say so – literally, as shit, here is the photograph of Aldo Moro, a prisoner; the photograph distributed by the Red Brigades. His head is leaning over to his right shoulder, his gaze still sceptical, but maybe more pained than sceptical, underneath the five stars of the Red Brigades. Let’s keep our gaze locked on Aldo Moro’s photograph. Look at it very closely. Look at it from a distance, breaking it down to its physical elements, which begin to take on new meanings as we do so. It is as if, under our scrutiny, Aldo Moro seems to become, for the first time, someone like us, a brother. We are not trying to be moved ourselves or to provoke sentimental feelings in

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others. As far as we are concerned, democracy is the effort we must make to organize ourselves in such a way as to make possible the recovery of mankind, in its original and potential equality, so as to break the myths, rituals, prejudices, brutal interests, which prevent this from happening. Now let’s take a look at Moro, as he appears in a series of old press photographs, during an official ceremony or a speech in Parliament, or while he is kissing a Cardinal’s hand. Moro the man is separate from Moro the politician. And yet, he is not separate: the man is hidden by the mask. Moro the politician resembles other politicians more than he resembles himself; that self which the extreme logic of power – once endured under sufferance, not wielded – reveals to us. * 5. As we get closer to the Epilogue, at which point our narrative will be truncated, as we gaze at dusk through the bars confining the small cemetery where Moro’s shrunken dead body reposes, let us continue to reflect. Meanwhile, in the rest of Italy, the struggle continues between a yes and a no, printed on the 11 June Referendum. Once again, violence and the rapid-fire of machine guns imposes itself on this different, democratic, kind of struggle. At this point, the latest terrorist attack, the one that will have taken place the day before we finish the film, appears on the screen. Because we are certain that terrorism will strike again and continue to do so, for as long as the ultimate causes of hatred and violence are not uprooted; for as long as the dreadful connivance between victim and torturer is not vanquished. Terrorism in Italy has a long history, going back to the birth of the Italian nation. On that occasion, the king, or one of his ministers, said: ‘We have made Italy, now let’s make Italians.’ Words of wisdom, which were not, regrettably, followed by actions. To ‘make Italians’ could only mean to create a democracy: that is to say, to give access to all citizens to the running of the res publica, making everyone equally responsible for it, from the wealthiest to the poorest, towards the construction of a society of free men. Whereas, Italian history, from 1870 up until today, is the history of interventions from on high (in terms of economic power, political power, and ecclesiastical power), aimed at blocking the process of democratization and preventing it from following its natural course. One need only think of 1920, when, following the huge sacrifice of the First World War, and in response to a wave of European renewal, masses of workers in the North and masses of peasants in the South, proposed a socialist solution to deal with the Italian crisis – to which the ruling class responded with fascist terrorism (whether red or black, terrorism is terrorism). One need only recall 1947, when the Republican, Democratic, Italian Constitution, the outcome of the Resistance, the broadest autonomous movement of the people Italy has ever had, was negated by the political class of the Democratic Christian regime

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which, for the following thirty years, did everything it could to exclude from public office political forces inspired by the ideals of the Resistance. Or it will suffice to remember the Massacre at Portella delle Ginestra, carried out by [Salvatore] Giuliano the bandit, a massacre which was the Sicilian landowners’ response to the peasants’ hunger for land, and their response to the unemployed manual labourers. Or we can point to the theory of opposite extremisms, which spilled innocent blood all over Italy, with classic terrorist methods: from the Banca dell’Agricultura of Milan to the massacre of Piazza della Loggia in Brescia. And today, we have the example of the massacre of Via Fani and the Moro kidnapping, which were carried out on the same day a vote in Parliament was to give the go-ahead to the hypothesis of top-level cooperation between different social and political entities. Thus, terrorism, albeit in different guises, emerges and acts in Italy, whenever a shift is taking place towards broader participation of the social classes in the res publica and greater civic responsibility in governance. By contrast, it seems preferable for the few to continue to retain and concentrate power in their hands exclusively and indefinitely, in line with a deeply elitist conception of culture and life. * 6. The analysis of the mysterious aggregation of political forces centred on terrorism would merit a separate chapter. In other words: where does terrorism recruit its manual labour? The rank and file of terrorism does not resemble the rank and file of any political party. The recruitment of this form of labour is the fruit of careful scrutinizing among the unemployed, the disaffected, the deluded, frustrated students, harbouring legitimate expectations of radical change; but also in the criminal circles of the peripheral neighbourhoods of the big cities, among common prison convicts, or among the ‘excluded’ from the islands, enrolled in the formidable army of the Mafia and of banditry. * 7. The morgue at the Policlinico hospital of Rome. Five coffins lined up and covered in flowers. They are the coffins of Moro’s five-strong police escort, killed on 16 March, today. But the soundtrack transports us elsewhere, to another place and time; to the screaming, wailing and lacerating agony of the victims’ relatives: mothers, wives, brothers, fathers, grandfathers. Once again, the funeral lament which always accompanies the tragedies of the South is performed, ever since the ancient massacre of Bronte, right up to the one in Portella della Ginestra. And the cause for the lament is always the same: a political system which prevents making history together, while on the contrary, very obliging in making history against. The rich pitted against the poor; the North against the South, whites against blacks, Aryans against Jews. In such a conflictual logic, death represents the definitive ratification of the impossibility of an integration with life. And life

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itself, not only for the vanquished, but also for the apparent victors, is reduced to only a vegetative state: a life which leaves behind everything exactly in the state it was. A pretence of living, a life devoid of creative inspiration, a dead end life.4 Here is Aldo Moro, a shrunken body, softened into the foetal posture constrained by death, in the boot of the Renault 4. This is the hour when rhetoric appropriates this death, negating it, through the insanity of empty words. Nobody is saying the only thing to say: that this exceptional death is only slightly more absurd than the endless deaths which extinguish lives that have not even begun, and that will only begin when we reach the understanding that one person is another’s equal and that our destiny on earth cannot be delegated to anybody. * 8. What is to be done? This is the situation we have documented and watched unfold before our eyes. It is the recurring question that individuals, society, and any father, will ask at every turn of history. We may pose this question directly, while we are providing facts, in the course of the film, translated into cinematic language, reflection, juxtaposition of shots and situations. Then again, we may include it in a conclusive section, in which we openly and forcefully express our convictions and democratic passion, in other words, a combination of sentiment and reason. What is to be done? It is our conviction that the most incandescent, the most scandalous home truth, we can offer, as a contribution to real knowledge, consists in having the strength to make a public admission that the protagonists, the actors, of all the social events, those who are active on the stage of our history, whatever their involvement, lack the courage to face mutual criticism, to face each other, and get to know each other, consistently with that abstract expectation of a new man, which we demand others to embody, but never ourselves. And now our screen, already a site to decipher the Moro Case, becomes the site to judge this year, 1978, and, more particularly, the ‘genuine Italian’, theorized by the war of independence – the Risorgimento – which is, in this day and age, nothing but an abstract ideal, one whose counterpart in actuality must be accurately portrayed, sparing no details, however painful looking at that portrait is going to be, forming multiple portraits, however brief; intended as the outcome of all the linguistic means we have at our disposal, from animation to interviews with poets and artists, deployed to convey our most glaring contradictions, our macroscopic individualism, civil anarchy, long periods of submission, servile resignation to circumstances, lacking an alternative moral 4

‘Life reduced to a vegetative state’: Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’, theorized years later in Homo sacer (1995), in relation to the death camps, comes to mind. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Turin: Einaudi, 2005.

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compass, acquired through painful experience. We shall highlight all these [contradictions] for being multiple causes, in relation to the drama we are living. Incidentally, not a single unprejudiced film exists in our country which openly tackles the relation between Church and State, and yet this is such a determining factor. The more our conscientization, the more adopting as a point of departure a situation as authentic as ours, is going to ‘speak Italian’, in a manner of saying – just as post-war Neo-realist cinema did, for an all too brief a period – the more it will be truthful about contemporary man, the protagonist of comparably tragic events; from the ever impending threat of the Bomb to the hatred and terrorism disseminated and operational everywhere. This shows that democracy, even where it is at its most advanced, is light years away from having given birth to the new man, who cannot be limited by nationality. It is no longer feasible to exist in separation, neither at the level of individuals, nor on that of nations. What has not been resolved for everyone, has been resolved for no one. 9. What is to be done? It is our conviction that the further we are from a substantial renewal, the more we must begin to give proof of our commitment to it. We deliberately use this obsolete word, wrongly cast aside, at a time when events show that we should use it; commitment to engage with real events – even on a daily basis – and engage with them publicly. This film is the contribution we can make, consistently with what we said earlier. We are writing on 10 June 1978. We are not saying that any contribution should presume to set precise deadlines for effecting radical change, for we have no prophetic talents. What we are saying is that the contemporary moment is to be considered the most difficult challenge History is setting us. One might venture to say that History is very disappointed in us. But then so are we terribly disappointed in History. The point we are making is that we are dissatisfied with the kind of Man resulting at present from the relation between individual and collective, since today the two terms are unable to merge into one. But it seems to us that the reconstruction of Aldo Moro: Before, During, After offers one of the organizing principles required for the transformation we need. We should effect the reconciliation between History and Man, in ourselves, to form Man himself, making him responsible for being the prime agent of the event. Consequently, we must change Man, if we want to change the event. Instead, we currently expect Man, unchanged, to have the strength to reshape the surrounding world. What is to be done? Know more, and acquire knowledge together, not in isolation, in the firm belief that all men are equal.

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Scenario The Truuuuth (1981)1

Context In the 1970s, Zavattini rewrote the scenario Assault on Television (1962). The biggest change the project underwent was that Zavattini acted and himself played the main role. Don Quixote-Enzo, a candidate for a reporter’s job in television, was replaced by Don Quixote-Antonio, played by Zavattini, in the role of a madman who escapes from a mental asylum. The film is set in Rome and features Rome’s two famous – or should we say notorious – balconies. Namely, the pope’s balcony in Saint Peter’s Square, which represents prudish, censorious and hypocritical ‘clericalism’, and Mussolini’s balcony in Piazza Venezia. Both are cyphers, underpinning the allegorical nature of the film. They indicate the interplay of authoritarian rule by Church and State which two powers, the former the spiritual power, the latter the temporal power, are presented in their current state of affairs as major obstacles to ‘the truth’. They are not the only obstacles, however, for, if the theological definition of evil is the absence of good, in La veritàaaaa! a shift towards establishing what constitutes the truth requires the abolition of hypocrisy, by a society willing to admit its major shortcomings: corruption and double standards. Despite all the re-writes, and the changes of casting – Zavattini thought of different comedians for the lead role, including the folksinger Enzo Jannacci and the comedian Roberto Beningni – the central idea behind the film remained the same. He resorted to two elements of his early days, a comic genre and a madcap escape, combining them with a testamentary message: the urgent need for radical change, at both a personal and a social level, for which honesty is an essential prerequisite. The scenario, indeed, the film itself, outlines an escape which manages to avoid didacticism through comedy, verging on black humour, gentle irony, alongside harsh sarcasm, more monologues than dialogues, fast1

Zavattini, La veritàaaa, edited by Maurizio Grande, Milan: Bompiani, 1983. For the context, cf. Maurizio Grande, ‘Il soggetto inesauribile’ and ‘Come nasce la veritàaaa’, in Zavattini, La veritàaaa, 1983, 7–57 and 61–5.

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paced delivery and the strong presence of Zavattini the actor and, indeed, director, proving himself to be equally at home under this spotlight, as in his apartment in Via Merici, where he was quite capable of expounding on a new idea well into the small hours. Given the film’s experimental nature and considering that all but a handful of the actors were regular extras from Cinecittà, non-professional actors, much of the dialogue appears to have been the outcome of improvisation, based on one of many versions of the screenplay (the production archives thousands and thousands of pages), which last version was only used as a general guideline. This might explain why the definitive version of the screenplay, published by Maurizio Grande, is a transcript from the film itself, along with final version of the scenario. The 16-millimetre colour film was first broadcast on rai 2 on 5 January 1982, and later released in the cinemas and is accessible on YouTube, but without English subtitles.

Text 1 Private Diary, 25 March 19782 The film is a vehicle for a final reflection on my way of seeing things and my intention to express and communicate how I am; what lies behind the scenes and the scenes too, in my approach to reflection, thought, and imagination. At the moment, the way I see myself can be summed up by saying that I no longer have any interest in my career as a writer or my life. I have come to realise that I’m not interested in creating a fable, a poem, a novel, or a diary. What really does attract me enormously is to see if I can develop further insight into the matter. And I’d say that this is something I ought to write down in block capitals. Only a few days ago, I was asked in an interview: where do you get your vitality and sense of purpose, at your age? My reply came to me in a flash, I have no idea why. After all, we don’t always have an answer on the spot. I said I was indebted to my ignorance. Why? Because that is what I’m like ... deeply ignorant. I don’t investigate clear spaces, but dark ones. This way, every new space is a black hole rather than a white one. Not only do I fail to understand, I have never understood anything for fifty years. And so, could a man die in such a state of ignorance? No, it’s impossible to die with this predicament. Because there’s such a contradiction with being which is so deep-rooted that I must live on, not that I’ll end up understanding the much-desired truth, but something, at the very least, I

2

Zavattini, ‘25 March 1978’, in Io. Un’autobiografia, 265–6.

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should manage to grasp. So that is why they’ll let me live on, not necessarily for long; after all, you can form an idea in barely five minutes or in five years.

2 (Explanatory production notes, 1979). I have always felt pleased with this scenario, since its solid and dynamic structure provides the flexibility for continuously updating its content, in the light of current affairs of the day, and to suit whoever the actor and director turn out to be.3 But, above all, what I have always considered effective is the internal and external rhythm of the story, not exactly like a cartoon animation, but almost. The protagonist wants to change the world in an hour and a half, find out the truth, with the police at his heels. He has this naïve, rhetorical, yet critical, conviction that if we all said what we really think (which our shortcomings, rooted in history, the past and the present make difficult), we would save body and soul, and it should not be ruled out that someone would say to him that we would become immortal. Time was when I imagined [Enzo] Jannacci, [Renato] Pozzetto and [Renato] Raschel in the role; we had more than an initial exchange of ideas, but then all of us got caught up in other projects. The lead character’s constant trait, regardless of which actor is going to be playing him, is a need for space, for change, for the transformation of our ways, of our explicit and concealed behaviour. Therefore, his irrepressible impulse is to act as a severe judge, if compassionate at times, resulting in a confession in public and the urge to make others confess, and to insinuate himself into their everyday and into the habit patterns of words and gestures, in a mounting pressure which can only seem anarchic, whereas it’s based on principles, values, easily within anyone’s reach. If we were able to cast aside, for a moment at least, our mutual fear – that is all it would take, a single instant of time – to face our hypocrisy, which has become second nature, our presumption of knowing something we don’t really know or our laziness of believing that someone exists who has charismatic powers. I consider him neither mad nor an optimist: he reveals both sides of the same coin; what we are and what we could become. As far as our Enzo is concerned, human beings are a quarry from which you can extract hidden treasures. Too few are those who sing, those who play a musical instrument, in other words, those who allow the full range of human capabilities and potential to be realized. Enzo is something of a prophet, of a visionary, unwittingly comic and dramatic too. He’s also popular in the current sense of the word, in so far as he is able to inspire a collective movement, a choral, cooperative movement with his insights, poised between lyricism and didacticism, being somewhere between an early Christian and a revolutionary shouting: ‘Up with the Body!’ and causing large public demonstrations by doing so.

Zavattini, Basta con i soggetti!, 323–5.

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There’d be no reason to be bored, if we go along with his style, his hopping about from situation to situation, as soon as he has exposed a situation’s flaw, and leaving behind a wake of converts, half converts and those resisting conversion who run off to phone the nearest police station or mobile squad. He jumps, runs, weeps, addresses the crowds, whom he invites to yell the slogan: ‘truffles! truffles!’ as a symbol of equal human rights for all. But he also expresses his conviction, both passionately and kindly, relying on a mixture of science and intuition, that a deeper form of equality exists – one which is natural – and that believing in it underpins and provokes every single action we can come up with and carry out to create a society based on greater equality and reason. Now and then our hero might seem a bit abstract, outside the realms of the real world; more a victim of his imagination than of the harsh necessities of accounting. But whatever it is, it is always founded on a solid basis, on something which exists within each one of us. To the extent that, to repeat myself, he’s able to convince other people to rid themselves of centuries-old prejudice, just like that, getting them to strip naked in the street, making them understand just how claustrophobic societal restrictions are, in all their covert and mediated repression. Which is why then everyone cries: ‘space! space!’ really feeling as if they are suffocating, while, in the meantime, he has to resume his escape, and complete his extensive research, his revenge on the all mass media, spectacular in its failings, in its task of keeping the general public informed. In order to follow him, at times, we’ll also jump like kangaroos and sometimes we’ll flit from one person to another, and, like birds on the wing, from one place to another. We’ll think up a montage of scenes, based on the diverse situations he creates and the encounters he has. These are all flashes, barely enough to show someone dying, someone being born, someone coming, someone going, a dance hall where he doesn’t have enough time to interrupt the dancing, but makes the dancers tell their story, while moving in time to the wild music. Perhaps it is superfluous to add that in this kind of film the cinematography, well, actually, technology, in every sense of the word, will be positively influenced by this helter-skelter pursuit across Rome, making use of videotape, along with any other medium available. It is probably no less evident that the rigorous screenplay will be accompanied by an equally rigorous anti-screenplay: this is no paradox. I just want to allow for the fact that whoever the actor might be (the most suitable for this kind of work), must be given leeway in his gestural and verbal interpretation of the role. In other words, he must be free to improvise. This is something to bear in mind, and it should always be worked out in close collaboration with the director, who may sometimes intervene. The two are like partners in crime, both also on the run, we could say, in search of a little truth, to which irony and satire will contribute making the film more interesting and useful. The same goes for the other characters, including Rocco, and others playing roles which, however short, are no less pertinent, not excluding people taken by surprise, asked to act out a role, willy-nilly.

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I remember a film I came up with some time ago, which was made in collaboration with several excellent young people.4 In some ways, I consider it the serious prototype for something similar, yet in a comical vein, but no less demanding. That investigative film was intended to be very direct, immediate, but then only some footage came out like that. For reasons it would be too long to explain here, that approach was side-lined by more traditional criteria. We shot a scene where some young filmmakers, who’d ventured into corridors off limits in the Vatican, were chased off the premises by the police. The Truuuuth presents a different challenge, it is true, yet this recollection comes naturally to me. It should help elicit spontaneity, surprise, speed and occasionally, unplanned developments, in a work which is, as I have already mentioned, carefully planned. 3

The Truuuuth, 19815 1. The protagonist is Antonio. He has been officially sectioned as mad. Because he laughs, when others weep, and cries, when others laugh. He lives in a mental asylum where he spends his time endlessly expressing his thoughts. He is completely against peace. He wants to escape from the asylum to go around convincing people that you can’t be in favour of peace, if you don’t know what it is. He is against what you don’t know. ‘Watch out, I’ll escape’, says he. Well, as it so happens, he vaults over the three-metre wall, he clears the perimeter wall around the mental hospital and so begins his escape. * 2. He confronts anyone he meets, obliging them to tell the truuuuuuuuth. He goes as far as slapping them in the face. He is convinced that everyone has some crumb of truth to say, but never says it. He’s also convinced that the most pressing truth to say is that we don’t know what truth might be. And he gets excited and gets depressed. Takes offence. Apologizes. Avoids the police whose orders are to arrest a madman who has just broken out of a psychiatric hospital who’s in favour of war; he climbs on a bus where a woman is giving birth prematurely, out of fear, and he tries to keep the baby from coming into the world, since the world is a place in which not a single person says what he or she thinks. His sincerity swings between enchantment and desperation for the actual situation we’re in and for our inadequate behaviour. He mostly uses vulgar language, constantly apologizing, and explaining that the reason he does

4 5

The Mysteries of Rome. Zavattini, ‘La veritàaaaaaaaaa. Film da camera. Scritto, diretto, interpretato da C.Z., marzoaprile 1981’, in Zavattini, La veritàaaa, 85–91. This is the final version of the scenario.

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so is that, if he were to use polite language, he’d end up sharing the ideas of the majority, suitably polite, yet no less culpable. At one point, Antonio is about to be nabbed. But he manages to join a group of tourists from different countries who are just setting off on foot into the catacombs of Saint Agnese. In the catacombs, his spontaneity prevents him from keeping quiet and, consequently, attracting the police’s attention. This is where he says what he thinks of Christianity. His speech grows longer and longer, as he criticizes Christ, God and any thought arising in mankind, since he says Man fails to reflect, Man could think, but does not. Man has never been able to think. Man is not equipped with thought. He says he’ll explain what he means to the whole world in Piazza Venezia. While he is talking, a woman cries out that someone is pinching her bottom. At this, there’s shouting, confusion and fear, and everyone is trying to get out and all the faces, without exception, are distressing to see, due to the fear they reveal and the struggle among pilgrims to be the first to get out. Antonio states that the truuuuuuuuth is this fierce competition and everyone agrees with him when he says it, even the police, because they feel intimidated by this character and follow him in procession, while he yells: ‘To Piazza Venezia! To Piazza Venezia!’ Where he will put forward his momentous proposal to the world. * 3. And sure enough, in Piazza Venezia, Antonio makes a speech to prove that humanity doesn’t think. That it is governed through and through by ideas and thoughts that are completely ineffective. ‘All of us stink from the bad smell of the rotten ideas we carry inside us. We must vomit them out of our system.’ He succeeds in persuading everybody to vomit these decrepit words which prevent the birth of new ideas. Everyone starts vomiting. You could say they’re vomiting the past and freeing themselves of it once and for all. He also manages to enthuse the crowd with talk of love between man and woman: as far as he is concerned, to fuck means to think. There’s an extraordinary equation of sexual love and thought; an amazing identity and interdependence. Which is why he invites people to watch a man and woman fucking in public, even finding a divine quality in it. Hurray! Meanwhile, more and more people from all volunteer to take part in the great banquet of truth. They want to throw up, in other words, to speak at last, including the ones who have nothing to say at first, but feel the deep-rooted need. To talk, talk, talk. Not one of them becomes as enthusiastic as Antonio the enthusiast, who invites everyone to go to Viale Mazzini to the Television Broadcasting headquarters, to express, via ether, the new feelings which are coming to the surface and which, for the time being, take the form of a song composed of words which are only seemingly nonsensical, but which do allow the urge for truth and independence to emerge. ‘Let’s go and say on ether that we are against peace’, Antonio yells. ‘I mean, against such a vague thing which we all use as wordy rhetoric, to conceal our ignorance, like thieves and assassins.’

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4. The cortège, led by Antonio, reaches Viale Mazzini, rai-tv headquarters. The world seems overwhelmingly in need of saying what it thinks, as never before, although, for the moment, all you can hear are only snatches of partly decipherable sentences, because everyone’s trying to use a new language, a mixture of songs and who knows what else, a language reborn to a new existence, in which words are consistent with deeds. Antonio is enthused. He keeps urging them on and on. He announces, in the form of another discovery, that people – and he means absolutely everybody – fails to tell the truth – and does so out of fear. Fear of whom? Of everyone, of others and even of themselves. They utter the names and surnames of whom they fear. One fears assholes, simply because they have a rank, because they’re in charge, because they’re taking part in a ritual. ‘Old stuff’, he says, but in this testamentary atmosphere such things are only touched upon by these people. He wants any inferiority complex to be swept away like the wind, so that everyone has equal responsibility. Not even Christ is immune. He was undoubtedly a great soul, but he had a thing about hierarchy, he says. And he was also an intellectual. At this stage, the entire State machinery is pitted against Antonio; even the Army turns up, while ordinary people and celebrities are vying for the mike to open their hearts, bear their souls, tell the world a little about solidarity, by stating the way things are and Antonio makes the point that he is not propagandizing love and embracing others. On the contrary, even some hatred is necessary to recognize the truth. Christian love, having turned into a superficial illusion, confuses the issue, slows down knowledge, yet coming to know, at all costs, and in depth, is precisely the first step in the right direction. ‘Then we’ll see what needs to be done.’ The crowd includes personalities, politicians, artists and writers all of whom vie for the mike and there is someone on air over here and someone else over here; monologues compete with dialogues, tears with elation. Everything overlaps, and we must admit, you hear many a good insight about life and each other. But in this place, it seems as if this change is here to stay. There are even people willing to give their lives to witness their new-found repentance from all the rogue deeds they committed right up to a short while ago. An extraordinary situation of newly acquired confidence begins to spread. You get the impression there’ll never be a war again, and that the bombs falling down on the television screens of Viale Mazzini can at last be stopped at will. And Antonio is mistaken for someone who can stop all the bombing. And there he is, actually attempting to stop them on the video screen, while everyone looks on, in the belief that he can perform wonders. But it isn’t possible. In the battle between the law of physics and the law of ethics, the former wins out. Bombs fall and generate massacres. Antonio looks as if he’s waking up from a dream. He picks up an arm from inside the television – as if this were really happening and were not being filmed – a victim’s arm, and almost goes out of his mind

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when he realizes that this is what reality is, not something else. He flees the scene, heading for the Vatican to see the pope and ask him for an explanation. He believes the pope has an obligation to give a less generic answer than usual. ‘Pope, Pope, Pope!’ he yells as he runs flat out in the direction of the Basilica of Saint Peter’s. * 5. When he reaches Saint Peter’s Square, he gets the pope to throw down the key from the window, picks it up, and heads for the Vatican Gardens, where the pope is waiting for him. And there, although he is still being pursued, he has a conversation with the pope, as overwhelmingly sincere, as it is overwhelmingly interrupted by the Swiss Guards who are searching for him, and by the deafening barking of their watchdogs. The whole conversation bakes down to Antonio summing up all his feelings. No matter what the pope or others may say, or the more they say, nothing can change what made Antonio lose his mind: why does war exist? Why is it that although we say we don’t want it, it keeps happening all the same? Surely this is a contradiction which is more terrifying than bombs, than the deaths they provoke. We pretend we are alive. We deceive one another. In the face of such a situation, his words are worthless, no better than the words of the greatest philosophers. ‘I am at a loss, I can’t bear it anymore’, says Antonio. ‘I’d rather die; I’ll kill myself.’ And to carry out this appalling plan, which the pope cannot prevent, having nothing but Faith to oppose it – that arm, one of millions of limbs and of unspeakable sufferings – Antonio holds his breath to die. This is real suicide which makes us feel our predicament, as if for the first time: stupid, barbarous, inhuman. While Antonio goes on breathing, silence reigns around him. We have a sense of a time which is divorced from the will to live together. That child’s limb is like a useless leftover. Better to die, then. Even allowing for all the respect for him, the emptiness of the pope’s frantic words becomes apparent. They’re useless words. This becomes evident when Death comes on to the scene. Yes, Death. But Death is no longer able to perform the role of Death. Humanity has impoverished it to be a single role: terror, nothing but terror and more terror. How could it be any other way, when man doesn’t think? And only pretends to think? Death is offended and belittled by non-thought, so it takes Antonio’s side and also sings that new, albeit absurd song which Antonio encouraged everyone to sing in Piazza Venezia, while the pope leaves, accompanied by his clerics, praying and thanking God that Antonio is alive and well, even though the police are taking him back to the asylum. * The film ends. But no, it doesn’t end. While the customary words the end appear on the screen, Antonio, who, until this moment, has been played by the author (c. z.), takes off his theatrical costume, to reveal his own, the clothes of a petit-bourgeois male, of a citizen, of the person he is. And he says as much,

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while he takes off his mental asylum smock. He says the story boils down to this: he was wrong to hide behind a make-believe story. Why not say that he is the one who thinks these things? A very specific person, with friends, enemies, a family, sentimental attachments and whatever makes up a man today? In this way, his would be an act of truth, of humility, to say what one thinks, no longer indirectly through others, through fables, and such things. Moreover, because it really is him, he feels even more obliged to name names and to speak openly, even though he may be mistaken, even though he lacks the authority and the required knowledge. In four or five minutes, he sums up 1981! ‘If I didn’t possess at the very least this little courage, then I know that it would be better to hold my breath and leave.’ And after explaining that there is never going to be a new world without new thoughts, and that there are never going to be new thoughts without everyone’s contribution, and that that no new thinking can exist without a new purpose, which consists in trying to understand why we don’t understand; how we can manage to live, while giving up trying to understand what it is possible to understand and what we have an obligation to understand, c. z., no longer Antonio, ends his speech addressed, perhaps, to young people, as if they were the best interlocutors with whom to make an effort to understand more, together.

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Transmission test Telesubito (1983)1

Context By 1983, 343 private television stations had come into existence, of which 88 in Emilia Romagna, Zavattini’s second home and place of birth, as someone who was directly involved in parliamentary commissions of the period and directly with Zavattini, in setting up a Zavattinian-style television station has documented.2 Zavattini, Alessandro Carri and others met several times in 1983 and 1984, to discuss setting up a different kind of television which, it was hoped, would serve as a model of democratic practice. The figures are misleading. For, despite the large numbers of broadcasters, financial interests meant that a few, including Canale 5, Berlusconi’s channel, Italia 1 and Rete 4, were becoming increasingly powerful and visible, at the expense of the myriad of other broadcasters. Be that as it may, ntv was formed in Bologna, financed by a cooperative-style approach, based on popular shareholding. However, ntv imitated what other channels were doing and their time-honoured, recipe, inherited from national broadcasting (consisting in a mixture of entertainment and generic newscasts), until Carri contacted Zavattini to see if he might get involved in developing a genuine alternative, based on his media theories on the unrealized potential of television, to develop a ‘new television’. Zavattini’s response was that it was high time for a radical critique of both public and private broadcasting, according to his analysis. He thought that there had to be a cheaper, and more effective way of doing television, proposing a model which resisted and rejected viewer manipulation, the illusionist deformation of the real and the exposure and rejection of television mythologies. He brought urgency into the equation. Urgency of accurate and focussed reporting, towards

Zavattini, ‘Prove techniche di Telesubito’, in Alessandro Carri, La televisione di Zavattini. L’idea e il progetto di Telesubito nelle parole e nelle lettere di Cesare Zavattini, Reggio Emilia: Consulta librieprogetti, 2016, 31–51. The author would like to thank Giorgio Boccolari for bringing Telesubito to his attention. 2 Alessandro Carri, ‘Zavattini e la televisione’, in Carri, La televisione di Zavattini, 11–17. 1

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an alternative television, a counter-television. These ideas pitted the existing model of television against an alternative model, in the same way as the Free Newsreels films and movement, pitted mainstream feature filmmaking against a grassroots non-fiction which resisted auteurship in favour of citizenship and participation. His plan was that Telesubito would combine facts with analysis and reflection, on a twenty-four hour basis, adopting the point of view of ordinary people, not of the élite, and deconstructing content, to make connections, instead of broadcasting issues in isolation from the broader context in which they fitted. The new television he had in mind would cease to be dependent on advertising and a sales orientation which only contributed to mass consumerism. The name Telesubito, Immediatetv, reflected the need for immediacy, between identifying a social fact and broadcasting its analysis, addressing the gap he saw both in his critique of mainstream cinema, and of national and private television broadcasting. Other names he used were Telepace and Televerità Peacetv and Truthtv, to repurpose the medium and make it people-friendly and emancipatory. He critiqued the gap between knowledge and action, knowing and taking appropriate steps, instead of putting issues and their resolution on the long finger, so to speak, including environmental issues of desertification, pollution, alternative forms of renewable energy. Subito meant now, immediately, not postponement, as opposed to dopo (later) the norm. Participation would take the shape of non-professional presenters, interviewers, witnesses, engaged in discussion, following on from the suggestions his fictional television film The Truuuuth. Internal opposition to Zavattini’s plan and analysis and, fierce external competition, above all, led to the sale of ntv to tv7 and the end of this media experiment. The selection of texts below are from filmed preliminary broadcasts in which Zavattini theorized his proposals, revolving around philosophical issues: war, the apparent impossibility of peace, pacifism as a necessary and fundamental way of being, the contradiction of civilization, ecological disaster and ruling power structures, are the recurring themes.

Text 1 In essence, the fundamental distinction to make is between a sense of urgency in carrying out media interventions aimed at effecting change, as opposed to media interventions, informed by compromise and delay.3 Telesubito belongs to the first category. This then determines practical, operative and theoretical consequences which can, at least in part, be foreseen. Our Telesubito [tv Now] challenges Teledomani, [tv Tomorrow], which is the reality of power and those

3

Zavattini, ‘Prove della prima puntata’, in Carri, La televisione di Zavattini, 31–2.

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affiliated with power and to this latter approach, be they on the Left or on the Right. How time is interpreted is neither left-wing nor right-wing, but is equally homogenized and complicit, even when broadcasters are not aware of it.

2 All the ideas and related initiatives, from the first to the last, derive from this premise which touches on a central point: the rejection of domani, tomorrow.4 This concept is inscribed in all the intellectual aspects of our lives, from thought, to art, and the categories of art, grandiose as they may seem to us, extraordinary, encapsulated in our humanity, life itself, creation.

3 Many of my proposals will be unpopular.5 Is there anything more unpopular than imagining a school system in which teacher, student and parent are all going to school to learn? This would require an organizational structure, based on generosity, totally unthinkable today. But it might seem less unreal in the future, if our interest in such a scheme were linked to the promotion of peace, which such a system would favour ideologically. To suppose that peace can exist, in the context of the existing educational system, is simply absurd, and the school system is the most authoritative site of such absurdity. Current lifestyle facilitates students in developing their prejudices, and in transmitting their ignorance to their families.

4 Films should become information, including their making, using the new language made available by technological advances, but without becoming enslaved by them.6 Do you realize how long filmmakers have waited to get very significant capital funding to make their non-mainstream films and then had to respect decrepit parameters of supposed best practice? Decrepit not only in terms of entertainment value, understood in a conditioned and very limited sense, but more importantly, of the relation, which we are failing to overturn, between our fundamental needs and how we related to them through our imagination. The focus of this polemic is clear enough: the ongoing, broadcasting trend of deadening everything and anything such that independence, freedom of speech, is no more than an illusion. I would wish that all those who become involved

Zavattini, ‘Subito a rifiutare domani’, in ibidem, La televisione di Zavattini, 39–40. Zavattini, ‘Molte delle mie proposte saranno impopolari’, in Carri, La televisione di Zavattini, 44. 6 Zavattini, ‘L’uomo estratto a sorte’, in ibidem, La televisione di Zavattini, 41–2. Zavattini’s emphasis and italics. 4 5

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in Telesubito will agree that in no way will the regard for their work and their status diminish if they are thorough in their approach to problematic issues.

5 We don’t know how to make the best use of ourselves.7 Thought is a legacy. Its attributes include reflection, but this legacy has only been used by a few, which means by no one. But, as I see it, thought succeeds in manifesting itself as such, that is to say, in producing, only when it is equipped with the participation of all. The philosophy we make use of is so below its potential that it never faces its own self-criticism and acknowledge its failure. I don’t believe any failure is as exposed and public as war and the monotony of reciprocal hatred.

6 The greatness of Man. I am still utterly convinced that things could be no worse than they are at present. It seems a contradiction. On the one hand, I have no faith in Man as operating in a defined, historic sense and context, however much this idea is authoritatively presented in the media as the predestined outcome of mankind and civilization, on the other hand, my faith in Man in absolute terms has grown. From my humble observation post, I’ve discovered that the greatness of Man does exist, but cannot manifest itself. And I have asked myself the reason. In these years, I have come to think that the reason is a lack of intelligence. Man only produces, and always tardily, a modest part of his intrinsic value, of the phenomenon that he is. We are no longer capable of viewing him with the same astonishment reserved for other manifestations of nature. It seems all so obvious and part of consumption. We live without living, Living is reduced to conflict between man and man, reaching its apex in war. It happens already within these four walls of home: on a small scale, all the issues, the needs, the errors, the likes and dislikes, the lucky, the unlucky, the egotists, the altruists, all this is multiplied in war, through psychology, confrontation, pretence, deception, which grow out of all proportion and lack any real restraint. 8

7 Power.9 However it presents itself or is formed, power, even in democracy, is always the sum total of a minority which rules over a majority and of a majority which aspires to take part in the minority, but without the willingness to take any responsibility for its actions. Power is a collection of stereotypes, of ruthless habits, which are carefully hidden by the same sort of piety which characterizes Christian doctrine and praxis. Zavattini, ‘Non sappiamo usarci’, in ibidem, 37–8. Zavattini, ‘La grandezza dell’uomo’, in ibidem, La televisione di Zavattini, 37. 9 Zavattini, ‘Il potere’, in ibidem, La televisione di Zavattini, 36–7. 7 8

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Cesare Zavattini Selected Writings Volume 2

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Cesare Zavattini Selected Writings Volume 2 Edited and Translated by David Brancaleone



BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Edition and translation © David Brancaleone Cover photograph © Archivio Zavattini Reggio in Emilia Texts © Eredi Zavattini Commentary © David Brancaleone Edition © David Brancaleone Translation © David Brancaleone Cover design: Namkwan Cho All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1705-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1992-1    eBook: 978-1-5013-1993-8      Set: 978-1-5013-1718-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Introduction to Volume 2 1 Part one  Pre-war 1 ‘The Directors’ Gift’, from The Hollywood Chronicles (1933) 2 ‘The Frustrations of a Young Scriptwriter’ (1936) 3 Letters to filmmakers, Il Settebello (1938–9) 4 ‘The Best Dreams’ (1940) 5 ‘Notebook’ (1940–1) 6 Radio eiar Interview (1942) 7 ‘One Minute of Cinema’ (1942) 8 The Imola Conference (1942) 9 ‘The Importance of the Script’ (1942–3)

5 8 15 19 24 28 30 34 47

Part two  Post-war

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Radio interview: Fascism and post-war Italy (1983) 51 ‘Poetry, Italian Cinema’s only Business’ (1945) 54 ‘Three Questions’ (1946) 56 ‘Italy Wants to Know’ (1947) 58 ‘I’m an Optimist’ (1949) 61 ‘Is Cinema going to Die?’ (1949) 63 Perugia Conference: ‘Cinema and Modern Man’ (1949) 65 Letter to Father Morlion (1949) 71 ‘Scrap Scripts’ (1950) 73 ‘Italian Cinema Tomorrow’ (1950) 78 ‘Taking Issue with the Present’ (1951) 81 Interview: ‘Cinema, Zavattini and Reality’ (1951) 85 ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’ (1952) 89 ‘What Is a Flash Film’ (1952) 119 Flash Film: ‘A Development of Neo-realism’ (1952) 123 Enzo Muzii attacks Zavattini: ‘Adult Realism’ (1953) 127 ‘Theses on Neo-realism’ (1953) 130 The Story of Catherine in Zavattini’s diary (1952) 142

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Contents

28 Voice-over: Love in the City and an excerpt of dialogue (1953)

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

145

Shadowing (1953) 148 Parma Conference: ‘Neo-realism as I see it’ (1953) 152 Zavattini’s first trip to Cuba in his diary (1953) 166 The Havana Conference (1953) 171 Milan Conference (1954) 181 Neo-realism as ethics (1954) 188 Transcendence in Zavattini’s diary (1954) 199 Neo-realism and Italia mia. Correspondence (1952–8) 201 Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village. Correspondence (1952–3) 207 Zavattini, ‘Strand the Photographer, 13 April 1953’ 215 Zavattini, Introduction to Cinema Nuovo photographic stories (1955) 217 Alfredo Guevara, ‘Cuba’, Cinema Nuovo, no. 51, 1955 220 Guevara, letter to Zavattini, 2 April 1955 222 José Massip to Zavattini, 26 April 1955 225 Guevara, letter to Zavattini, 4 May 1955 229 Zavattini, letter to Guevara, 12 May 1955 232 ‘Letter from Cuba’ (1955) 233 Paris Conference: ‘Useful Cinema’ (1956) 236 ‘The Economic Conference of Cinema’ (1956) 238 ‘The Loneliness of Zavattini’ (1958) 247 Zavattini, letter to Guevara, 2 January 1959 251 Fernando Bernal, letter to Zavattini, 29 May 1959 253 Guevara, letter to Zavattini, 29 September 1959 255 Zavattini, letter to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1 November 1959 257 ‘How to Write a Screenplay’ (1959) 259 icaic Conference, 15 January 1960 262 Zavattini, letter to Gaetano Afeltra, 15 February 1960 268 Zavattini, letter to Valentino Bompiani, 7 March 1960 270 Cuban filmmakers on Zavattini, Cine cubano (1960) 272 Héctor García Mesa and Eduardo Manet, Cine cubano (1960) 274 ‘Debating with the Opponents of Commitment’ (1960) 276 Zavattini, letter to Lino Miccichè, 2 November 1977 287 Zavattini, letter to Benito Alazraki, 30 October 1954 289 Prologue and Epilogue: El Neorrealismo cinematografico italiano (1955) 292 63 Mexican Bellas Artes Conference, 24 August 1955 296

Contents

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64 Interview: ‘Three films by Zavattini in Mexico’, 5 September 1955 304 65 Zavattini, letter to Alvaro Beltrani, 20 October 1955 307 66 Carlos Velo, letter to Zavattini, 7 November 1955 311 67 Zavattini, letter to Felipe Carrera, 29 January 1956 314 68 Zavattini, letter to Velo, 5 October 1958 316 69 Elio Petri, letter to Zavattini, 1 April 1962 318 70 ‘An Act of Courage’ (1960) and ‘On Censorship’ (1960) 320 71 Zavattini and television (1961) 326 72 The Newspaper for Peace (1961) 329 73 Interview: The confession film (1961) 333 74 The confession film: Correspondence (1962) 340 75 Interview: The Mysteries of Rome (1962–3) 345 76 ‘The Newsreel for Peace’ (1962) 355 77 The Why? project (1963) 358 78 Rinascita round table (1965) 362 79 ‘First Conversation’ (1966) 365 80 Interview: ‘Four Questions Addressed to Filmmakers’ (1967) 370 81 Zavattini, ‘Why I am not resigning from anac’ (1968) 375 82 ‘Free Newsreels’ (1968) 379 83 Zavattini, letter to Luigi Chiarini (1968) 382 84 anac Press Conference, Venice Film Festival (1968) 384 85 ‘The Cine-camera as a Weapon’ (1969) 387 86 ‘Pesaro Film Festival and Free Newsreels’ (1969) 390 87 Political film (1970) 393 88 ‘The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat’ (1971) 398 89 ‘Time and Cinema’ (1975) 403 90 Grassroots interventions (1976) 405 91 Screenwriting (1977) 407 92 The Truuuuth (La veritàaaa) (1978–81) 410 Bibliography Index

419 429

viii

Introduction to Volume 2 This second volume presents a representative selection of Zavattini’s film writings, from a wide range of sources, including conference papers, unpublished internal production reports, interviews, correspondence, excerpts from his published cinematic diary and radio broadcasts. This volume is divided into two parts. The first offers a selection of pre-war writing, the second, a rich selection of post-war texts, presenting a cross-section of Zavattini’s interests. The basis for this selection is Neorealismo ecc. (1979), edited by Mino Argentieri.1 The representative selection of pre-war texts enables the reader to trace the origin of Zavattini’s evolving ideas on the cinema and appreciate his approach and theorization of Neo-realism. The more one juxtaposes disparate, far-flung texts, some never published in Italian, the more a common thread, a pattern begins to emerge: they all fit in to Zavattini’s interventions, which are limited to those concerning the cinema, understood as what appears on the screen, but not limited to the screen and to the frame, so as to include what is outside the frame. It becomes clear that the writer and theorist keeps refining, developing and even changing his approach. The writings are mostly organized chronologically. The exceptions are instances in which his interventions have required the editor to break the chronological sequencing in order to cluster related texts, as is the case of those relating to his trips to Latin America, as well as to the Italia mia project, for example. In such cases, the reconstruction of Zavattini’s intervention takes precedence over chronological sequence. The selection of texts is accompanied by contextual introductions and explanatory notes for every single text. Here is a filmmaker and writer who was never a systematic writer, as Ansano Giannarelli has noted, adding that he was, nevertheless, a theorist, and generally considered the main theorist of Neo-realism, understood by Zavattini both as a historic movement and as a socially engaged, ethical and political cinema. The representative selection of scripts collected in Volume 1 contains his theory in action, but they are only one particular type of his myriad interventions within the cinema and beyond. Very little exists in English, with the exception of an edition of ‘Some Ideas on Cinema’ almost coeval with its Italian 1950s publication, and an edited synopsis of this text, and two more texts from the same era, translated and heavily abridged in the late 1970s. There is also an English translation of Straparole (1967), published in 1970, which contains a collection of his regular

1

Cesare Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., ed. Mino Argentieri, Milan: Bompiani, 1979.

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Cesare Zavattini

cinematic diary in public, as well as other writings, long out of print. But this English publication provided no framework or context to speak of, making it very difficult for the English-speaking reader to appreciate Zavattini’s insights, interventions and their context, in what are crucial episodes of Italian cinema, related by a witness, participant and major protagonist.2 Every single text is preceded by its own explanatory introduction, providing a frame of reference, context of ideas and any further background required, to help make these writings very accessible to the reader. So all that needs to be added here is to point out that the footnotes contain further contextual detail, as well as philological clarification, where necessary. Film theory and film practice, practice as theory and theory as practice, understood as praxis, is the central focus and guiding principle of Zavattini’s interventions and the guiding principle of these two volumes of Zavattini’s writings. The reader will find a broader overview in the separately published Intellectual Biography, by the same author.

2

Cesare Zavattini, Zavattini. Sequences from a Cinematic Life, translated and with an Introduction by William Weaver, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970.

Part one

Pre-war

4 

1

‘The Directors’ Gift’, from The Hollywood Chronicles (1933)1

Context The following short story is part of The Hollywood Chronicles, a pre-war series of fictional articles, presented in the form of a foreign correspondent’s reports, of which a selection appears in Volume 1. The reason ‘The Directors’ Gift’ opens Volume 2 is because it demonstrates the continuity of certain post-war Neorealist themes, within Cesare Zavattini’s earlier career as a full-time journalist and his early allegiance to an entirely different logic from that governing the kind of realism theorized by the Cinema group and put into practice in Luchino Visconti’s film, Obsession, based on the realism of the Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga. Zavattini began to write gentle, ironic critiques of Hollywood in 1927. He was fascinated by the Flicks, but also critical. Critique, his early distancing from the illusion of Hollywood, takes on the form of whimsical humour at Hollywood’s expense. The first story of this type appeared in print as early as 1927, on the cusp between the Silent era and the Talkies, just when Siegfried Kracauer was writing film reviews about cinema as a mass phenomenon, and the problems it posed.2 In the stories anthologized in Volume 1 and this additional story which appears further, humour extends to making Hollywood stars and directors say what Zavattini would like them to say, pitting Hollywood as it was against a Hollywood as it would never be, one which bears little resemblance to the products of the Dream Factory. In ‘The Directors’ Gift’, comprising fictional interviews with directors, Zavattini makes King Vidor claim that what he would really like to do is shadow a person all day with a camera and that that alone would constitute the film. The screenwriter and theorist pursued this idea after the war. Then there is the ‘La beneficiata dei direttori’, in Giovanni Negri (ed.), Cronache da Hollywood, Rome: Lucarini, 1991, 143–4. First published in Cinema Illustrazione, 17 May 1933. 2 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Cult of Distraction: Berlin’s Picture Palaces’ (1926), ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1927), ‘The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies’ (1927), ‘Film 1928’, in The Mass Ornament, Weimar Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 1

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film star who criticizes the star system and the fact that young actresses have no opportunity to learn about life. If they did, their experience would show in their acting. His critique contains reflections about silent movie actors adapting, or failing to adapt, to sound, about the reality between reality and appearance, and the interrelation between fiction and non-fiction. The Pirandellian critique of the stage and of illusion is a recurring theme in Zavattini’s post-war scenarios and screenplays, from Bellissima (1951), to the first framing episode of We Women (1953) in which a casting competition is filmed as part of a film within a film, to the proposed non-fiction film The Guinea Pig (1962) centred on a public film confession of an actor, to the film The Truuuuth (1982), in which the street is replaced by the stage and fiction and non-fiction constantly overlap.

Text A few days ago, I was at a banquet at the Ambassador Hotel, in the company of all the directors working in Hollywood and it was easy to exchange a few words with many of them. I managed to get the taciturn Frank Capra to utter twenty words or so; I succeeded in provoking anger in Lewis Milestone, the calmest man in the world. As for [W. S.] Van Dyke, the guy who directed White Shadows in the South Seas [1928], he took me aside, and murmured a few unusual indiscretions in my ear. All in all, quite a haul for a cinema news reporter. So, read on for snatches taken from the brief interviews.3 Ruben Mamoulian. Where is cinema going? I have no idea. All I know is that cinema is expanding its powers every hour, taking over from all the other forms of entertainment. I believe that several extraordinary technical innovations are going to trigger new directions for cinema. But we will never dispense with the star system, since physical beauty has always exerted a mesmerizing fascination over people. You can make a film, a work of art even, without stars, but you can also do so with stars. For example, look at Miriam Hopkins in Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.4 I chose her very carefully, after exacting screen tests. Her sex appeal5 was a key to my success. And now I’m happy to work with Marlene Dietrich in The Song of Songs.6 Believe you me: a beautiful woman can work miracles. Besides, I devoted myself to cinema out of love. I fell in love with a girl in New York, I followed her and filmed her whenever I could with a small camera. This meant that when I was at home, I could go on looking at my idol on the screen. After a month, I realized that I had a talent for photography, and little by little I got so fired up by my work that instead of filming my girl in the street, I began to see places and scenes with a cinematic eye. In the end, I got White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) was directed by W. S. Van Dyke and Robert J. Flaherty. 4 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. 5 In italics in the original and in English. 6 The Song of Songs (1933), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Marlene Dietrich. 3

‘The Directors’ Gift’

7

over the infatuation, just when I fell in love with ‘the cine-camera’. That’s how I became a movie director. King Vidor. What film would I like to make? Well, as you know, we directors are punished with ‘The Torments of Tantalus’. The dreams are all within easy reach, it’s just that we can’t make them into films, because of the public, and, above all, because of the producers. We’re not allowed to do what we like, only what they allow us to do. My ideal film would be one that described a day in the life of a man, from when he wakes up to when he goes to sleep. I have an ordinary person in mind. The length of the film should coincide with the length of my hero’s day. And it would all be reproduced with the greatest accuracy.7

7

The author thanks Arturo Zavattini, Cesare’s eldest son, for pointing out this text and its significance.

2

‘The Frustrations of a Young Scriptwriter’ (1936)1

Context Cesare Zavattini gave this interview to Raffaele Masto in the very first issue of Cinema, the magazine that was to host articles by Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Michelangelo Antonioni and other Italian critics. It was in the pages of Cinema that the debate on Italian realism began. It was a specialized magazine, which became a forum for debate about the nature of cinema.2 The 1936 October issue contained Leo Longanesi’s enthusiastic call for a realism of the everyday that was devoid of literary connotations. The year 1939 saw Umberto Barbaro’s acceptance of documentary as a legitimate art form, provided it was not didactic and that it gave precedence to poetry as opposed to ‘facts’, a view in opposition to John Grierson’s model of the documentary. The year 1941 saw the publication of two articles by Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis, advocating Giovanni Verga’s nineteenth-century literary realism or verismo, as a model for new cinema, based on his novel I malavoglia (1888). In this interview, Zavattini openly discusses his problems as a budding scriptwriter working in collaboration with a director, Mario Camerini, and his team of writers, to develop his original story into the screenplay for I’ll Give a Million, which he also discussed at length at his Imola Conference in 1940.3 Masto refers to him as ‘a modern humourist’, as well as a scriptwriter.4 Zavattini The full title is Cesare Zavattini, ‘Colloquio con Zavattini. I dolori di un giovane soggettista’ (interview by Raffaele Masto), Cinema, no. 4, 1936, 25 August 1936, 152–3. 2 Leo Longanesi, ‘Sorprendere la realtà’, Cinema, no. 7, 10 October 1936, 257–60. Michelangelo Antonioni’s article ‘Per un film sul fiume Po’, Cinema, no. 68, 25 April 1939, 254–7, a script which later became a lyric documentary. This was the only kind Umberto Barbaro, film historian and critic, and director of the new Rome film school, inaugurated in 1935, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia di Roma, considered artistically valid, in so far as it wasn’t didactic. Cf. Umberto Barbaro, ‘Documentario e Didattico’, Cinema, no. 71, 10 June 1939, 366–77. 3 See below for the full text of Zavattini’s Imola Conference. 4 In the Italian of the 1930s and 1940s, humourist meant a writer, a wit, writing in something approximating the American mad, but, given the limitations within a fascist dictatorship, without overt satire. Zavattini’s early career as a writer involved both commissioning editors 1

‘The Frustrations of a Young Scriptwriter’ (1936)

9

relates his bitter experience in witnessing how his abstract comedy could be recycled into a Camerini sentimental and romantic story. By 1936, Zavattini had been in publishing for nine years, beginning with a stint as the editor of the cultural pages of La Gazzetta di Parma, a provincial daily. He had also acquired an excellent reputation as an author, publishing many short stories, raccontini, whimsical, abstract, tales, very popular and widely published in the satirical press of the time. He soon realized that his type of humour could inject new life in Italian cinema and submitted a scenario containing his type of abstract humour to his publisher, Angelo Rizzoli, one of the major magazine publishers in Milan at the time. His original script was I’ll Give a Million (1935), which became a film directed by Mario Camerini, who specialized in sentimental and romantic stories, such as Signor Max (1937). Zavattini’s efforts were scotched by Camerini who got his own team of screenwriters to bowdlerize the scenario, turning it into a moralizing and sentimental story, a far cry from Zavattini’s modern, pungent and thoughtful humour, which belonged within the circle of contemporary Italian humorous and satirical magazines (Giuseppe Marotta and Achille Campanile, Ercole Patti and Vito Mosca). It was only after the war that his unique brand of humour appeared in a film: Miracle in Milan, directed by Vittorio De Sica, in which gentle allegory and the fable reveal his lightness of touch and observant eye. For Zavattini, an open-ended structure was ideal, but Camerini told him: ‘There’s no plot, we need a plot!’ Scriptwriter and director were pitted against one another. To address this problem, Zavattini later tried to launch the Association of Humourists (Umoristi Associati), whose writing for Italian cinema would – he hoped – reverse the situation, by shifting the balance of power in favour of the writers. However, the association didn’t take off. As Zavattini realized at the time, this clash was ‘a turning point’ in his life, as he puts it. It raised more important issues than his clash with a director – an overriding problematic he tackled after the war: how do you deal with the power relations or relations of production, between screenwriter and producer and between screenwriter and director. Was there an alternative? Finally, an out and out critique of a successful director, of his working methods, and outlook, accompanied by the proposal for an alternative, unsentimental, approach to film comedy, replacing sentimentality with satire was a courageous public intervention, coming from a humble screenwriter, and bearing in mind that it appeared in the most authoritative film journal of the time. A David and Golias contest. And yet, the plucky screenwriter, whose parting shot was to raise the issue of power, or control over the means of production, was already an established author of fiction.

and editing magazines, as well as writing humorous pieces for Il Settebello and Il Bertoldo, Tevere, and other magazines. By the mid-1930s he had become a magazine publisher, working for the two biggest publishing houses in Italy, Rizzoli and Mondadori, as well as for Bompiani, on a freelance basis, since 1931.

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Text [Raffaele Masto] There is no way we can broach the subject of your work for the cinema without discussing the exile of seven manipulators in a Brianza villa – Rizzoli’s idea. [Cesare Zavattini] You are referring to the Grimello nightmare, perhaps? Grimello is the Brescia estate where a detective drama took place that should be filmed one of these days. A turning point in my life. [Masto] (Zavattini speaks with the authentic, serious and somewhat dramatic tone of a modern humorist). But why did you all lock yourselves up in Grimello? And what were you writing? A scenario, perhaps? [Zavattini] A scenario? Give me the time to tell you the full story. But before I do, let me say that in this conversation I shall be making several polemical points, some with a bitter aftertaste, concerning [Mario] Camerini, [Mario] Soldati, and other key figures in Italian cinema. These critical observations are intended as a sign of how productive this friendship is and of the gratitude that binds me to them all. My experience of screenwriting has been an emotional experience which is why I can’t elaborate without relating the topical polemic. [Masto] Poor Zavattini! I never imagined that you were such a fighter. [Zavattini] Who, me? Not at all. I was just new to the inner circles of the cinema industry and have had to learn at my expense. For example, who do you think I had to contend with the least? Actually, not at all? [Masto] With the people who were better able to understand the requirements of your poetic vision, obviously. [Zavattini] Hardly. Let me tell you about these characters. The only ones with whom there was no disagreement, even after the first version of I’ll Give a Million was completed, were [Andrea] Rizzoli, the backer, and [Luigi] Freddi, the Director General of Cinematography.5 Do you see how commonplaces turn out to be wrong? Well, this is what happened. Four years ago, I published in Tevere magazine, an article on Mario Camerini about What Scoundrels Men Are! [1932] (Gli uomini, che mascalzoni).6 This film confirmed an idea that I had been thinking over for quite a while. I believed then, as I still do, that Italy can produce better comic films than any other country. Not many people know that in the course of the last ten years, a generation of Italians has in its midst a group of very original comic

Luigi Freddi was appointed in 1934. He was in charge of censorship and subsequently became the first director of Cinecittà. I’ll Give a Million (1938), directed by Walter Lang, was a cheap remake of Mario Camerini’s Darò un milione (1935). A wealthy man saves a tramp from committing suicide. He then borrows his clothes and goes incognito around town looking for the first person who is kind to a tramp. Camerini accentuated romance, as did Lang, to the detriment of Zavattini’s story. 6 The film was a romantic comedy which launched Vittorio De Sica’s career as an actor. The external locations were filmed in Milan, using actual locations, in preference to a film studio. 5

‘The Frustrations of a Young Scriptwriter’ (1936)

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writers, the only ones, in my opinion, who could invent a form of comedy that is universally accessible.7 [Masto] Out with the names. [Zavattini] But they are already well-known! [Achille] Campanile, [Ercole] Patti, Anton Germano Rossi, Giuseppe Marotta, [Vito] Mosca, a star contributor of Il Bertoldo. [Masto] And the Zavattini who wrote Let’s Talk a Lot about Me.8 [Zavattini] Can’t you see that I’m making a new edition? What are we talking about if not about me? It goes without saying that I share these colleagues’ ideas about humour, in seeking a somewhat abstract form of comedy, quite different from traditional comedy, which is everywhere, and which is both sentimental and didactic in nature. You see, in Italy there is no dearth of original ideas in this field. We only lack technicians who are able to materialize them on the screen. I have even been thinking about starting up Humorists Associated, and you never know, it might happen one of these days ... . I have every confidence that, in terms of gags, we can beat Harold Lloyd. One could do a series of ‘three-minute comic films’, a series of tasters before the main billing, containing a wide range of themes, from the bitter-tasting abstract and distorting comedy to the fast pace violence of a string of somersaults. I have already written twenty of these, ready to go into production. I have no difficulty letting ideas flow! [Masto] Yes, I see that. God has given you a head that can store twice as much content as normal for this very purpose. But can we get back to I’ll Give a Million? [Zavattini] My first contact with Camerini was when I wrote The Poor in a Motorcar, which I wrote in collaboration with Andrea Rizzoli, who purchased it and invited Camerini to direct it. He showered me with praise before coming to the conclusion that: ‘There’s no plot. It needs a plot!’ But we’ll come back to that later. Then the scenario was shelved and, working in collaboration with [Giaci] Mondaini, I wrote the first version of I’ll Give a Million. I was alone when it came to the final drafting of this script. My original work was published two years ago in Quadrivio.9 You might recall that it is a farcical story that involved animation, a ladder that became a xylophone, and other daring comic gags. Rizzoli, adopting a very liberal modern attitude, didn’t hesitate to take on the whole thing, without discussing the fine detail. He said: ‘I trust Zavattini and Camerini. It’s down to them to find an agreement’.

Actually, that is precisely Chaplin’s achievement. But Zavattini wasn’t thinking of emulating Chaplin, whose comedy was about the individual, presented as all alone in a hostile world. Even during the years of fascist dictatorship, Zavattini had in mind the plight of the working class, having come from a working-class background himself. 8 The reference is to Zavattini’s fictional book, Parliamo tanto di me (1931). This and the two sequels were so successful that they sold out and were reprinted many times. 9 Giaci Mondaini was a cartoonist and a friend within the same pool of comic writers and illustrators Zavattini commissioned for various publications. But Mondaini dropped out quite soon. 7

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Camerini read that very same Quadrivio article. And I remember him coldly remarking, while he was waving the page this way and that: ‘There’s absolutely nothing here to make you laugh!’ Imagine saying that to a well-known humorist! [Masto] Poor Zavattini! Rather like telling a high-profile mathematician that his figures don’t add up. [Zavattini] I’d hardly had the time to swallow this, when Camerini, added sharply: ‘And anyway, it needs a plot’. At this point, I suddenly realized what a predicament I was in. I was horrified to see that Camerini and I would be moving in two diametrically opposite directions and that we were divided by frighteningly different natures. I would venture to say that Camerini’s idea of comedy is traditional, a type of comedy made of sentimentality, with a greater measure of realism than usual, as in What Scoundrels Men Are! [1932] or But it isn’t serious [1921].10 Doubtless, an excellent concept, and conducive to creating works of art, but impossible to reconcile with my idea, which is a subtle form of comedy, leaning towards the lyrical and the abstract, the comedy of, for example, Chaplin’s Dog’s Life [1918]. You will remember the gag in the first version of I’ll Give a Million, where those policemen who are chasing a thief in a wood and hide behind the trees end up saying: ‘Cuckoo!’ and playing hide and seek. Camerini, who doesn’t understand gags, couldn’t stand this stuff.11 [Masto] And what about the plot? [Zavattini] Well, listen to this. I believe that for many directors – and from their point of view they are quite right – the plot is like a safety blanket. The most experienced among them are the ones who are obsessed with the plot. It could be because they know that cinema, in its economic foundation, is a big industrial complex which needs to be, to some extent, at least, risk averse. Indeed, the plot is the fail-safe of bad films, the coefficient; the distinguishing element that maintains the viewers’ attention, even when everything else is a disaster. Whereas, the generation of comic writers whom I mentioned to you, and I, have a very different take on the plot. It seems to me that the modern comic film can even dispense with a narrative storyline, set to dialogue, in chronological and consequential order. The most effective plot consists in a satire of a whole social scene, which is exactly how the first version of I’ll Give a Million was conceived. [Masto] And how on earth did you end up at the Grimello, given this context? [Zavattini] It seems clear to me that Rizzoli was being very optimistic about our abilities and our character. And he was confident that working in his Brianza villa would aid our creativity. At first, there were four of us, Assia Norris, Camerini, [Libero] Solaroli, the production director, and me. We arrived at the villa, and after barely one hour the detective drama began. This dreadful clash between the new man, full of poetry and illusions, and the others – who were

A play by Luigi Pirandello. This nonsense-style example, where the norm is undermined, had appeared earlier in the raccontini, his compressed stories within stories.

10 11

‘The Frustrations of a Young Scriptwriter’ (1936)

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as cunning as they were disillusioned technicians – began. An hour later, their faces were this long. [Masto] Wonderful! I can just imagine what photographs you took of that forced detention of yours! [Zavattini] Are you crazy? The bad feelings that divided us were too deadly to even think of taking photographs. Now, come to think of it, I could be mistaken; maybe they loved me. But my feeling was that I was both detested and persecuted by the lot of them. My frame of mind was of the poet who sees his work being contaminated and who has to defend, at all costs, the purity of his creation. This made me despair, shout, resort to insults. They conspired to make me die or go mad. One morning, as I walked into the living room, Camerini approached me with a satanical air about him, to say: ‘Listen, we’re thinking of making the protagonist drunk. ...’ I started shouting and rushed back to my room and locked the door. Eventually, after a great deal of discussion and arguing, we decided to resort to two other gentlemen to resolve the screenplay situation, Ivo Perilli and Ercole Patti. Who better than these two to show some understanding to poor old Zavattini? But they were called in by Camerini. They came to work for Camerini. And this was only the beginning. A chummy character, who had a degree in law, former police inspector and former Cines production house director, whose title was Senior Director of Production, began to frequent the villa. You should have seen how benevolent he was towards me. Imagine that during every argument he had an air about him, as if he were wondering what exactly I might be doing in such a place and in the company of these people. And to avoid making any mistakes, he always sided with the others. To make a long story short, we decided to move to Rome to resolve the screenplay issue. They tried out the ideas of Amerigo Bartoli and Calandrino, Giuseppe Zucca and Soldati. Soldati came up with a beautiful drama. [Masto] Too much dialogue? [Zavattini] Dialogue? You must be joking. It was at this point that the free-for-all started once again. I had in mind – as you may have guessed – a slightly unreal dialogue. Whereas Camerini demanded a realistic, comic, and sentimental dialogue. Meantime, while the screenplay was being written, Soldati whose dialogue was Hamlet style, came up with a proposal: ‘What if we get rid of the part about the poor?’ [Masto] But that was the crucial part ... [Zavattini] You will sympathize, then, when I tell you that I was sick twice over this. In the end, in the space of a week, Perilli, Camerini and I completed the dialogue. [Masto] I get it, you went from one change to another. But what I’d like to know is if there’s even fifty percent of your work left in the film? [Zavattini] Not at all. Thirty percent, perhaps. And the result was a heroic outcome. I have no doubt that if I’d been more tactful, if I’d behaved less like a pure poet, I would have achieved much more. [Masto] And now what?

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[Zavattini] And now, my son – because you too, I see, have a strong desire to follow this damned path of mortification and sin – allow me to give you some fatherly advice. Try and be discerning in your vocation. If all you want is to stick to writing, then sell your idea, pocket the readies, and turn a blind eye to the mess they’ll make of your creation. But if you fail to kill off the demon of pure poetry, learn to develop your stories into screenplays. Then learn to be a cameraman and a director. Then learn to be an actor. Then, perhaps ...

3

Letters to filmmakers, Il Settebello (1938–9)1

Context When he was editorial or publishing director at Mondadori publishers, in charge of the latest in magazine publishing in the 1930s, and was also developing his activities as a writer and screenwriter, Zavattini wrote several letters addressed to poets, writers, celebrities of the day, businessmen and people in the film industry. They were published in the satirical weekly Il Settebello, directed by him and Achille Campanile for Mondadori publishers in 1938 and 1939. These letters concern cinema and express his critique of the pre-war film industry, proposing that actors can be found in the street and that there is a choice as to what kind of film to make and that the street and everyday life can offer more inspiration than a film studio. Furthermore, that producers, as well as directors, are to blame.

Text 1.  To Giuseppe Amato2 Dear Don Peppino, I have no idea what your thoughts are concerning the use of children in the cinema. I’m writing to you because I think that you are one of the very few who understand me. Every time a producer is given a scenario that involves child acting or which requires children, even for the smallest of roles, I always hear: ‘It’s impossible to cast any exceptional children, let alone teach them to interpret a role.’ This is not true. Too often we think problems are impossible to resolve, simply because we have approached them in the wrong

1 2

‘Lettere di Zavattini’, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 32. A Giuseppe Amato, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 31. The letters were published in 1938 and 1939 in Il Settebello.

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way. How can a director even dream of getting a boy he has met in the street to act a certain character, if the director is unable to dream? The director is going to meet Jackie Coogan, only if he is Charlie Chaplin. What I mean to say is that we are back to the usual problem: discovering a child has nothing to do with a child being photogenic. ‘Ha’, they object, ‘those American children with freckles!’ The world is full of freckles. No, it’s a question of artistic creation, be it modest or of the highest order. Let’s forget about theory. I have discovered no one, but I went to see The Amateurs’ Show in local cinemas in Rome. The people who came on stage were young and old, girls, housewives, and also children. A parade of strangers, mostly interesting people. The public enjoyed itself immensely. But this is not about the size of the crowd. The point I’d like to make, rather, is that in these meetings I have never had the pleasure of meeting anyone with a cinema background. I’ve read that in America there are designated individuals who visit even the dingiest theatres in earnest search of a face, a voice, a good line, to include in their film. In our country, too many people are disenchanted in their approach to the profession. You have to believe in things if you want to be in a position to invent them.3 Let me repeat that. I have never seen anyone and yet, the strangest characters have appeared on stage, in the Brancacci, Aurora, Jovinelli, and Vittoria theatres. What is it that struck me most? Three poorly dressed boys of twelve or so. The first sang Roman stornelli, the second, a popular tune by Ruccione, the third, I forget.4 It was a roaring success. One was so good that a member of the audience repeated the classic phrase: ‘Ah! What a phenomenon!’ Dear Don Peppino, if you’d been there too, I have no doubt that you would have taken their names, all three of them. I accept that, by nature, I’m an optimist, but I’m no fool. What I’m saying is that those lads possess some unique skill. They went back to their jobs. One is a milkman, another, a messenger, and a third, a prankster. I’d like to conclude by making two points: first, people who work in the film industry should understand that many amazing things happen outside the perimeter of their office. Secondly, there’s no shortage of children, millions, from the age of two to three, up to the age of fifteen to seventeen. Robert Lynen in The Redhead [1932] is no great actor: he is the child in the book and in the film adaptation.5 You can’t use a stork to find Jackie Coopers and Bartholemews, nor will our directors find them in a cabbage patch. NB. In January, eiar6 launched a national song contest. Thousands of contestants came from all over Italy. For days and days, competition panels have crederci alle cose: to believe in things. Zavattini is being informal. The phrase means events in everyday life, or, more simply, events; which he later referred to as i fatti. 4 stornelli are traditional and popular songs, which were sometimes improvised which are still sung today. 5 Jules Renard’s children’s story Poil de Carotte (1894). The 1932 film adaptation was directed by Julien Duvivier. 6 eiar was the fascist national broadcasting corporation. 3

Letters to Filmmakers, Il Settebello (1938–9)

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done nothing but watch, listen, judge. Excellent initiative. One question: did anyone from the film industry attend? Is anyone asking to even consider such interesting talent? A rare and unique opportunity to get in touch with eiar staff. I don’t believe any producers have lifted a finger. They are deplorable.

2.  To Mario Camerini I think, dear Camerini, that you will take this in a friendly spirit, when I say to you: have even more courage. Here [in Batticuore {1939}] you have taken a big step forward (in terms of cinema as an experience and a lesson for all of us, rather than of your own poetic world). Take two, three, four more such steps. The whole Italian film industry needs courage, courage is all it needs. May a plane cross the sky of the industrious Cinecittà every day and write in black smoke: courage. I’m always dreaming of a film that is wrong, for being too brave. You know how obstinate I am; the dream could become true. I have been writing and saying for the past five years that Italian cinema is full of talent, adding that it lacks courage and that, up to now, its problems stem precisely from a lack of courage. Let me explain; courage does not mean making Quo Vadis but making a film full of courage. You will say: ‘Chit chat’. No, Camerini, you won’t say that. Look at me: two hundred metres of film without an elephant, with nothing, a brook and a child, could be a work of art; you know that. And when you stop and daydream, as often happens to you, you are surely seeing in your mind’s eye the brook and the child. Could be that life, producers, or whatever, will drive you to make films with elephants, but your nature, dear Camerini, will seek out the brook and the child in the night.

3.  To the Scalera Brothers7 Your name is flying overhead like a kite and swoops down. At first, we were all fearful. Then we took heart when Greta Garbo didn’t bother to reply to your telegram. You were offering her five million liras, Scalera Brothers, to come over here and star in a film. Five million.8 Do you have any idea how many things you could do with five million? I think not. You have too many millions, and millions and millions, I fear. Whoever invented this word? I would also like to have a few millions myself, Brothers, which is why I beat my chest every night, crying out that I am guilty, that I deserve to lose a leg, that I deserve to lose my taste for bread and water. I’m just a small worm like you, Scalera Brothers.

‘Ai Fratelli Scalera’, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 33–4. The Scalera Brothers were Michele and Salvatore Scalera, who owned Scalera Film (1938–50).

7 8

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In your studios, you have hoarded whatever could be bought in the marketplace: actors with small noses, actors with large noses, one-eyed actors, silly or brilliant or dying actresses, young girls in the flower of youth, old men with long beards, lights, lamps, cameras, stage tricks, clapper boards that instead of working the way they should, play Beethoven. You have bought up the lot and written to our dear [Isa] Miranda to come back to Italy, and I lavish praise on you for that, I really do. But I suggest that you do something, dear Brothers, which might possibly save your soul and help your business prospects to match your enthusiasm and good will. Tonight, step outside your luxurious office door, the way children do where I come from for Saint Lucy. Maybe Saint Lucy will be so moved that she will put a note in your shoes with an idea, nothing expensive, a very cheap one, and yet a genuine idea. What would I give to see you in your nighties, while you go out to have a look and see what Saint Lucy has brought you.

4

‘The Best Dreams’ (1940)1

Context This chapter was written only a few months before Zavattini wrote the first version of Totò the Good, a scenario he then turned into a novella for teenagers, and then developed into the screenplay for Miracle in Milan. To make a case for observational and durational cinema, Zavattini goes back to the early history of cinema and distinguishes between two paths: one pursuing fiction, the other, non-fiction, already explored by its pioneers, Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers. Some have objected that the Lumières’ films are also fictional and that no clear demarcation can be made, which would, of course, invalidate the argument put forward. However, most of their shorts were straight non-fiction. Zavattini pits art against popularity, with a touch of irony: Let’s settle for the illusion that one day people will say: ‘Since the beginning, twenty or so individuals understood that Hollywood was not the way forward; that the problem first arose when the Lumière Brothers opened the spectacle on the Boulevards’.2

Text I often close my eyes during a film and try to guess what is going to happen next, both in terms of film technique and the events in the story: a close-up or a long shot, a woman sitting down or a landscape, since a screenplay can take different routes to reach its destination, just like Divine mercy, which explains why even the most elementary sequences can take us by surprise. Try watching a trivial sort of film, one that withstands the scrutiny of logic, with your eyes closed.

‘I sogni migliori’, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 37–40, first published in Cinema, no. 92, 25 April 1940, 252–3. Argentieri published a part of the article. This English-language edition includes the full text of 1940. 2 ‘I sogni migliori’, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 37–40, first published in Cinema, no. 92, 25 April 1940, 252–3. 1

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It still justifies our presence, revealing its subtlety every inch of the way. For the criteria you adopt for the single shot should be no different from the ones for choosing your words. But you are left with the angelic doubt that in those moments of blindness you might have missed some amazing scenes. You make some allowances, just as you do with those people whose speech is interrupted by long silences, since there is always poetry in parsimony. Not that I would want producers who have grasped my thought to sign an agreement which stipulates that the viewing public should watch the première blindfolded. All I’m saying, by suggesting this experiment, is that the imagination flourishes when it is faced with flaws. The reason recent cinema of the 1930s and 1940s is rarely surprising is that it is commercially flawless. Sadly, we too are moving towards American production values. Are we still in time to make different choices? I fear not. The whole world sees cinema entirely in terms of an industrial product, and with such conviction that when we artists get involved, we accept the rules of the game, including the compromises. We listen to the producers and agree on some points, especially the one that establishes that he is the one who is really in charge of the situation. ‘After all – we concede – he has a right to protect his budget.’ We are hardly going to change with a couple of pages the millennial power of vulgar economic interest which, taken as a whole, ensures that cinema is distinct from literature, resulting in two kinds of aesthetics and two types of ethics. Let’s settle for the illusion that one day people will say, ‘Since the beginning, twenty or so individuals understood that Hollywood was not the way forward; that the problem first arose when the Lumière Brothers opened the spectacle on the Boulevards.’ Nichel Odeons, they were called, these first cinemas, from the nichel coin, the price and sign of a marvellous event.3 What was urgently needed was taking over the means of production and making films so affordable that they could be accessible to anyone – like paper, ink, plasticine, paints: introducing film stock and camera lenses into the household, in the same way as the sewing machine. Then producers would never have existed, the top of the hierarchy of a bourgeois system, applied cinema, on a par with a certain kind of publishing that is at this stage secure, well-established; the cliché of creating jobs for thousands of citizens; the creation of a lofty, high-sounding justification. But what about them? What do they care about all this, however worthy it might be? Absolutely nothing. Where was I? The point of this preamble was to state that the blind are not a pitiful case at the cinema. I meant to say that the imagination is stimulated by an economy of means such that the title of the work, the score, the viewers’ breath, a few sentences are all it takes to create an original story, different every time, their story.

3

Zavattini’s italics.

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For example, in a detective story, a sense of anxiety will be greater if the noise of a scream is heard after a pause, coming from the ticking of time, with no background whatsoever. That is to say, when the blind are told what is going on, when they can feel the weight of seconds, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, laden with evil. The blind are no different from the rest of us. In order to relate to a film, they too need a beginning and an end, and a limit, or they will be in an imaginary and elaborate solitary construction of their own. Objects fixed by an absorptive gaze become spectacle. So, for example, my uncle, who was a very wise man, never said: ‘Look at the sunset.’ He would line us up in front of the window – he’d often even invite some of his friends – ring a bell, and only then draw the window curtains and exclaim: ‘Here is the sunset.’ What a wonderful vision!’4 They sit next to us, in close contact with every sound we make, with our human warmth, becoming our real and only critics. They already know what could happen next. If they miraculously got their sight back suddenly, the scenes they would be seeing would be well below their expectations. In my opinion, we filmmakers are constantly perpetrating their betrayal. If directors want to progress, then they should bear in mind the blind. They reconstruct life through their memories of childhood. This is why I wouldn’t dare to summarize a film, because they would immediately detect the method and the professional technique, even in the best-case scenario. Does this mean they don’t love simplicity, since the audience is often weeping or laughing? On the contrary, they love only simplicity, because syntax is the basis of genuine discoveries. World cinema relies almost entirely on the exceptional, on action adventures, but as to the nature of such a narrative mode we cannot agree. The blind can imagine far more significant adventures than those dear to international scriptwriters; they are the only ones who would countenance and support an actual revolution: the film about the man who is sleeping, the film about the man who is quarrelling in a continuous shot and, I would dare to add, one which is not based on a scenario: an episode devoid of a unifying structure which is the outcome of chance.5 If only we could return to man and to being, as ‘quintessential spectacle’. Certain footage that you can get if you place the cine-camera in the street, in a room, and keep looking, with insatiable patience, educating ourselves as we do so – what a great victory that would be – to contemplate other people, carrying out their simple actions. The blind person is sitting next to us; we help from time to time, by providing captions: ‘Now the man is moving his hand across his face, the middle finger has come to rest over his eye, his mouth is moving to the left side.’ Cinema will need to discover

Zavattini’s example has a precedent in his Totò the Good, Cinema, no. 102, 25 September 1940, 228–30, translated in Volume 1, and also used in his screenplay for Miracle in Milan and in the film itself. 5 Some sequences of Miracle in Milan suggest pure chance, but these suggest more signs of a premeditated cinematic manifesto written into the screenplay by Zavattini, than instances of chance. 4

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elementary things and dispense with the bizarre notion of the exceptional and of the unreal which literature is jettisoning, at long last.6 The blind won’t blush if you suggest a story such as this: ‘At 5pm, by Divine order, we shall all become immortal.’ Questioning this, having doubts and so on and so forth is pointless. After the initial shock that gives way to pure joy, to orgies and dancing in the streets, tears, the realization of truth is going to come. Immortal. A man threw himself over the wall of the Pincio Park, bounced three or four times, like a rubber ball on the pavement, then he got up as lively as before. Only his jacket got a bit dusty. Life goes on as before, at first, at least, while the stories from earlier than 5.00pm come to an end.7 Little by little, a new state of being arises. Let’s say that we envisaged a story containing six or seven characters, bearing in mind the new ‘after 5pm’ situation. A girlfriend phones you up. ‘See you this evening.’ What are you going to reply, my Immortals? I myself have no idea. Imagine walking into a home where they are quarrelling and you make an announcement, in the voice of a janitor: ‘You will all be immortal from such and such an hour.’ The time between the mortal and immortal state would be very interesting to observe. Well, actually, in your mind’s eye you could see the unchanging configuration of a humanity turned to stone with ivy creeping up around our bodies and our feet sinking roots into the soil. Dreams belong to the blind and the visionaries. A film that were entirely based on dreams would be an important documentary, even for future generations. Otherwise how would they know what citizens in those warlike times were dreaming? I would engage a blind director, and this is no silly play on words. But no fade in, no slow motion, no surrealism, as producers would say, for our dreams are crystal clear and abrasive, you could discuss them over breakfast while you are relaxing in a hammock. Our dreams are the Pythagorean Table: multiply Anthony by Achilles, add a drinking glass to a magnet or Carla’s nephew and you get clear and controversial results. But no, let’s stick to the order of the familiar: a tree is a tree and cannot exist in any other form but that of a tree. In dreams, however, the tree can speak, and miles and miles of intestine can spill out of us, as if it were natural. We know how to create a city which is entirely based on a dream. Close your eyes, my friends. Here are the cities with their squares, their bell towers and inhabitants. In a shop window some men are on display. A gloomy passer-by walks in and hires a fair-haired young man for an hour, takes him to the park nearby, confides his personal stories and returns him to the shop one hour later. I The reference is to Modernist prose, for example, in James Joyce’s Ulysses and other novels which turned to everyday life as a source of inspiration, with an antecedent in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, notably the addition of 1861, ‘Tableaux parisiens’, which is about a flaneur’s (idle man-about-town) twenty-four hours, spent wandering around the city and its everyday life. 7 Zavattini’s script The Last Judgement (Il giudizio universale) was based on the opposite idea – that life would end at 6.30pm. 6

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shan’t tell you the other unexpected apparitions, but what I will say is that their meaning and purpose will stick to the material truth of their unfolding. No magic. To dethrone Frankenstein and attempt ‘the new’, we should not delay in turning our attention once more to the themes that have turned to stone by centuries of forgetting. We need have to drop the tricks of the trade, the dissolves, slow motion, fake backdrops, the endless subterfuges, so dear to Méliès. We shall discover the marvel in ourselves, and express it without marvel: the best dreams are not clouded over by fog, you can see into them, as clearly as you can perceive the structure of a leaf.8

8

Zavattini, ‘I sogni migliori’, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 38–40.

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‘Notebook’ (1940–1)1

Context The following two related articles were published in 1940 and 1941, respectively, under the rubric of ‘Notebook’. They both appeared in Cinema, a very ambitious film magazine launched in 1936, and at this stage, edited by a group of filmmakers connected with Luchino Visconti – Giuseppe De Santis, Antonello Trombadori and Mario Alicata. They launched a debate about realism, favouring Giovanni Verga’s nineteenth-century model, known as Verism. In the same years, as is clear from these articles, Zavattini was also interested in realism, but he took a different approach, as the previous texts have already shown, associating it with the everyday, not to literature. Recurring concerns of his in the post-war period that crop up in this first article are the idea of filmmaking without having a preordained script, finding inspiration directly in the everyday, such that art can be sought out in what surface appearances lead to suppose is uninteresting as subject matter, and discovering instead the potential for any number of potential films, thus belying any shortage of scenarios, and turning a forensic eye to specific, concrete, tangible, situations, seeking them out and ‘shadowing’ (pedinamento) individuals or groups, by spending time with them in their habitual environment. The second article also departs from his colleagues’ perspective, entirely focused on content, as it was. Zavattini shifts the attention to the means and relations of production, attacking Italian producers for being short-sighted and unprofessional, unable to distinguish between cinema and cinema industry, incapable of valuing artistic talent, and unwilling to work with qualified artists who could make a difference to the quality of the output. In an interview of 1939, when asked to comment on the subject, Zavattini made the clash of interests personal, stating, ‘I have boundless faith in Italian intelligence. I am not impressed by Italian producers, especially the ones who reject my ideas.’2 Direct experience informed his critique which attacked a

§1 ‘Quadernetto di note’, Cinema, no. 90, 25 March 1940, then in Zavattini, ibidem, 35–6. §2 ‘Quadernetto di note’, Cinema, no. 129, 10 November 1941, then in ibidem, 41–3. 2 Zavattini, Film, no. 30, 29 July 1939, cited by Argentieri, in ibidem, 42. 1

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commercial logic that was unable to appreciate the experimental value of art as a means to better the quality of Italian cinema.

Text A film I’d like to make: The Good Person, in colour. A kind of Christ, very earthy, fortyish, who works miracles in Technicolour. He improves men using blue or Veronese green. All white one day or pink in black stripes. It would only take some indigo dye in the rain to see a crowd of people genuflecting down the street. Another film: My Town. A cameraman, an electrician, a handyman, the assistant director and me. We will live in my town for four or five months. We wouldn’t spend much, just enough to pay for the celluloid film stock. What about the plot, the show? I don’t have one. Anything I can think of dematerializes in the face of this idea: three or four months staying in my town, surrounded by fifty or so children to whom I can say in my dialect: ‘ver la boca de peu.’3 Perhaps the children and I could really take over the town, a town with no books, but big woods, riverbanks and the Po – fifty or even a hundred children in charge of a town full of sinners and arthritic people. A third film; this one’s difficult. But what does difficult mean? How many easy films ended up in the junk heap? For human or divine reasons, a family is forced to carry out the following experiment. The father will act the role of the son; the son the role of the grandfather; the housemaid the role of the aunt; the daughter of the cousin. Not grotesque, actually, but very simple, serious. After framing the simple plot relating to a normal family unit, we develop it, applying it to a fictional family, within the four walls of their home, using dialogues and situations that don’t shy away from the type of intransigence an edifying objective justifies. The most unexpected thing that can happen to someone who becomes part of the world of cinema is to discover that it is no different from how it was described and from what he knows about it already and from how he understands it in theory. It is astonishing to see how a particular case proves the general rule. Regrettably, this is not my own thought, but [Giacomo] Leopardi’s.4 I already knew that I would meet a great many cunning people, and if I had to state what struck me most at the time of my first contacts with this world, I would have to write: cunning. Wherever you look, there are honest people and dishonest people. Provincial expectations are neither pipe dreams nor akin to fiction. I’ve seen people work twelve-hour days, people who are always punctual and people

3 4

Zavattini writes this in dialect, not standard Italian. It means: ‘Open your mouth wider.’ Giacomo Leopardi, the poet and thinker, author of the posthumously published Zibaldone, a massive collection of thoughts, ideas and fragments of research in many subjects (an unabridged English translation was made by the Leopardi Centre of the University of Birmingham in 2013).

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who keep their word. But, oh, the number of shrewd people, shrewd in the extreme and totally explicit about it! I understand that it is no easy task to rid an environment of cunning. A person will only very reluctantly give up such a quality that leads to the best results with the least effort. That is a mistake. Cunning is the real cause of many colossal delays, of far too many wasted phone calls. I’m envisaging a film about housemaids in order to make the most of their vantage point so as to take a good look at our bourgeoisie: not a crepuscular film, or à la Molnari or socialist leaning.5 Only by dealing with ethics, equipped with greater courage than we possess, are we going to make anti-rhetorical cinema. There is a struggle against the middle class in which cinema is notable for its absence. It’s a joke to think that 10 per cent of all Italian citizens are carrying a film script in their pockets, but at certain hours of day, getting close to sunset, producers begin their search looking for scenarios. You hear them say: ‘I need a script within the next six days. I don’t know where to look, I’m so desperate.’ Such urgency, such a blind search in the street, in a bar, doesn’t prove a shortage of scenarios, but the existence of a great number of improvisers.

2 My friends who are not in the cinema industry often ask me: ‘Is there a flaw in our cinema that you can sum up in a single word?’ It’s easier to point to the flaws than to the qualities in a single word. If the devil forced us to express ourselves so succinctly on our deathbed, in our last breath we would utter the word producer. We would do so in the full knowledge of being generic, biased and unoriginal. This opinion is probably based on the memory of a producer whose only preoccupation was to utter a perfect imitation of a woman speaking on the phone who said she wasn’t in – on the memory of another producer who fell asleep, while the script was being read out aloud. Should we blame the script? Maybe. But the script was purchased, nonetheless. What do I expect? I have a pressing need for producers who are capable of pointing out our errors, people with whom you can have a conversation. Yes, I’m acquainted with some educated, affable and clever ones. Not that many, when you consider an annual output of 140 films a year. And if the same devil were to ask us on our deathbed, in extremis, for more funding and so on and so forth? What would we say? This would take more than a single word, but I shall utter them: the dictatorship of artists, granting two hundred new artists violent access to the industry, for a start. 5

Crepuscolare was a word used before the war to signify intimism, naturalism, seen as negative, decadent, qualities in a film. The word was drawn from an early twentieth-century school of poetry. Aldo Palazzeschi, Sergio Corazzini and Guido Gozzano were the main poets.

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Their names? Everyone is familiar with their names. Fortunately, there is no member of the guf Cinema Section6 who is unable to make a convincing list of painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, famous or well known, who would be an asset for the film industry. Forgive me if after two years of hands-on experience I’m unable to advise anything less utopian. Now don’t make the objection that the few who managed to get into the business in the past decade haven’t made any difference. They have been contaminated. They have been compromised, mishandled, precisely because they are so few. Moreover, it is so very rare for them to work in a conducive environment. Superior stabat lupus.7 Clearly, such power is comprehensible only to those who have little faith in genres, only to those who consider the gap between the arts minimal, and something which can be overcome, especially when you come to realize that we are talking about a new world. While cinema as industry can be considered old, cinema itself is still in its infancy.

Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (guf) Cinema Section was a part of a fascist organization for undergraduates during the years of Mussolini’s dictatorship. 7 A quote from one of Aesop’s Fables, the rest of the line reads: ‘The wolf was high higher up and the lamb lower down.’ Zavattini is stating that the same power relation exists between Aesop’s wolf and lamb as exists between the screenwriter and the producer or director. 6

6

Radio eiar Interview (1942)1

Context Zavattini was very comfortable talking on the radio. Even in this area, he was a pioneer for the way he did it. In 1940s Italy, broadcasters were required to sound artificial, speaking in the received middle-class pronunciation. They followed the same radio etiquette observed by the bbc in Britain, when formal dress was required and the King’s English was the norm. Zavattini transferred his musing, diary style to radio, addressing the listener directly, conveying the impression that he or she were a personal friend. On radio, Za could be either outspoken and bold or softly spoken and reflective, depending on the purpose of the broadcast. His first broadcast took place in 1931. He was invited to broadcast some ‘Conversations’ by the eiar producers. They lasted just ten minutes. But what did I talk about? About nothing. I was considered a wit, the less trouble I caused, the more they liked me. The atmosphere was a little like the one in Via Teulada, until a while ago. [...] Even in those days there was fresh air, the family, the papers, and so on, but with the exception of a few people we could call heroes, the majority was used to the state of affairs and furthermore even tried to fool itself, by saying: ‘my support [of the Fascist regime] is sincere’.2

The first broadcast was ‘Il borotalco’ and was about talcum powder. He tells his listeners that they should not dismiss such an apparently trivial topic and goes on for ten minutes to describe an invented character who only used talcum powder on Sundays, concluding that care for his external appearance had helped this person get low-interest bank loans. But by 1942 he had become a celebrity, an established, bestselling author, a publisher, media mogul and screenwriter. eiar producers would let him talk about anything he liked. By this time, he was becoming ever more vocal about the cinema and how to change it for the better. 1 2

Zavattini, eiar broadcast, in Argentieri (ed.), Neorealismo ecc., 367. Zavattini, cited in Paolo Nuzzi (ed.), Io. Un’autobiografia, Turin: Einaudi, 2002, 65–7; 66.

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Text The myth of the public has no substance. In my opinion, there are any number of publics. They all have one thing in common. They can be educated. It is not a question of making one hundred films a year, in an attempt to create a sensation. You only need two or three, but good ones. I say that if you are going to make ten films which will attract catcalls, like Hallelujah [1929], for example, all that work of yours for the public’s boohs is wasted. By the following year, the entire national production will have obviously improved the public’s taste after their negative reception, and raised the stakes, accordingly.3 [Interviewer]: Would you like to be a cine-camera or a documentary? [Zavattini]: A documentary. What I find extremely interesting is the idea of placing a man in a room and filming what he does for an hour without interruptions, even if he does nothing at all. Anyway, how could I not be a cinecamera, if I love the cinema and if I believe that I perceive cinematographically?

3

Hallelujah [1929] was an all-Black cast musical directed by King Vidor. Going by Zavattini’s broadcast, it was a flop in Italy.

7

‘One Minute of Cinema’ (1942)1

Context The following article, signed R. G., appeared in Cinema magazine. By 1942, Zavattini had been freelancing for two years. In 1940, he quit his editorial director and publisher job, based in Milan, then as now, the Mecca of Italian publishing, and moved to Rome, to concentrate on his screenwriting, in the Mecca of the Italian film industry. Cinema was a good choice for proposals, plans and putting forward his ideas. The first part of the article sums up Zavattini’s reputation in 1942, introducing Zavattini the writer and Zavattini the screenwriter, and is written in the third person. It is purposefully polemical. The second part reads like a transcription of an interview reported by a second person, presumably a journalist, who is not citing directly. Whereas, in the third and last part, Zavattini’s voice speaks out directly, relating a story and a demonstration of what a different kind of scenario would be like, if, that is, and when, the sort of alternative cinema of which it is an expression were ever allowed to exist. It is a tour de force, a provocation, a What if? Freeze frame put into words as part of a different way of seeing, one in which duration defies action, becoming contemplative, reflective, not of the distant past, of action in history, but of the present moment, exactly during the time of its unfolding. It heralds durational cinema and its preoccupations, one of the innovations of Neo-realism. It stands as an alternative to the above-mentioned Gruppo Cinema’s adaptations of latenineteenth-century Italian literary verism, which was their proposed model for New Italian Cinema. In Zavattini’s phenomenological and alternative model, the story is not defined by a series of actions, but by a situation or a series of situations, using the language of cinema to make his point, and marking his clear rejection of verism.

1

R. G. (Zavattini), ‘Un minuto di cinema’, Cinema, no. 136, 25 February 1942, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 1979, 44–6.

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Text Zavattini says, ‘From 1933–1934 on, I’ve written at least twenty scenarios, but the one I care about more than about my entire cinematic track record is the one I shall now relate.’ Zavattini’s cv includes, besides Let’s Talk a Lot about Me, The Poor Are Mad and I Am the Devil – the first edition sold out immediately and the second came out that same day – the scenario I’ll Give a Million (1934, in collaboration with Giaci Mondaini), Five Poor Men in a Car [1939], in collaboration with Andrea Rizzoli, The Nervous Tic Clinic (1934) and so on. In 1938, after suggesting in different ways that cinema could use Italian comic writers, he also wrote in addition to many other stories, Bionda sotto chiave (Blonde under Lock and Key), which [Camillo] Mastrocinque destroyed with great skill.2 In 1939, he wrote La famiglia impossibile (Impossible Family), in 1940, Four Steps in the Clouds and soon [Gino Cervi] agreed to play the lead role.3 Among Zavattini’s recent work, his contribution to the screenplay for A Woman Has Fallen [1941] and the story for La scuola dei timidi (School for the Shy) [1941], which Giuseppe De Santis reviewed in this magazine in issue no. 135. He is currently writing a dramatic story, Chiusi in camera (Locked in a Room).4 As far as Zavattini is concerned, the key to cinema is poetic language. If it were as easy to make films as it is to go down to the tobacconist’s to buy a packet of cigarettes, if, that is, it could offer the same immediate expressive potential, without all the trappings of organization and large investment, we would have an art cinema, he says, a real cinema, just as we have painting and sculpture. Cinema took the wrong turning at the beginning, when it relied on big investors. He says, ‘As I envisage it, cinema is the example I can provide.’ Here are forty metres of celluloid ... minute of time ... With forty metres of celluloid, no more than a minute of projection, something interesting can be said. I have no time for shock tactics aimed at the viewer. What I am aiming at is linked to the elementary and often unknown concept of cinematic language. Now, the scene I wish to film, not just ‘portray’ takes place during one minute of time. (Zavattini’s short stories also last a short space of time and are restricted in space too.)

Zavattini thought up, planned and instigated the Autori Associati (Associated Authors), a short-lived limited company set up in April 1940. Corrado Alvaro, Leo Longanesi and Mario Pannunzio were among the other screenwriters and signatories. Cf. Cinema, no. 91, 10 April 1940. Bionda sotto chiave (literally, A Blonde under Lock and Key) was directed by Camillo Mastrocinque. 3 Four Steps in the Clouds was directed by Alessandro Blasetti, with whom Zavattini worked after the war too, notably on Bellissima. It won a bafta Award in 1947. Una famiglia impossibile (An Impossible Family) was directed by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia. 4 La scuola dei timidi (literally, The School for the Shy) was directed by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia. A Woman Has Fallen (È caduta una donna) was directed by Alfredo Guarini. 2

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‘Crowded street, people coming and going, two men are walking down the street, talking and laughing. One of them, involuntarily bumps into another passer-by, coming from the opposite direction. He complains, the other man apologizes, laughing all the while. But the man is annoyed and tells him there is nothing to laugh about and insults him. The other man stops laughing and responds with an insult. The situation gets worse until the two come to blows. Other people flock to the scene. Someone is trying to break up the fight, but to no avail. One of the two draws a revolver and fires, hitting his opponent who falls into the arms of a passer-by or to the ground.’ That’s all. I’ve timed the action. It lasts just one minute. * And this is what I can do cinematically. When I get to the end of the minute, at the end of the scene, at the very moment the man drops to the ground, I watch the sequence backwards at a slow pace. When I get as far as the beginning of the action, I see the two friends walking down the street, and above them, instead of the background sound of the crowd, I hear the angry voices of the altercation. Here is the man who is going to shoot, walking along in a normal state of mind. I frame his face in extreme close-up, to show his peaceful expression. So close, I can see the reflection of street life in his eye. Clean cut. Same face, but his mood has changed: now there is something brutish about his expression; it shows nothing but anger. Again, action. The man walks forward, the other man bumps into him and the argument begins. But I don’t let it run up to the point when one of the two men is about to give the other man a slap. I get the projectionist to run the scene that will cause the crime, not once, but twice, four times, even five. The two repeat the scene. The fifth time I stop, in order to focus on the gesture and at the point of the slap, I stop the camera. Look. Our protagonists are frozen still. How long can we leave them like that? I’ll leave them for thirty seconds and, during that length of time, the viewers can give themselves the space to reflect as they wish. Meantime, I focus on the four or five faces of the people next to them and hear their off-screen remarks, exclamations, even their thoughts, from the very beginning, up to the yelling and their fear when they hear the sound of a gunshot. Within the time frame of a minute, there has been time to root for one of the two opponents, to attempt to calm them down, to agree with one or the other and then to be in a state of shock, time to feel one’s breath cut off in one’s throat, or to respond by running away in a state of terror. I switch on the camera again and the motion of the slap begins. The hand falls swiftly on to the other man’s face, gets to within a hair’s breadth of the face. Extreme close-up of the face and of the hand. I go back and show a close-up of where the hand was thirty seconds earlier, same for the face. These close-ups are the outcome of lightening tracking shots, starting from medium shot position with full-length figures.

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Now we focus on the two men’s faces. First one, then the other – switching from one to the other. For at least thirty seconds, I closely examine the contorted face of one of the two protagonists, at the very moment their eyes express their extreme anger and their facial features are twisted into a grimace. When the viewers have had a good look at them, I do a number of really quick fade-ins, then show out-of-sequence shots of the two men. That is, first I show a close-up of the wounded man, when he drops to the ground, then when he is walking peacefully down the street, and so on, to produce alternating moments in time and changing expressions in time. Same for the other man. I’d like to show the two faces simultaneously on the screen, in this very short story, one on the right, the other on the left, with no concern for time sequencing. ‘But let’s keep going. We mustn’t waste celluloid’, says the producer. Whereas I would quite happily dwell on the fingers, on how they wrap themselves around the revolver butt that has just been drawn. I’d also want to follow the trajectory of the bullet, very brief and terribly fast, but not so fast that it can’t be filmed by the camera lens. While we are watching the bullet’s trajectory, and I want us to be able to see it slowed right down, I am curious about filming a close-up of the section of pavement, where one of our protagonists is going to fall in two seconds time. The street curb, before and after, before and after. If it is not too tedious, I’d really like to click back to the point where the two men are about to collide. Yet again, I’m stopping the machine, and playing the scene at the fastest possible speed. The man collapses to the ground. The screen is empty again. The public leaves while the soundtrack is still playing. It’s at its loudest and while you hear the voices and the yelling, the gunshot rings out. The voices, the yelling and the explosion, at least for four or five minutes. I can go back and analyse the scene in many other ways and reach the ninetyminute length with ease, which means a low-cost, feature-length film. I would definitely make the cheapest film that has ever been made in the world. You need to consider time from an ethical perspective, that is to say, you should view the single frame with the same intellectual rigour which is increasingly applied to words. With action lasting six, seven or even eight minutes, I feel confident that I could make a normal length film which is even acceptable to producers, at a risible cost, costing no more than a few thousand liras.

8

The Imola Conference (1942)1

Context Giacomo Gambetti, a film critic and journalist who spent years interviewing Zavattini for his book, Zavattini mago e tecnico (1986), found in Zavattini’s personal archive two long-lost papers given by Zavattini, the first, in 1937, the second in 1942 in a film club.2 Both put forward the idea that film scripts could be inspired by everyday life. The first talk was ostensibly about Charlie Chaplin, but Zavattini soon shifted the focus to contemporary Italian cinema and the film industry. In particular, he targeted producers and directors. He also suggested subverting newsreels with what he calls a ‘Giornale Luce a rovescio’, ‘An Alternative Luce Newsreel’ or ‘An Upside-Down Luce Newsreel’ for which the writer puts forward the idea that humour could be used to lampoon official newsreels. (Luce was the major state-owned production house of the fascist era.) Zavattini also took the opportunity of suggesting a new association, ‘The Association of Humourists’, as a means of developing Italian cinema comedy beyond improvisation. This was a short-lived initiative, but one that proves that as early as the 1930s, Zavattini began to develop a critique of the film industry, while also working in the industry, as a screenwriter. The Imola film club was the first in Italy and Zavattini’s 1937 talk, given on 24 April, was one of a series organized by the Imola Istituto di Cultura Fascista, Nucleo Universitario Fascista Arnaldo Mussolini, featuring Umberto Barbaro, director of the Rome Centro Sperimentale di Cinema (founded just two years earlier), the critics Gianni Puccini and (the undergraduate) Pietro Bianchi, whom latter Zavattini had met while he, Zavattini, was working as a supply teacher in Parma. The topics in the 1937 cycle of talks were Dupont, Chaplin, Clair and Stroheim. Zavattini loved Chaplin, as his Hollywood Chronicles and other 1930s sketches show. However, as this letter to the organizers proves, while acknowledging that ‘Chaplin has inspired, one way or another, a little or a lot, at

Zavattini, ‘Conferenza di Imola, autunno 1942’, in Giacomo Gambetti (ed.), Zavattini. Cinema e Vita, vol. 1, Bologna: Edizioni Bora, 1996, 95–104. 2 Gambetti, ‘Premessa’, ibidem, 75–82. Cf. Giacomo Gambetti, Zavattini mago e tecnico, Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo Editore, 1986 and Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc. 1

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least half the world’, he goes on to attack contemporary Italian cinema for being ‘immune to his influence’. He notes that ‘judging from our film production, one would conclude that we are hopeless at comic films, at humour’. One of the examples he gives is I’ll Give a Million, based on his scenario, but almost entirely rewritten, despite his objections, as he told a journalist in the interview earlier, by a pool of writers hired by the director, Mario Camerini. Whose fault was it? The fault of producers and directors (such as Camerini). Yet, he argued, there were any number of good comic writers and even promising comedians, such as Totò. Zavattini went on to mention that he had put forward Buster Keaton for the main role in the Camerini film, a proposal that was turned down. He observed that in rejecting Keaton, a type of comedy was also turned down. This way, Zavattini enlarged the scope of the Conference theme, understood as an opportunity to listen to an expert teaching film appreciation, and broadened its scope to encompass a discussion about the problems with Italian pre-war comedy and how to deal with them. Zavattini’s second Imola conference took place in the autumn of 1942, shortly before the release of Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps among the Clouds). He offers a retrospective view of six years working in the film industry as a screenwriter and pointing out the difficulties he encountered. His critique is sharp and goes beyond personal experience to consider the function of the new medium in society. Cinema was from the very beginning a commercial enterprise, at the expense of artistic endeavour. Not only. Ten years before Zavattini’s text ‘Some Ideas on Cinema’ (1952) was published, the writer conceived of a cinema that is as creative as a pen, some time earlier than Alexandre Astruc’s ‘Du stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au stylo’ (1948). Going beyond Astruc’s claims for artistic autonomy, Zavattini stated that filmmaking is ‘within everyone’s reach’.3 Who is to blame? Zavattini lays the blame solely at the feet of producers who command a strategic role in the relations of production in the film industry. What is the answer for a professional? A two-tier approach: to defend artistic independence and innovation, while also being prepared to accept bread and butter work. In the post-war, Zavattini did just that.

Text When I was a young man, I used to stop people in the street and ask them: ‘Why does bread taste good?’ No one answered me in a satisfactory way to this and other innocent questions. I saw puzzled faces before me.

3

Alexandre Astruc, ‘Du stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au stylo’, L’Écran Français, 144, 30 March 1948. The pen metaphor, as Laura Rascaroli has pointed out, was used even earlier by Zavattini in an essay published in Cinema, 92, 25 April 1940, now in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 37–40. Cf. Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, London: Wallflower, 2009, 194.

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Cesare Zavattini

Now that I’m bald, I’m also concerned that I’ll be stopped in the street by a young man who will ask me: ‘Is cinema art?’ I have no doubt that cinema is art, but I cannot support this statement with the kind of aesthetic arguments put forward by my friend Alberto Consiglio, whom I regard with both terror and admiration.4 Be that as it may, I do believe that in this place where I am currently speaking and where I am pretty certain [Enrico] Ribulsi has also spoken, the only reason such meetings can take place is that you consider such a premiss a universal given.5 The problem, however, has nothing to do with the category of producers, who are the only ones who refuse to reply to the question, despite being an intrinsic part of the word ‘cinematographic’, which is never made clear as often as it should be, just as, equally, distinctions are required for the word ‘humour’ to differentiate between writers and someone called Bita from Udine. In the space of a few years, I have earned the nickname of ‘madman’, among producers: a dangerous person, in the midst of a serious production. Whereas, if I am at fault, it is because I am not mad enough; in other words, I’m not as dutiful as others towards the desires and dictates of Capital, the real despot of the situation. What I mean by that is that my fault is not being committed enough towards my art, to the extent an artist ought to be. In this, the final part of my talk, I shall clarify what I am trying to say and, in the meantime, please forgive me if my talk is going to seem too overtly autobiographical, which undoubtedly it is. Even so, I have no doubt that your subtlety will enable you to draw some general points from my own personal situation. I have always been much appreciated by my publishers, and I have met quite a few in my travels, but never have any of them asked me to relinquish the dignity of my imagination. I recall that [Count Valentino] Bompiani, when I once told him as a joke that in my next book I would skip a few pages, in other words, that there would be a few blanks in the book, and that I was wondering if my idea was too daring, gave me a serious response, stating that perhaps a book of blanks would be too extreme, but that he would let my conscience, and mine alone, decide.6 By comparison, in dealing with producers, we are forced to stoop in subservience. They are the ones who sign the cheques, the ones who can guarantee us a job for a year. Our constant fear of the future reaches its climax in the presence of producers. In other words, money has, from the very beginning, led astray the history of cinema and continues to do so. Cinema took the wrong turn at the outset, with Nickel Odeons, those machines that made it possible to watch the first short-length films for no

Alberto Consiglio was a journalist who became an editor of important pre-war magazines like Solaria and Pegaso and later became a screenwriter. 5 Enrico Ribulsi was a screenwriter and actor. 6 Zavattini had read Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (1759–67) in which there are deliberate blanks, in a playful questioning of the genre (of the novel), during its early development. 4

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more than twenty cents. From that moment, cinema took on the attributes of a miracle, in terms of finance and of technical know-how, and, most importantly, it strayed away from the path of artistic freedom. This was its destiny. Why this happened is a mystery. It seemed so obvious that even the most discerning seem to have forgotten its other, ideal, destiny. This disregard reached the point of accepting the existing consensus as both natural and absolute, when, in actual fact, what is at stake is a temporary hierarchy within a social contract. If we bear in mind the origins of cinema, which were immediately corrupted, it becomes clear that, in the cinema, intelligence in its most autonomous and individual forms has been notable for its absence. The whole playing field is in the hands of producers, the prophets of ‘useful’ intelligence, and I am quietly convinced that its chosen ones – feel free to name [G. W.] Pabst, [King] Vidor, [Josef von] Sternberg – would have been far less well known, if art alone had been the deciding factor. Whereas, individuals working in the film industry benefited from a lack of competition and from overwhelming public recognition. The field was, and still is, dominated by a select few. By comparison with literature and visual art, in which selection requires a choice from very large numbers of writers and artists, in this case, the winners only had to beat a few hundred competitors, to the detriment of quality. Consequently, we should be willing to recognize such a state of affairs. Let’s tackle it in all its complexity, taking into consideration its formidable industrial framework, the Stars, California and Via Veneto. We must abandon the ideal world in which we imagined an entirely different history of cinema, consisting in a cine-camera available to all – no different from a writing pen and a paintbrush – a cinema which would allow you to purchase film for the price of a box of salt from the tobacconist; a history of cinema made of individual values and of congenial and unselfish passions. What an Earthly Paradise that would be! One in which everyone would be carrying a camera, as if it were as common as a bicycle, and the titles of films as wide-ranging as our most secret thoughts, and, furthermore, in step with them. As for me, I am a scriptwriter. Yet, no one can be as critical as I am towards scriptwriters. It is not that I wish to discourage people from writing, because I want to get rid of the competition. That’s not the point. Everyone has a story wedged in their pocket and, bizarre though it may sound, producers are always looking for stories. There are even production houses that are struggling because they are out of scripts. I have heard people looking for stories in the street, but with no rhyme nor reason, and with the same kind of pressure of a person seeking an antidote against diphtheria. When I moved to Rome, I dreamed of setting up a central agency for scenarios. The idea was to gather the very best of what could be done in Italy. It had always struck me that well-established writers were unable to get in touch with the cinema industry environment, a garrison defended by mediocre self-interest and enveloped in myths. For a number of reasons, my initiative, utopian as it was, met with failure.

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But at the time, several notions of mine were wrong. I would never attempt launching an agency for screenwriters, because I discovered that any number of scenarios exist where you would least expect to find them. All books are scenarios. There isn’t a single news story that isn’t also a film script. I would like to know why The House of the Dead and Demetrio Pianelli, to cite two examples, or the Giornalino di Gian Burrasca, can’t become film adaptations.7 I don’t believe you could find a book that is more suitable for cinema. Even [Benjamin] Constant’s Adolphe would work and [Michel de] Montaigne’s Essays – not to make too fine a point here – could be adapted, to produce a series of short fables, containing something worth communicating, with the proviso, of course, that this work does require skill. There is no shortage of ideas. The eleven o’ clock daily paper is full of them. And there is no lack of individuals able to come up with twenty inspiring themes a day, who could elicit just as many from each of you or from the most apathetic, petty bourgeois, individual. But could you make films out of them? I don’t think so. I think screenwriters should be humbled. My recurring feedback to them would be: ‘Your pages are good, but – no offence – I prefer the Odyssey, or a painting by Brueghel, which combine ideas with creative skill.’ I’m not saying that only books should become cinema, but that everything and anything could. The most engaging example is that film by Dziga Vertov [Man with a Movie Camera {1929}], an authentic cinematic story, in which raw events happening in the street are ‘edited’ into joined sequences – it goes without saying that editing had already been figured out in the author’s mind.8 As for the scenario of M, [Fritz] Lang’s classic film, it is a detective story on the same footing as Miralgo’s latest homicide. This shows that there is no shortage of scenarios. But there is a dearth of decision makers to make a selection of scenarios. In practice, then, as things stand, we are faced with the obstacle of producers. Alas, they are not in bad faith. But their good faith adds up to the good faith of a businessman, the kind of person who drives a hard, cruel bargain. Only someone who has no imagination will mock [Giorgio] De Chirico’s work. And I have watched a scenario being laughed at because it featured angels, since angels are the worst enemies of cinematic common sense. The cinema, which is entirely visual, is managed by people who are unable to visualize. I am talking about the gift of seeing in your mind’s eye, so that, for example, if I say: ‘a long row of trees with men sitting in the branches’, while you will be able to visualize the long row or rather that particular long row, no producer will. While they are able of to detect the dialectical value of a text in all its social modulations, they can only do so, if it is what they call objective, that is to say, The House of the Dead (1861) is an autobiographical novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Demetrio Pianelli (1889) is a novel by Emilio De Marchi. Il Giornalino di Gian Burrasca (1907–8) is a novel for children by Vamba. 8 Dziga Vertov’s type of realism was discussed by Umberto Barbaro in Cinema magazine. Zavattini is mistaken about its editing, which was not by Vertov, but his wife, Elizaveta Slivova, whose skilful work turned it into a work of art. 7

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informed by a degree of verisimilitude and, above all, lacking any supernatural qualities. Not that I expect anything extraordinary from them. I would be happy if, waking up one morning and seeing a red sky with green polka dots above their heads, they could experience not just fear but also a sudden chromatic sensation. There is no lack of raw materials for the cinema. I’m pretty sure that you all have thousands of ideas for a story. Is there a single person who doesn’t have at least one idea for a film? All you need is the phrase: ‘Let’s make a film about housemaids’, to justify making one and set it in motion. All you need is a word. Say a word, any word at random: table. Whatever you touch will inspire you to make a film. Nothing more than a word: table. ‘We’ll tell the story of the life of a table’, a young man said to me, ‘through the vicissitudes of a family’ and in the end the table is transformed into a person; it would be far more portentous than [Carlo] Collodi’s wood, since, all things considered, you come to realize that each one of us is an object, and that we live according to the nature of such an object.9 Speaking in confidence, in a previous life, I was a barometer, and I live in fear that a powerful man like Edward Arnold will hang me – a poor man – outside the window and every now and then will grab me with his hands and inspect me and if my clothes are wet, he’ll say: ‘it’s raining!’ Then he’ll hang me on the hook again – a barometer for the well-off, that is what I would be.10 * My first involvement in the cinema took place in 1934. I was born in a cauliflower, like a character of mine, entirely devoid of any technical experience. The painter [Giaci] Mondaini was working with me. The title of the film was I’ll Give a Million. I already had an innocent obsession with thinking up scenarios of an evangelical and satirical nature, going too far, perhaps. Imagine a film by Frank Capra or better still, by [Robert] Riskin, something closer to what is not said than to what is. It was no comedy. Angelo Rizzoli, an exceptional producer, bought it and, although when it comes to journalism, my former publisher and I don’t see eye to eye, I must admit that I have never again come across a man so willing to embark on a most enviable adventure. He chose Camerini to direct it and let us use his sumptuous villa in Canzo and imposed no limit: ‘I shall spare no money, means, time, provided the first comic Italian film is born.’ Instead, I’ll Give a Million was born. Ercole Patti once described, in La Gazzetta del Popolo, the months we spent working on the screenplay and I told the story on Lugano Radio. Those months were spent arguing morning, noon and night. I was fighting with everyone. I kept myself to myself, in the four corners of the villa, fuming with anger. And I The reference is to Carlo Collodi’s children’s book Pinocchio (1883). His idea, originally a joke in his literary raccontini, became a gag in the film Miracle in Milan, directed by Vittorio De Sica, and based on Zavattini’s story, treatment and shooting script.

9

10

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recall that I was even rude to Assia Noris, the nymph of our hermitage. The more time passes, the more I realize that Camerini was right. Surely, I couldn’t expect him to contaminate his personality? The mistake, if there was one, was to pick Camerini, a worthy enough director, but fortunately with a very particular world of his own to convey, however questionable, who would never in a million years have agreed to a scene in which two brave enemies running through a forest, end up turning the chase in the tangle of branches into a game, punctuated by the cheerful sound of cookoo!11 As far as Mario Camerini’s chaste and pathetic point of view, the kingdom of beggars was plausible, but the gag with two men, one of them offering the other something, as he had done earlier, when he came across a beggar, saying ‘No, no, you offered an aperitif, it’s my turn’, was too implausible.12 For the record, I can say that on various occasions I was furious, especially when Totò refused to do the leading role. The production director, Muccino, failed to address him using his proper aristocratic title, so he flatly refused and was replaced by Luigi Almirante. Clearly, the presence of Marquis Antonio De Curtis – alias Totò – would have been an incentive for Camerini to agree to a few instances of clear-cut humour. Totò would have doubled the gags to twenty, by simply using the mobility of his face, and today I’ll Give a Million would be remembered as a film, not a play. Nobody knows that I was also thinking of [Erminio] Macario for the role. I shall never forget the sight of Macario, while he was putting on his trousers, in a corner of Studio 2 in Cines, all alone and disconsolate. He had travelled all the way from far-flung Pisa, paying for his own journey through the Maremma with what little money he had at the time. Camerini rejected outright someone who was going to become our dear Macario, because Camerini instinctively blocked any tendency whatsoever towards gags. Camerini was adamant and it is such allegiance to his own ideals, whatever they may be, that explains his dominance over others. But the script was doomed. Even the Americans, who purchased it in 1936, ended up highlighting the love angle. De Sica became Warren Baxter, and the suicide role was given to Peter Lorre, the man with bulbous eyes. In the 20th Century Fox version, the dance number disappeared altogether and my darling beggars all but disappeared from the scene. That same year, I wrote The Poor Men’s Motorcar [1952]. Five poor men win a motorcar in a regional lottery and, of course, decide to sell it. But before they do, each one of them wants to use it for twenty-four hours. My plan was to cast five Italian comedians, and I thought that this would be enough to get the film into production. It seems to me that comedy was non-existent six or seven years ago and that, back in 1935, variety show comedians had a zero rating.

Another gag originally used in Zavattini’s prose writing, using incongruity to mock antagonism. 12 Zavattini borrowed the gag from one of his short stories or raccontini. Its absurd humour is typical of them. Variants appear in other stories and trickle down into a scene of Miracle in Milan, the true cinematic vehicle for his pre-war so-called magic realism. 11

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Meantime, Angelo Rizzoli, who purchased this second film script, was heading for drama with Everybody’s Woman [1934], while The Poor Men’s Motorcar is still stuck in an office in Piazza Carlo Erba.13 It also included characters and adventures, and allusions that recreated the atmosphere of certain American comic films. Let me relate the last episode of that story, which will strike you as out of date today, but seven years ago, in my view, it had a charm all of its own. One of the five, Bab, has been taking his large family out for a drive about town in the luxury motorcar. But he is in a hurry, since at twelve noon he has an appointment with a singer he met in the bar, the evening of the lucky draw. The drive about town was a mad rush for the father and gave indescribable joy to the mother and children who could feel rich for several hours in a row. At last, Bab drops off the whole family, including his numerous offspring, mother-inlaw, aunt and wife, outside the front door of their home. When he motors off, he envelops his family in a cloud of smoke, never noticing for a moment his youngest child playing in the back seat. Soon, a young celebrity climbs into the front passenger seat, next to her beau, and the two set off, totally oblivious of the little child playing on the thick carpet behind them. Bab and the celebrity park outside a restaurant and we are just in time to hear Bab’s sweet nothings addressed to the blonde. Then, all of the sudden, while the two are courting, the little boy’s head pops up from inside the motorcar. He spots his father and smiles. His father doesn’t know what to do. He pulls faces to no avail. He fails to make him understand that he has to disappear out of sight inside the vehicle. The child’s first response – it’s a new game – soon gives way to fear and floods of tears. Meanwhile, a crowd of people gathers outside the restaurant, and Bab’s embarrassment reaches dramatic proportions. Bab is divided between the child and the blonde who looks on, without realizing what is actually going on. Finally, Bab gets up from the table, looks at her like a wounded lamb and races past the astonished crowd, carrying the child on his shoulders as fast as he can, while imitating the sound of a car horn with his throat. * The year 1935 was the year of my greatest illusions. As Pietro Bianchi has recently noted in an article, at the time, I was the worst victim of my own optimism, believing as I did that the step from page to screen was but a short one.14 It took me years to understand how wrong I was. There’s a huge distance between the two, what with compromise solutions and bank notes.

Piazza Carlo Erba was where Rizzoli, the publishing house was situated in Milan. La signora di tutti, Everybody’s Woman (1934), was directed by Max Ophüls. The lead role was by Isa Miranda. 14 Pietro or ‘Pietrino’ Bianchi had been a student of Zavattini’s in the 1920s, when he was a teacher in Parma. Bianchi later became a journalist and a film critic. 13

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1935 was the year I began to talk and write about setting up the Association of Humourists. I was convinced that the potential of creative invention for comic films was far greater in Italy than anywhere else. At a conference held here in Imola, organized by guf, I said, ‘There are at least twenty or thirty men who have the talent to revive a decrepit screenplay.’ I cited a few names. I said that while [P. G.] Wodehouse was in Hollywood, they locked him up for months, trying to squeeze a few meagre jokes out of him. Not one of our producers has tried to contact such people. And even when a producer is willing to speak to them, he gives up as soon as he is faced with any obstacle, failing to understand that no one, no matter how clever he might be, can possibly come up with the goods in the space of a morning. It takes much longer; of course it does. By the way, it took [Robert] Riskin nine months to write the screenplay for It happened One Night [1934]. What I was getting at was that screenwriters need to be trained. It is not something you can improvise, no differently from what happens in every other field. I went on to say that in Italy we are easily spotted, at least in these years of training new managers, for preferring the bright idea film over the organized film. Which is why it is important to make room for experimentation and training. I added that I hoped to create The Association of Comic Writers to produce film shorts. Not the customary comic short, but a comic newsreel, lasting seven or eight minutes. Its main advantage was to function as a workshop for a new generation of screenwriters and directors, all working to that end in original and diverse ways. * In 1937, I made a fresh attempt, this time, in an article published in a film magazine, entitled ‘A fixation’. I followed this up in other public conferences, defending the idea of Italian comic films. But, as always, events took a different turn, independently of my polemics, and the day came when Totò acted in his first film, Keep Your Hands to Yourself [1937], directed by Gero Zambuto, who specialized in dramatic roles as an actor, based on a screenplay by Guglielmo Giannini, a first-class detective story writer. My obsessive idea was really naïve. How could I forget yet again that the cinema was in the hands of high finance? Not even the years of direct experience opened my eyes. Indeed, in 1940, I prepared a new proposal for a film that you can gauge for yourselves how childish it was, despite having the backing of people like [Corrado] Alvaro, [Alessandro] Pavolini, [Giuseppe] Landi and so on and so forth.15 Let me read you an extract from a letter I wrote on 8 May to an influential figure in the film industry: In 1936, I wrote a script that was tailormade for Totò, The Nervous Tic Clinic. The main character was a male nurse in a clinic for mental illness. 15

Giuseppe Landi and Alessandro Pavolini were both influential figures, high up in the fascist hierarchy.

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I  am not going to relate the whole story, but at least let me tell you that he had hidden a hypochondriac girl who was being sought out by other people in a room of the clinic. He carried out clever experiments on the other patients to find a cure for her. They all recovered except her. She simply couldn’t get over her depressing solitude. Our Totò gained the reputation of being a healer, without knowing it, so entirely focused, as he was, on his objective. There were many criminals lurking in the clinic, feigning illness, because they were trying to steal a certain document. The scenario featured a romantic story about a young gymnast who appeared and disappeared during his high jumps, just outside the girl’s window. To her, he seemed like an angel. Towards the end, there was a final battle involving syringes, bundles of cotton wool and so on, and in the epilogue the lead character, now defeated in love, returns to the park, where we see him running towards the camera, like a large horse held by very long reigns in the hands of a crowd of children, the same children whose mothers, in the scene in the park at the very beginning, had asked him to keep their children amused with his antics.

This scenario was written in 1936 and sold in 1938. Now and then, it crops up. Only a few days ago, it surfaced, like a sea monster. The strange thing is that Totò never saw this script. I couldn’t even get him to read it. Bear in mind that Totò is a mime, who, as you know, is aware of his worth, but only by instinct. Consequently, like a courtesan, he works for one kind of director today, and for another tomorrow, never stopping to ask himself which might be the best direction to take, to further his career. A few days ago, I was in his apartment. He was wearing a very short pyjama and shuffling around, wielding a small hammer to move the crocodile souvenirs he had brought back from Addis Abeba from one wall to another. He spends the best hours of the day changing the places where he hangs the crocodiles. He also owns a tiger skin and he told me he was planning to have two green light bulbs fitted where the eyes should be. Not to mention that he hopes to have a mechanism installed under the carpet in the hallway that will trigger the sound of a roaring tiger coming from the tiger’s jaws. He was telling me this with the straight face of an interior designer. As I wrote in Scenario, Totò is someone who will offer you some excellent Campari to drink in his home full of carpets and alabaster marble on a beautiful tray. Then, when the guest isn’t looking, he will take away the tray, polish it with his elbow and place it on the sideboard, to make it shine from the marvellous reflection of the electric light. He is pure instinct. He’s an amoeba. The precious stone serves to feed his vanity. His taste is funereal. If only he had a sudden insight and became humble. His salvation will come exclusively from embracing wholeheartedly a story based on his innermost nature, one that I’m sure he himself has never explored. Macario, by comparison, possesses greater awareness and, like a termite, builds his private world from one year to the next.

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After the misadventures with Totò, Blonde under Lock and Key was in store in 1938. [Camillo] Mastrocinque directed the film and I wrote about it in Tempo magazine. Mastrocinque reacted polemically, but in the end, after a few months, he very generously confessed that he hadn’t been able to do the scenario justice. And furthermore, he added that if he were to remake a film, his choice would be Blonde under Lock and Key, convinced as he was that he could do something more worthwhile with the same material. In truth, Blonde under Lock and Key was hardly a good script. It was originally called Miss Celebrity Signatures, and, if truth be told, it was linked to an advertising campaign. But then the Miss Celebrity Signatures magazine closed down and with it the competition to find a leggy girl who looked like the cover girl drawn by [Gino] Boccasile. The plan was that it would run concomitantly with the launch of the film.16 Where did Mastrocinque go wrong? He limited the screenwriting to twenty days. Now, when it came to reviewing the film, in Tempo, I didn’t praise my script, but complained that one of the worst ills was not allowing enough time for screenwriting. This is, quite possibly, the cause of many of the problems of Italian cinema. * In 1939, I wrote Everyone Should Have a Rocking Horse. I approached a few producers, but soon came to the realization that this wasn’t going anywhere. Then one day I read it out aloud to Vittorio De Sica, and he bought it. Two years later, we reached the stage of screenwriting. Such a long period of time, and De Sica never had any doubts about making the film. It’s about a manual worker, his wife and son. He tries in vain to make an appointment with the owner of the factory that manufactures rubber artefacts, Bot. This is where he works. One day, our lead character dares approach the lobby outside the capitalist’s office. When he sees a jungle of business cards, and so many people coming and going, he thinks to himself that all he need do is get himself a business card and then surely Mr Bot will agree to see him. He wants to propose to Bot to distribute the manufactured toys to everyone. This is the only way to improve human beings. He also wants to suggest to him to have a room set aside for workers, for when they’re feeling tired and depressed. They go in and can freely give vent to their feelings, shouting, ‘Bot’s a bastard. Bot’s a cheat. Bot’s a money lender.’ Then, after their outburst, they can go back to work feeling much better and the first to benefit is Bot himself. But the crux of the film is a small ring, the cheap kind you find in the sawdust at Christmas fairs, a ring which turns out to be a magic ring, or so people are inclined to believe. Whoever puts it on can make a wish. A riot breaks out for 16

The magazine was very successful in two ways: financially and for publishing high-quality articles.

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the possession of this magic ring, in a crescendo leading to the final scene, as furious as it is choral – a scene I really like – in which, one by one, everyone makes an avid wish before letting someone else have it.17 At last, after the fury of battle, including kicks in the shin, possession! But at the crucial moment, out come ancestral desires. Some wishing to be a few centimetres taller, others wishing something that can only be said in the corner, out of hearing, despite the mad haste, other still, like Stoch, wishing that nobody else will be able to wish for more than he can wish for. The film ends on a positive note. Our hero becomes deputy manager of the big factory and succeeds in carrying out some of his social reforms, and, long last, he is no longer forced to meet his creditors, in the company of his wife and son, and wearing a carnival hat to hide his shame. Needless to say, the casting for the child is key. We’ll need an excellent child because he plays a decisive role. This child is a little odd. He asks his penniless father a bizarre Christmas present: a child who would be standing in the snow, waiting to kick in the pants a strange man who made the little boy’s flying balloon pop every single day with a cigarette. And the father, in the white morning, accommodating and shy as he is, would have to grant his son’s wish, unable as he is to give him any other present. I must say that De Sica was keen on this script and I am hoping that he will be the lead character, since my worker has much in common with the best in De Sica, somewhat dreamy and sometimes on the verge of flying away, with a parting and a southern melancholy. We’ll see. That same year, in 1939, I wrote Little Bird in a Family, which the producers turned into An Impossible Family, without even consulting me. I was right to suppose this scenario would be a big catch. Sure enough, the producers competed for its purchase. The main idea was a strange family that decides to get in touch with a film director to settle their chaotic infighting and domestic affairs. And the director manages to do so, by using music and song, and with the help of the best-known radio personalities. I doubt it has anything in common with My Man Godfrey [1936].18 When the quarrels reached their apex, the Trio Lescano, as light and slender as Sylphs, breeze through the Bartolis bedroom, hinting at an aria, while Bormioli and Semprini are hiding behind the curtains.19 I wrote to some producers when I felt I had developed the idea. The director was meant to be Vittorio De Sica, and, to be more precise, Vittorio De Sica playing himself. The radio voices were to come into play in the last dining room scene, in an open symposium hosted by the Bartolis family, attended even by Nunzio Filogamo and Otello Bocaccini, featuring a series of gags stretching satire to pure fantasy, and the kind of precision associated with [Charles Adrien] Grock.20 Zavattini used this idea, including the situation it creates, to great effect in the screenplay for Miracle in Milan, where the magic ring becomes a magic dove. 18 My Man Godfrey, directed by Gregory La Cava. 19 The Lescano Trio were the three Leschan sisters, of Dutch-Jewish and Hungarian parentage, who were very popular before and during wartime. 20 Nunzio Filogamo was an actor singer and radio show presenter. Otello Boccaccini was also a well-known singer who performed on radio. Grock was a famous clown and a singer. 17

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Let me add that I also planned to cast three children to form a vocal trio, something that has never been seen before in a film, so I visited Rome’s most down-to-earth variety shows, while L’Ora del dilettante was running. Ecco la felicità [1940] is something like it.21 But the producers ignored my suggestions and the screenplay was written by other people. And yet the film became a box-office success and the producers are delighted with the results, so far be it from me to argue with them. What a cynic I’ve become! Or rather, an honest screenwriter who stoops low when he is approaching the threshold of the studios. * All these trials and tribulations, satisfying results as well as errors of judgement bring us up to the end of 1940. Last August, Pietro Tellini (a promising young film writer) and I wrote Four Steps in the Clouds, produced by Giuseppe Amato, which is due to be released in a few months. Last September, I published Totò the Good in Cinema magazine. This scenario was also written with the Marquis Antonio De Curtis in mind. Its humour is close to my first book [Let’s Talk a Lot about Me {1931}], definitely not to the second [The Poor Are Mad {1937}], and even less so, if I may say so, to the third [I Am the Devil {1942}]. The first and last fifty metres of this story will be in colour, giving it the blatant connotations of a fable.

Ecco la felicità (Here’s Happiness) was directed by Marcel L’Herbier. L’Ora del dilettante (The Hour of the Amateur) was a radio show written and performed by two comic writers, both friends of Zavattini’s, Vittorio Metz and Marcello Marchesi. Cf. Alessandro Faccioli, Leggeri come in una gabbia: L’idea comica nel cinema italiano (1930–1944), Turin: Kaplan 2011, 37.

21

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‘The Importance of the Script’ (1942–3)1

Context In 1942 or 1943, ‘The Importance of the Script’ argued that there is no such thing as a good or a bad script, since the text will dissolve into cinema, becoming a different medium altogether. For this reason, the writer should not be held responsible for a mediocre film. What happens after the writing stage is entirely separate from what went before. Zavattini’s conclusion is that: ‘The story becomes cinema only when it is no longer a story.’

Text The search for scripts continues. This is, as far too many people are concerned, the cinema’s biggest headache. Perhaps I was slightly exaggerating last year in an article, when I claimed that you could make a film with only the word table as a point of departure, but the truth is that some dreadful films have been made, based on brilliant literature, and vice versa. There is no guarantee that a spectacular sunset is going to be as good as the painting that depicts it. And the fact remains that cinema is an art which recreates everything, and so why there should be any a priori expectation of a scenario is a mystery to me. The cinematic fact is not complementary, but integral to cinema; it is cinema. The sentence ‘Paolo escaped from the window into the foggy night while the police were shooting at him from the roofs nearby’ says nothing about how it might be filmed. It can be taken in so many ways, just as the shadow of a hand might trigger the imagination in any number of ways. This is the reason why I fail to understand people who say they have a so-called good script tucked away in their study. What they fail to see is that the scenario problem must be addressed during every second of the film’s duration. Their optimism comes from the belief that the cinema boils down to translation. I think it is worth saying instead that the more they believe in their good scripts, the more they 1

Zavattini, ‘L’importanza del soggetto’, Si gira, 1942 or 1943, now in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 47–8.

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limit cinematic recreation. What I mean by that is that they cramp the freedom of cinematic art. By freedom, I intend absolute freedom, the kind the writer is faced with in front of a blank page, the freedom that the Italian Quattrocento enjoyed and that will also be enjoyed some time in the future. But no. We have reached technical arcadia and mannerism of content instead. To settle for so little, when grammar and syntax are still alive and well: poets create them, not mannerists. To justify the amount of attention afforded to scripts, they claim that you can make a good film based on a good one, whereas, if the script is bad, you can’t. I dare contradict this. There is no such thing as a good or a bad script and no sunset exists that contains the attributes of a good painting. The scenario, which is more or less faithful to its literary origin, is not cinema. It only becomes cinema when it is no longer a script. Therefore, the aesthetic problem leads one to object whether a script possesses cinematic qualities or not. It isn’t something you can tell from the script, but from the person making such a claim. If several people make a claim like that, a hierarchy of cinematic possibilities is established which transcends the novel – possibilities which depend on their artistic creativity. When it comes to a bad script (I am now referring to a literary storyline, and it could not be otherwise), you could take a sentence such as: ‘The soldiers fought for an hour with water up to their waist.’ The very same sentence is found in the good script. It would be absurd to think that the sequence would work, if it came from the good script, and not work, if it came from the bad script. The point is that cinema begins after the scriptwriting stage is over and done with. You might argue that, if the script is inspired by a cinematic intuition, then cinema already exists within the same script, just as the painting exists already in the painter’s eye, when he sees the sunset and finds it inspiring. Right. But you can only prove it a posteriori, after the event, as it were, and only if the script was written by the film director. Otherwise, it can’t be the first stage of the creative act. And we will not join in when the film is over to say that the scriptwriter saw this or that. What pertains to the scriptwriter is only a responsibility for the strengths and weaknesses of the text.

Part two

Post-war

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10

Radio interview Fascism and post-war Italy (1983)1

Context The war marked a change in Zavattini’s outlook. In 1940, he left Milan, the capital of Italian publishing, and his job in Milan at Mondadori, to live and work in Rome, the capital of Italian cinema where the main film studios were situated in Cinecittà and devoted much, if not all, of his time to writing scenarios, screenplays and working on, or fixing, scripts and screenplays written in collaboration with others. In a series of radio interviews late in Zavattini’s life, Giacomo Gambetti asked him about that period. At the end of this stage of the interview, the interviewer mentions The Night I Gave Mussolini a Slap (1976), a short prose text accompanied by its very lengthy postscript, in which Zavattini imagines that he once gave the dictator a slap. Of course, he never did anything of the kind. To even suggest such a thing, as the title does, is patently absurd, and suitably shocking for many dormant post-war fascists. The title, and the fiction it stands for, is indeed a provocation, a preface for its sequel, the 130 numbered reflections, running to almost three times the length of the text itself. The postscript, which is really the main body of the book, in an act of subversion of linear text, if you will, is a sustained engagement with the ethics of social and political engagement, beginning with his own, his lack of it, to include that of the Italian people. Zavattini embarks on an examination of conscience in relation to fascism, something which was never done by public intellectuals in the post-war years and has never been done since.2 Here is an excerpt from The Night I Gave Mussolini a Slap: Zavattini, from ‘Cinque conversazioni con Cesare Zavattini’, rai, Radio Tre, 10 April–8 May 1983, in Gambetti (ed.), Zavattini. Cinema e Vita, vol. 1, 25–6. 2 In this respect, Italy was similar to Austria, in not undergoing a salutary de-fascistization programme and indeed much of the pre-war bureaucracy, in the judiciary and the police, for example, was reinstated and as early as 1946, members of the former Republic of Salò, the first Neo-fascist party that came into being in 1943, was legitimized and allowed to run at the first post-war general elections. 1

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Strange. [Writers] were aware of the awful contradiction in lesser aspects of life, but not in the glaringly obvious political governance which, when all is said and done, we accepted, which confirms the notion that if we are able to carry tons of weight on our shoulders, then either there is something wrong with our understanding of weights and measures or we are being assisted. And today, how can we stand and watch while other misdeeds are being perpetrated? [...] Was it possible? And the answer is yes it was.3

What follows is from an interview with Gambetti in which Zavattini reflects on the early years and how the shift in his outlook came about after the war.

Text [Gambetti] This is where, in my opinion, one of the antitheses and, perhaps, one of the syntheses of your way of being come to the fore: the synthesis and this antithesis, between fantasy and reality, two elements that have been so present in your work. What can you say about this? [Zavattini] Well, there would be several things to say about this. I’m not so sure I can do it well, but I’ll try. There was a long stretch of time, years and years and years, in which fantasy seemed to be very worthwhile; a great opportunity for a writer to develop, enough to suggest reality, to make an allusion, an indirect reference, as we used to say. Since between fantasy and reality there were similarities, a kinship, but not so strong as to equate the two. Then, over time, I adjusted my aim and abandoned this idea. Now, I mean, in these years, I don’t see it that way anymore. And it is not as if there is a redemptive value in fantasy. It’s not as if I would go to bed with a better conscience if I were to still write fables today. No. The fables I’ve written and the ones I could write would make no difference to my state of mind, because the distinction between the two is no longer there. The problematic, in all its importance, lies elsewhere, but calling it ‘importance’ minimizes it. Let’s say that it lies in its victims, victims of all the kinds you can possibly imagine. Here we are. Can’t we find appropriate means of communication? Why is it that we are always a second too late in relation to the event, so that we miss it? This is what is lacking. [Gambetti] There are, I think, two distinct periods in your writing. The 1930s, when you wrote your first books and then the post-war period, up until today [1983], which saw a new phase developing, especially from roughly 1965 until 1975 or 1976. If you agree that there are these two essential moments in your work as a writer, how can you sum them up? [Zavattini] I have always made a distinction between the period before the war and after the war. These two moments are different, in terms of states of being and of content. It is no coincidence that before the war I was completely 3

Zavattini, La notte che ho dato uno schiaffo a Mussolini, in Cesare Zavattini, Opere. 1931– 1986, edited by Silvana Cirillo, Milan: Bompiani, 1986, 1301–48, 1353.

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immersed in the myth of literature. After the war, I began to take a long critical look at myself, increasingly weighing up my own moral and social status, as opposed to the situation in which others found themselves. What happened was that before the war, like millions and millions of people, I’d been living under fascism, a political situation you could either tacitly accept or reject. Regrettably, very few rejected it, whereas, the majority accepted it and I was part of that majority. And when I look back, I cannot absolve myself, because I didn’t love it and this, I think, I have said on more than one occasion. I didn’t like that way of running society and governing people, all too hierarchical. In some of my books, I’ll refrain from citing the usual titles, four or five of them, all very successful, there are a few slight references, hints of what some called at the time a ‘socialist leaning’. It was an accusation of sorts, locating [my leaning] in the imagination. True, I could have ridden it like a broomstick to reach distant frontiers, but I never dreamed of doing so, because I was rooted in Italy and committed to the family I had to support. Do you understand?4 I myself must always bear that in mind. Later, my personal introspection began, though, at some level, it was already active before. I became more aware, thanks to the fact that I came across a more socially conscious circle of intellectuals, friends who had been braver, more active than me, who had crossed the line.5 I learned from them. This is how my understanding of the cinema somehow benefited from a climate of ideas and a circle of people, and connections with others, leading me to feel the need to work out what relation existed, or might exist, between one’s own situation and this means of expression. [Gambetti] This is one of the themes of your book The Night I Gave Mussolini a Slap.

Zavattini is making a reference to his novella Totò the Good, later developed into the screenplay for Miracle in Milan, a poetic allegory about poverty and antagonism. 5 Zavattini is referring to Antonello Trombadori, Gianni Puccini, Mario Alicata and others who militated in the clandestine Communist Party and were active in the Resistance. 4

11

‘Poetry, Italian Cinema’s only Business’ (1945)1

Context In one of the first of his post-war interviews, the screenwriter takes to task producers for their narrow-minded approach to cinema and calls for putting a stop to making foreign cinema lookalikes, suggesting instead that the way forward was to concentrate on making films that expressed Italian culture, through the mediation of poetry. New writing for cinema would require a radical reorganization of the Italian film industry which needed to become open to newcomers and to more freedom of expression for screenwriters.

Text The entirety of Italian cinema, up until today, has been a translation, a copy, totally lacking originality. True enough, it is done better and better and there is still room for improvement. However, what is missing from its very foundation is poetry. In Italy, film production is improving, it is true. The films are more and more pleasing to the general public, and it is a thriving business. But the problem is the narrow focus on the individual film that is being made, as if everything depended on that single film. Often, it is the only film that the producer is going to make, which is why he wants to make a big profit, in the same way one would expect a black-market trip from Turin to Rome to be very lucrative. This type of speculation is almost destroying cinema. Businessmen pay a whole film crew of people. They make them dependant on their funding and try to make the whole thing come to fruition with the least damage. What does it matter if there is an authentic creative element? Little by little, the recipe film will become more and more effective and even reach as far as the Balkans or

1

Zavattini, ‘Poesia, solo affare del cinema italiano’, interview by Franco Deci, Film d’Oggi, no. 10, August 1945 now in Neorealismo ecc., 367–8. The editors of this weekly cinema magazine were Mario Camerini, Vittorio De Sica, Gianni Puccini and Luchino Visconti.

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some other country, without addressing or resolving the root problem: Italian cinema. Who cares if this cinema of ours, from the point of view of civilization, is going to invade foreign markets with a fair copy of the cinema of other nations? What does it matter whether or not it makes a contribution to conveying Italian culture across the world through a creative act? The only way forward, the only possible salvation, is poetry. I’m not saying something banal here, as it might seem at first glance. I am calling for a radical reorganization of Italian film industry that will make it possible for poets, if there are any, to gain access. It follows that producers must be equipped with artistic sensitivity. They should also be creative enough to allow artists their freedom of expression, their intuition, their fantasy, allowing them to express what they wish, what they find most worthy of attention. [Interviewer] And, do you think that men of letters would be suitable for such a purpose? [Zavattini] No, never. Actually, I want to say death to men of letters, as such. I could equally be referring to painters as painters. The cinematic artist needs to have complete autonomy, needs to be free from any constraint, and might be a poet or a writer or a woodcutter, or even someone who has ignored artistic problems. Indeed, you don’t have to have written a good book to be a good painter and vice versa.

12

‘Three Questions’ (1946)1

Context An ephemeral few words spoken on Italian radio, in the spring of 1946. In this hard-hitting interview, the screenwriter and theorist makes it clear in his tone and brevity that he is concerned with the destiny of cinema and its ultimate purpose, its ethics, its social engagement, rather than intending to discuss specific films. His contempt for lofty intellectuals was to become a recurring feature of his public statements. He simply could not accept that for most of them art and politics, art and society were entirely separate, autonomous entities.

Text [Interviewer] How do you rate intellectuals? [Zavattini] Poorly. Or rather, extremely poorly. There’s a formidable masonic set among intellectuals the world over, to keep their neighbour in awe of them. Intellectuals consider themselves a God-given, privileged caste. Only they have known suffering, for example, since they are able to express it artistically. In their autobiographies, there is an implicit pride which gets in the way of relating to others, instead of finding ways to make it easier. [Interviewer] And what about post-war cinema? The films that are going into production the world over, with few exceptions, confirm a depressing rule. That cinema is, among the arts, the least generous. It holds back civilization, instead of encouraging it to dare. It has provided no message. The sheer power of communication of this medium equals its resounding failure. Cinema is trapped in ancient tropes of sentimentality, never once attempting to insinuate in the viewers’ minds a single doubt about time and space. The truth is that we are witnessing the restoration of scholastic morals, which stamp out any doubts, any questioning that arose during the times of fear,

1

Zavattini, ‘Tre domande’, a rai radio broadcast, spring 1946, in Neorealismo ecc., 368–9.

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hunger, and above all, cruelty. Cinema is one of the best organized sectors of this restoration of the status quo. They say that the public wants nothing but fun and games. I must confess, that if we grant it what it wants unquestioningly, we are demonstrating only contempt for this public, perhaps even hatred. And sooner or later we will regret it.

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‘Italy Wants to Know’ (1947)1

Context The following two texts are private notebook entries about the writer’s plan for a new magazine, Italia Domanda (Italy Wants to Know), which was to become the driving force of the new magazine Epoca three years later, and spelled Epoca’s commercial success in the field. The texts concern a different, if related, area of Zavattini’s professional activity, his commitment to changing the face of journalism in Italy. First, Zavattini tried to persuade Bompiani to endorse investigative journalism in his magazine publishing, consisting in fact-finding in the streets of Rome, adopting the same principles advocated in his idea of Neo-realism and seeking out the social fact in everyday life. But Bompiani was inevitably quite aloof, rather like the writer and editor Elio Vittorini, whose politically engaged cultural magazine Il Politecnico failed to make contact with a general readership. But book and high-volume magazine publisher Alberto Mondadori saw the opportunity and took on Zavattini’s project. It is another intervention, which sheds light on how his idea of cinema was not unrelated to his postwar work in publishing, in the role of what we might call a commissioning editor, in journalism. It complemented his screenwriting and enriched it. What distinguishes Italy Wants to Know is the focus on participation, utterly absent not only from Il Politecnico but also from its rival, published by the pci, the Italian Communist Party, Il Contemporaneo. These texts evidence Zavattini’s influence and focus on subverting one-way mass communication and increasingly thinking about doing the same in cinema, leaning towards an ethnographic, participative cinema, building on one-to-one relationships with people.

1

Zavattini, Io. un’Autobiografia, 150.

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Text Rome 31 July 1947. I need to send a couple of men out into the city; following an unprecedented principle – the experiment I carried out with Vandano collecting unusual news stories around Rome – which could not have given better results. I persuaded him to go into the places where journalists never go, which are full of stories, both useful and interesting for everybody, from the guinea pig salesman to the man who fixes broken dishes. I plan to set two more men on the heels of well-known personalities who would either react, by resorting to incomprehensible or unpopular language, or would simply refuse to respond. I must get someone else into the press office; which is what I did with four youngsters, when I let them talk about whatever they liked. I got Toddi going, Professor Schepis from the Statistics Office, who is useful in so many ways;2 the astronomers and the Belloncis, the journalists (looking into stories and events which haven’t been followed up and so on) and the philosophers. But in everyone’s eyes I can see the writing: ‘When are you going to give us some money?’3 * I suggested [to Bompiani] a magazine [Italy Wants to Know]. This time, he was enthusiastic about it. [Corrado] Alvaro and [Alberto] Savinio were also taken with the idea. It is a pity I can’t pull out, because I’m not keen on producing magazines with Valentino [Bompiani], and he knows it. But I got involved before I even realized it. Seems to me that this magazine contains a unique formula. It is a magazine which could influence public opinion. How? I have a brain trust at my disposal which will respond to any question Italy puts to them. So it is a magazine containing only answers; you publish the question and the answer. From politics to love. At a time like this of disorientation, the public is asking any number of questions. No paper gives answers to such questions. What normally happens is that while you’re reading the paper, dozens of questions crop up. I tried this out. Even a man like me is bombarded by questions, while he is reading the paper or is walking down the street. Public opinion needs to be educated from scratch. My researchers will be accurate and also humorous, but, above all, canny. Some will be desk-based, others walking the streets. I shall have as many as I want, what with writers, scientists and saints. Short replies, long answers, but all crystal clear and close to the facts. No abstract replies, only fact-filled replies and information. It will become fashionable to send a reply; I say this with no shadow of frivolity intended, just as writing a piece was trendy once. And it is understood that I’ll put the most interesting question of the week

Professor Schepsis taught statistics at La Sapienza, in Rome, and had personal contacts in the government. 3 Zavattini, Io. un’Autobiografia, 150. 2

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first and therefore the answer too, which will hinge on a news item rather than something about politics. We will help Italians think, help them become as autonomous as possible, and encourage them to broach a dialogue with themselves. But doing so without boring them, dramatizing (in the etymological sense of the word) themes instead. [...] We won’t give them the truth, but the hope that they can find it out for themselves, and we will help each of them to think about everything. Because you can reflect on a news item and equally on a declaration of war. There is no doubt that this is a huge and difficult undertaking, but I plan to rely on an excellent team. No one reads in Italy: the brevity and the reliability of the answers will promote reading.4

4

Ibidem, 147–8.

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‘I’m an Optimist’ (1949)1

Context 1949 was the year that several obstacles hindering Italian cinema came to a head. This short, sharp, article was published in Cinema italiano, a few months before the Perugia Conference, in March. Production was down, North American cinema was flooding the market, unemployment was increasing and national investment in Italian cinema was low. In response, actors, screenwriters and directors organized a popular protest in Rome in Piazza del Popolo and adjacent streets, with the solidarity of the cgil, a major workers’ union, whose general secretary came to the demonstration, Giuseppe Di Vittorio. ‘Help us!’ urged Anna Magnani, the actress who had starred in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), from the podium. Zavattini’s ‘I’m an Optimist’ might seem like a repudiation of Neo-realism. It is not. It is, rather, an invitation to experiment, and an incitation do more with the lessons of Neo-realism. Zavattini advocates its socially engaged dimension as crucial for a renewal of cinema, and integral to the renewal of society. He pushes for an anti-narrative cinema, and an ethical cinema.

Text It would be foolish and profoundly unfair to suppose that the destiny of Italian cinema coincides with Neo-realism. Unless, that is, we ascribe to this term an uninterrupted state of awareness, in which case, we might envisage any outcome whatever. I believe only foreigners, or worse, the enemies of our cinema, want to place us in the dead end of Neo-realism, as most people understand it. We need only agree that reality exists, but that it is never the same. Perhaps these enemies of ours have understood that if we are left in the wild, we constitute a serious

1

Zavattini, ‘Sono ottimista’, in Cinema italiano, March 1949, now in Neorealismo ecc., 66–7.

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threat, but if we let definitions intimidate us, as often happens, then, we will burn out like a candle. The truth is that a state of wonderful freedom has begun for Italian cinema. I’m not so sure we have quite grasped this fact. Perhaps we are like the child who is surprised by his first, unaided, steps, and before taking more steps, stops for a moment in a state of exhilaration, as if to gaze at the horizon; we are like that child who then throws off all restraint, causing a commotion among the well-to-do folks who are watching. What is crucial is that, in whatever direction the attempts of Italian cinema will take us, it will always convey an unreserved love of life which, in other cinemas, even in the best, inevitably ends up seeming an affectation. Our struggle and our novelty consist in a daring attempt to make spectacle and reality coincide, something which can only take place in a citizenship for whom the value of reality is so precious that it can be considered a spectacle in itself. Such intentions will automatically find an appropriate cinematic language, as has already happened in certain famous cases, and it seems indisputable that such a language will have nothing in common with narrative, which, for the sake of clarity, we can define as a nineteenth-century language. The split from narrative, which 90 per cent of filmmakers still use, is definitive. We have got to tackle cinema ethically: addressing the need to make new cinema from scratch. I think foreigners have a long way to go before they come to make similar unpretentious observations. We are closer, thanks to three or four men who are not fully aware themselves of the urge for renewal that Italians, with all their shortcomings and suffering, have entrusted to them.

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‘Is Cinema going to Die?’ (1949)1

Context Television broadcasting didn’t begin in Italy until 1954, preceded by the first experimental transmission at the 1949 Triennale di Milan Exhibition. The advent of television and the debates about the challenge the new medium would pose to cinema form the background to this article and to Zavattini’s question. He doesn’t dismiss the query out of hand. Instead, he states that Italian cinema would survive the advent of television and foreseeable competition, on condition that it embraced change, by responding to the immediacy of actuality, and by closing the gap between idea and film distribution. Doing away with the delay is, he claims, an ethical issue. What is at stake is the everyday, sacrificed on the altar of inane newsreels. He presses for a direct cinema about the now, the passing moment, genuine actuality. But the shared aesthetic must change in order to appreciate it and for producers to fund it.

Text People are saying that television is going to kill off the cinema and that the cinema is already in its death throes. I don’t believe these rumours. Though it stands to reason that to secure its future, the cinema will have to get closer to its true expressive purpose, which is the contemporary moment – immediacy. Cinema must become a narrator of our lives and for this purpose, there is no one who could replace it. Its ethical and artistic advantage is based on its capacity to grasp the contemporary. Let me elaborate. If it were possible to shoot the film about our day in the course of the day and watch it that same evening, then the quality of our actions would improve. The following day the choices we would make would be better choices, more ethical, more compassionate. Why is it that I am so impatient when, having read a story in the paper, I immediately expect to see it filmed and screened? Such impatience is a cypher,

1

Zavattini, ‘Morirà il cinema?’, Vie Nuove, 7 May 1949, then in Neorealismo ecc., 68–9.

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suggesting that the cinema is not free in its expressive production cycle. Far too much time elapses between conception, production and release. What is lost in translation from everyday event to film is its ethical categorical imperative and, consequently, its artistic imperative. Speed as an ethical issue: this is the point. Literature covers what we already know, that which was already part of our cultural heritage. The reason for this is that writers are hindered by that old world and memories which they consider the entire ethical world. In the nineteenth century, they would have said that it was worthwhile to narrate past events. Antiquity as subject matter has a didactic value all of its own. Whereas, the cinema today stands for the self-reflective value of the mirror, of the event that has taken place, which has been filmed and screened without delay. So it is that speed becomes an ethical issue. What concerns us, and concerns us exclusively, is reality. Stylistic novelty consists in the novelty of reality. Canons of beauty and stylistic rules are no longer necessary. Everything is alive and beautiful in its immediacy. Form will be suggested by the nature of the event, by that which has occurred and has been immediately expressed. Consider for a moment the makeup of newsreels: an inauguration of an exhibition pavilion here, Spring Collection presentation there, a fire in Los Angeles and so on and so forth. What about the text? The commentary? What about the reality of everyday life? What the current news of the real consists in is the poetic discovery of normal and particular phenomena: that man crossing the bridge, that woman running to do the shopping, while thinking about home; a family about to turn in for the night in London; another family going for its Sunday stroll in Paris. By comparison, newsreels are no different from historic period drama films. There is no attempt at connecting with the real. It is not the artist who is walking down a street, looking, observing, gazing. Cinema is still a prisoner. It is still in captivity. You can tell, from watching documentaries, which should really be at the forefront in the discovery of what is going on. I would like to say a great deal about the cinema’s incarceration. It is time to break the identification of cinema and spectacle, to challenge that excessive concern for the viewers, which makes producers, faced with the contemporary moment, with new discoveries, say: ‘But do you really find this so very interesting?’ This phrase spells the death of cinema. For what interests us is what moves us. The cinema, it is true, is falling behind the other arts, in terms of its expressive capabilities. And yet one can already discern an evergreater passion for the real, a growing curiosity for the new event in a search for man, one that seeks to bring to light what is almost invisible: the essential man, always a source of amazement.

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Perugia Conference ‘Cinema and Modern Man’ (1949)1

Context ‘Cinema and Modern Man’ is the title of Zavattini’s inaugural paper at the Perugia Conference on Neo-realism, which took place on 24–27 September 1949. Its official title encapsulated in this question: ‘Is modern man and his problems reflected in contemporary cinema?’ proposing a debate over the purpose of cinema in modern society. The year of the Perugia Conference was the year after the general election which had disenfranchised the Left from Parliament and power, and when the political stand-off of the Cold War had begun to bite. The Conference was organized by a formidable committee representing the best of Italian cinema, which included writers and directors, old and new guards alike: Corrado Alvaro, Alessandro Blasetti, Mario Camerini, Renato Castellani, Giuseppe De Santis, Vittorio De Sica, Pietro Germi, Alberto Lattuada, Alberto Moravia, Antonio Pietrangeli, Roberto Rossellini, Mario Soldati, Luchino Visconti, Luigi Zampa and Cesare Zavattini, who had recently scripted Bicycle Thieves. Umberto Barbaro, the former director of the Rome film school, who had become in the post-war era, a prominent figure in the party, in October, published a review article in the communist cultural magazine Rinascita. He applauded Zavattini’s inaugural speech, and how it set the tone for Italian filmmakers, stating that one day on the way out of a film he had gone to see purely for entertainment, he heard the paper vendors saying the Second World War had broken out. He was making the point that cinema had its responsibilities, for not having warned the public, but had, in opting exclusively for entertainment, betrayed its role.2 For Barabaro, the task for cinema was to take on its essential

Zavattini, ‘Il cinema e l’uomo moderno’, Perugia Conference, 24–27 September 1949, in Neorealismo ecc., 61–5. A slightly shorter, edited version appeared in 1967 in his anthology Straparole and was later reprinted as ‘Inutile. 1949’, Diario cinematografico, 75–6. 2 Umberto Barbaro, ‘Il convegno cinematografico di Perugia’, Rinascita, no. 10, 1949, in Gian Piero Brunetta (ed.), Neorealismo e Realismo II. Cinema e Teatro, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1

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task: to understand reality. For Zavattini, it was more than that. But Barbaro went as far as endorsing his view of cinema as socially engaged and supporting his attempts at bringing about change, regardless of their different views on cinematic realism. Barbaro it was who organized the publication of the Proceedings of the Perugia Conference. And Barbaro was the one with strong ties with filmmakers and film schools on the other side of the so-called Iron Curtain. Only the year before, Barbaro was invited to teach a course on film theory at the Løtz Film School, in Poland, in which he defended the idea that film serves to educate and that the problem with realism intended as pictorial naturalism is that it strives for objectivity while lacking the integration of the imagination.3 There were participants from the Italian Right, Father Morlion and the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (ccc), a film association funded and run by Catholics. Journalists from the Catholic Osservatore Romano and Il Popolo. The Right later, Barbaro reports, accused the Conference of being biased and dominated by the Left, which it was, in truth. Then again, none of them had intervened in the discussions of what was undoubtedly an international event. The Soviet theorist Vsvelod Pudovkin was in attendance. The French communist critic Georges Sadoul was there. So was the eminent communist documentarian Joris Ivens. Because this was also the year when the Cold War became a sharper reality for Europe, as well as in the United States, it is all the more surprising that there was a strong Iron Curtain contingent. At the Conference, it proposed the Soviet socialist realist model as the best. Also present were Ben Barzman and Alvah Bessie, two us screenwriters who came to inform the Conference of the plight of the Hollywood Ten, a group of American filmmakers hounded from Hollywood by McCarthyism. Paul Strand was also in attendance. Given his earlier filmmaking, he could have been singled out, but his name was not on the Hollywood Ten list. To avoid persecution, he had only recently emigrated from North America to find shelter in France which became his home for the rest of his life, for the same reason. The first speaker was Cesare Zavattini whose talk set the tone for the Conference. He began by pointing out that fifty years of cinema did not add up to much, all things considered. ‘Cinema has not helped us’, he told delegates. But now Italian cinema is proving ‘an effective tool for examining man and contemporary society’. Italian cinema ‘has reclaimed its destiny’. Italian cinema could deal with the real, instead of the ideal; concrete materialism (by which he meant a phenomenological approach) could replace idealist metaphysics. Of course, Zavattini’s paper caused a split. He stood for an alternative socialist cinema that proposed a different route from Lukácsian literary realism or its cinematic, idealist, equivalent. Among Italian Communist Party members, Carlo Lizzani distinguished himself for throwing in the towel, on the grounds

3

1976, 554–8. Umberto Barbaro, ‘Contenuto e forma’ (1948–9) in ibidem, 530–3.

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of an unspecified cinematic real politik. If Italian cinema was to survive, it had to compromise. While the Iron Curtain guests harped on about Soviet realism. Yet Zavattini found a prestigious supporter in the Marxist philosopher, Galvano Della Volpe who agreed with his distinction between the two directions of cinema in its history, between the cinema of attractions of Georges Méliès and the non-fiction strain of the Lumière brothers.4 Della Volpe cited the example of what he called Jean Cocteau’s ‘photographed literature’, and placed it in opposition to Bicycle Thieves, characterized as ‘poetry with a documentary, cinematic foundation’. He pointed out that obviously its realism involved montage, ideation and the mediation of poetry. A far cry from those who then and now equate Neo-realism with some kind of naïve, literalist form of realism, in their mistaken, essentialist, belief in the indexical value of realism, as its very foundation. Della Volpe distinguished between literary fantasy and cinematic fantasy. His conclusion was that the answer to the Conference’s problematic: ‘Does modern man and his problems reside in contemporary cinema?’ was that New Italian Cinema, in the form of Bicycle Thieves, demonstrated that the answer was that it did, for, film aesthetics apart, ethical, political and historic issues could exist in cinema; in other words, this cinema was socially engaged.5

Text In its first half century, cinema, we must admit, has been, without wishing to detract from any of its amazing achievements, at the service of people from a land that was far away from our own, an almost perfect place, where folks were so good that happy endings made them shed copious tears. In the meantime, real men of this world were silently organizing the Second and the Third World War. Surrounded by war rubble, we realized that we’d spent too few images to open our neighbours’ eyes and, at the very least, help them face dreadful events, if not put a stop to them. To put it simply, cinema had failed, opting for Méliès’ direction, instead of Lumières’, where the thorns of reality were everywhere to be seen. Moreover, hardly for commendable reasons, the cinema had nurtured, ever since the years of the Nickel Odeon, the human inclination to avoid any radical examination of conscience. In no time at all, it succeeded in pushing viewers as far away as possible from themselves and, with the aid of money and talent, in making this separation a lasting one and a sweet experience. Having deserted their own surroundings, viewers felt they were citizens from a country suspended in mid-air, a place where they could hear the cries of suffering of invented characters on the screen, but not those of the people in whose company they’d crowded buses and stores.

There have been objections to identifying the Lumière brothers with non-fictional cinema; however, the fact remains that two-thirds of their output was non-fiction. 5 A fuller account can be found in the author’s Cesare Zavattini. An Intellectual Biography. 4

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One day, when I walked out of the darkness of a cinema, I heard the news vendors shouting that there was a war on, which meant a woman’s arm detached from her body, stuck between telegraph cables and the head of Paolo Gai landing in a flower pot in the street, at number 3, just outside someone’s home. We could only hope that the remaining bombs wouldn’t land on our roof, but on the roof of the house opposite. And when that house was hit instead of ours, we survivors embraced and sang. Yes, gentlemen, I heard a song of joy in such circumstances with my very own ears. How many films were made during the long vigil, in preparation for the great slaughter? An incommensurable number in fifty years: 1895–1944. Fifty years of cinema. It sounds like a memorial plaque. Hundreds of thousands of metres of celluloid, armies of people toiling to make something out of these thousands of metres, enough to wrap around the whole world. It would make a news item for an illustrated weekly. It says it all. The report on the first half century in the life of cinema concluded with a statement that is going to send a shiver down the spine of a great many people: cinema didn’t help us. But something is appearing on the horizon and the theme of our meeting and your friendly presence here are a symptom of this. The history of cinema is being told – only in terms of a technique or an aesthetic at first – as an effective tool for examining man and contemporary society. This is how cinema has reclaimed its destiny. This is the new development and it is manifesting itself so naturally and forcefully that even the film industry is beginning to feel the consequences. An immense number of eyes can now share a modicum of hope in the prospect of seeing a film expressing all the truth or all the love for others that can be shown at once in a single film. That film will be projected in the sky and will be visible at the same instant the world over. Well, if this film hasn’t been made yet, it is not because we ignore the truth, but because we hide it, out of fear or for the sake of material convenience. We have always stopped a few metres short. But now there is a stronger common purpose. It is almost as if there is a competition among filmmakers to be the first to report injustice at the expense of the poor. Italian cinema, my dear teachers and friends, will continue to take part in this competition with all the hope and intelligence that are needed. Italian cinema has been fêted by the most desirable praise. It won’t find it easy to disregard this praise, which, unwittingly, limits its horizon with the definition of Neo-realism. Our cinema has something more durable than a style and something very different from what earned it the highest distinction: this need for truth. Since falsity will continue to find a purchase among men for quite some time, it seems to me that more work needs to be done in the name of cinema and of Italian cinema. This home-grown Last Judgement, devoid of trumpets, devoid of supernatural interventions, face to face, which our cinema began immediately after the war, cannot be interrupted. If it were reversed by the old way of life, the life many call normal and which is tantamount to deceit, it would spell the end of cinema and the end of democracy itself.

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But we know that great things can be achieved with the aid of conscience alone. Not that this is a guarantee against making a bad film. It is a well-known problem and one that Italian filmmakers have tried to resolve, by bringing the two terms of life and spectacle so close as to subsume the second into the first. This is the sort of effort that must be made. But if someone were to object that this has always been the purpose of art, we could respond that for Italians the endeavour to see things as they are is a decisive choice that borders almost on cruelty and that, ultimately, this is what counts, even more than art and over and above art. It is the document that comes to prominence in manifesting, in real time, where exactly genuine epic is to be found. If we explain this in terms of social values, what all this means is that there is an impulse to be become interested in others. No longer, however, in terms of a narrative synthesis of the past, but by means of an analysis, leading to the realization of the existence and suffering of men in their actual duration. I mean to say that the call by the victims of our selfishness and by nature is becoming an ever more urgent call for solidarity, precisely because it is heard in its minimal fractions of time, moment by moment. Man is there before us and we can observe him in slow motion (with the right cinematic machine) so that we can realize how concrete is his minute of presence which will reveal to us how equally concrete is our minute of absence. We will have to acknowledge that his importance is continuous and that his presence needs no explaining. Let’s observe our man: he is walking, smiling, talking. You can look at him from every angle, you can get close, move away, study his every action and look again, as if you were at the moviola. Under the light of numerous spotlights, like planet earth, he walks slowly in circles as we observe him with keen interest. When we open our eyes, we notice that there is no fable, no apparent story. It seems to us that we are about to rediscover the original value of our image in three dimensions. But then, this is what cinema was from when it first opened its lens to the light of the world. That was when it gave equal importance to everything and everything was worth fixing on the plate. That was the most uncontaminated and promising moment in cinema history. Slowly, reality began to resurface, although it was buried under a pile of myths. Cinema began its creation of the world. A tree here, an old man there, a house, a man eating, a man sleeping, a man weeping. Cinema could have laid all this bare before us like didactic tables, since it alone had the technical means to do so with scientific precision. Yet, it preferred the plot, to avoid the issues arising from a deeper knowledge of reality. Man would have acquired too much dignity and surprising comparisons would have been made possible. The close-up of the eye of a poor man might have seemed the same as that of a rich man and vice versa, so alike were they. We would have done our best to seek, even in the obvious, the fundamental values of human nature which would consequently have seemed noteworthy and worth telling during every single moment of its existence. Our ties with other people would have been closer and would have spread. We know this,

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which is why it would be a serious failing to turn our backs on any aspect of man whatsoever. This is the reason why our cinema would want to film ninety consecutive minutes in the life of a man, as a supreme act of faith. Each of these shots would be equally intense and revealing. Each one would no longer be just a bridge for the next shot, but would vibrate in itself as if existing in its own microcosm. Then our attention would become uninterrupted, and, I would say, perpetual, as one person’s attention should be for another person. Are we going to succeed? For the time being, let us begin to consider it an objective.

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Letter to Father Morlion (1949)1

Context Father Morlion taught cinema at the Pro Deo University in Rome. He had attended the Perugia Conference two months earlier, but had not intervened in the discussions. This is Zavattini’s response to Morlion’s invitation to give a class in his institution which the writer promptly turned down, giving clear-cut reasons for doing so. For those who would consider Zavattini a sentimental humanist, with a leaning towards Christian values, the letter clarifies the writer’s position. Although he never became a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party, he always voted for it, even though he had many clashes over cinema and the party’s unwillingness to support it financially or in terms of Zavattini’s ideas and growing tendency towards non-fiction cinema which he considers the way forward in terms of a socially engaged, ethical and political practice.

Text 29 November 1949 Dear Father Morlion, I have received copies of your flyers about the Pro Deo University where I see that I have been described as a professor and a docent. Apart from the fact that I really don’t know how to teach, I can certainly say that if I were a teacher, I would want to follow my deepest convictions, which would most probably not coincide with yours, or at least not completely. You already know which fundamental ideas separate me from Catholicism. How could I take on an official role as a teacher in a quintessentially Catholic school? You may realize that I am steeped in ignorance, but not to the point of not appreciating how incompatible with my beliefs your invitation is. You claim 1

Zavattini, Letter to Father Morlion, 29 November 1949, in Paolo Nuzzi and Ottavio Iemma (eds), De Sica & Zavattini. Parliamo tanto di noi, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997.

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that I am a Christian. I wish I were. You say that I am not political. No problem there. But even if only in a broad sense, you can be certain of one thing: that I am on the Left, and I don’t mean [Giuseppe] Saragat’s Left, and, what is more, you know as well as I do, you Catholics do not see eye to eye with the Left.2 I have my own internal conflicts, I have many doubts, I often feel lost, but I have no doubt about one thing; and namely, that humanity is divided into two categories, rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed. The broad spectrum of forces on the Left, in spite of all their errors and exaggerations – errors which frighten me, at times – stand for the poor and the oppressed.

2

Giuseppe Saragat (1898–1988) was a member of the PSLI Italian Liberal Socialist Party, a breakaway from the Italian Socialist Party.

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‘Scrap Scripts’ (1950)1

Context Zavattini gave the following interview to Elio Petri in 1950. Although they never got past the draft stage, it is an important statement. Petri was then a very young reporter in his early twenties, working for the communist daily L’Unità. Their meeting and interview was followed by in-depth research made in collaboration for Rome, 11 o’Clock (1951), at Zavattini’s behest. He had been asked by the director Giuseppe De Santis to turn into a script an initial idea about the collapse of a staircase in a building where some two hundred women were waiting to be interviewed for a single typing job. De Santis’s intention was to fictionalize it, whereas Zavattini strongly suggested making a film based on full-blown field research. It went ahead and resulted in an exhaustive report by Elio Petri, running to over one hundred pages of typescript, which formed the basis of the script. It was based on the voices coming from the street, from the interviews with a large and representative range of social actors. Thus, under Zavattini’s guidance and encouragement, Petri did exactly what Zavattini argued in this interview that young filmmakers should do: immerse themselves in the reality of the street, so as to confront the contemporary moment where it occurs. Zavattini says, for example: These young people, then, should be chucked out into reality, empty-handed. No prepared scripts in their pockets, no preconceived ideas about reality.

There was an agenda, a need to know, as a first step, but no script. The script would follow, and it did. In 1956, Petri published a shortened version of his lengthy report running to well over one hundred pages. The full report provides an extraordinary account of the hard lives of ordinary people in 1951, and shares with The Story of Catherine (1953) and The Roof (1956), films based on scenarios written by Zavattini which follow the same principles, the character of experimental urban ethnography.

1

‘Basta coi soggetti’, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 70–3.

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Petri worked on Rome, 11 o’Clock as an assistant director, and was soon to become a director in his own right. Although the interview was never been published, Zavattini valued it sufficiently to include it in his Neorealismo ecc. (1979) anthology, and even borrow its title for the book title of the accompanying collection of his stories or scenarios: Basta coi soggetti, published at the same time. Zavattini also dwells on the testimonial element of what is, in essence, field research, in discussing the cinematic diary form which, he says, he first thought of in the last year of the war, when he wrote the scenario he mentions in the text; the idea being that personal, face-to-face contact with the Other can be an exchange, in which a deeper sense of participation emerges, through a process of self-reflection and, implicitly, that this can only take place through empathy and respect for the other. With reference to Rome, 11 o’Clock, Zavattini’s approach is borne out by the depth of self-reflection of some of the testimonial reports from the typists for the film, most of which material, regrettably, was cut from Petri’s book, published in 1956.

Text [Petri] In interviews and articles you have mentioned a certain form of realism that you prefer, a view confirmed on other occasions by the slogan ‘Scrap scenarios’. I’d like you to say something about this topic, entirely in confidence, as you see it at the moment. [Zavattini] It seems to me that I have said it several times and the more I repeat the statement, the less effective it becomes. If you wish, I can try to sum up what I call my obsessions. My encounter with cinema was motivated by a strong desire to tell stories. But I began to have what I would like to call a conscience of cinema, as far as I can tell, much later. [Petri] Can I make notes of our conversation for Filmcritica? [Zavattini] I can’t say. Let’s have this conversation and you take notes. Then we can take a look and see if anything interesting emerges from it. I tend to think that perhaps I have never expressed myself clearly enough, but I’m not sure. What I do know for certain is that young people have always understood what I meant. Perhaps, on several occasions, I didn’t explain my points well. There was the time that one of the most committed technicians of cinema interpreted a Preface I wrote as too convoluted and too cerebral, with philosophical pretensions. Never mind that I’m really ignorant and my writing could not be less culturally informed, I must say that those young people, whenever I had an opportunity to say what I thought, understood my point of view perfectly well. I say: ‘Scrap scenarios’. Obviously, such a statement is polemical and therefore extreme. But consider this: most cinema, 99 per cent of it, has always consisted in the narration of stories. Good ones, fun, worthwhile, but only up to a point. That is to say that it has always been nothing but mere spectacle. Its maximum

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potential, however, goes no further than the narration of stories, invented stories. Cinema is comparable to literature, yet literature takes extremely diverse forms, whereas cinema adopted a single genre, which has never stopped typifying what it is: the genre of events which occurred, or are occurring, in the imagination, and which do not belong to immediate, direct, experience. It is true to say that any attempt to close the gap between imagination and reality is made exclusively in documentaries, which are totally foreign to mainstream cinema. But they were never more than a few isolated efforts. After the war, a new factor came into play in cinema: and namely, the conscience of an ongoing useful function. The concept of spectacle was toppled. What replaced it was the concept of a medium for getting to know reality in its immediacy and actuality. And there can be no doubt that the documentary contributed to remind the cinema of this potential it has. I was saying that literature is so far ahead of cinema. The reason is that cinema is really the eye’s relation with what it perceives, since imagination and the eye are crucial elements of the technical medium. The machine does not photograph, nor should it photograph, our past thoughts, but should photograph what we are thinking at the very same moment that we are perceiving. It follows that this is a very different approach to a medium, compared to the approach in literature, which has some points of contact with painting, precisely because of this essential relation between the object and its expression. The reason for saying ‘Let’s do away with scenarios’ is that whenever I invent a story, I feel as if I am betraying the immediacy and freshness of the cine-camera. Used like this, the camera serves for translation, not cohesion. Currently, too much time elapses from the moment of thinking to the moment in which the cine-camera produces this thought. This is the reason why I consider the diary format the most complete and authentic expression of the cinema. Obviously, what I mean by diary is something unprecedented. I don’t mean a specific diary, but the sum total of what we know about others and about ourselves, expressed with immediacy, not prearranged. We need to have unshakeable faith in the real. Just as children, when they are learning to walk, are given a push to learn how to do it, we need to equip young people with a camera and push them out into the streets, plunge them in among things. These young people, then, should be chucked out into reality, empty handed. No prepared scripts in their pockets, no preconceived ideas about reality. It stands to reason that their contact with life will produce a different effect on diverse young filmmakers, precisely because they are different people. But it is a matter of matching our character, the way we are, to the reality that we actually encounter, not merely the thought of reality. The cine-camera should be given to young filmmakers; the camera, not a script. And they should bring back what they see, the things that strike them the most, without delay. Some will film people, others only windows, others still will swivel the camera around and film themselves. Because, although it is true that there are so many things to narrate in scenarios, the things we see are inexhaustible. And certainly what makes anything and everything possible for the cinema is a contemplation

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of this reality.2 If this had been done at the outset, and we hadn’t shut ourselves in a room to think up scenarios, to then go ahead and produce them in the studios, these young filmmakers would have been tasked to film everyday life as early as 1900. Instead, up until today, the wrong direction was taken. As for me, I began to feel intolerance for film scripts during the war. This led me to prefer a certain kind of film in which the only preconception was me, since I was to be in contact with reality and take three thousand metres of film to tell the story of my contact with such reality. That was when the diary form came into being. There was nothing more than a title: Rome-Naples, Return. It consisted in a 500-kilometre journey in a truck carrying me and a cine-camera. That’s all I knew. I couldn’t know anything more than that. I couldn’t say: ‘I’ll stop for ten minutes in Cassino and two minutes at Porta Capuana.’ Well, who knows? Perhaps I wouldn’t stop off at Cassino or at Porta Capuana, but instead I might end up chatting with three men who deserved to eat up all three thousand metres of celluloid. At that stage, I had already conceived of the idea of the ‘diary’ – in other words, the endeavour to carry out self-reflection and reflection on others and whatever is worth telling. The idea of making a worker the hero of the story has already been given validity, but I would go even further, and make the lowest of the low the central figure. To come as close as possible to reality. Because even the most apparently realistic story, even in the case of the story of a man in the street, the story is inevitably that bit apart from reality. It is never really the image of the man before us, in touch with all there is, but what is also conveyed at the same time is that there is nothing beyond that, not the realm of thinking, and that, actually, the image of what we think is really only a suspended reality, a Limbo.3 You know better than I do, that in this Limbo the story is bound to have a happy ending. These days, there has been a reaction to this kind of thing, and there are unhappy endings, whereas they should have neither a happy nor an unhappy ending, but only go as far as being a call back to reality. This can be achieved, when you consider that we have a cine-camera in front of us that can film us, as we are, naturally. But no, the cinema up until now has turned events into stories; that is to say, the events are turned into something rather artificial. A man’s crisis consists in this: not being in a position to see reality as it is. How do we address such lack of knowledge of reality? By using cinema, the miraculous, even providential medium, which enables us to narrate others and ourselves, and do so much better than any other medium could do. Since, if it were only able to produce literature, then it would be better if cinema had never done anything but documentaries. There can be no doubt that a great author can make you feel a person’s inner being, but it is also true that the cinema can show that person’s physical body, with all that entails.

2 3

By ‘reality’, Zavattini means phenomenological reality, accessible through the five senses. Limbo being a suspended reality or perhaps a virtual reality, a non-place, in any case.

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When I suggested to De Sica to go to work in North America, and everyone came up with themes such as Brooklyn, I said we should go there with no preconceived ideas, because we might be in a restaurant, or on Fifth Avenue, and find our scenario right there. To leave with a suitcase full of ideas would have been like the guy who brought along his bricks to build a house, but then he built an archway that was so small it couldn’t give any shelter. When I had the opportunity to explain these ideas of mine, someone objected that I would soon run out of non-fictional stories. What a simplistic objection. I could never run out of ideas drawn from forays into reality, since, if the scenarios one can think up are infinite, and if the potentiality of writing scenarios is endless too, the possibilities of being face to face with [ready-made] scripts are also endless.4

4

Ma potrei: literally ‘But I could’. This is a printing error in the Italian edition of 1979, and not picked up in the 2006 edition. The sense of the sentence dictates ‘Never would I’, or, in Italian: mai potrei ...

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‘Italian Cinema Tomorrow’ (1950)1

Context This is the provocative title to a Preface written by Zavattini for an anthology, a collection of essays by film critics. The editors were the militant Right-wing Catholic Gian Luigi Rondi, author of an essay titled ‘Italian Cinema Today’, and the film director Alessandro Blasetti, author of ‘Cinema italiano ieri’ (‘Italian Cinema Yesterday’). Unsurprisingly, in subsequent editions, Zavattini’s radical Preface was dropped. The first sentence reads: ‘The time has come to consign the following herd of images, shepherded so well, to the pastures of memory.’ It is indicative of a text that eschews celebration, in favour of experimentation, aimed at developing Neo-realism further, in the direction of the personal film, the diary film, beyond the ken of the editors Gian Luigi Rondi, Alessandro Blasetti and their contemporaries.

Text The time has come to consign the following herd of images that has been shepherded so well, to the pastures of memory. I invite you instead to ask what is in store for our neighbour’s eyes in 1951, since 1950 is the year that brings a certain kind of cinema full circle, and not just because of the round zero of the last digit. If Neo-realism really was first and foremost the discovery of social awareness, concretizing what each of us is able to contribute to collective life, all we need do next is take such a line of engagement to its extreme consequences so that we can identify the characteristics of the new spectacle, if, that is, we insist on continuing to think in terms of spectacle.

1

Zavattini, ‘Cinema italiano domani’, Preface to Alessandro Blasetti and Gian Luigi Rondi (eds), Cinema italiano oggi, Rome: Bestetti, 1950, now in Neorealismo ecc., 74–6.

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It seems that post-war Italian cinema has contributed more than any other national cinema to make the social function of this art form both explicit and definitive. Its destiny is to be snapping at the heels of time, narrating what is happening, not what has happened, since the present time, actuality, is the real measure of human dignity, in terms of one’s ‘immediate’ responsibility. Such are the consequences of such a tough commitment that not even the merchants can get rid of them. Rather, since they are directly involved in the system, they must give in to the themes this conception demands. If you are sceptical about this, consider our cinema’s very different type kind of success during the First World War. In those days, all the old myths were still in place: from the myth of the actor to the myth of the film studio. Silent cinema really was a Limbo full of hierarchies. Whereas, today, it is not clear which myth can survive, except humility, taken in its original sense, as the primary condition for cinema. And since every art, when it finds its true language, tends to make use of the most economical means, we must hope that our cinema will soon dispense with many more of those industrial patterns of thought which are still blocking it. Neo-realism has already made several significant changes. Despite the traces of melodrama, many of the shots it leaves in its wake have liberated us from the nightmares of heroism. It has freed us from the nightmare of exceptional events, replacing the story with the concept of history in the making, thus creating a space for all the things and people whose experience is worth relating. It has shortened the gap that separates the thing from the description of the thing. Consequently, its ‘time’ is never, and never will be, eternal, but the ‘time’ of the hours on a wristwatch, which marks so-called marginal life, where the creatures in six-point live, and where the importance of moment-by-moment living is perceived in all its growing interdependence. The scenario has been seriously enfeebled by such considerations, which tend to emancipate the cine-camera from literature. Well then, let’s be consistent and, long last, burn all scenarios in the public square, regardless of whether they are good or bad. The cine-camera will no longer be used for the unnatural gymnastics of turning back on itself to film the past. Instead, it will be completely open to what is happening before it. Even today, it still relates what has already been related, when art should tell the story only once, and at the very moment, the sudden moment, I should say, when it faces its object. The only pre-existing element is what we are, which is why scenarios will be replaced by the complete living person, who is both prepared and, at the same time, helpless before events, like a special correspondent.2 We shouldn’t be afraid of using these comparisons with journalism, for a journalist tends to show an interest in literature, only to claim an identical

2

This is the figure of the new filmmaker.

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responsibility. As for the cinema, it relates to journalism in order to transcend the limits of ‘translation’, and gain possession of autonomy at its most daring, in the face of the world ‘as it happens’. This leads to completely free forms of expression, in the direction of the diary form, understood, in other words, as an attitude which enables us to chronicle everyday reflections. This is the most direct medium to come to know who we are. Just as we have reached the stage in which it is possible to screen an event that took place two hours ago, we should be able to screen a particular kind of documentary of our personal or public affairs, with the precision and immediacy of a mirror, making use of cinema’s innate analytical capabilities, in order to expose all temporal and spatial aspects. To aim for this would be, in my opinion, one of the most wonderful aspirations for the cinema, in so far as it would help human beings to be better people the following day, not centuries later. Cinema has this potential of daily self-reflection. It is a fact that our most eminent directors have now turned their attention to saints, fables or to parables.3 But this should not confuse us. This is just time out. It would be a pity if they stopped making New Cinema. What is at issue is no longer whether to make a good film or not, or even a work of art, but to develop further what began immediately after the war. They ought to be steadfast in following the insights provoked by the war. Italian cinema would then be making a genuine contribution to the real duration of a person’s suffering and physical, not metaphysical, presence in the course of a day, the presence of someone we meet on the corner of our street, and this real duration should correspond with our real solidarity.

3

Zavattini is referencing Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis (1950).

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‘Taking Issue with the Present’ (1951)1

Context In 1948, Minister Giulio Andreotti published an official communiqué in which he condemned films revealing Italy’s negative aspects, namely the country’s poverty and its social problems as a whole. It was the beginning of an intellectual and cultural war he and his Christian Democrat government waged against contemporary Italian cinema, against the cinema of commitment, with disastrous consequences, stunting its growth and forcing a change of direction.2 This radio broadcast, soon transcribed and published in Filmcritica, tackled Andreotti’s attacks head-on, not directly, but nevertheless in a tirade of objections. For, instead of targeting official censorship, Zavattini points the finger at the listeners, the Italian public, whose response to Neo-realism and reaction at seeing real suffering represented on the silver screen was mostly a negative one. Zavattini notes the paradox of the New Cinema’s success abroad and its difficulties in Italy: same films, entirely different viewer response. In fact, at the time, there was a sizeable gap in Italy, and elsewhere, for that matter, between the viewing public’s visual culture and the visual culture of filmmakers and of film clubs too, which were far more cinematically sophisticated. The film clubs were places where cineastes, producers, budding filmmakers and critics could develop their appreciation of film as an art form. As far as Zavattini was concerned, Neo-realism was an unfinished project which needed the general public’s support, but leaving aside the ethical side of the issue, it was only in the late 1960s that Italian film culture had grown enough and official censorship, from the early 1960s on, released its tight grip on Italian cinema.

Text This critique applies to cinema, simply because I have first-hand knowledge of it, going back quite some time. It’s aimed at the viewing public of today, which is 1

2

Zavattini, ‘Polemica col mio tempo’, Radio broadcast, rai, 6 June 1951, first published in Filmcritica, 6–7 June–July 1951, then in Neorealismo ecc., 77–80. Mino Argentieri, La censura nel cinema italiano, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974, 76.

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not such a metaphysical concept; it’s aimed at you who are listening to me now. Please forgive me if, in the heat of the moment, I take liberties and treat you too confidentially or worse, if I offend your sensibilities, within the parameters, of course, of what education and above all the law prescribes. Then again, the rai, Italian Radio, by giving writers an opportunity like this, for which they deserve praise, was doubtless inviting them to be polemical. So, I’ll try not to be a hypocrite, at least for these few minutes. First, Italian cinema, which is so well stocked with directors and writers, old and young alike, not to mention technicians, is enjoying an extraordinary success all over the world, and I do mean extraordinary. Second, Italian cinema has obtained such a result by means of the sincerity which informs it. Third, you, ladies and gentlemen, because you are afraid of uncompromising sincerity, are therefore indifferent to the acclaim reaching our cinema from the East, from the West, from the North and – believe you me – from the South. This fact leads you to insinuate suspicions in simple minds, by defining Italian cinema as unpatriotic or even an enemy of the nation, since, according to you, it would demonstrate our poverty, rather than our wealth. In actual fact, you desire a cinema in which the sun, the sky, the sea and the citizens flutter in the wind, the way flags do. You call it ‘an optimistic cinema’. And you consider yourselves optimists, though it is far from true to say that you are, as I shall attempt to prove to you later on in my discussion. The other cinema, then, is the one you call ‘pessimistic’, because it foregrounds ordinary people who have the ugly habit of making themselves heard, by the rattle of their actual needs, in the context of open fields, damp rooms, workshops, trains where they say goodbye forever, at least it might seem so, at first glance. But no. One person climbs into a first-class carriage, while another person heads for third class. These are the ordinary people who are gaining a greater awareness of their participation in the history of the nation. They knock on the doors of the theatre, of literature, of painting, and, in the cinema, they find their natural home, and perhaps this is where they are going to discover their own epic. I was forgetting the fourth point, and namely, my conclusion. Italian cinema will die in a couple of years’ time, if you take away this protagonist. And mark my words: you will be the ones responsible for this. And from that day on, we will export only oranges. Now, I wouldn’t want to come across as someone who dismisses oranges. I love oranges, I love Sicily, which has given us, among other things, [Giovanni] Verga, [Luigi] Pirandello and an important film like The Earth Trembles. What I mean to say is that after suppressing its unique themes, Italian cinema will have a hard job attracting even those who would aspire to a cosmopolitan cinema, part of a set we would have fought against for a million good reasons. Do you find our cinema monotonous? We need to welcome boredom as one of the most precious means of getting to know an object. It is the most ethical action we can carry out in relation to modern man. But you believe the theme of ordinary people is a limited one? A dozen films, in your opinion, have already exhausted it? You’re mad. Remember that after the war we said we would

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keep going. The goal was miles and miles away from where we were. But we stopped short, after less than a mile, and now, to make matters worse, we are even turning back. It took great courage even to get that far. Now some say we need hope and compassion. The only way to do the right thing is to have courage. Everyone will envy us if we do. The purpose of cinema is to show us what is in front of our eyes, that is, its technical make-up makes it courageous by its very nature. It no longer wishes to employ fake people who seem real, but people who are real. Nor does it seek to repeat what has been written. It only seeks to see reality in front of it. For there is a lack of confidence towards life, whenever we use the cine-camera to repeat what we have thought. Let’s do away with stories, then, but not with the inventory of what surrounds us. How much integrity, how much hope in those last hundred yards. No less than the hope of saving the world, of finding the key to our future relations. For these reasons, it is a crime to slow down or interrupt Italian cinema’s progress towards the promise of reality itself, a reality which cannot but be, both quantitatively and qualitatively, Italy’s reality of poverty. There was a time when a man would walk down the streets at night shouting: ‘It’s nine o’ clock, remember that you must die.’ The new town crier should shout instead: ‘It’s eleven o’ clock, how many people are illiterate in Italy? It’s twelve noon, have you ever heard of the Po Delta?’3 However, ladies and gentlemen, just as you are alarmed by the Word of the Gospel – the most unpopular book in Italy and elsewhere – by the same token, such themes frighten you, and you fidget in your cinema seats, complaining when you see the suffering inflicted by men on other men on the large screen. Perhaps such hostility is due to your failing to understand that in the same instant that this Italian reality is appearing on the big screen before the eyes of your neighbour, it also becomes a demonstration, almost a symbol, of a constructive aspiration for change, which is far from being merely empty rhetoric. Indeed, what is it that foreigners, who are in some sense our latter-day audience, strive to convey with their many prizes, if not our people’s will, intention, courage, to measure up to the harsh events of today, its ‘open presence’, to use the words of a good writer? Contrary to your fears, they don’t say: ‘Here is a nation of poor people’, but: ‘Here is a nation which is getting closer and closer to its actual condition and, in order to get to know it better, one that is keen to narrate it. Here is a nation of people with such faith in life that it relies more on life than on a fantasy of life.’

The year Zavattini made this broadcast, Florestano Vancini filmed a documentary, Delta padano (1951) about the predicament of 300,000 Italians living in extreme poverty, on terrain that was little better than a swamp or bog, in north-east Italy, under the constant threat of typhus and malaria, facing unemployment and starvation. Zavattini’s reference is to the film’s economic censorship. It was denied an export visa for having dared to present the wrong view of Italy in the public sphere. The film industry had no role in its production, since it was funded by the trade unions. Delta padano can be viewed online: https​:/​/ww​​w​ .you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=I9-​​​xNrN9​​ERI, accessed 6 July 2017.

3

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Neo-realism finds its justification in this methodical approach, like bomb disposal sappers removing unexploded landmines from our land, a nation where people and things are so charged with vital and well-documented pursuits that it would be a sacrilege to invent new ones – endeavours which, in the cruellest moments of wartime, really connected us with God and revealed to us, and all at once, the value of bread and water, our shortcomings and those of others. One can almost hear the echo lurking behind the images of a siren or the shouts and crumbling of rubble, while a building is collapsing, to signify the continuity of our experience. At the outset, I stated that it wasn’t true that you are optimists. Sure enough, you have so little confidence in the strength of man that you feel the need to hide the truth from him, as if he couldn’t face it. You still firmly believe that no film should create any shadow of bitterness in the viewer. When you leave the cinema and go home you want to sleep peacefully. You don’t care that cinema has at last escaped from pure spectacle and, therefore, from pure business, to reach out to culture, transforming itself into a civilizing force. You want to sleep your untroubled sleep. What if there is someone out of work in the film, an innocent person in trouble and in a state? Everything must be resolved within the body of the film. This is the screenwriter’s and the director’s responsibility. You have forked out two hundred liras on your ticket, and you want to have a good time, you want to be moved, you want to find the unemployed man a job, you want to save the innocent man and – why not? – you would even wish to resolve the social question. From this point of view, I consider you optimists. Well, our cinema reaches far-flung countries, our ‘pessimistic’ cinema, as you call it. Even in Australia, in Japan, in Mexico, in Spain, everywhere, there are people who, when they see those shots, also see the features of our homeland. It makes them think that the war was not in vain, if there are people willing to make such a brave public confession; if there are people of a different colour and customs who, in telling their own stories, are also telling the stories of many others, scattered around the world, discovering a common suffering and a common hope in a better world. This is the light which Italian cinema, that you would wish to be destroyed or at least ‘corrected’, for being pessimistic, has been shining on the dark forest of our times.

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Interview ‘Cinema, Zavattini and Reality’ (1951)1

Context In the early 1950s, Zavattini argued that in its further development, Italian New Cinema would have to close the gap between film and life, as he stated in this interview with the writer and journalist Pasquale Festa Campanile. What he envisaged was a less cumbersome production system that would make it possible to screen social facts, soon after they had taken place. In this interview he goes further: film them while they are happening. Earlier, he had been interested in developing a durational cinema which seemed to unfold almost in real time, as in his story for the film Umberto D. (1952), written in the late 1940s, and, by the time it was made, Zavattini was working on Italia mia. Italia mia, My Italy, is a departure into non-fiction and a more militant cinema, a cinema he calls l’altro cinema, ‘the other cinema’. It was, for Zavattini, the logical consequence of filming in the street, and being in the street, responding directly to its phenomenological, tangible, moment-by-moment reality, and reducing any mediation to a bare minimum. Hence his idea of ‘flash films’, that is to say, films abandoning the traditional lengthy production process, in favour of a compressed process – starting with filming, for example, the story of a single mother who abandoned her child and was reported, then taken to court; namely, Caterina Rigoglioso, and getting the film out fast, within a couple of months. He argued that actuality should take precedence over aesthetics, adding up to an aesthetics of its own, an aesthetics of immediacy, of urgency, dictated by ethical and social concerns, so as to be in tune with current events, as he hoped television might do, when it was introduced to Italy.

1

Zavattini, ‘Il cinema, Zavattini e la realtà’, interview by Pasquale Festa Campanile, La Fiera Letteraria, no. 47, 9 December 1951, now in Neorealismo ecc., 81–5.

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Text [Zavattini] Italia mia is no different from My Germany, My France, My America, and so on. The idea was suggested to me by Italy, of course. Italia mia seeks to be the experiment of a cinema that has respect for what makes us live and in which we live, and escapes from an imagination that is always something of an ‘ivory tower’. In other words, by giving value to phenomena, by treating them as the story to tell, we can hear ‘the voice of reality’. Second, Italia mia satisfies my desire or everyone’s need, I should say, to deal with those things which have an immediate relevance. If it is true to say that art ignores the limits of time and space, then I think it is necessary to engage first of all with the most urgent, incandescent, and telling reality, contained in the time and space of our current human awareness. I am so convinced that reality can be read from a poetic, ethical, and social point of view, and so confident that it is feasible to communicate it, that the greatest spectacle that I would like to make is reality itself. In this way, in my opinion, reality would speak an extensive and intensive language.2 I would like to say to someone: ‘look, there’s a chair. Sit down and take a look at what there is.’ In other words, I aim to reduce to a minimum the distance between life and spectacle, because I think life already contains in itself its own poetic dynamic and wondrous energy. The most I can aspire to do is to make a spectacle of what already exists.3 Naturally, I might be more interested in the spectacle provided by one person than one provided by another, given that reality offers us an ample choice. What drives this type of cinema is my ethical need to draw people’s attention to situations. The reason we don’t love one another is that we don’t know each other well enough. The lack of solidarity is due to a lack of knowledge, which is why I prefer to concentrate on knowing the real world as opposed to any putative fictitious world that is the product of an illusory imagination. The problem is that we feel solidarity for fictitious characters as well as for real ones. The time will come, very soon, when, I think, we shall watch what a person does in her most minute daily activities with the same interest once afforded in antiquity in seeing Greek tragedies. This is the new event to which the ‘new medium’, cinema, can make a contribution. By using principles of this kind, we can make a film about Italy today, about a city tomorrow, and later on about a small town, a village, a man, a moment in a man’s life. [Pasquale Festa Campanile] And what about your old films? [Zavattini] Quite. I have invented stories, yet I have, in the past, made several statements conveying very specific theories. But the story qua story must be challenged. I am now very negative about creating situations, because of the Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote about cinema as the language of reality some years later, but he was taking the cue from a recent interest in structuralism and semiotics, but he soon abandoned his attempts at going beyond a mere analogy. 3 Editor’s emphasis. 2

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urgency of events that ‘want’ to enter the cine-camera. There isn’t a single day, hour, minute, of any human being which is not worthy of being communicated to others, provided such a communication derives from the need to witness one’s participative presence and solidarity in our own day-to-day existence and that of others. [Pasquale Festa Campanile] And what is the Italia mia scenario about? [Zavattini] I have no intention of committing Italia mia to paper. I intend going out to meet reality and engage with it directly myself. The story will come naturally and spontaneously from this relationship between situations and my presence in them. Perhaps this is where the break, the difference, between literature and cinema is to be found. I have always tried to districate cinema from any sense of subordination to literature, since, in most cases, the writer reduces writing to an interpretation of characters and events which are the fruit of creativity and imagination that are alien to his or her direct personal experience. Another point worth making is that, whereas literature enjoys unlimited freedom of expression, cinema, on the pretext of what is and what is not suitable for cinema, has surreptitiously extracted a series of preconceived rules in relation to themes. These limitations imposed by the film industry are unacceptable. It is rather like saying: ‘We can’t tell this story as if it were of the order of literature.’ To go back to my point about human contact, I could write about people, but I would prefer to meet them in the flesh. Their humanity is more persuasive, their authenticity is left intact. If a person laughs, I must realize that it really is that person who is laughing, and not an abstract type. This is the kind of cinema I have been rejecting for quite some time. I make it an obligation for myself to get to know situations, increase my contacts with them, with other people, with other people’s aspirations, with current affairs, as well as one’s family’s aspirations. [Pasquale Festa Campanile] And what about the characters of your films? [Zavattini] They belong to another kind of cinema altogether, which I have no intention of belittling. And there is no doubt that important works have been made, and will continue to be made, in this area. But I have the problem of being consistent in my argument which I believe today is the only one that is feasible, from an ethical and social perspective. Although I drew the characters of my old films from my experience, the audience were moved all the same. I would like to reach the same result, saying: ‘This person, whose name is such and such, and lives here, and so on and so forth.’ This is how you gain an awareness of something more. At least, I for one, have learned something more, something I didn’t know. I have come to know another person. A preordained recipe of emotions is always sterile, whereas cinema now represents an almost scientific contribution to knowledge. [Pasquale Festa Campanile] You are talking about a scientific contribution. What about poetry? [Zavattini] Let me give you an example. Let’s take a character chosen at random: Umberto D. Essentially, this character was inspired by reality, one

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which is not drawn from a mental construct. Even so, I do think that it would be preferable to tell the story of an authentic old age pensioner, instead of the story of Umberto D. It doesn’t follow that cinema should forego the possibility of a lyrical approach to the story. But I shall go as far as to say that the kind of cinema which I find interesting is not the one that tells the story of a past event that really happened, and which is interpreted by the people directly involved. Cinema should, in my opinion, tell the story of what is happening.4 The cinecamera is designed to looking at what is in front of it. For the story of what is happening, it is crucial to gather all the possible leads, all the information, the alarms, implications, and understand the cultural dimension, whatever is pertinent to the feature film about the event that has taken place. Let me repeat that the time is ripe to throw away all the scripts and to use the cine-camera to shadow people. The poets of this new era will be young filmmakers carrying cine-cameras. Hollywood is the cause of the decadence of American cinema. Italian cinema would also die, if everything depended on Rome. Cinema, today, tends to resist the influence of Rome, abandoning the studios and production houses, rejecting the script. A great painter said: ‘We want to feel the sensation of a breeze on celluloid’. The reality of the situation is that mainstream cinema, which is viewed on the commercial circuit, served by its distribution system, by directors, script and screenplay writers, is afraid of freeing itself in one fell swoop from its own organizational and commercial structure, because the Other Cinema5 stands for the possibility of knowing the truth. We want to embrace life, not escape it and despise it. Enough is enough. Let’s do away with metaphors.

4 5

Zavattini’s emphasis. Editor’s emphasis.

22

‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’ (1952)1

Context In this text, Zavattini articulates his thought, as it had developed by the early 1950s, combining film practice with film theory in his own unusual way. It can be said that in his case, theory depends on practice, issuing from it directly. He attaches an unprecedented importance to a constant in Neo-realism: non-fiction and inverting the relation between fiction and non-fiction, driven by an ethical purpose for cinema. His theories were not well received by Italian filmmakers of the time, but found an enthusiastic audience in the younger generation, with whom Zavattini collaborated on many occasions: Elio Petri, to conduct documentary research for Rome, 11 o’Clock; Marco Ferreri and Riccardo Ghione, to work as co-producers for Love in the City; Francesco Maselli, to be the director of The Story of Catherine; and many others. Indeed, this text itself was the fruit of collaboration with one of them, and namely the documentarist, film critic and desk editor at Cinema Nuovo, Michele Gandin. In the months this, their extended interview, 1

This English translation of Zavattini’s seminal text was made using the original typescript version, and comparing it to the version printed in Neorealismo ecc., also bearing in mind and comparing these to Pier Luigi Lanza’s incomplete version, made in 1953, which will be referred to as Lanza53 and David Overbey’s also partial translation, signposted as Overbey78, to establish a credible, reliable text in English. Cf. Zavattini, ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’, Sight and Sound, October 1953, 64–9. Translated by Pier Luigi Lanza. Then in Richard Dyer MacCann (ed.), Film: A Montage of Theories, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1966, 216–28. David Overbey’s partial translation was published as David Overbey, Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978, (Overbey78). The witnesses for the new version in this anthology are the exact reprint of the 1952 edition (dss2005), which has been adopted as the base text for this first complete translation, in preference to the 1979 authoritative edition (N79) published in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., which is also, on careful inspection, incomplete. Its errors and lacunae prove its direct dependence on the 1952 edition (punctuation, use of commas, colons and semi-colons corrected by N79), and finally, the typescripts preceding the essay’s first publication in 1952, located in the Zavattini Archive of Reggio Emilia. These are: ‘Alcune idee sul cinema’ (with handwritten author’s corrections), acz 77/7, 10 May 1952, fols 1–21 (1aic1952), ‘Alcune idee sul cinema’ (with corrections made), acz 77/7, 10 May 1952, fols 22–71 (2aic1952), ‘Alcune idee sul cinema’ (‘Tutto come diario’ 1953), acz 77/7, fols 72–80 (1tcd1953 [a heavily edited version of 2aic1952], 2tcd1953 [copy of 1tcd1953, with corrections made and a few additions], 3tcd1953 [carbon copy of 2tcd1953]).

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was made, Zavattini was working with Gandin and other young filmmakers on a ‘shadowing’ project for a film. Indeed, this text is the outcome of a sequence of regular interviews with Zavattini, carried out on many different occasions, and over a period of several months, specifically, from March until May 1952. When it came to editing the transcription of the text, Gandin decided not to intervene on Zavattini’s spoken Italian style, but instead to retain his vivacity and directness, as he himself explained in an unpublished typescript which is here reinstated, and forms the Preface of the text further. This typescript includes the dates of the individual interviews that took place in Zavattini’s home in 40, Via Merici. The text first appeared in journal format in La Rivista del cinema italiano, whose editor, Luigi Chiarini, then included it in the form of an introductory essay to the book Umberto D. Dal soggetto alla sceneggiatura, precedono alcune idee sul cinema (1953).2 The publication was an important event in the film discourse of the period, and, definitely a cinematic intervention in itself, weighing in on the debate about the nature and function of contemporary Italian cinema. While Zavattini had, since the beginning of his career, regularly published his scenarios, ever since his first script, the book edited by Chiarini also included the changes made to the screenplay. In their new publishing context, within a book, the collected interviews gelled into a single test, helped by the decision to delete the date line signalling each separate interview. Furthermore, in this guise, the now consolidated text became a theoretical justification for the film Umberto D. and an affirmation of a screenwriter’s authorship and creativity with respect to a film. At the time, young filmmakers like the Taviani Brothers and Vittorio De Seta appreciated the scope of Zavattini’s book. In addition, Zavattini’s film theory went further than being a justification of a fictional film about a lonely old-aged pensioner and his dog. It went as far as positing a new phase for Neo-realism, in the direction of investigative cinema, non-fictional cinema, which latter Zavattini considers worthy of becoming mainstream cinema, in preference to exclusively fiction-based cinema. The first typescript version stored in the Zavattini Archive contains Gandin’s Preface and the dates of when the interviews took place. He placed his Preface in a footnote, and removed the date lines from the typescript for publication. In this new edition, both appear in the text. Two English translations have appeared in print which have been carefully studied in preparation of this edition, especially in light of the fact that they are considered the established text (though, the second of 1978 is a heavily abridged and interpolated version). Indeed, even the first English translation, made in 1953, is problematic, since it is incomplete. The author of the second explains in his Introduction that he conflated this text with two other texts by Zavattini.3 Both have been consulted and compared to the Cesare Zavattini, Umberto D. Dal soggetto alla sceneggiatura, precedono alcune idee sul cinema, Milan: Fratelli Bocca Editori, 1953. 3 Overbey, Springtime in Italy. 2

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Italian text for this edition. Moreover, errors, lacunae and omissions apart, since ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’ is one of several key texts in the development of Zavattini’s idea of cinema, but the only one that has been widely translated and that is also available online, it has warranted a critical apparatus, especially in light of certain cultural misunderstandings in the two versions in English, due to a number of causes which, compounded with the problems already mentioned, have the effect of rendering the sense opaque, when Zavattini is not. The latter part of these interviews are specifically about the status of the film text, as scenario. Zavattini argues that the story or scenario produces, or expresses, a world which the screenplay then completes. He makes the important distinction that the screenplay in itself is unproblematic, when regarded as ‘the written phase’. Zavattini vindicates the autonomy of the screenplay as a creative ‘written phase’. His stance is the opposite of Pasolini’s more conventional understanding. For Pasolini, writing in 1965, there are no two ways about it: a written text either belongs to literature or to cinema – each being governed by medium-specific or different, linguistic structures.4 This double allegiance of the filmic text, so to speak, generates an internal tension between the word-based narrative (literature) and the image-based narrative (cinema). Consequently, a screenplay cannot be an autonomous text, but inevitably always points to something else, and namely its visualization in the film it references and depends upon (unless it is an adaptation, of course). Its very ‘will to form’ (volontà alla forma) makes it an incomplete entity: unfinished, dynamic or in fieri. In Pasolini’s cinema, the roles of screenwriter and director are collapsed into the figure of the filmmaker. But this is precisely the best-case scenario, recommended by Zavattini in ‘Some Ideas about Cinema’. However, bearing in mind Zavattini’s role as ideas man, often called upon to come up with the initial idea alone (e.g. by Visconti for Bellissima, in which Zavattini had limited involvement in the successive stage of developing the idea into writing the screenplay for that film), the treatment or scenario or initial script may well be completely autonomous. Whereas, the shooting script is a ‘phase’ of a film’s development. And yet, Zavattini argues that, insofar as the screenwriting phase fleshes out the author’s original scenario, it too retains a degree of literary autonomy. Ultimately, in the context of the essay being a Preface to his scenario, screenplay and related documents about Umberto D., Zavattini is vindicating the role of the film writer as auteur. It is a fact that, in Umberto D., however beautifully filmed and directed by De Sica, the famous long maid scene is entirely scripted, to give just one example (demonstrated in the comparison of scenario and treatment in Volume 1). Similarly, Zavattini published the scenarios, screenplays and related documents of The Roof and The Mysteries of Rome, the former edited by the interviewer and documentary filmmaker Michele Gandin. The

4

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, Milan: Garzanti, 2010 [1972], 188–97.

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very fact of publishing the entire documentation of Umberto D. is a cypher of Zavattini’s polemical stance, indeed, his critical intervention, one which angered De Sica, who from the beginning attempted in various ways to belittle Zavattini’s creative contribution, as Paoli Nuzzi and Ottavio Iemma’s De Sica & Zavattini (1997), a montage of texts, amply proves.5 This new English edition of this famous text is an unabridged edition and a critical edition. To make the new translation, the Italian text has been carefully compared with the original typescripts in the Zavattini Archive and the Italian printed editions of 1953 and 1979. The texts of the two translation, the complete one and the abridged one, are compared in the footnotes, to produce here an apparatus criticus. The comparisons reveal lacunae and slight errors in the printed editions and numerous mistranslations and interpolations, and calques, in the existing translations, all of which have been borne in mind in a detailed and reasoned analysis, to produce a text that is closer to Zavattini’s.6

Text [Conversations] [Here is the diary of conversations with Zavattini]7 These ideas were gathered live by Michele Gandin in conversation with Zavattini in conversation, on behalf of La Rivista del Cinema Italiano.8 They reveal all the strengths and weaknesses of improvisation. But it still seemed to us that the former exceeded the latter, precisely because such thoughts, expressed in the heat of the moment, with polemical force and sometimes with a paradoxical tone, bring to the fore the evocative insights of an artist who is pursuing his own poetic world, through the demands of artistic creation which also includes reflection and awareness. Consequently, these ideas constitute, on the one hand, the continuation of the works Zavattini has already made, which help the attentive critic to interpret them better, and on the other, the premiss for his works to come, and connected Nuzzi and Iemma (eds), De Sica & Zavattini. Parliamo tanto di noi. These are: ‘Alcune idee sul cinema’ (with handwritten author’s corrections), acz 77/7, 10 May 1952, fols 1–21 (1aic1952), ‘Alcune idee sul cinema’ (with corrections made), acz 77/7, 10 May 1952, fols 22–71 (2aic1952), ‘Alcune idee sul cinema’ (‘Tutto come diario’ 1953), acz 77/7, fols 72–80 (1tcd1953 [a heavily edited version of 2aic1952]; 2tcd1953 [copy of 1tcd1953, with corrections made and a few additions], 3tcd1953 [carbon copy of 2tcd1953]). 7 dss2005 and 1aic1952: ‘Colloqui’ (‘Conversations’) ‘Ecco il diario dei colloqui con Zavattini’ (‘Here is the diary of conversations with Zavattini’). The two subheadings in square brackets, as handwritten and typed additions, both crossed out, 1aic1952, fol. 1. Deleted in 2aic1952, dss2005, N79, Lanza53, Overbey78. They have been reinstated in this critical edition to signal the original context of publication and reception. 8 dss2005 and 1aic1952: (‘Queste idee ... colloquio diretto con lui’) (‘These ideas ... conversations with him’). Lanza53, N79, Overbey78: lacuna. (In 1aic1952, the introduction is pasted on and marked c. 8 (fol. 8) in pencil). 5 6

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with the earlier ones by the consistency with which he seeks to define and expand on his conception of the art of film. For this reason, in my view, even apparent contradictions and repetitions help express this ongoing inner artistic process and, even at the cost of having to put up with gentle opposition from Zavattini, I have resisted adding finishing touches, so that the reader can get the feeling of a live conversation with him. * 10 March 19529 Doubtless one’s first and very superficial response to everyday reality is boredom. Reality will continue to seem devoid of any interest, for as long as we are unable to overcome our laziness,10 both ethical and intellectual. We should not be amazed11 then, that cinema has always felt the natural and even inevitable need to introduce ‘a story’ into reality, to make it thrilling, ‘spectacular’. Nevertheless,12 it is clear that this was the way to make a sudden escape from reality, as if there were no alternative to bringing fantasy into play.13 It seems to me that the most important aspect and most significant innovation of Neo-realism is to have realized that the need for the ‘story’ was nothing more than an unconscious way of concealing our human defeat and that imagination, as it was being exercised, kept imposing dead formulas onto living social facts.14 Ultimately, this has meant noticing that reality is extremely rich and that all you needed was to know how to look at it; that the artist’s task is not to make use of metaphors15 to move people, or to make them indignant, but rather, to lead them Paragraphing in the typescript version – acz 77/7, 10 May 1952, fol. 1 (fols 1–21) – coincides exactly with the printed version in La Rivista del cinema, December 1952. However, the subheadings have been deleted. These date headings have been reinstated throughout, since they help provide a context for the ‘Conversations’ between Michele Gandin and Zavattini and neatly form a series of clusters containing the different aspects of the problems Zavattini tackles. A trace of these headings in the 2005 reprint of the first edition or original text (from now on referred to as dss2005) is a gap left between dated paragraphs in the book edition and numbered sections in the 1953 translation (from now on referred to as Lanza53). 10 Lanza53: ‘laziness’, Overbey78 opts for the biblical term ‘sloth’. But in Italian, sloth is ‘accidia’, whereas laziness is ‘pigrizia’, as in dss2005. 11 Overbey78: ‘surprising’. But ‘non bisogna stupirsi’ (dss2005) is a much stronger psychological reaction, as Lanza53, ‘be astonished’. 12 dss2005, N79: ‘tuttavia’ (‘however’); Lanza53: ‘all the same’; Overbey78: omission or lacuna. 13 dss2005, N79: ‘intervento’; Lanza53: ‘intervention’. Overbey78: ‘to prevent the interference of the imagination.’ Overbey changes the meaning from mediation or involvement of the imagination into its ‘interference’. However, Zavattini does not rule out the function of the imagination at all, as he later explains. 14 dss2005, N79: ‘schemi morti su fatti sociali vivi’; 1aic1952: ‘fatti sociali vivi e reali’ (‘social and real world events’). Lanza53: ‘dead formulas over living social facts’. Overbey78: ‘death schemes onto living events and situations’. But Zavattini is referring to ‘dead’ (‘morti’) formulas, meaning lifeless, empty and ‘schemi’ stand for skemata or pre-existing formulas, as Lanza correctly renders it. 15 dss2005, N79: ‘traslati’; Lanza: ‘metaphorical situations’; Overbey: ‘transference’. But, as Lanza explains very well, Zavattini is not referring here directly to the process of identification and emotional catharsis explained by Aristotle in his Poetics, but to the use of a one-step removed imaginary reality, which replaces the concrete object with the metaphor 9

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to reflect on what they and what others are doing (and, if you like, lead them to even feel indignant or moved); to reflect on real things, right there, in front of them, precisely the way they are.16 For me, this has been a huge step forward. I wish I had taken it years ago. But I only made this discovery at the end of the war. It is an ethical discovery, a call to order. At last, I saw what lay before me and understood that whatever had been done to escape reality was a betrayal. To give you an example, up until now, anyone planning to make a film about, say, a strike, would immediately be trying to invent a story that would fit in well with the strike that would then be reduced to a mere backdrop. Conversely, today what you do is you put yourself in ‘relation’ and tell the story of the strike itself, endeavouring to bring to the surface the greatest number of ethical, human, social, economic, and poetic values it contains, drawn from the raw, documentary fact.17 A shift has taken place from an unconscious and extreme lack of trust in reality,18 and a deceptive and ambiguous escapism,19 to a boundless trust in things, facts, and people. It follows that adopting such a stance requires one to investigate reality and perceive its power, its expressive potential, as well as the complexity20 no one thought it possessed, before Neo-realist cinema.21 To achieve this, however, to put this differently, and discover the most deep-seated human values, you need to invest a huge amount of genuine interest in what is happening. For this reason, we feel the need for cinema to recruit not only the greatest minds, but above all, people with the greatest degree of awareness, who

of the concrete object, a concrete or lived event with a metaphorical one, which has not been lived directly. In his sense, his is already a call for a direct cinema, and one that was ahead of its time. 16 Lanza53: ‘on the real things, exactly as they are’, Overbey78: ‘reality precisely as it is’. ‘Reality’ is everything, it is a needlessly vague term which Zavattini is avoiding here, trying hard to be more specific. From here on, paragraphs of text included in the 1978 translation are signposted by first and last words. Overbey78: ‘Doubtless ... exactly the way they are’. The Italian bears this out. dss2005, N79: ‘sulle cose reali’ (‘on real things’) ‘lì precise come sono’ (‘right there, precisely as they are’). All underlined words are as in the origi­nal. 17 dss2005 and Lanza53: ‘To give you an example ... documentary fact’, omitted or lacuna in N79. 18 dss2005, N79: ‘sfiducia nella realtà’; Overbey78: ‘lack of confidence in confronting reality’; Lanza 53: ‘mistrust in reality’. Overbey is interpolating. His addition steers the meaning towards a technical, or philosophical, inability to film, as opposed to the film industry lacking the confidence to believe that reality is a spectacle in itself, as indeed the rest of the argument goes on to explain. 19 dss2005, N79: ‘illusoria e equivoca evasione’ (illusory, deceptive escapism); Lanza53: ‘equivocal evasion’, Overbey78: ‘ambiguous evasion’. A calque for ‘escapism’. Cf. the expression: cinema d’evasione (‘escapist cinema’, as opposed to ‘evasionist cinema’). 20 dss2005, N79: ‘riflessi’; Lanza53: ‘a series of reflexes’; Overbey78: ‘radiance’. But ‘radiance’ is an idealist (even neoplatonist) term. Being closer to real events, Neo-realism has been able to screen the reality of the contemporary. ‘riflessi’ (‘reflections’) can mean, different nuances, or aspects from different angles, hence a complex, rich, nuanced reality. 21 1aic1952 and dss2005: ‘it had until Neo-realism’. Lanza53: lacuna. Overbey78: ‘There has been ... until Neo-realism.’

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also share the highest ethical values.22 Nowadays, especially from an ethical standpoint, almost the entire film industry is debased.23 * 14 March 195224 From the time we grasp the correlation of everything that exists, and thus of the decisive and continuous presence of human beings (whoever they may be) in everything that happens, we are obliged to carry out an ongoing review, hour after hour, involving one person after another.25 Furthermore, cinema’s powerful desire to see and to analyse its ‘hunger for reality’ is26 a tangible tribute to other people and to everything that exists,27 which is what, incidentally, distinguishes Neo-realism from American cinema.28 Indeed, the American standpoint is in antithesis to ours: for, while we are interested in reality,29 physically right beside us and seek to get to know it directly, and in depth, the Americans go on settling for a watered down, metaphorical, version of it.30 Consequently, while in America there can be a shortage of stories,31 such a crisis is impossible in our country. As far as we are concerned, there can be no lack of themes, since there is no shortage of reality.32 Anyone at all can be narrated at any time of the day and anywhere, provided, that is, the narration is done in such a way as to observe and convey33 those collective elements which Lanza53 omits the following paragraph: ‘La presa di possesso ...’. It is very unlikely that it is based on a different version of the Italian original, from now on referred to as dss2005 (a reprint of the December 1952 first edition), later discarded. The translation also divides the text into sections. These are numbered but lack the dates. 23 In typescript 1aic1952, not in dss2005 or Lanza53. 24 ‘14 March 1952’: in typescript 1aic1952: ‘14.3.1952’; omitted in dss2005, N79, Lanza53. 25 ‘From the time ... after another’’: in typescript 1aic1952 and dss2005, lacuna in Lanza53 and N79. 26 N79: ‘it is’ ‘È ... è’ (‘It is ... it is’) Error. dss2005: ‘e’ (‘and’). 27 dss2005 and N79: ‘tutto ciò che esiste’; Lanza53: ‘what is existing in the world’; Overbey78: ‘to all who exist’. Lit. ‘that which’, so cannot be taken for people. 28 ‘Furthermore ... American cinema’: in typescript 1aic1952 and dss2005, Lanza53; lacuna in N79. 29 dss2005 and N79: ‘la realtà confinante con noi stessi’; Overbey78: ‘the truth, by the reality’; Lanza53: ‘in the reality around us’. Overbey interpolates, but ‘truth’ is confusing. Zavattini is again at pains to using words to point to concrete things. 30 Lanza53: ‘unnaturally filtered’, ‘purified’ ‘at one or two removes’, but Zavattini says: ‘conoscenza educolarata, per traslati’ which means impoverished, watered down. He is programatically rejecting, in effect, the use of analogy to point to an object, on the basis that this would create more distance between the object under consideration and the viewer (filmmaker or spectator). Overbey78: ‘sweetened version of truth produced through transpositions.’ 31 Lanza53 and Overbey78: ‘subjects’. A calque. dss2005, N79: ‘soggetti’ is a technical term meaning scenario, story, even treatment. Overbey78: ‘the Americans are undergoing a crisis’ where the text has (dss2005, N79): ‘in America può esistere una crisi di soggetti’ (lit. ‘in America there can be a crisis regarding stories’). 32 Overbey78: ‘truth’. dss2005, N79: ‘realtà’; Lanza53: ‘reality’. One might claim that reality is truth, but Zavattini is simply discussing concrete reality, not a higher, or ideal, truth. 33 Lanza53: ‘observing and illuminating’; dss2005: ‘avvertire e mettere in luce’; N79: ‘mettendo in luce’. 22

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are constantly active34 within them. Therefore, from our viewpoint, you cannot speak of a crisis of scenarios (about facts),35 rather, if there is any crisis at all, it is one of content (and namely, a lack of interpretation of such facts). Such a substantial difference was very clearly emphasized36 by a well-known American producer who told me: This is how we would picture a scene with a plane flying overhead: a plane flying past ... machine gun fire ... the plane shot down. And this is how you would37 picture it: a plane flying overhead ... the plane flying past again ... and the plane flying past again.

And it is true.38 But we are still falling back. It is not enough to get the plane to fly overhead three times. We should make it fly past twenty times.39 * 19 March 195240 What consequences, in terms of narrative, construction, and ethics, has this awareness of reality that characterizes Neo-realism produced?41

1. That, whereas cinema would derive one situation from another and another from that one, and yet another and each scene was thought up

dss2005 and N79: ‘avvertire e mettere in luce quegli elementi collettivi che vi lavorano continuamente dentro’ (lit. ‘work inside them’). Overbey78: ‘reveals and emphasizes the collective elements which continually shape them’; Lanza53: ‘observing and illuminating all these collective elements by exploring their interior value’. ‘Shaping’ indicates ‘determining’, but that is pushing the meaning beyond the text. Zavattini takes a third way, putting forward a socialist aesthetic which does not coincide with a Zdhanovist, Stalinist, Lukácsian idealist typology. 35 dss2005: ‘crisi di soggetti’ (‘crisis regarding scenarios or stories’) refers to the film industry supposedly running out of viable scenarios. Zavattini’s play on words is ironic, connecting scenarios directly to real-life events which are, needless to say, inexhaustible. Creating scenarios, in his proposal, consists in the activity of selecting fact-based events and interpreting them. 36 dss2005, N79: ‘sottolineata’, Lanza53: ‘emphasized’, Overbey: ‘clearly expressed’. 37 dss2005: ‘da voi’, N79: lacuna, Lanza53: ‘this is how you’. Overbey: omitted: ‘In Italy’: ‘da voi’ means ‘in your country’. 38 dss2005, N79: ‘ed è vero’ (‘and it’s true’ or ‘correct’); Lanza53: ‘he was right’; Overbey78: ‘It is the absolute truth.’ Once again, Overbey brings in metaphysics, where Zavattini is simply expressing agreement. There is no emphasis in saying: ‘it’s true.’ 39 Lanza53: ‘twenty times’. dss2005, N79: ‘venti volte’. Overbey78: ‘twenty times. We have to work, therefore, to extricate ourselves from abstractions.’ Overbey additional sentence is not in the Italian. He is adding a conclusive gloss. 40 1aic1952: ‘19.3.1952’, dss2005: line space, deleted in Lanza53. 41 dss2005, N79: ‘Quali conseguenze di carrattere narrativo costruttivo ...’ Lanza53: ‘What effects on narrative ...?’ Overbey: ‘This awareness of reality, which constitutes neo-realism, has two consequences in terms of narrative construction.’ The question has been turned into a statement which introduces the answer. An interpolation. The numbers for the two points below in Lanza53 and dss2005 have been deleted in Lanza53. The two answers to ‘what?’ begin with ‘1. That ...’ and ‘2. That ...’. Lanza53 is replaced by: ‘to begin with ...’ and ‘while’. 34

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and filmed, only to be immediately set aside42 – a natural consequence of distrust in the ‘fact’ I have already spoken of – today, after thinking up a scene, we feel we need to ‘stay’ in that scene, since we know that it has all the potential of producing a far-reaching resonance and establishing all the issues we want.43 Today, we can quite confidently44 say: give us any event whatsoever and we will explore it45 to such a point that we can turn it into spectacle. Thus, the ‘centrifugal’ force which constituted, from both a technical and an ethical standpoint, the fundamental characteristic of cinema, has become a centripetal force.46 Before now, the theme itself and its real significance were not developed. Whereas, now, thanks to Neorealism, everything leads back to the fundamental theme.47 2. The cinema48 always told the story of life in its most garish49 and superficial moments, and a film was essentially a series of carefully combined events, taking place during these moments. Whereas, today Neorealism50 claims that each of these events, or rather, every single one of these moments, includes enough material for a film.51 To put it differently,

dss2005, N79: ‘abbandonata’ (‘abandoned’); Overbey78: ‘forgotten’; Lanza53: the whole explanation is omitted. Zavattini is referring to what Gilles Deleuze refers to as the asa or sas model of the movement cinema, whereby the action or situation following the previous one, breaks away from it, doesn’t ‘forget’ it. For full explication, see footnote below. 43 dss2005, N79: ‘poiché sappiamo che ha in sé tutte le possibilità di echeggiare lontanissimamente e di porre tutte le istanze che vogliamo’; Lanza53: ‘because the single scene itself can contain so man echoes and reverberations, can even contain all the situations we may need.’ Overbey78: ‘we now know that it has within itself all the potential of being reborn and of having important effects.’ Again, Overbey creates abstractions where there are none. This obfuscation conveys little of Zavattini’s more specific and detailed reasoning about how the documentary spirit is conducive to identifying and exploring concrete issues where fiction fails to do so. The situation reverberates, that is, it serves as a trigger in the viewer’s mind, generating participation. 44 dss2005, N79: ‘tranquillamente dire’; Lanza53: ‘quietly say’; Overbey78: ‘calmly say’. But in Italian it is a set phrase conveying confidence. 45 dss2005, N79: ‘lo sviscereremo’; Lanza53: ‘disembowel it’; Overbey78: ‘and from it’. 46 dss2005, N79: ‘La forza centrifuga ... fondamentale’ (‘The centrifugal force ... theme’); Lanza53: A paragraph-long lacuna; Overbey78: ‘Furthermore, cinema’s powerful ... centripetal force’. 47 dss2005, N79: ‘mentre prima ... fondamentale’’ (‘Before now ... fundamental theme’); Lanza53, Overbey78: lacuna. Two sentences which explain the positive consequences of the Neo-realist approach are omitted. 48 1aic1952, dss2005, ‘il cinema’, Lanza53: ‘the cinema’; N79: ‘il cinema cioè’. Error. 49 ‘most visible’ in Lanza53, but ‘appariscenti’ indicates ‘showy’, ‘garish’. Consequently, ‘superficial’, as part of the doublet, preferred to ‘external’ in Lanza53. 50 Lanza53: ‘the neorealist’, but the text is clear: ‘neo-realismo’. The difference indicates a movement. 51 Overbey78: ‘and a film was ... to put it differently’; omitted. Overbey deletes the argument supporting the concept he translates separately. Lanza53: ‘the neorealist affirms that each one of these situations, rather than all the external moments, contains in itself enough material for a film.’ This mistranslates: dss2005, N79: ‘il neo-realismo afferma che ognuno di questi fatti, anzi ognuno di questi momenti contiene da solo materia sufficiente per un film.’ Lanza mistakes the explicative clause introduced by ‘or rather’ with the adversative clause introduced by ‘rather than’, thereby changing the sense. 42

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Here is an example. While the adventures of two lost souls53 looking for accommodation would once be limited to the initial moment alone (in terms of what was superficially visible and related action), followed by a change of scene to something else, today we can assert that the simple fact of looking for a home can form the subject matter of a film; if, that is, the event is explored in each of its moments, for what it suggests and for all the implications.54 Today, we take the first stage (house hunting) and concentrate on that, seeking to examine all it means. I shall go further, adding that one would like to narrow down that stage, by picking out a part of it, in order to analyse it better.55 But we are still a long way from in-depth analysis. Within contemporary film production, analysis as such, can only be measured in relation to a generalizing approach.56 However, the best we can do for now is a propensity towards analysis; yet, there is already a strong impulse towards concrete reality within

dss2005, N79: ‘Il cinema cioè, che era stato un fatto allusivo, riassuntivo, e perciò in un certo senso sintetico tende ora ad andare verso l’analisi. O piuttosto ad una sintesi dentro l’analisi.’ Lanza53 also intervenes heavily on this paragraph, editing out the crucial distinction made between a summary description, or summary, of an event, using allusion, as opposed to an analysis of the event, leading to a synthesis. Overbey78: ‘whereas the cinema always told of life’s external aspects, today neo-realism affirms that we should not be content with illusion, but should move toward analysis, or better should move towards a synthesis within analysis.’ But ‘external’ does not convey the distinction made. Zavattini states quite clearly that cinema’s relation with reality was superficial, vague and schematic, in the way in which events were summarized, instead of being investigated – alluded to, instead of being tackled directly. He’s making a comparison between film events. 53 Lanza53 translates dss2005, N79: ‘due esseri’ as ‘two people’, but the choice of word ‘esseri’ (literally, ‘beings’) doesn’t equate. The generic term ‘beings’ is deliberate, not the same as ‘human beings’. 54 dss2005, N79: ‘echi e i riflessi che ne derivano’; Overbey78: ‘echoes, reflections and reverberations’. Lanza53: ‘echoes, all its implications’. Lanza omits: What is omitted is: ‘followed by a change of scene to something else’. Zavattini is referring to cutting from shot and its moment to another shot (of something else), as opposed to staying within the shot. He is theorizing durational cinema. Cf. Deleuze’s distinction between Hollywood’s movement image: a-s-a or s-a-s, as opposed to s-s-s. In other words, the logic dictation the situation-action or action-reaction sequencing is rejected in favour of staying in the event and its moment or moments. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Action-Image. The Large Form’, 145–63; ‘The Action-Image. The Small Form’, 164–81. ‘The Crisis of the Action-Image’, 201–19 in Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum, 2012. The action signifies a break, a change of focus and perspective from the original event: an action in the sense of an intervention making a change and taking the story into a new direction. However, Deleuze is mistaken to consider the emphasis on events, situations, facts, moments as purely a matter of opticality. Cf. ‘Beyond the Movement Image’, in Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Gaeta, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 1–13. 55 In typescript 1aic1952, not in dss2005. 56 dss2005, N79: ‘grossolana sintesi’ (lit. ‘rough, coarse synthesis’); Lanza53: ‘dull synthesis’; Overbey78: ‘vulgar artificiality’. This is not Zavattini’s point. 52

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such an attitude: a desire to understand, to share, and to participate, in a word, a desire for cohabitation.57 * 25 March 195258 From what I have said so far, it emerges that Neo-realism has intuited that cinema – counter to what had been done up until the war – should narrate minimal events, with no interference from fantasy and endeavour to articulate them in terms of whichever aspects they might contain, be they human, historic, decisive or definitive. The point is that today it is no longer a matter of taking what comes from the imagination and turning it into ‘reality’ (trying to make it appear as authentic and real as possible), but of making events – just the way they are – convey their full meaning, by letting them almost tell their own story. For life doesn’t equate with what is invented in ‘stories’; life is something else entirely. And to come to know what it is, detailed and extensive research is indispensable; ultimately, we are talking about patience. Now I need to point out a different perspective. As far as I’m concerned, the reason the world is getting worse and worse is because we lack any awareness of the real world.59 Therefore, the most authentic60 standpoint for anyone today is to commit to highlighting the problems associated with getting to know the real world.61 This is the reason why the foremost imperative of our time is ‘social attention’. I am referring, though, to direct attention for what there is, not mediated by moral tales,62 however well thought up they may be. The person on the screen who is starving or humiliated should be a real person, identifiable by name and surname. It follows that there is no point in telling a story featuring a starving person, because it is not the same thing: it dss2005, N79: ‘convivenza’; Lanza53: ‘living together’; Overbey78: ‘coexistence’. However, Zavattini used this word to mean that the filmmaker ought to spend time with the filmed subject, reflecting his new proposal and practice of dialogical, participative approach, pedinamento or ‘shadowing’, which a generic ‘desire for coexistence’ or for ‘living together’ fail to convey. 58 Section numbered ‘3’ in Lanza translation, and ‘25.3.1952’ in typescript 1aic1952, dss2005: line space, N1979: no added space. 1aic1952, dss2005, N79: ‘From what ... contain’; Lanza53: lacuna. dss2005, N79: ‘From what I have said ... different perspective’; Lanza53: lacuna up to: ‘... might contain’; Overbey78: lacuna. 59 dss2005, N79: ‘la realtà’; Lanza53: ‘reality’; Overbey78: ‘the truth: we remain unaware of reality’. Once again, despite the interpolation, note Overbey’s bias in favour of metaphysics, in his preference for abstract terms and doing away with Zavattini’s argumentation which proceeds from particular to general and Zavattini’s concentration on the particular. Zavattini is a materialist, a historical materialist, not an idealist, Kantian or otherwise. 60 dss2005, N79: ‘autentica’; Lanza53: ‘authentic’; Overbey78: ‘necessary’. 61 dss2005, N79: ‘scandire fino alle radici il problema della conoscenza della realtà.’ Lanza53: ‘tracing the roots of this problem’ for (lit.): ‘this problem of the knowledge of reality’; Overbey78: ‘resolve, as best he can, the problem of this knowledge and lack of awareness’. Overbey takes the task of identifying or researching a problem to mean ‘resolving’. But Zavattini is not suggesting anything of the kind. ‘scandire’, lit.: ‘to scan’. 62 1aic1952, and dss2005: ‘apologhi’, Lanza53: ‘apologue’; Overbey78: ‘moral allegory’; N79: ‘applausi’ Error. 57

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is neither as effective nor as ethical. For the real function of cinema is not to tell fairy tales.63 It is, rather, one and the same as the true function of all the arts, which has always been to express the needs of a given epoch.64 We should reinstate such a function.65 Clearly, the fable-based approach can produce an analysis of reality (Miracle in Milan carries out an analysis to tackle wealth accumulation with such a mode of address).66 Such methods are also welcome, for such expressive means also come natural.67 However, if Neo-realism is to remain consistent, it ought to persevere with the self-same ethical impulse which defined it at the outset, while opting, from now on, to go in an analytical and documentary direction.68 For no other means of expression possesses the cinema’s unique medium-specific capability of photographing those things that, in our opinion, deserve to be shown in their ‘everydayness’ which means, namely, shown in their truer, fully extended duration.69 For everything lies in front of the mechanical machine70 which frames objects, rather than the concept of objects. In this respect, at least, it makes things easier. For no other means of expression

dss2005, N79: ‘poiché la vera funzione del cinema non è quella di raccontare favole.’ (‘For the real function of cinema is not to tell fairy tales’); Lanza53: ‘the true function of the cinema is not to tell fables’; Overbey78: omitted. 64 Overbey78: ‘As far as I’m concerned ... epoch’. 65 dss2005, N79: ‘a tal funzione occorre richiamarlo’; Lanza53: ‘to a true function we must recall it’; Overbey78: ‘towards this function that we should redirect them’. A mistranslation, for the subject is cinema, not the arts. Overbey78 omits a paragraph from: ‘clearly, the fablebased ... things easier’. 66 1aic1952, fol. 6: (‘Miracle in Milan ...’), not in Lanza53 or dss2005. The parenthesis was cut, but has been reinstated, since Zavattini deals with a contradiction. ‘Ways of fiction’ fails to render ‘modi favolosi’ which refers to fantastic or fabulous narrative, pointing to fabula or fable, not only to ‘fiction’ (Lanza53), as the original draft points out. For Zavattini, the dialectic is that between facts opposed to fiction or fiction and non-fiction and his proposal is for a non-fiction cinema becoming mainstream. 67 dss2005, N79: ‘Such methods are also welcome: they’re also a natural expressive means’; Lanza53: lacuna. The qualifying sentence indicates that Zavattini is not ruling out existing cinema entirely. He is proposing a parallel mainstream cinema alongside it. 68 The sense of this sentence is lost in Lanza53: ‘but neorealism, if it wants to be worthwhile, must sustain the moral impulse that characterised its beginnings, in an analytical documentary way.’ Zavattini is signalling a new direction, towards documentary, and putting forward his argument, omitted entirely by Overbey, thus obscuring the explicitly stated documentary direction. 69 Zavattini is rejecting the practice of cutting away from the event being filmed which deserves to be shot in its full duration. His point refers both to in-camera editing, in the sense of which direction you choose to point the camera in, and equally to editing the event in the cutting room. In his contribution to cinema, Zavattini was closely and decisively involved at the editing stage. 70 Lanza53: ‘the cinema has’, but the text reads: ‘la macchina’ for, ‘machine’ or cine-camera, not in the sense of a metaphor or synecdoche of cinema as a whole. Machine stands for a mechanical medium. There follows a lacuna in Lanza53 which skips to: ‘and no other medium has the same possibilities for getting it known quickly to the greatest number of people.’ Yet the distinction made by Zavattini is a nice one: ‘e vede cose e non il concetto delle cose.’ The parataxis has been replaced by hypotaxis, taking ‘and’ to indicate a relative clause: ‘which sees objects, rather than the concept of objects’.’ The next sentence makes more sense with this restitution of the text. 63

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possesses the cinema’s ability to convey the knowledge of such things71 to the greatest number of people72 and so quickly.73 Moreover, given that a sense of responsibility comes with the conferral of such formidable power, every frame should be perfect.74 What I mean by perfection75 is the deeper and deeper penetration of reality, in terms of both scale and quality.76 We can therefore state that77 cinema is ethical only when it faces reality in this way. Furthermore, the ethical and artistic challenge is to know how to observe reality, not to opt for invention beyond it. This is always a form of escapism, as I have already stated.78 30 March 195279 Even so, all those who understood these points were still under pressure for various reasons – not all valid – to comply with tradition and consequently to think in terms of an ‘invented’ narrative.80 However, at least they tried to include a spark of that intuition in the story. This is what Neo-realism has been, created in Italy by a few men.81 As a result, the first endeavour was82 to simplify the story, narrowing it down to its most basic form – as ‘banal’ as possible, I’m tempted to say. This was the beginning of a practice83 that has been interrupted since. Bicycle Thieves is a typical and relevant example. The child tags along down the street behind his father. At one point,84 he is just about to be run over by a car, yet his father doesn’t even notice. This episode was invented, but invented with the intention of inventing85 an everyday, minimal event,86 so

‘Such things’ are the objects given pride of place and preferred to the ‘concept of objects’. Overbey78: ‘For no other means ... people’. 73 N79: ‘far conoscere ... e al maggior numero di persone’ lacuna; dss2005 and 1aic1952: ‘far conoscere queste cose rapidamente e al maggior numero di persone’. 74 Lanza53: ‘make every frame of film count’. But the text reads: ‘è necessario un uso perfetto di ogni fotogramma’. Lit.: ‘a perfect handling of each frame is necessary’. Lanza53 then ignores Zavattini’s explication of ‘perfetto’ in the next sentence. 75 dss2005 and 1aic1952: ‘Intendiamo’; N79: ‘intendendo’. 76 Lanza53: ‘into the manifestations and the essence of reality’. Obfuscates Zavattini’s thought. Zavattini is thinking of something like media ‘coverage’ (he writes: ‘quantity’); after all, he was also a successful journalist and former editorial director of the biggest publishing operations in 1930s Italy, and depth of analysis (he writes: ‘quality’). 77 Lanza53 omits: ‘We can therefore state that’, turning a sequential argument into staccato sentences. 78 Lanza53 loses Zavattini’s critique of escapism, by omitting the relative clause ending the sentence: ‘che è sempre una forma, come ho già detto, di evasione.’ 79 Lanza53: ‘4’; dss2005: line space; 1aic1952, fol. 7: ‘30.3.1952’; N79: no space. 80 Overbey78: ‘to compose stories invented’; Lanza53: ‘to invent stories’; dss2005, N79: ‘pensare ad un racconto inventato’. 81 dss2005, N79: ‘Questo è stato il neorealismo[,] effettivo in Italia attraverso alcuni uomini’, where ‘has served’ conveys: ‘for this is what it is (or has been)’; Lanza53: ‘This effectively, has served as neorealism for some filmmakers in Italy’ which is not the same as the text. Overbey78: omitted. 82 Lanza53: ‘was often’. ‘Often’ is his addition, not in the text. 83 Lanza53: ‘speech’ for ‘discorso’ which in this context refers to a particular aesthetic choice, a direction taken, an adopted practice, hardly a speech. 84 dss2005, N79: ‘a un certo momento’; Lanza53: ‘at one moment’. A calque. 85 dss2005, N79: ‘l’intenzione di inventare’; Lanza53: ‘the intention of communicating’. 86 Lanza53: ‘about these people’s lives’’. An addition; not in the text. 71 72

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minute that not even the protagonists themselves give it any importance, despite the fact that it is charged with life, by which I mean ‘life’, in the sense I was using earlier.87 It is of vital importance, so much so that we should reject as forcefully as we can the other kind of life and the other type of events that have been brought to us onto the big screen for fifty years by the cinema, because they are always larger than life and always artificial. From the current phase, which we could describe as a compromise, a transition, just marking time, we should move on to the second phase some of us are aiming for,88 in which we face objective reality directly.89 Paisà, Roma città aperta, Sciuscià, Ladri di biciclette, La terra trema: each one contains entirely meaningful sequences90 which convey the concept that everything can be told as a story. However, these are still metaphorical, because there is still an invented story, as opposed to the documentary approach.91 In some films, like Umberto D., the event subjected to analytical scrutiny is more in evidence; nevertheless, the framework is still traditional.92 Be that as it may, we have not yet realized Neo-realism proper. Neo-realism today is like an army ready to march. The soldiers are all set. They follow Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. These soldiers must launch the attack; only then will the battle be won.93 For we have to accept the fact that all of us are still only beginning;94 some a little further forward, others further back. But it is still an achievement. Today, the grave danger we face is that we abandon our positions and namely, the ethical stance many of us shared implicitly, immediately after the war.95 What matters, though, is that such a new direction has been taken: either we follow it through to the end or we are going to miss a great opportunity, since the prospects of Neo-realism are much greater than one might suppose today. What is at stake is to give the cinema its mission of observing and exploring the

Zavattini expands on his point, but Lanza53 omits the paragraph, from ‘By which I mean “life” ... to objective reality directly.’ The omission, once again, deletes an important point: a transition from the compromise of the first phase of Neo-realism to a second phase of Neorealist direct cinema. 88 dss2005, N79: as above; 1aic1952, fol. 8: ‘and it is the one we have reached ... and it is the one we’re in’. Overbey omits several paragraphs of explication from: ‘As a result ... objective reality directly’. 89 dss2005, N79, 1aic1952, fol. 8: ‘by which I mean ... directly’. Lanza53: lacuna. 90 dss2005, N79, 1aic1952: ‘alcune cose’ (lit. ‘a few things’); Overbey78: ‘passages’. 91 dss2005, N79, 1aic1952: ‘c’è ancora un racconto inventato, non lo spirito documentarista’; Lanza53: ‘there is still an invented story, not the documentary spirit’; Overbey78: ‘do not apply the documentary spirit simply and fully.’ The loss or omission of the conditional clearly distorts the meaning. 92 dss2005, N79: ‘sempre però nell’ordine tradizionale’ (‘still within the traditional framework’); 1aic1952, fol. 8: ‘although still within an indirect order of things which fits into the traditional order’; Lanza53: ‘but the presentation is still traditional.’ 93 Lanza53: ‘the soldiers have to go into the attack and win the battle.’ But Zavattini’s point is subtler. dss2005: ‘occorre che questi soldati partano all’assalto: allora la battaglia sarà vinta’. 94 dss2005, N79, 1aic1952, fol. 8: ‘allo start’. Lanza53: ‘still only starting’. 95 Overbey78 omits: ‘For we have to accept ... the war’; Lanza53 omits a page of text, from dss2005: ‘L’importante comunque ... un paio di scarpe’ (‘What matters ... a pair of shoes’). 87

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real. If96 it is true that the spirit of Neo-realism exists today – albeit only in a few people – there is no work as yet that brings out the full potential of Neo-realism, both in the sense of a compromise and in the sense of using genuine names and surnames. Let me recount the example of the quarrel, which I have given on other occasions (I say quarrel, but I should say disagreement). Time was when, for the usual confused ideas of rhythm, suspense, movement, and so on, an altercation could never last more than two minutes, because – so they said – the public would get bored and it was time to move on. Nowadays, we have succeeded in making it last a little longer; let’s say seven minutes. Neo-realism must allow it to last as long as it takes, the necessary and sufficient time (which could even coincide with the entire length of the film), so that the argument can be analysed in all its dimensions, echoes, in its very essence. This will only happen the day we convince ourselves that a disagreement (I am, of course, talking about a putative argument, between hypothetical people, in any place whatsoever), shown as analytically as possible, contains moments of pain, surprise, tension, just like the most highly constructed of stories. My example has been an argument. But I want to choose an even less exceptional case:97 a woman who is going to buy a pair of shoes. For one can even make a film about such a mundane event. All you have to do is discover all the aspects contained within this ‘banal, everyday adventure’, for it to become worthy of attention, and, therefore, ‘spectacular’.98 Of course, we have to decide to take spectacle to signify the norm, not the exceptional; in other words, our astonishment will be a response from becoming aware of the significance of everything around us everyday, which we never noticed before.99 It will be hard to turn these events into spectacle. It will require powerful human insight, both in the filmmaker, and in the viewer. What is required is to give every single minute of a man’s life its historic meaning.100 * 2 April 1952101 In life, in contemporary reality, empty spaces no longer exist. There is such an interdependence between things, people, events, that, if I strike

dss2005, 1aic1952, fol. 8: ‘Se’ (‘if’); N79: lacuna. dss2005, 1aic1952, fol. 8: ‘Non esiste ancora un’opera che realizzi fino in fondo le possibilità del neo-realismo’ (‘There is no work yet ... Neo-realism’; N79 lacuna. 97 Lanza53: ‘What matters though ... less exceptional case’. Lacuna (three paragraphs). 98 Lanza53: ‘even ... spectacular’. But the text reads in dss2005: ‘e quindi spettacolare.’ Lanza’s rendering leaves out the argument: it is spectacular, in so far as it is worthy of attention. That makes it so. The two points are connected and lead into the following explication. 99 Overbey78 omits several paragraphs: ‘What is at stake ... noticed before.’ 100 dss2005, N79: ‘Si tratta di dare alla vita dell’uomo la sua importanza storica ogni minuto’; Lanza53: ‘the question is: how to give human life its historical importance at every minute’; Overbey78: ‘it is a dialogue in which one must give life, reality, its historical importance, which exists in each instant’. No ‘dialogue’ is mentioned. 101 1aic1952, fol. 10: ‘2.4.52’, dss2005, N79: no space. 96

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a blow against a theatre curtain here in Rome, it will have repercussions all over the world.102 Well, if this is so, then it is surely a worthwhile enterprise to pick out any moment whatsoever from a day in the life of a person, in an endeavour to show how, by choosing that moment, in other words, by identifying it, its echo, purpose, and lesson, will resonate everywhere else in the world.103 While it was once stated that there should be a great number of events taking place in a film, the task in hand today is to pick an event, just one, any fact whatsoever, and open it up in all its meanings. By bringing us face to face with it, the camera is already carrying out an ethical function, thus making amends.104 And this is equally true when it comes to poverty and peace.105 Don’t look for the reasons for peace in large-scale events, when small ones will do. For peace is really and truly106 an accumulation of little events, all of which, deep down, share the same ethical dimension. But the task in hand is not limited exclusively to making films that make an audience familiar with social and collective situations. For individuals are not only unfamiliar with the social fabric, they are also unfamiliar with themselves.107 That is the reason I speak paradoxically in terms of a ‘newsreel about themselves’.108 Because, in my opinion, seeing yourself on the screen, while carrying out your everyday activities (bearing in mind that ‘the fact of seeing yourself’ makes us perceive ourselves differently

It is surprising that Zavattini should express such an idea, despite its fairly long ancestry in mathematics. It goes back to J. C. Maxwell (1876), Matter and Motion, New York: Dover, 1991, H. Poincaré, The Foundations of Science: Science and Method, Lancaster: The Science Press, 1913, and J. Hadamard, Lectures on Cauchy’s Problem in Linear Partial Differential Equations, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922. However, outside specialist circles, it was only long after the publication of Edward Lorenz’s paper on the ‘butterfly effect’ that it became popularized (E. N. Lorenz, ‘Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow’, Journal of Atmospheric Science, vol. 20, 1963, 131–40). However, Zavattini was no scientist, and, moreover, hopeless in mathematics. Lanza53 takes (theatre) curtain (‘telone’ can also mean tarpaulin) as a metaphor for cinema, but actually replaces the word with ‘cinema’. Later on, Zavattini uses the phrase ‘tessuto sociale’, ‘social fabric’, which suggests that the cinema metaphor may not be intentional and makes it more probable that the metaphor is that we are a collectivity and as such, all connected, an insight also expressed by him elsewhere. 103 Zavattini uses this concept to defend his choice of random moments of existence as being significant, something which can only be ascertained on connecting the chosen ‘moment’ in time and space to its context. 104 1aic1952, dss2005, N79: ‘While it was ... function’; Lanza53: lacuna. 105 ‘peace’, in March 1952, peace was a reference to the Cold War and the impending threat of a nuclear holocaust. 106 Lanza53: ‘usually’. But ‘proprio’ is not a frequentative adverb, but an intensifier. It means ‘really is’. 107 Lanza53: ‘people understand themselves better than the social fabric’. There is no textual basis for this. dss2005: ‘Come non ... non ...’. Alternatively, this correlation could be translated as: ‘neither do ... nor ...’, but there is no comparison in sight. The error disrupts the sense of the following paragraph. Zavattini is not talking about a lack of knowledge of reality, but of oneself, about self-knowledge. 108 1aic1952, fol. 11, dss2005: ‘film luce’, N79: ‘film Luce’. This a reference to the newsreels of the era produced by the Istituto Luce, so N79 gives the correct reading, for the word must be capitalized. Elsewhere, Zavattini refers to the Settimana Incom, another newsreel. Cf. Ernesto G. Laura, Le stagioni dell’Aquila. Storia dell’Istituto Luce, Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2000. Augusto Sainati, La Settimana Incom: cinegiornali e informazione negli anni ’50, Milan: Lindau, 2001. 102

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from how we are – and moreover, the same thing happens on radio) can help fill this ‘void’, this divide, this lack of self-knowledge,109 these discrepancies.110 * 10 April 1952111 If such a love for reality, for spontaneity, must nevertheless conform to the requirements of cinema, it will have to adapt, suffer, wait. This means that the capitalist structure of cinema continues to wield a dreadful influence on its true function. It is borne out by the fact that today there is a growing backlash against all the fundamental issues, which are under discussion for the first time since the war. There are two main consequences of such a moral crisis: (1) Old-style films are quickly taking over, with a return to ‘original’ scenarios and, therefore, to the escapism which typifies them. (2) Neo-realism is being attacked and obstructed by the bourgeois, which is making all kinds of accusations. The following are the main ones:

1. Neo-realism only describes poverty Neo-realism can, and must, face both poverty and wealth.112 We began with poverty, for the simple reason that it is one of the most blatant realities113 of our time. I challenge anyone to prove the contrary. And to believe, or to pretend to believe, that, by making half a dozen films about poverty, the theme has been exhausted and that it is time to move on to something more lighthearted, is a big mistake.114 It is tantamount to misunderstanding, or pretending to misunderstand, what Neo-realism is. It means seeking to confine it to an extremely limited scope.115 You may as well compare it with someone who is supposed to plough a large area of land, but, sits down instead, after barely covering the first hectare.116

1aic1952, fol. 11, dss2005: ‘non conoscenza’; N79: ‘conoscenza’. Error. The correct reading is clear from the logic of the sentence. 110 To ‘lack of knowledge’, Lanza53 adds: ‘of reality’, but the whole paragraph is more specific in discussing self-knowledge and suggesting the benefits of being filmed, in non-fiction, as in newsreels, where the purpose is self-knowledge. Zavattini, as always, is specific, concrete, materialist, not metaphysical. 111 Lanza53: ‘7’; dss2005: line space; 1aic1952, fol. 11: ‘10.4.1952’. 112 Lanza53: ‘and wealth’ omitted. Overbey78: ‘luxury’. Zavattini’s response is that Neo-realism can make films about both. 113 dss2005, N79: ‘realtà più vive’; Overbey78: ‘vivid realities’; Lanza53: ‘vital realities of our time’. 114 dss2005: ‘un grosso sbaglio’; Overbey78: ‘an error or sophistry’; Lanza53 omits last part of sentence. dss2005: ‘spirabil aure’ (lit. ‘breatheable air’) is a reference to a phrase in Cinque Maggio, a famous poem by Alessandro Manzoni with connotations of lightness, happiness. 115 1aic1952, fol. 13, dss2005: ‘it means choosing to confine ... limited scope’ (‘significa volergli attribuire una funzione modestissima’); N79: lacuna. 116 Lanza53 omits the sentence following ‘a grave mistake’. Lanza loses the references to neorealism. And continues: ‘As well believe’ which doesn’t make any sense. Overbey78: ‘it is tantamount ... hectare’. Omitted. 109

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You could devote117 an entire life to the theme of poverty (‘the rich and the poor’). We have only just begun. We need to summon the courage to explore it in all its details. This theme, ‘the rich and the poor’ is the nub of the contemporary world. And if the rich turn up their noses,118 particularly at Miracle in Milan, they should think again.119 For Miracle in Milan is merely a fable, and there is much more to say than that. And besides, I count myself among the rich. Our wealth is not limited to financial wealth (money is only the most glaring aspect),120 we are also rich in every other form of oppression and injustice: for you can be rich in adopting either an ethical or an unethical attitude.121 When the audience, the producer, the critic, the state, the church, or anyone else says: ‘I have had enough of poverty’, ‘I am fed up with depressing films’,122 they are falling into a state of sin.123 Because they are refusing to be informed, which is what escapism is: a rejection of knowledge, whether a conscious one or not. Moreover, the need for escapism is a lack of courage: it spells fear. Someone should make a film on this topic: how far do we go in seeking to escape in the face of disturbing events which we habitually wrap up in coloured cellophane?124 The fear of being found out, of being singled out, which is to say of gaining a social consciousness, of no longer being capable of lying to ourselves, of being urged to know and to reflect, to therefore feel responsible, of no longer being able to pretend. They even told Christ that it was time to do something different, that his Gospel was enough.125 Enough with misery and with miseries too.126 If I

1aic1952, fol. 12: ‘io potrei’; dss2005, N79: ‘si può’. dss2005, N79: ‘hanno arricciato il naso’; Lanza53: ‘turn up their noses’; Overbey78: ‘raised their eyebrows’. But there is a significant difference between the two; the former denoting surprise, the latter disgust. 119 dss2005, N79: ‘abbiano un po’ di pazienza’; Lanza53: ‘we can only ask them to be a little patient’; Overbey78: ‘they will soon see better than that.’ Lanza and Overbey don’t pick up on the colloquial set phrase. 120 ‘the most blatant’; 1aic1952, fol. 12, dss2005: ‘apparente’; N79: ‘appariscente’. Error. The doublet ‘vistoso e apparente’ is a synonym, but the reading is a change to the text. 121 dss2005, N79: ‘c’è una posizione “morale” (o immorale) dell’uomo così detto ricco)’; Lanza53: ‘that is the moral (or immoral) position of the so-called rich man’. Overbey78: ‘there is also a moral position which might be counted as a man’s riches’. 122 Lanza53 mistranslates: ‘basta’ means ‘enough’ (meaning, enough with socially engaged films). It is attributed to Church and State, and the producers, all hostile to Neo-realist films. Inevitably, the error affects the rest of the paragraph. Lanza53: ‘the films about poverty’ is a change, not a translation of: ‘I film tristi’ dss2005. 123 The ‘state of sin’ belongs to an ironic register, following as it does, the reference to the church. The irony suggests that the very institutions a citizen or a churchgoer (Zavattini was an atheist, and thus only the former) expects to rely on are failing miserably in their respective missions. 124 1aic1952, fol. 13: ‘siamo abituati ad avvolgere in cellophan colorato’. ‘We are used to wrapping up in coloured celophane.’ dss2005: ‘ad aspergere di soavi licor’, poetic phrase, meaning: ‘to spray or envelop with perfume’. 125 1aic1952, fol. 13: ‘anche a Cristo dissero che era tempo di far qualcosa di diverso, che bastava con il suo Vangelo’. N79: lacuna. 126 1aic1952, fol. 13, dss2005: ‘The fear of ... miseries too’. Lanza53: lacuna. The explicative paragraph leads into the striking statement about Christ and the true mission of Christianity, betrayed by the church and the state. It is the kind of revolutionary or Liberation Theology117 118

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weren’t concerned about coming across as irreverent, I would say that if Christ had a camera, he would never fabricate parables, however enjoyable, but would show who the good and the bad are, in this day and age. But, first of all, he would show close-ups of the ones who make their neighbour’s bread too bitter, and show such people’s victims – censorship permitting.127 What would suffice ... would emerge from timing the process of getting to know reality. click! That’s enough!128 To have only gone as far as choosing the theme of poverty is hardly enough. The real challenge now is to analyse poverty in its constituent elements. In other words, there is a great need for ever more specific and wide-reaching information about the issues concerning the needs of humanity. Only from such in-depth work can a certain kind of film emerge and no other kind. Neo-realism should ignore time and keep going for as long as it takes.129

2. Neo-realism offers no solutions, nor does it suggest a route through. The endings of Neo-realist films are escapist to an extreme.130 I completely reject this accusation.131 Furthermore, as far as I am concerned, all the characters and the situations in the films I have scripted are unresolved, from a practical point of view, because ‘this is one particular form of reality among others’.132 But every single moment of the film is an ongoing response to a series of questions. As far as solutions are concerned, who can suggest valid, concrete, substantive ones today? If someone had solutions, reality would not be the way it is. All that can be done is to seek, research, and study. And this is all I do. What is required is the courage of coming to know, I shall never tire of repeating it. We need to take a theme and investigate it in depth. In my films, there is no technical or political solution, but a solution from which viewers can deduce their own technical and political solution.133 And besides, which other films offer solutions? The solutions they offer, when they do so, are sentimental, reflecting how superficially issues are dealt with. At least my films interpellate the viewers to provide a solution, so much so that the suggestions for solutions regarding the content of Miracle in Milan have come from the middle class which called style evangelical uncompromising Christ who figures in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew and is right there in the Gospel. 127 1aic1952, fol. 13, dss2005: ‘If I weren’t ... permitting’; N79: lacuna. Lanza53: ‘in actuality’, but the text reads ‘attualmente’ (dss2005), meaning ‘at the present time’. The scriptural metaphors of bread and neighbour add to Zavattini’s irony. 128 Lanza53: ‘to say that we have had “enough’’ films about poverty suggests that one can measure reality with a chronometer.’ The first part of the clause is an interpolation. 129 Overbey78: ‘when the audience ... as it takes’. Omitted paragraphs. 130 dss2005: ‘evasivi al massimo’; Lanza53: ‘particularly inconclusive’; Overbey78: ‘totally evasive’. Calque for ‘escapist’. 131 dss2005, N79: ‘con tutte le mie forze’; Lanza53: ‘I cannot accept this at all’; Overbey78: ‘I  deny this with all of my being’. 1aic1952, fol. 13: ‘di fare dei finali evasivi’. ‘To make escapist endings’. 132 1aic1952, fol. 13: ‘questa è la realtà’. dss2005: ‘questa è una realtà’. The change is significant, from this is the whole of reality, to one reality among others. 133 1aic1952, fol. 14. Overbey78: ‘But every ... for them’.

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for a solution tackling the nature of the characters, but I preferred to leave them as they were.134 The fundamental emotional response to Miracle in Milan is not escapism,135 but indignation, coupled with the desire for solidarity towards a certain group of people and the lack of solidarity towards another group of people. However, the structure of the film demonstrates that the oppressed put up an impressive fight against the other side.136 If the subaltern group had had tanks, they would have been willing to defend their land and their shanty town.

3. That everyday events are of no interest and don’t constitute a spectacle.137 In avoiding the analysis of the everyday event film writers138 are, on the one hand, obeying the largely tacit command coming from the capitalist film industry and from the public itself, and on the other hand, a sort of laziness. To elaborate, the analysis of the event is always more demanding than making one event lead to another and another, and yet another. In other words, we’re faced with the problem of carrying out a deeper level of research,139 something which film writers are avoiding. The reason for this is that, apart from a few directors, there are no film writers; in the sense that there are no writers with a world of their own to express, with the same rigour they would apply to writing a book.140 We should expect from the cinema what we expect from a book. If we did so, what is happening today would be taken as monstrous in everyone’s eyes. And namely, the fact that certain products are given consideration which, if you compared them to books, would neither deserve a single line of review nor to be listed among books received. We must not forget that cinema, no less than television will be in the future, has a formative and cultural value,141 over and above being a distraction, in the sense that Capital assigns to this word.142

1aic1952, fol. 14 dss2005, N79: ‘la evasione’; Lanza53: ‘escape (the flight at the end)’; Overbey78: passage omitted. But Zavattini refers here to ‘escapism’, as opposed to a fable which is paradoxically a socially engaged work eliciting indignation from the viewers. 136 dss2005, N79: ‘una grande leva’; Lanza53: ‘a great gathering’. 137 dss2005, N79. The third numbered point omitted by Lanza53. 138 dss2005, N79: ‘gli scrittori di cinema’; Lanza53. Omitted. Overbey78: ‘a director’. Mistranslation. ‘film writers’ or ‘screenwriters’. Zavattini often uses ‘film writers’ to indicate a degree of autonomy in the writing process which is defended in the penultimate section of this text, and is evident from the context of this text’s inclusion in the publication of the scenario and screenplay of Umberto D. 139 dss2005, N79: ‘l’analisi è sempre faticosa ... è il problema dell’approfondimento che gli scrittori di cinema sfuggono’; Overbey78: ‘The analysis ... is extremely difficult’ (last phrase omitted). Lanza53: omitted. 140 dss2005, N79: omitted. aic1952, fol. 15. This sentence has been reinstated, because it sheds light on the previous one, confirming that Zavattini has writers, not directors, in mind. 141 Error in dss2005: ‘calore formativo e culturale’ (‘formative and cultural warmth or heat’. It does not make sense. Correct in 1aic1952, fol. 15: ‘valore formativo culturale’: ‘cultural and formative value’. 142 This entire paragraph is omitted in Lanza53: ‘We should expect ... this word’. Last paragraph omitted in N79: ‘We mustn’t forget distraction’. Yet, valuing visual culture was something Zavattini began doing from the late 1920s on, in his work in the Italian publishing industry, and his contribution to Italian visual culture. 134 135

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* 13 April 1952143 As one might expect, genuine Neo-realist cinema is cheaper than current cinema, since its subject matter can be expressed more economically. The most important repercussion of this is that it will be able to unshackle itself from capitalism.144 Every art form, in so far as it is art, and thus aspiring to a highest standard of artistic achievement, seeks to express itself using an economy of means. The more aligned with an ethical imperative an art form is, the less it costs. The social immorality of cinema is down to its cost.145 The cinema has not yet found its morality, its necessity, its quality, because it costs too much. That is to say, it is conditioned to such an extent that it is far less of an art form than it could be. If this were not so, then singling out the kind of subject matter that is more congenial to the innate technical character of the medium would be the artistic, ethical, economic, and historic event of cinema.146 * 19 April 1952147 Cinema should never look back. It should embrace the contemporary unreservedly. today, today, today. We should investigate what lies before us, using cinema as if it were a spotlight. When I speak of the diary, when I say: ‘everything like a diary’, it is an invitation to narrate life on the plane of existence, not on that of the plot. The issue is to engage in a struggle against the exceptional and to grasp life, at the very same time we are experiencing it, at its most ordinary. But we cannot succeed, unless we recognize it for ourselves first. The fact of the matter is that we still ignore everyday life. As well as not looking back, cinema should not ‘repeat’. This spells the death of the scenario, a preconceived ‘story’ which cinema later ‘repeats’. Cinema 1aic1952, fol. 15: ‘13.4.1952’, no subheading in N79, Lanza53 has: ‘8’. Significantly, Zavattini has replaced the generic phrase: ‘The kind of cinema I’m talking about’ (1aic1952, fol. 15: ‘Questo cinema che dico io’), with Neo-realism (dss2005), reinforcing his claim for the further development of Neo-realism entirely towards non-fiction. 144 Lanza53 significantly tones down Zavattini’s argument: ‘It can dispense with capitalist resources on the present scale’ which reads in dss2005 and 1aic1952, fol. 16: ‘La conseguenza più importante è che potrà liberarsi dal capitalismo’. (‘The most important consequence is that it will be able to unshackle [lit. “free itself”] itself from capitalism’). Therefore, nothing like: ‘on the present scale’, but altogether. Such a statement, however logical, would have seemed absurd, in all probability, to Lanza translating in 1953. In hindsight, however, it is a fact that the so-called digital revolution has brought professional and semi-professional cinecameras and film production (editing from Moviola and Steenberg to the still prohibitively costly and industry standard digital Avid, to now affordable Premier Pro or Final Cut, and cheaper equivalents), enabling World Cinema, in particular, to break into mainstream capitalist film production more and more. 145 Omitted from Lanza53: ‘Every art form ... than it could be’. 1aic1952, fols 15–16, dss2005: ‘We must not forget that ... the cinema’; N79: lacuna. 146 Omitted from Lanza53: ‘The cinema has not yet ... to historic event of cinema’. Since Zavattini is naming the documentary turn of Neo-realism as the historic event of cinema, it is surprising to say the least that both N79 and Lanza53 both deleted such a bold statement. Had the sentence been a repetition, the deletion might have made sense. 147 1aic1952, fol. 15: ‘13.4.1952’, dss2005: line space, Lanza53: ‘9’. 143

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should create the story (if we can still call it that) along the way. At most, the director can give life to a figment of the imagination inside himself, but he should never make a film based on someone else’s story. A genuine experiment would be to narrate reality as if it were a story, not to invent a story that is similar to reality.148 The gap between life and spectacle should disappear, see [my article in] La Fiera letteraria and the Preface to Cinema italiano.149 But then – some will say150 – how and when does the imagination intervene?151 It is a question of a different sort of imagination altogether, one which requires an entirely different method to make it function. Here’s an example.152 A woman goes to a shoe repair shop, to buy a pair of shoes for her son. The shoes cost seven thousand liras. The woman starts bartering, to get them for less. The scene lasts ten minutes. I have to make a two-hour film out of that.153 What am I going to do?154 I examine the situation in all its aspects, to find out what went on ‘before’, what happened ‘afterwards’, and what is going on at the present moment.155 This is where a new responsibility and a new task for our imagination comes into play.156 The woman is buying the shoes. What is her son doing, while the woman is purchasing the shoes? What is going on in India, which might have some connection with this event? The shoes cost seven thousand liras. How did the woman come by these seven thousand liras? How hard did she have to work to earn them? What is this money worth to her? And what about the shopkeeper, who is busy bargaining over the price and uttering these words

Another sizeable omission in Lanza53; from: ‘We should investigate’ to: ‘similar to reality’. 1aic1952, fol. 17: ‘Cinema italiano domani’. This is the Preface to Cinema italiano oggi, edited by Gian Luigi Rondi, Milan: Bestetti Editore-Edizioni d’Arte, 1950, now in Neorealismo ecc., 74–6. It was removed from subsequent editions. The second reference is to an interview: ‘Il cinema, Zavattini e la realtà’ (Zavattini interviewed by Pasquale Festa Campanile), La Fiera Letteraria, no. 47, 9 December 1951, now in Neorealismo ecc., 81–5. Both are in this edition. 150 Omitted in Overbey78: the long section from ‘We should expect from the cinema ... but then – some will say –.’ 151 dss2005, N79: ‘come e quando interviene la fantasia’; Lanza53: omitted. Overbey78: ‘the imagination, the creative act, enter neo-realism?’ 152 Omission in Lanza53: ‘But then ... an example’. 153 Interpolation in Overbey78: ‘(we will discuss the commercial “rules” of distribution and exhibition which dictated that a film be of a certain length at another time)’. 154 dss2005: ‘che cosa faccio?’, N79: ‘che faccio?’. 155 dss2005, N79: ‘nelle sue contemporaneità’; Lanza53: ‘in its contemporaneity’ (a calque); Overbey78: ‘What is really happening while the situation exists’. 156 dss2005, N79: ‘Comincia qui un nuovo dovere e un nuovo lavoro per la nostra fantasia’; Overbey78: sentence omitted. Lanza53: ‘the fact creates its own fiction, in its own particular sense.’ This obfuscates the text in dss2005 and aic1952, fol. 17: ‘Comincia qui un nuovo dovere e un nuovo lavoro per la nostra fantasia.’ This is a ‘new’ foundational statement which is part and parcel of the documentary turn highlighted earlier, making Lanza’s interpolation belittling. The concept finds its practical application today in, for example, Francesco Rosi’s award-winning documentary Fire at Sea (2016), but already in Rome, 11 o’Clock (1952) (story and script by Zavattini and Elio Petri, entirely based on field research and interviews with the actual protagonists of the real-life story). The original script – which turns out to be a very detailed typed field report running to over a 100 pages – can be consulted in the Rome Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and also in the Zavattini Archive of Reggio Emilia. 148 149

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to her? Telling her what they are going to cost? Who is he? What relationship has formed between these two beings? While they are busy bargaining, whose advantage are they defending? Who are they? What do they represent? Like her, the shopkeeper also has children; the two are talking and eating.157 Do you want to hear what they are saying? They are right here, in front of you.158 It is a matter of knowing how to carry out an extensive investigation to show the correlations between facts and the root cause of these facts and to find out what gave rise to them. By making this sort of enquiry about ‘the purchase of a pair of shoes’, an entire world opens up before us, in all its complexity; one which is very significant on a number of levels, not only the practical level,159 but also the social, economic and psychological. In the face of the intensity of responsibility to be found in each passing moment, banality ceases to be.160 Each moment is infinitely fruitful: the banal does not exist.161 All you need do is start digging, then every single fact will reveal its multiplicity. The gold diggers of reality are welcome to come and dig within the vast quarry of reality. This is the only way cinema is going to become socially important. Clearly, all this can be achieved with invented characters too. However, if one adopts such an investigative method, shadowing things, applying it to actual, real people, with whom I experience direct participation, as opposed to a metaphorical relationship, my emotional involvement is going to be more fruitful, more ethical, and more useful. Art should be elevated, by using authentic names and surnames, not false ones.162 I am bored of heroes who are figments of the imagination, to a greater or lesser extent. I’m weary of Hamlet: I want to meet this Hamlet character here and now.163 I want to meet a person who is a genuine protagonist of everyday

dss2005, N79: ‘ha due figli che mangiano, parlano’; Lanza53: ‘also has two sons who eat and speak’; Overbey78: ‘there might be two other sons also there eating and chattering’. Indicative, not conditional, mood in the Italian. 158 dss2005, N79: ‘davanti a voi’; Lanza53: ‘in front of you’; Overbey78: ‘And it goes on.’ Another interpolation. 159 Lanza53, ‘motives’; Calque from ‘motivi’ (dss2005), a word which can mean both ‘reasons’ or ‘issues’, but not ‘motives’. Overbey78: ‘motifs’. ‘Motif’, from art history, signifies a source of inspiration or theme. But here Zavattini is referring not to the source, the theme, but its dimensions or aspects which underlie it. 160 dss2005, N79: ‘Il banale sparisce proprio per la carica di responsabilità di cui è carico ogni momento’; Lanza53: ‘Banality disappears because each moment is really charged with responsibility’; Overbey78: ‘Banality disappears for it never really existed. I am against ...’ Overbey deprives the statement of its supporting argument – yet again making of the text more of a manifesto than it is. 161 dss2005, N79: ‘il banale non esiste’; Lanza53: ‘banality never really existed’. Why the past tense? The text is not in the past tense. 162 1aic1952, fol. 18: ‘L’arte deve essere lievitata’ (‘Art must be uplifted’). No editorial mark over the typing. This reading is clearer than the one in dss2005: ‘L’arte deve essere espressa’ (‘Art must be expressed’). Overbey78: ‘The woman is buying ... exist.’ 163 1aic1952, fol. 18: ‘Di “amleto” ne ho piene le scatole: io voglio incontrare questo Amleto, oggi.’ (‘I’m fed up with Hamlet: I want to meet this Hamlet, today’). Zavattini’s original analogy criticizes the theatrical and literary bias of the cinema. The specific details of facial features in the next sentence fits in better with it. Rossellini’s La presa del potere da parte di Luigi xiv (1966) (La prise de pouvoir par Louis xiv) does precisely this: Rossellini’s 157

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life. I want to see what he looks like, if he has a moustache or not, if he is short or tall; I want to see his eyes, I want to talk to him.164 We shall look at him on the screen with the very same anxiety and curiosity that we experience when a small crowd of people gathers in a square and makes us rush onto the scene and ask: ‘What is going on? What’s happened?’ – in relation to a real person. This is the task of cinema, to foster such an instinct to overcome solitude. Cinema has understood, in the sense that Neo-realism has understood, what a unique and inexhaustible experience derives from events taking place naturally, before our very eyes.165 I am against exceptional characters, against heroes. I have always felt an instinctive abhorrence towards them.166 They always made me, and millions of other human beings, feel offended and excluded. We are all characters. Heroes elicit an inferiority complex among viewers.167 The time has come to tell viewers they are the genuine protagonists of life. This will lead to a constant appeal168 to the responsibility and dignity of every human being. Besides, the persistent habit of identifying with characters is very insidious. There is no need to identify oneself with anyone but oneself. The world is made up of millions of people who are thinking about myths. Only those identified by name, in books, newspapers, and on the radio, are supposed to be special. We must put across the fact that ‘we are all identified by name’ at the Registry Office and, consequently, that we are all equally interesting. The radio ought to broadcast the list of every Italian without distinction, to encourage them.169 Neo-realism stands for an aspiration of this sort: to give each individual a stronger sense of self-worth170 and an awareness of what it is to be human.171

equivalent of Hamlet is a genuine contemporary in the role of King Louis xiv, played by a non-professional actor, Jean-Marie Patte, whose understandable alienation from the role was deployed to great effect by Rossellini, finding in what Richard Rushton calls ‘filmic reality’, a wealth of untapped meanings coming to the fore in the situation on set. Cf. Richard Rushton, The Reality of Film. Theories of Filmic Reality, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011, 1–19, where Rushton expounds on moving away from representation towards a performativity taking place on the screen itself. This is what Zavattini explores in ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’. 164 Lanza53: ‘how he is made’ in a literal translation of dss2005: ‘come è fatto’, but this latter is a colloquial expression to signify a person’s external appearance or looks. 165 Omitted in Lanza53: ‘To foster ... in the sense that’; dss2005: ‘Aiutare questo istinto di non solitudine è il compito del cinema che ha intuito ...’ The omission produces a loss of sense. Omitted in Overbey78: ‘you need only dig ... our own eyes.’ 166 Lanza53: ‘personages’. A calque for ‘characters’ (dss2005: ‘personaggi’). 167 Omitted in Lanza53: ‘against heroes ... all characters’. 168 dss2005, N79: ‘richiamo’; Overbey78: ‘emphasis’. But the word indicates an eliciting of responsibility in the viewer, not an emphasis on responsibility. 169 Omitted from Overbey78: ‘Besides, the persistent habit ... encourage them’. This polemical absurdity completes Zavattini’s argument and its nonsensical humour harks back to his hilarious short stories or ‘raccontini’, which brought him fame in the 1930s. It is also interesting in the light of radio and early television in which talk shows habitually ridiculed ordinary people whose dignity (and shyness) were manipulated to provoke the audience’s mockery and enjoyment – what Germans call schadenfreude. 170 dss2005, N79: ‘rinfrancare tutti’; Lanza53: omitted. Overbey78: ‘strengthen everyone’. Vague. 171 The whole paragraph omitted in Lanza53: ‘myths ... human’; dss2005, N79: ‘dare a tutti la coscienza di essere uomini’. Overbey78: ‘give everyone the proper awareness of a human

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* 20 April 1952172 The term ‘Neo-realism’ – taken in a very broad sense of the word – also implies the abolition of technical and professional industrial structures, including the figure of the screenwriter. Manuals, formulas and grammars no longer make any sense.173 Nor do the terms: ‘close-up’,174 ‘shot reversal’, and so on and so forth.175 Each individual possesses a private screenplay. Neo-realism breaks all the rules, rejects all the conventions176 which are, essentially, no more than rule-making about boundaries. It is reality itself which breaks these rules, given that the modalities of encounter between filmmaker and reality are limitless. What I am actually suggesting is going out in the street with a film camera. We have to rule out a priori close-ups or shotreverse shots.177 And besides, the role of the screenwriter, as it is currently understood, is so very ambiguous. Usually, what is envisioned is a purely technical and totally impersonal collaboration, which is obviously absurd in the extreme. However, this is not to say that a great many ‘screenwriters’ of this type don’t exist.178 I am a film writer179 who seeks to express specific things, and to say them in his own particular way. Clearly, my creative activity is founded on certain ethical and social ideas, so I refuse to settle for providing a very limited technical contribution. And even when I am collaborating on films which are remote from

being.’ Lanza53: ‘10’, 1aic1952, fol. 19: ‘20.4.52’ (handwritten correction on typescript). 2aic1952, fol. 32: omitted. 173 Lanza53: ‘have no more application’. But dss2005 is unequivocal: ‘non hanno più senso.’ ‘No longer make any sense.’ 174 dss2005, N79: ‘p.p’ (primo piano); Lanza53: ‘there will be no more technical terms’; Overbey78: ‘There can be no “first takes”.’ This is a surprising error for someone who was working in the film industry in France. ‘primo piano’ is a technical phrase that translates as ‘close-up’, a type of shot in which the subject (or a material object) fills the screen frame. 175 Lanza53 dispenses with cinematic terminology, distorting the phrase into a Manifesto-style dictum: ‘There will be no more technical terms.’ Yet his translation was for a film journal. 176 Overbey78: ‘Neo-realism ... conventions’. 177 Lanza53 modifies the sense and abridges: ‘reality breaks all the rules, as can be discovered if you walk out with a camera to meet it.’ Sounds good, manifesto-style stuff, but it is not what Zavattini said, justifying a far subtler viewpoint. dss2005: ‘È la realtà che li rompe questi schemi essendo infiniti i modi dell’incontro da parte dell’uomo di cinema con la realtà (parlo proprio d’andare in giro con la macchina da presa). Non ci possono essere p.p. o c.c. a priori.’ His argument is a plea for spontaneity, not an absurd imposition against close-ups or shot reversals. Omitted in typescript, 1aic1952, fol. 19, but included in 2aic1952, fol. 33. Ruling out a priori decisions for greater flexibility in filming the everyday. 178 Lanza53: ‘He is usually considered part of the technical apparatus.’ But the printed text in dss2005 is less ambiguous, pointing to the impersonal nature of the collaboration: ‘una pura collaborazione’, ‘del tutto spersonalizzata’. Zavattini could not have been clearer. The rest of the sentence, which contextualizes screenwriting further, is omitted in Lanza53: ‘which is ... very numerous’. 179 dss2005: ‘scrittore di cinema’. Lanza53: ‘I am a screen-writer.’ But Zavattini chooses not to describe himself as a ‘screenwriter’, so this latter term is inaccurate. (Cf. note below on Pasolini and screenwriting for full discussion on the issue.) 172

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my interests, I try to instil as much of my personal world and of this pressing inner ethical necessity as I can.180 Not that I think that there is anything wrong with screenplays as such, except that it might be better to think of them in terms of the written phase; the stage at which one’s personal world and the conceptual elements of what needs to be said are being worked out. Bear in mind, however, that this is an integral part of the creative stage, for the creative process has already begun.181 Scenario, screenplay and direction should not be three distinct forms.182 They are, in this day and age, but it is abnormal. The roles of screenwriter and writer of scenarios should disappear and make way for the sole author: the filmmaker who, long last, will have nothing more to do with the theatre director.183 Everything becomes more fluid when you make a film by yourself, with everything constantly subject to change;184 everything in a state of becoming and within the realms of possibility. There are endless possibilities, (not only during the actual filming, but also

dss2005 and 2aic1952, fol. 33: ‘di questa esigenza morale che ho dentro’ (lit. ‘which I have inside’), 1aic1952, fol. 20: ‘di questa esigenza morale che mi urge dentro’ (lit. ‘which is pressing inside me’); Lanza53: ‘of the moral emergencies within myself’. 181 Several paragraphs omitted in Overbey78: ‘which are essentially ... has already begun’. Lanza53 omits Zavattini’s argumentation which is what distinguishes ‘Some Ideas about Cinema’ from a manifesto format of unsupported pronouncements: ‘except it might be ... the creative process has already begun’ (dss2005: ‘Si può parlare semmai di fase scritta: della fase cioè di precisazione del proprio mondo, della esatta concezione delle cose da dire.’). In other words, Zavattini argues that the story or scenario produces, or expresses, a world which the screenplay then completes. But Lanza53 skips the important distinction that the screenplay in itself is unproblematic, when regarded as ‘the written phase’. Instead, his translation jumps to a separate argument about collapsing what were often, and still are, in the industry, three separate roles (at least, in Italy) into one, exercised by the professional figure of the filmmaker. By so doing, Lanza’s translation also fails to convey Zavattini’s nuanced approach and analysis: vindicating the autonomy of the screenplay as a creative ‘written phase’. Zavattini’s stance is the opposite of Pasolini’s. Cf. Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘La sceneggiatura come “struttura che vuol essere altra struttura”’, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, Milan: Garzanti, 2010 [1972], 188–97. 182 dss2005, N79: ‘non dovrebbero essere’; Lanza53: ‘should disappear’; Overbey78: ‘cannot, in neo-realism, be ...’. ‘Neo-realism’ not in text. ‘Neo-realism’ added by Overbey78 in the following sentence too. 183 Lanza53 omits the second half of the sentence. dss2005: ‘il regista che, finalmente, non può avere niente più di comune col regista di teatro’ (‘the director who, long last, will have nothing more to do with the theatre director’). In this new critical edition, ‘regista’ is translated as ‘filmmaker’, on the basis of Zavattini’s distinction between the role of the theatre director and film director. He is advocating a new film practice in which the director to come will also be an author, a filmmaker who assumes all three existing roles in industrial cinema: author as writer of the story, author as developer of the story into film script and author as director of the film. Interestingly, the producer is missing from the picture. 1aic1952, fol. 20: ‘... il regista. L’arte è stata sempre creazione di un solo individuo’ (‘... the director. Art has always been the creation of a sole individual’). That reading was rejected by the final script 2aic1952, fol. 30 and dss2005: ‘... il regista che, finalmente, non può avere niente più di comune col regista di teatro’. The shift is from the role of the film director as developing the film writer’s idea to the compounded role of the filmmaker to come, being both director and writer, since, the compressed argument runs, art has always been the creation of a sole individual. The correction makes the statement more specific, pointing to the similarity between theatre director and film director within the film industry. 184 dss2005: ‘possibile’, 1aic1952, fol. 20: ‘fluido’. ‘susceptible to change’. 180

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during montage, synchronization and so on),185 until that single moment when we say: ‘enough is enough’.186 Only then is the film brought to completion. Of course, I am not suggesting that you cannot make collaborative films, novels or plays. It is possible, precisely because of the very many ties of identity between individuals and groups (millions go to war to get themselves killed for the same reasons, for example). However, no work of art exists without a single person’s seal of approval and without the creation of a personal, poetic world. For there is always a person who makes the decisive creative decision, whose intelligence prevails. There is always someone who ‘makes a choice’ at a given moment and says yes to this and no to that and then decides: ‘c.u. of mother crying for help!’187 Technology and capitalism have led to the misunderstanding that collaboration is a new form of creativity.188 However, it is one thing to have had to adapt to these new requirements, enforced by the current structure of cinema, but quite another to say that they are totally indispensable and necessary.189 Because it is evident that when celluloid film will cost next to nothing, and everyone can afford a camera, the cinema will become as freely available and versatile a medium as any other.190 The cinema possesses a unique poetry and social beauty all of its own, which foster collaboration, but in the following sense: that the need to be at the centre of attention dies a death and everyone involved – as if they were carrying out a ritual – puts their efforts into showing ‘how things happen’.191 But the artistic Overbey78: ‘Scenario, ... so on’. Omitted in Lanza53: ‘Tutto nascente disponibile. Tutto pieno di infinite possibilità’ (dss2005): ‘Everything in a state of becoming and within reach. All full of endless possibilities’. 187 dss2005, N79 and 2aic1952, fol. 35: ‘e poi decide’. 1aic1952, fol. 20: ‘e poi scrive’. Lanza53: ‘reaction shot’. But dss2005 has: ‘p.p. [primo piano]’. 188 Lanza53: ‘Technique and capitalist method, however, have imposed collaboration on the cinema.’ Zavattini is subtler. dss2005: ‘Sono il fatto tecnico e il fatto capitalistico che hanno permesso l’equivoco della collaborazione, come nuova forma di creatività.’ But there is a considerable difference between ‘imposing’ as opposed to ‘allowing a misunderstanding to arise’. To put the same concept differently: the internal workings of capitalism and of the technology of industrial cinema require collaboration. This has led to a misunderstanding of this nature. It is not. It is a technological necessity which is not the same. In the next sentence, Zavattini notches up to dss2005: ‘imposte’ (‘imposed’). But the shift in meaning does not apply to the previous sentence. 189 Lanza53: ‘to imagine that’. But there is no appeal to the imagination. dss2005: ‘che siano’ (‘that they be’). 190 Lanza53: ‘films’, but Zavattini is making a concrete point about the prohibitive cost of 35mm celluloid. dss2005: ‘la pellicola’. The rest of his statement is prophetic. What sounded utopian has come into being, borne out by the advent of digital technology, in terms of very small, handheld cameras and the zero cost of the digital image which requires no material support. Lanza53: ‘would become’, dss2005: ‘diventerà’ (‘will become’). The consecutio temporum is wrong in English. The main verb is in the indicative, so the verb in the dependent clause needs to be in the future, not the conditional tense (can/will; not: can/would). 191 Entire paragraph omitted in Lanza53; dss2005 and 2aic1952, fol. 36: ‘Il cinema ha una sua poesia, una sua bellezza sociale che permettono il fatto collaborativo, ma in questo senso: che muore il divismo e tutti si prestano come a un rito per far vedere “come succedono le cose”.’. 1aic1952, fol. 21: ‘Il cinema ha una sua poesia, una sua bellezza sociale che permettono il fatto collaborativo, ma il fatto artistico è uno. Bisogna riuscire a fare un film come si fa un libro.’ The lacuna in Lanza53 disrupts the logical sense. However, the sentence elucidates and qualifies Zavattini’s earlier point about collaboration. For this reason, since they add clarity 185 186

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event is single: we need to find a way to make a film in the same the way a book is made. * 3 May 1952192 Clearly, as far as Neo-realism is concerned, it is not exclusively the imagined story that can no longer be justified,193 but also the actor, in the sense of a person who is artificially lending his own body to another. Neo-realism, as I understand it, requires everyone to be acting themselves.194 To want to make one person play the role of another implies a preconceived story. Yet we are trying to show what we have actually witnessed, as opposed to showing fables.195 I tried to do something along these lines with Caterina Rigoglioso, ‘the flash film’. But unfortunately, at the last minute it didn’t go ahead.196 The producer didn’t think Caterina was ‘suitable for the cinema’. But she was ‘Caterina’, wasn’t she? It will mean, of course, selecting themes in which actors are automatically unnecessary.197 For example, I would like to conduct investigative research on children in the world. If they let me make it, so much the better. Otherwise, I shall limit the scope to Europe, or even just Italy. Either way, I shall do it. Here is an example of a film that does not require actors. I do hope that the Actors’ Union won’t protest. Neo-realism doesn’t discard close psychological examination.198 Psychology is one of the many elements of reality. I come to grips with it in the same way

to the argument, returning to the point of artistic contribution being, in his view, singular, not collaborative, the last two sentences in 1aic1952, fol. 21 have been reinstated. 192 Lanza53: ‘11’. 193 Lanza53: ‘no more right to exist’. dss2005: ‘non ha più ragione di esistere’, the Italian form of Fr. raison d’être. Lanza53 turns purpose, reason or justification into legal ‘right’. 194 Lanza53: ‘must be’. dss2005: ‘Il neo-realismo richiede’ (Neo-realism requires or calls for). The difference in meaning here is between a request and a demand. Once again, Lanza pumps up Zavattini’s interview to Manifesto rhetoric level, at the expense of reasoned arguments, which, in fairness, are a feature of this text, as recorded by Michele Gandin. 195 Lanza53 modifies and abridges the text: ‘implies the calculated plot, the fable, and not “things happening”’. dss2005: ‘Il nostro sforzo è di mostrare cose viste, non favole.’ 196 At the time of the interview with Gandin, Zavattini had proposed a single-episode short featuring a real-life story. The following year the short became a twenty-minute episode of Love in the City. 197 dss2005: ‘I tried to do something ... unnecessary’. Lacuna in N79 and 1aic1952, fol. 27. Lanza53 dispenses with the producer, shifting the blame onto Caterina: ‘Caterina did not seem to “take” to the cinema.’ But dss2005: ‘Al produttore Caterina non pareva “adatta al cinema”.’ (lit. ‘But to the producer Caterina didn’t seem “suitable for the cinema”.’) 2aic1952, fol. 37: ‘Un tentativo del genere ho cercato di fare con Caterina Rigoglioso, “il film lampo”. Ma purtroppo all’ultimo momento tutto è saltato in aria’. (‘I made such an attempt with Caterina Rigoglioso,: “the flash film”. Unfortunately, however, at the last minute the whole thing was cancelled’). 1aic1952 is an incomplete witness, breaking off at this point. 2aic1952 is a copy of 1aic1952 with handwritten corrections implemented, but a complete typescript. In this case, a further addition was made at an even later stage, probably at galley stage, for which there is no textual record. 198 Lanza53: ‘12’. Line space in dss2005, no space in N79. ‘11’, ‘12’ and ‘13’; the last three sections of the ‘Ideas’ tackle three different subjects: namely, the non-professional actor (11), writing method (12) and the use of dialect (13). Of the two Italian published versions, the

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that I walk into a street. But if I have got to write a scene about two men having an argument, I am not going to think it up. I will get out of my sheltered space and go and look for them. This is already the important new event.199 I shall pick the two men. I will then get them to talk in my presence, for an hour or even twenty hours, depending on what is required. My creativity consists in, first of all, spending time in their company, then in listening to them and ‘making a selection’ based on what they are saying. But I don’t do all this with the intention of creating heroes, because ‘every man’ is one, not just ‘a select few’, as far as I am concerned. There is nothing demeaning about wanting everyone to feel they are equal; it is a matter of dignity and of solidarity. The lack of solidarity always stems from assuming that we are different.200 The absence of solidarity is always the outcome of a but: ‘Yes, true, Paul is in pain, and so am I. However, my suffering is something more ... my soul is something else ...’ and so on. We must get rid of the but. We should be able to say: ‘This person is going through what I would feel in the same circumstances.’201 * It has been noted that the only decent film dialogues in Italy are in dialect.202 This is because dialect is closer to reality. In literary and spoken Italian, syntactical constructions, and even the words themselves, always sound somewhat artificial.203 In my case, when I have to write a dialogue, I think it through in dialect first, either Roman dialect or the dialect of my home town. I feel that I can be more succinct and more genuine. Only then do I translate it into Italian, while retaining the syntactical structure of dialect.204 This is not to say205 that I write dialogues in dialect. What I find interesting are the shared

line spaces in dss2005 are closer to the typescript witnesses than N79. It is very likely that the spaces indicate, as above, two more separate sessions on separate topics and, lacking the dates for earlier sections, have been reinstated as in dss2005. 199 Inexplicably omitted in Lanza53. ‘Questo è già il gran fatto nuovo’. dss2005, N79 and 2aic1952, fol. 37. There seems no reason to have deleted this sentence, given its programmatic value. 200 Omitted from Lanza53. 201 Lanza53: ‘what I myself should bear.’ dss2005, N79 and 2aic1952, fols 38–9: ‘quello che patirei io’. ‘should’ signals a moral obligation lacking from the conditional ‘patirei’ (‘I would’). 202 Lanza53: ‘13’. dss2005, line space, N79: no line space. Lanza53: ‘the best dialogue in films is always’. dss2005 and N79: ‘gli unici dialoghi cinematografici di una certa validità.’ 203 Lanza53: ‘synthetic constructions’. An error for linguistic constructions and syntax: dss2005, N79: ‘giro sintattico’. 204 Lanza53: ‘thus maintaining’, dss2005 and N79: ‘conservando però’. però (‘however, but’) signals an adversative, not an explicative, clause. The Lanza53 version doesn’t make sense. 205 Lanza53 repeats the same error as immediately above: ‘I don’t therefore’, where an adversative clause is at least suggested, but there is no sign of an explicative. dss2005 and N79: ‘Questo non significa’ (‘This doesn’t mean that’).

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characteristics of dialects: their immediacy, their vitality, their authenticity, and their expressiveness.206 The point is, that most of my raw material comes from the real world. Because Neo-realism excludes invented characters, which obviously require that you devise in advance the mechanical structure the dialogue is going to have, I go out into the street to pick up phrases, a word here and a word there, and conversations too. Memory and a shorthand writer are my chief aids.207 Then I do with words what I do with images: select and edit the raw material which I have gleaned, to give it the appropriate rhythm and get to its nub and truth. No matter how much confidence I may have in solitary imagination, I have more confidence in the real world and in people, for what interests me is the drama of what you encounter face to face, not of preconceived ideas. You can make poetry out of reality itself; in other words, to exercise your poetic skills in the here and now, what you need to do is get out and meet other people in the flesh, engage with them and understand them. This really is an ethical imperative, as far as I am concerned and, if I don’t respect it, I do so at my peril. I know full well that it is quite possible to create wonderful films, such as those by Charlie Chaplin, which, I accept, are not Neo-realist. I know perfectly well that there are American, Russian, and French directors, and many more besides, who have made masterpieces that are a tribute to humanity. And no, no, of course they haven’t wasted any celluloid. And, moreover, who knows what other masterful works they are going to give us in the future, in keeping with their genius, and with how they use actors, film studios, and literature? However, when it comes to Italian filmmakers, in my opinion, if they wish to maintain their film style and subject matter, and go on to develop them further, after bravely half-opening the door to reality, they should now open it wide, in the sense that I have explained.208

Lanza53: ‘verisimilitude’. dss2005 and N79: ‘icasticità’. It comes from the ancient Greek: eikastiké (téchne) the art of representation through figuration or images (from Byzantine Greek: eikóna, ‘image’). In context, Zavattini is pointing out the dual nature of Italian and the two linguistic registers, one formal, the other colloquial. The point he is making is that educated Italian, or the Florentine normative language used in places of work, public office, school and so on, is one step removed from reality; mediated, unspontaneous, to the point of being artificial language. Whereas dialect is not. Therefore, he is not suggesting to endorse dialect as a form of regional patriotism, but as the most authentic and expressive spoken form of communication in Italy. These views were shared by Pasolini, Carlo Emilio Gadda and other Italian prose writers and poets, who were writing in dialect after the war, for precisely the qualities Zavattini points out in this text. 207 Sentence omitted altogether in Lanza53: ‘Because ... is going to take’. dss2005 and N79: ‘Poiché il neo-realismo esclude i personaggi costruiti per i quali evidentemente bisogna preparare prima il meccanismo delle battute.’ Once again, Lanza deletes the argument supporting Zavattini’s statement, with an obvious loss of sense. 208 Overbey78: ‘Of course ... even more.’ 206

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‘What Is a Flash Film’ (1952)1

Context The two texts that follow, ‘What Is a Flash Film’ and ‘Flash Film: A Development of Neo-realism’, theorize what Zavattini refers to as a ‘flash film’ in the previous text. The idea behind the title is the proposal to make a different kind of cinema, one running counter to its normative mainstream function, generally considered, then as now, the exclusive vehicle, the be all and end all for fiction films. His counter-cinema is intended as ethical cinema, born of the need to address societal issues to generate in the audience a social awareness, reflection, a sense of citizenship and social responsibility. The already mentioned example, Caterina Rigoglioso, the real-life individual who scandalized the media in 1952, was to act herself in a medium-length or short film, which is explained and discussed in greater detail in the second article, entitled ‘Flash Film: A Development of Neo-realism’. A crucial aspect of this different idea of cinema concerns the means and relations of production, since Zavattini proposed flash films as the outcome of a small budget and a short production cycle, using handheld cameras which offer filmmakers the possibility to retain their independence, by circumventing the laws of Capital, in, essentially, a form of guerrilla filmmaking, which Zavattini went on to theorize, and put in practice, in the Italian Free Newsreels of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He also addresses the question of being versus acting and viewing. Why should viewers identify with an invented character, when they can empathize with a real one? He argues in favour of real people acting themselves, on the grounds that what is unique to them is also what makes them interesting to a viewing public. The cinema has always turned real people into analogies of themselves, by creating fictional characters who only appear to be real. From the viewers’ perspective, watching mainstream films and being moved by makebelieve characters in a parallel universe is tantamount to agreeing to become a willing participant in cinema’s involution. Making is a question of ethical responsibility, but so is viewing. The viewer too is held responsible. Conversely, 1

‘Che cos’è il film-lampo’, Premio letterario 1952, Viareggio, then in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 86–8.

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he argues that if ordinary people agree to take part in a non-fiction film about everyday life, they are making a gesture which has connotations in the order of the sacred, for expressing, in his view, an extreme form of generosity towards others. Far from producing arguments to claim a spot in the film industry for a niche type of cinema of his choice, Zavattini makes a case for sidelining mainstream fiction-based cinema, and replacing its hegemonic position with non-fiction. (At the time, it was customary for newcomers to the Italian film industry to develop their skills making documentaries, generally rated a minor form of moving image, hardly perceived as cinema at all.) By filming an event, cinema can add meaning to it. Filming, in his view, is an innately reflective practice. Through selection and framing events, the filmmaker and the viewer are encouraged to consider events more attentively, and, by so doing, rescuing them from ephemerality, from the continuous flow of everyday life, thus reaching a higher plane of viewing, bordering on contemplation, as if, by filming an event, the original were transformed into a painted portrait, one in which the everyday is stilled on a screen for reflection. Since Italian mainstream cinema was and still is to this day, fiction-based and, generally speaking, the documentary, not to mention the short film, is considered a minor art form, Zavattini’s proposal at the time came across in its context as extreme, reflecting an overarching engagement with the nature of cinema itself on a plane that transcends individual films. Yet he had in mind film shorts addressing specific issues of all kinds, provided they were part of contemporary life. Not everyone disagreed with Zavattini. Budding filmmakers, such as Ermanno Olmi, the Taviani Brothers, Brunello Rondi and Vittorio De Seta, found in these writings a justification to pursue new avenues. Brunello Rondi, the author of a book on Neo-realism and one on film philosophy, and became Fedrico Fellini’s screenwriter, after working for Rossellini, tribute Zavattini as ‘The most effective architect of “cinematic time” which coincides with existing durational time, and for us, with the love and rediscovery of life and concrete human beings’.2 Brunello Rondi was the only Italian film critic and theorist in the 1950s to take on Zavattini’s ideas, which Rondi frames in the context of philosophical phenomenology, of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a connection previously made by the French film critic André Bazin in French articles and, earlier still by, the French philosopher Amédée Ayfré, who published articles foregrounding Italian film phenomenology in articles translated into Italian, the first being ‘Cinema e realtà’, in the prestigious Bianco e Nero (1952).

2

Brunello Rondi, Il neorealismo italiano, Parma: Guanda, 77 and B. Rondi, Cinema e realtà, Rome: Edizioni Cinque Lune, 1957. For an exhaustive discussion, cf. David Brancaleone, Cesare Zavattini’s Neo-realism and the Afterlife of an Idea. An Intellectual Biography, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

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Text In the last few years, I keep saying to myself or to interviewers that we should scrap the script and invented stories. Let’s make an effort, instead, to relate to what takes place all around us, and do so using cinema, a medium predestined for this particular kind of narrative. Just to give you one example, why should we shed tears over Antonia Marianni, a fictive character, when only a few metres away there from us we find, say, Carlo, Caterina Rigoglioso’s son, who is demanding that we take care of him? You have all read about the not-sounusual events surrounding this person, Caterina Rigoglioso, a mother who had second thoughts, a mother considered a perverted mother by some, but who is essentially a poor girl, who was seduced and abandoned at eighteen. One day, after several blunders – she committed the worst of blunders – she abandoned her son in a field, but the very next morning she rushed to the Instituto Maraini where Carlo was taken and told them: ‘Give me back my son.’ Cinema can do so many other things, I know, and has produced some amazing results, but it seems to me, to reiterate, that its specific function is to concern itself with what actually happens, in that only cinema can express the significance or the warning, of any event whatsoever, no matter how tiny or large, through a reconstruction, or better still, by filming it, at the very time it is taking place. This is a revelation of our exact place in society, through a visual encounter between us and the people and the things surrounding us, offering us a visible comparison between our actions and those of others. The cinema says that none of these people who appear on the screen are imaginary people. Neither the man in search of a job, nor that line over there of pregnant women strolling as slowly as a camel within the courtyard of the institution for single mothers, and not even this office worker who is going to buy a pair of shoes and lingers in front of three or four shop windows, to compare the shoes and the prices. Oh no, they all have real names and surnames. If we limited ourselves to taking an interest in them only as potential analogies, we would be actively contributing to that process of involution the cinema is heading for, on the pretext of spectacle. In short, the awareness of the world around us that is growing, or should be growing, more and more, at least since the experience of the war, demands from us an immediate and direct examination of the real. Hiding behind the argument that there is no single reality is hardly convincing. Reality is there before us, to put it somewhat bluntly, there is no escaping that, if someone is hungry, that person is hungry in reality, that this is the reality. Where does art fit in to this argument? I have no idea. I do know that I would be happy, if we were often required to contribute to the reconstruction of one of the many events in which we are involved every day, in small or large measure. To put it differently, I wish we would not object, if a person who is always watching out for events asked us to participate in filming one. There is something sacred about such a contribution freely given by all, for the purpose

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of getting a greater understanding, of conveying the meaning of the geography of a gesture and therefore unlocking – even in this way – the sense of our usual, everyday life. This is what the flash film is. It is a film made over a couple of weeks, for these reasons, even using an unskilled cameraman. It is a film that is shot on a tiny budget so that it can be independent and escape the laws of Capital, which make cinema deviate from its mission. It is a film that relies on people who are willing to interpret their own lived experience on the screen, or an experience they are about to have. A flash film, then, attempts to break through the formal impediments of cinema, because it doesn’t need large film crews and many cameras which are the norm for making a film, but responds to the need to direct our attention towards the people around us, and do so quickly, faster than a book, than a painting, than music. And what are its themes? There is no hierarchy of themes as such. Only yesterday, a woman was about to jump out of a window of the Rome law courts, out of sheer desperation. Her husband had just been sentenced to eleven months; she is pregnant; she has a two and a half-year-old girl and her savings, all told, amount to only a few hundred liras. As you might imagine, the press has barely reported the story. Someone should have rushed to meet that woman, to make a flash film about her, her children, the place where she lives and, with her help, reconstruct that hour before her tragic decision, or follow her with the cine-camera, that is to say, shadow the woman, during any time of her day. Someone ought to film whom she spoke to, get her words, get other people’s words, get her and the others, her and the others, her and the others. And then go ahead and release it immediately – as if it were a newsreel – even if the film is not perfect. Anyway, what does ‘poorly made’ actually mean? Unleash hundreds of young filmmakers and their eyes, and they will bring home some celluloid with art in it, which is anxiously sought after by so many. Some people are horrified at the very suggestion that we make the woman repeat her suicidal gesture. I would have it repeated, that gesture, even in slow motion. I would have it scrutinized with all the means at the cinema’s disposal. I may be mistaken, but I think that the problem today is not being shocked, when you make the mother repeat her gesture, but being shocked during those numerous moments of our everyday existence which the cinema should help us get to know and which often, or maybe always, lead to events like the one that happened to the mother at the law courts. These are the young filmmakers who will be the ones to make a new type of newsreel, the new Giornale Luce. Bruno Chiari, while he is having dinner with his family; Giulio Banfi who is buying himself a new suit; an argument between Paolo Rieti and Mario Antonioni in a court of law for an eviction. Is that all? No, there are no limits. We could even include a crime, if you are not too frightened. The culprit’s sentence could be reduced, in exchange of his willingness to ‘reconstruct’ his crime, in front of a cine-camera.

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Flash Film ‘A Development of Neo-realism’ (1952)1

Context The last session of Zavattini’s interviews with Michele Gandin, later published the same year as ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’, took place on 10 May 1952. Very soon, in June, Zavattini picked up on one of the themes discussed in ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’, namely the gap between a film’s conception and its production. The problem was that it could take years for an idea to become a film. Leaving aside other obstacles, the production process was, he thought, excessively long. Cinema and reality were out of synch which is why he thought there was a need for cinema to keep up with reality and get over its technical limitations, by adopting a compressed production cycle, allowing the content to dictate terms, arguing that it was crucial when it concerned a real-life event, to be re-enacted by its participants, ideally, as soon after the event as possible. This is how cinema could historicize the present, by freezing the ephemeral flow of the everyday, reviewed, literally, and metaphorically, in the cinematic process, and developing the chronicle of a short-lived event into a historic event. Therefore, closing the gap between news story and cinematic event, based on the news story, was key. Flash films would overcome the usual lengthy delays, between making and screening, between seeing the event and screening its reconstruction. Another major advantage over mainstream cinema: coming face to face with the real would involve a greater awareness of self for the filmmaker and the social actors involved, leading to a perception of self as social being, as citizen with the potential of agency, of becoming an agent for change. The second part of the article develops what is only briefly mentioned in the earlier ‘What Is a Flash Film’, the previous text earlier, in which the flash film

1

‘Film-lampo: sviluppo del Neo-realismo’, 26 June 1952, was published in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 89–91. The editor, Mino Argentieri, based his published text on the typescript copy in the Zavattini Archive, which was stored in Zavattini’s home at the time. Argentieri, on Zavattini’s authority, stated that it was published earlier, but was unable to pinpoint in which journal it appeared.

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was tied down to a specific real event, one which had scandalized public opinion only a few months earlier (the case of Caterina Rigoglioso, who had abandoned her small child and later regretted her decision). Zavattini and another filmmaker attended Rigoglioso’s trial in 1952, with a view to making a flash film. The previous month, in the interview with Gandin of 3 May 1952, Zavattini recalled his first attempt at getting funding for this flash film about the single mother. The producer’s objection to the project was not the story itself, but that, in his view, the real mother was unsuitable for the cinema. Zavattini’s response was the merit of innovation: for once character and person would coincide, surely that was a decisive factor that would clinch the argument. Zavattini refused to give up. He defended the flash film idea and this specific project, most probably as a means to find a new producer willing to fund the film. He succeeded, by getting directly involved in its production. It took longer to make than he had anticipated and wanted. Be that as it may, the short episode became The Story of Catherine, a medium-length reconstruction of the reallife event, acted by Caterina and other ordinary people, produced by Zavattini himself, alongside Riccardo Ghione and Marco Ferreri.

Text This kind of film, that is to say, a film that reproduces a news story, where it actually happened and which is interpreted by the very same people who were its main protagonists, derives from an old wish of mine to use cinema to get to know what is going on around us, but to do so in a direct and immediate way, as opposed to the opposite, indirect and mediated approach of using invented narratives. I have always felt a certain aversion to being moved by fictional characters, when real people exist who call for our empathy more urgently and, consequently, request our solidarity. It seems to me that traditional narrative is always a route to an escape, when the contemporary endeavour to which we are called is not to escape. I think reality, shown in its authentic aspects, the ones which tangibly occur all around us, and which, taken as a whole, form society, possesses such conviction, is so captivating, so expressive, that we have yet to tap into it, and indeed, we have put off engaging in it for far too long. Why? Because of an aesthetic that posited that only an invented event was worthy of art. Yet this form of cinema leads to a better understanding of reality, as I have defined it earlier. It is conducive to an awareness of ourselves and of our place and that of others within the class structure. It is the answer to the public’s deepest felt, not to say natural, curiosity, to ascertain the precise nature of an event: ‘Is this where he fell? Or was it over there?’ Being able to specify an actual location, for example, means increasing the sense of belonging, of empathy with all that this entails. So it follows that we should strive to reflect on our actions and to see them for what they are, discovering, in doing so, that they are

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collective and, I should add, we should seek to repeat and reconstruct on the big screen those actions which belong to the collective. All those who have, to some extent, felt empathy for the story of Caterina Rigoglioso and have agreed to repeat it on the screen, by acting their role in the events, acknowledge what I would call its sacred dimension.2 Caterina Rigoglioso will also be required to participate in the reconstruction of an event in which she is not the sole protagonist, but will be one of the protagonists, or might even be given only a walk-on role. Reconstruction, or repetition, is a ritual of sorts, as well as being a scientific endeavour. It smashes the kind of shame that inevitably marks a separation from the collective; in other words, the shame that is defensive in the extreme, with regard to personal experience. How you develop an awareness of the collective destiny of each of our actions is through their ‘publication’.3 Even the concept of protagonist should be challenged, since it should be made clear that protagonists are the many people involved, in so far as they are all players, all determining factors of an event, including very marginal characters, even extras. They all share responsibility and are, therefore, just as important as the main characters. And I believe this is self-evident, just as intuitive ethics dictate that events should be reproduced as accurately as possible, allowing for the fact that it is the artist who selects which ones to film. This notwithstanding, what matters is that they should be inspired by reality, by the most that can possibly be achieved in terms of objective truth. What is at stake, then, is a genuine invitation to take a look at ourselves and to consider, equipped with more of a social spirit, the events that take place all around us, armed with the ongoing intention of re-enacting them, as if we felt remorse for not having understood at the outset their underlying significance and social correlations. All those willing to participate in films of this nature are taking time out from their regular job so that they can contribute to this kind of ritual and can cooperate in bringing out a truth, through their unassuming physical presence. They are no longer actors as such; the theatrical actor, in this type of cinema, is finished. This is something that can become a normal part of a person’s job, a person who says openly: I have access to cinema, a means that enables me to get a better understanding of how things are, and I use it with discrimination, ready to respond to any stimulus, for it is a question of being able to grasp a moment that sheds light on the meaning of our presence in the world and more specifically in ‘religiosità’. Clearly, given the context and the story, and given that Zavattini was an atheist, he is not referring to Catholic religion itself, but to a sacred or spiritual dimension, as perceived by him. 3 Zavattini thinks in terms of personal and collective, a dichotomy that he suggests should be broken. ‘Publication’ objectivizes subjective experience, by bringing it into the social sphere. There is, possibly, also the influence of his undergraduate years of legal studies and the value given to recording, documenting and communicating events. 2

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the everyday event, in the flow of life, through a gesture, an action, a word, within the repeated scene.

At the outset, I picked the kind of event that occurred in the life of Caterina Rigoglioso. However, based on what I stated earlier, it is no different from any other event. Clearly, there is no hierarchy as to what can or cannot be filmed. Any social fact is worthy of reconstruction, and worthy of this collective and creative task. This is where you find the words that only cinema can provide in such a complete way, because it is the one least prone to imprecision and non-objectivity, which, conversely, radio can provide only in a limited way, and which television should be able to give to a greater extent than cinema. This principle is not exclusively valid for the reconstruction of social facts, that is to say, situations which have already taken place – I wish I could express myself better – it also applies to events that are currently taking place, because what counts is not the reconstruction in itself – even though the very effort invested in making a reconstruction is conducive to an incessant discovery of the essence of things – but being able to view the repeated event on the large screen.

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Enzo Muzii attacks Zavattini ‘Adult Realism’ (1953)1

Context In July 1953, Enzo Muzii published a critical article about realism, joining the current debate launched by Guido Aristarco’s film journal Cinema Nuovo. It was to gather momentum the following year, when Visconti’s Senso and Piero Nelli’s La pattuglia sperduta, both nineteenth-century historic dramas, already in production at the time of writing, due to be released in 1954, were upheld by orthodox communists such as Guido Aristarco, and other party critics, as the promising new model for a development of Neo-realism into a mature, historic, realism.2 This article ‘Realismo adulto’ (‘Adult realism’) is included because it frames the debate, and traces it back to when Muzii took their side in this budding polemic, arguing that realism should not be equated with Zavattini’s ideas, and be reduced to what Muzii considered Zavattini’s formula of dialect-based populism and petty chronicle of the everyday. It should, rather, embrace as a viable cinematic model, the nineteenth-century Italian historic novel, and set future realist films in history, and specifically, at the time of the country’s Risorgimento, Italy’s nineteenth-century struggle for national independence. Then, Zavattini and Muzii discussed Muzii’s article and the screenwriter was able to put across his vision. Muzii then published a separate piece in the November issue of Emilia, which reads like an apology for his attack on Zavattini. It also serves as an Introduction to Zavattini’s programmatic text, ‘Theses on Neo-realism’. Muzii’s polemical article provides a context (and doubtless a useful focus) for Zavattini’s text, which, in the November issue of Emilia, appeared immediately after Muzii’s Introduction.

1 2

Enzo Muzii, ‘Realismo adulto’, Emilia, July 1953. ‘Il realismo italiano nel cinema e nella letteratura’, cited by Argentieri, Neorealismo ecc., 119.

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Text 1 In my view, what is at stake is that realism cannot be reduced to a formula. For realism issues from an artist’s attitude towards reality. It should not and must not follow a predetermined theme and content. To be clear, our cinematic realism should not be limited to a sort of dialect-based populism, nor descend to the level of film notes, relating to pure and simple ephemeral chronicle, as Zavattini would have it. Today, there are historic makings, thanks to the growth of the public sphere in Italy, of a mature form of cinematic realism, able to tackle issues pertaining to narrative, along the lines of the historic nineteenth-century novel, which has the potential of encompassing the entire Italian social reality in its complex interplay between past and present, in its social dialectics, in the wealth of popular sentiment of the Italian people, taken both in the sense of separate individuals and of society as a whole. Past and present. The way forward for realism is to leave behind its ‘objectivity’ – that is, its documentary side, which, at worst, descends into nothing better than a sketchy rendering of reality3 – to become critical and capable of addressing its analysis in order to represent society as a whole from a critical standpoint, at a national scale, combining into one themes relating both to tradition and to the contemporary moment. Not a thesis-based narrative, expounding a theory, but a narrative in which the conflict of feelings and of psychology – such words as these ought not alarm us – should find a dialectical counterpart in the struggles, the passions and forward-looking intellectual debates of our time. And now the historic film appears on the horizon of realism. It can be no coincidence that only in the past few days, the first samples of solid social commitment, set during the years of the Risorgimento, are being created. This is the time for an urgent demand on realism not to limit itself to a partial representation of our society, in which the worker, the farm hand, the office clerk, the ‘tramp’, the intellectual and the member of the middle class are not seen in isolation, as characters, but in their mutual conditioning, under the vibrant sky of their everyday life. And now is the time for a film about a pressing theme, the Italian middle class, which includes, yes, indeed, individuals such as Dado Ruspoli, but it is also the middle class, as anonymous as it is real, in its prejudices and its fanaticism over good and evil.4

The term bozzettistico also contained negative connotations of shallowness and of a limited vision, a word borrowed from the lexical field of Italian art history: Dutch or Italian genre painting, featuring a kind of deceptive realism of details – and applied earlier, in this specific sense, by Italian film critics. 4 Dado Ruspoli: the reference is to a member of Italian aristocracy, 1950s playboy Alessandro ‘Dado’, Prince Ruspoli (9 December 1924–11 January 2005). 3

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2 Cesare Zavattini has polemicized with my article ‘Adult realism’ which, apart from the content, was undoubtedly too rushed. He has done so with the kind of measured approach and praxis which is nowhere to be found in these turbulent times. Our polemic took the form of an honest and passionate conversation in which Zavattini expressed the general outline of his conception of cinema. I could call the notes based on that conversation Theses on Neo-realism,5 which, by mutual agreement with Zavattini, seem suitable for publication. However, the reader should bear in mind that the text is not based on shorthand and that, among other things, it puts across the passionate pace of the discussion in dialogue form and I think that’s a good thing. When you assemble these theories with those published by [Michele] Gandin, following a similar discussion with Zavattini in the Rivista del Cinema Italiano, and Zavattini’s statements in ‘Zavattini, from Literature to the Cinema’, which was broadcast on the wireless, as well as the conversations between the greatly missed Agostino Degli Espinosa and Zavattini for Paese Sera, what emerges is the kind of critical mapping which could enable an in-depth debate. I would like to avoid any kind of narrow personal polemic, preferring instead to include in this discussion, directors, screenwriters and writers, so that Italian cinema – I am referring to that part of it which has an ethical commitment – can gain greater clarity. Zavattini’s Theses offer the broadest, richest, human and critical insights we could wish for, as a point of departure for such a discussion.

5

In Italian, tesi can refer to the singular or plural. But internal evidence shows that Muzii is using the plural.

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‘Theses on Neo-realism’ (1953)1

Context In his introduction to ‘Theses on Neo-realism’, Muzii reflected further about the question of realism, in the light of his exchanges with Zavattini. Muzii now suggested that the text he titles ‘Theses on Neo-realism’ could foster a debate among Italian filmmakers, functioning as a position paper, which is exactly how it reads. Indeed, ‘Theses on Neo-realism’ is a bold statement, a rallying cry in defence of Neo-realism, and a call for unity among Italian filmmakers, in what was, for Zavattini, a crucial period of experimentation and development. ‘Theses on Neo-realism’ draws a distinction between historic Neo-realism and Neo-realism understood as a banner for a movement, active in a collective struggle for socially engaged cinema, and, by doing so, rescuing Neo-realism from the contingencies of the immediate post-war period. The theorist claims not only that it expressed ‘a new attitude towards reality’, but also that it is a needs-based cinema. Its publication was very timely: only a month before an important conference on Neo-realism which Zavattini was involved in organizing and at a time when he had taken his ideas and applied them to two projects which made it into production and release, in both cases, the ‘flash film’ about Caterina Rigoglioso, the single mother, which became an episode of Love in the City, and We Women, also non-fiction, and revolving around the idea of developing the personal camera or what Zavattini referred to as the ‘diary film’, or even the ‘confession film’. Zavattini’s response is a robust rebuttal, almost point by point, to Muzii’s initial polemic, which was part of a burgeoning attempt by Italian orthodox communists, which meant that they were Stalinists, at the time – Zavattini was a communist – but not a Stalinist or a card-carrying party member – to change the direction of committed Italian New Cinema. Since the second half of this text was translated into English by Overbey, it has been deemed necessary to include a critical apparatus, from that point on.

Zavattini, ‘Tesi sul neorealismo’, Emilia, no. 17, November 1953, in Neorealismo ecc., 114–19.

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Text Two preliminary observations:

1. Today, Neo-realism is our only flag. If we move away from the critical scope of this term, we risk a communication breakdown among us. Neo-realism is the foundation of the single, vital, movement that exists in Italian cinema. Therefore, any serious and thorough discussion should take place within Neo-realism itself. There can be many approaches inside Neo-realism, but unity is the outcome of a common front of struggle and inspiration and social awareness. 2. Neo-realism is not a historical movement – in the sense that it draws on grand ideals rooted in Italian nationhood – it emerged from a new attitude towards reality. Therefore, it would be erroneous to believe that the existence of a movement of this nature is to be identified with a transient episode of social upheaval which characterized the post-war period. It would be wrong to dispense with it with a few words: ‘We’ve had enough of Neo-realism; the situation in Italy has gone back to normal.’ It was precisely as a result of the reflections induced by the war that we made the discovery that, on the contrary, life has not gone back to normal and that the rule of our society cannot be normal2 life – but what would be considered the exception: from extreme poverty to injustice in their manifestations, blatant or yet to be exposed. It follows that we should seek to establish precisely where Neo-realism stands in respect of the discovery of current affairs. Previously, the cinema was based on the scenario which issued from the imagination and was entirely oblivious of events that were not inspired by a novel. As far as the cinema was concerned, only major events existed. But the war led us to discover the ongoing values of everyday life. ‘This is the reality of war’, we said, when we came into contact with the realities of devastation, and became pacifists in our outlook. The first Neo-realist films opened up a problematic which dealt with largescale human issues, films that would never have been made, had it not been for the relation between time-based, contingent facts (historical, social or political) and the interest in timelessness which had matured in us.3 The connection with the best of historical tradition – the Risorgimento element of our outlook – reflected our The italics in this text are Zavattini’s emphasis, unsurprising in the context of a polemic and a programmatic rebuttal. 3 Zavattini is drawing the distinction between the particular and the general, pointing out that the general, universal, overarching themes were tackled by Neo-realism through contingent events, thus dispelling the myth of Neo-realism equating with an anecdotal kind of cinema, dwelling in detail, for the sake of detail alone; the driving force being adopting an ethical stance towards reality, stretching to a political outlook, in the broad sense of turning public attention towards the social sphere. 2

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entirely human and antirhetorical concern, determinedly and polemically pitted against the hypocrisy and tyranny of fascism. The other connection was due to the contact between Neo-realism and the reality it had discovered – especially hunger, extreme poverty and exploitation by the rich. As a consequence, it was naturally socialist. (I really cannot take seriously those who are reactionary and Neo-realist. For they forget that Neo-realism coincides with the population’s extreme needs.) I am certainly in no position to say how it will develop, because I can’t know how our society is going to develop. However, Neo-realism will continue to narrate these developments ceaselessly, because Neo-realism is as attached to the present as sweat is connected with the skin. It never delays becoming acquainted with a contemporary event and this, I believe, is its ethics and its style. Let’s be clear about this. Neo-realism cannot proceed from predetermined content, but rather is dictated by an ethical stance: getting to know one’s times with the aid of specific cinematic means. Our shared preoccupation is seeking to know what is going on around us. It is far from a banality to say that, for many, the truth is of no concern or, at least, that they have no interest in making it known. For coming to know translates into taking steps.4 This is why the Right, to a greater or lesser extent, obstructs any intelligence of the masses’ vitally important problems. For how many years has the problem of the Granili in Naples been put off?5 It’s just an example. The point of contact between the Left and Christianity is not hope but the urgency, emergency and responsibility which are ignored by every single procrastination, as in the case of the Granili, in which the process of coming to know knows no boundaries. I can agree to be shown how to make banderillas, provided the whole manufacturing process is explained to me, including the human and social relations it involves. This is the only way for an investigative approach not to turn into something monotonous. In connection with such a research-based method, I am surprised that I need to explain that it encompasses all creative potential. If, for example, a poet of the Decadentismo School is describing a bottle, most of the emphasis will be on the light reflections in the glass, at the expense of other elements which are significant, from a human and social point

Conoscere per provvedere. Field research as the first, vital stage towards change, placing an ethical onus on those who come to know. The reference is to the housing emergency in Naples in the 1950s, of which the ‘Granili’ was a prime example. The ‘III and IV Granili’ was a huge rat-infested, stinking, building – a former military barracks during the Bourbons’ rule, a hospital, an arsenal, hundreds of metres in length. After the Second World War, it became a refuge of sorts for displaced persons or evacuees. In the early 1950s, it was still populated by homeless dps, or ‘displaced persons’. Cf. Zavattini, Diario cinematografico, ‘19 November 1953’, Cinema Nuovo no. 24, 1 December 1953, then in Diario cinematografico, in Zavattini Opere. Cinema, 2002, 171– 80. Zavattini mentions the recently published book about Naples by Anna Maria Ortese, Il mare non bagna Napoli, Turin: Einaudi, 1953, in which a woman tells Ortese, who was visiting, ‘This is no home, madam, as you can see, this is where the oppressed live. Wherever you go, the walls wail’ (Questa non è una casa, signora, vedete, questo è un luogo di afflitti. Dove passate, i muri si lamentano).

4

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of view.6 So, to give you an example, a worker has no choice; he must blow glass day in day out, to make that bottle, and thousands of bottles like it, and, at forty years of age, his lungs will be shot, just to point out the most important fact. But knowing is not enough. Artists need to look at the real through cohabitation with it. The need for cohabitation may arise from ancestral experiences; yet, what matters most, for writers like us, who write scenarios and screenplays, and for directors, is to establish meaningful relations with other people, and with the real – so meaningful as to create new relations of artistic production, something which does not only have an impact on our art but also on our lives, to the point that it generates a deeper quality of shared living among people. Few have the patience to observe and to listen. Yet, all you need to change a relationship is a gesture or a word. I don’t like the man sitting opposite me in the, otherwise empty, compartment. Then he says: ‘Can I open the window?’ and everything changes. The fact is that the more you deepen your awareness of reality, the more you analyse people and situations, the more the relations of coexistence become apparent, and the more the focus of attention is the commonality of purpose. To put this differently, the work in hand serves to free ourselves from abstractions.7 In the novel,8 the protagonists were heroes; the hero’s shoe9 was no ordinary shoe. In stark contrast, we are trying to identify what our characters have in common. It takes the same human labour and the same materials to make my shoe, his shoe, the wealthy person’s and the worker’s shoe. (Neo-realism always constitutes a process of non-differentiation, seeking to make the association between common rights and fundamental needs.10 And, in this respect, it expresses a sentiment of love towards life. Moreover, it seems to me that its anti-war protest is deeper and more natural, less ‘political’, than that of the Germans, of the French, let alone of the British. Perhaps the Italian quality of Neo-realism lies in this.)11

The reference is to Decadentismo, the Italian expression of a European literary movement inspired by the French poet Paul Verlaine. The movement’s epigons in Italy were Giovanni Pascoli and Antonio Fogazzaro. 7 In this and many other passages, Zavattini reveals his materialist approach which is neither utopian nor idealist. 8 Zavattini, ‘A Thesis on Neo-realism’, translated by David Overbey, in Overbey, Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism, 70–1. Overbey78, 70: ‘a novel’. But Zavattini is referring to the novel in the sense of the Italian nineteenth-century literary form which Muzii, Aristarco and orthodox Stalinist-communists considered a model of cinematic practice. ‘A Thesis’. There is no foundation for the singular. It is a mistranslation, since the Italian refers to the theses, le tesi. 9 Overbey78, 70: ‘shoes’. The use of the singular in Italian is deliberate, as it becomes a symbol containing an allusion to storytelling. 10 Overbey78, 70 skips the next paragraph, the first part of which, about needs and common rights, is central to Zavattini’s argument, from: ‘Neo-realism always constitutes ... lies in this’. 11 Overbey translated about 360 words from Zavattini’s ‘Tesi sul neorealismo’, from: ‘We must extricate ourselves from abstractions ... as they exist today.’ Only errors or interpolations are listed below. 6

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Let us now turn to the modus operandi.12 How to express the specific nature of reality before us through cinema?13 Here too,14 I wish to restate that the content one seeks to express has a way of always discovering its own technique.15 Then we also need to consider the role of the imagination,16 provided it is applied to reality and not to somewhere in Limbo.17 Let me elaborate. I wouldn’t want to create the impression that, as far as I’m concerned, the only events which count are those covered by current affairs.18 I have endeavoured to fix my attention on these kinds of events too, with a view to reconstructing them as faithfully as possible, and using the imagination balanced with an extensive knowledge19 of the event in question. I think20 it would make even more sense21 to film them at the very moment they are taking place. This is what I would like to do with Italia mia.22 Let’s be clear once and for all. How can anyone possibly believe that I am talking in terms of mechanical photography?23 However astonishing this might sound, the fact is that it is impossible to capture reality automatically. If it were possible to do so, then mankind would be so full of grace that there would be no need for art any longer, since human beings would be entirely engrossed in their lives. Consequently, every single relation with the object one wishes to communicate implies a choice, which coincides with the subject’s creative

Overbey78, 70: ‘style’. But from what Zavattini goes on to say, style is interchangeable with technique. 13 Overbey78, 70: ‘this reality (truth)’. As in his translation of ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’, reality is systematically replaced with ‘truth’. However, in this instance, both are given. Once again, Zavattini, as a materialist, is not thinking of the general, but of the particular: ‘this’ specific, and tangible, reality, knowable through my five senses. 14 Overbey78, 70: ‘what I have often said’. But N79: ‘anche qui’ (‘here too’). 15 Overbey78, 70: ‘expression’. But N79: ‘tecnica’. 16 Overbey78, 70: ‘Imagination, therefore, is allowed’; N79: ‘c’è l’immaginazione’ (lit. ‘there is the imagination’). 17 Overbey78, 70: ‘on the periphery’. But ‘periphery’ is misleading for Zavattini’s choice of word, ‘Limbo’, which is the Christian no-man’s land where unbaptized babies were once believed to reside after death. Zavattini’s analogy refers to a timeless, spaceless, ultimately, abstract dimension. Whereas, the ‘periphery’ only changes the spatial location to somewhere distant. He could equally have said ‘outer space’, the meaning would have been the same. But the use of religious analogies (Christ, Limbo, the humble for the subaltern, etc.) is a deliberate ploy. Zavattini himself was an atheist. 18 Overbey78, 70: ‘news items’. 19 Overbey78, 70: ‘perfect understanding’. N79: ‘profonda conoscenza del fatto’ (‘in-depth knowledge of the event’. To call it a ‘perfect’ understanding is somewhat twisting the sense. Understanding, however ‘profound’, does not equate with ‘perfect’ understanding. 20 Overbey78, 70: ‘obviously’; N79: ‘credo’ (‘I believe’). 21 Overbey78, 70: ‘more coherent’. Calque for ‘consistent’. Consistent with the theory expounded, not coherent. N79: ‘coerenza sarebbe’ (lit. ‘the consistent thing to do’). 22 Overbey78, 70: ‘my film on Italy’; N79: ‘Italia mia’. Zavattini names the title of the proposed film. 23 Overbey78 omits this important distinction, dispelling the very idea that he believes the camera can capture reality automatically or purely mechanically. From ‘intendiamoci ... nella vita)’. It is also an unambiguous statement that distances Zavattini from notions of ‘naïve realism’, mistakenly attributed to him, and to Neo-realism, by generations of film historians. 12

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act.24 But in our case the intimate relation between subject and object is entirely consummated in filming in the street, instead of merely making contact there and then going on to film in the studio. This is what I call a cinema of encounter. Adopting such a working method should lead to two results.

1. From an ethical point of view, filmmakers would go outside, leaving the studio to get in touch with reality, dispensing with any mediation.25 Doubtless, there will be filmmakers who only go as far as the first, or the second, or even the third stage in this process. However, in putting this into practice, by being in the thick of life, filmmakers will be lying in wait for the golden stag, that is, for a social reality which can inspire their creativity. Each person will elaborate on reality in a unique way. But we can be certain of two things: that the search will take place outside the office and that we will have added an ethical constant to the camera eye.26 2. This is how a new production system can come into existence, breaking out of the boundaries of the existing moral matrix, bringing into existence a novel collective awareness.27 It is also a question of numbers. If we make one hundred films a year which are inspired by such criteria, we will change the relations of production.28 Whereas, if we only make three a year, we will continue to be subjected to existing relations of production. If I have been expressing these concepts in a vehement way – concepts express without the precision of a theorist, that is to say, of a systematic thinker, expressed as they are by someone who is doing his best to understand the root causes of what Italian filmmakers have done and what they are able to do – it

Overbey78: ‘it should never be forgotten’. N79: ‘:’. This makes no sense, replacing a colon (indicating explication), as it does. Overbey’s interpolation serves to make a link with the next concept. Overbey thus drops the premiss of the argument in this case. Yet this passage is important, for it conveys Zavattini’s realism which is both critical and participative. 25 Overbey78: omits the resto of point 1 and all of point 2. From N79: ‘Qualcuno si fermerà ... macchina da presa’ replacing all this text with: ‘Therefore’. But his previous sentence began with ‘first’. It doesn’t follow. 26 N79: ‘l’occhio della macchina da presa’ (lit.: ‘the camera’s eye’. A reference and response to Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Glaz or Camera-Eye. In the 1930s, he had seen Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Cf. Annette Michelson (ed.), Kino-Eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Berkeley, New York and London: University of California, 1984. Zavattini doesn’t develop the point. However, the argument for doing so is implicit, creating a distinction between Vertov’s City Symphony-type Man with a Movie Camera (1929), as opposed to an analytical ‘cinema of encounter’ which goes beyond the mechanical dimension of filmmaking, to establish relations between subject and object, empathy, cohabitation and a patience of getting to know the Other in a specific, concrete context of a real-world situation, whether directly witnessed or recreated. 27 Overbey78: ‘we will create a system of production which will bring with it the freshness of collective awareness.’ N79: ‘una produzione che esce dalla stessa matrice morale del nostro tempo, recando la novità di una coscienza collettiva.’ The ethics have been omitted, thus crippling the scope of Zavattini’s conclusion. 28 Overbey78: ‘conditions of production’. But N79: ‘rapporti di produzione’, a technical Marxist phrase, relating to the wielding of power and decision-making, as the whole second point makes very clear. 24

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is because I sometimes get the impression that the whole point of what Neorealism has taught us could be lost, to the extent that what I see as the prevailing influence is that of those who endeavoured to make Neo-realism appear like a mirage, or a dead body.29 We must recognize the fact that there have been many desertions, some taking place even now, and also that there has been a great deal of disorientation. This has led to films which don’t spring forth from consciousness, but from the wheeling and dealing of the film industry, which sometimes coincides with advantageous social contributions, whenever the industrial environment perceives ‘a tangible gain’, if you catch my drift. Those who plan ahead are few and far between. Yet anyone who is active in the film industry should follow a plan, not because I think that different people should act in the same way, but because I think it would give each artist the confidence in the critical awareness, in the decisive, and immediate, power of the cinematic medium. Paradoxically, you could say that any filmmaker who has a programme – a direction – already operates within a Neo-realist framework. Regrettably, even some of those directors to whom Italian cinema owes so much have, in light of their later development, allowed the suspicion to insinuate itself that they had been Neorealists without even realizing it beforehand – that is to say, that they had never consciously followed a plan of action. This is how they handed their enemies implicit proof to support their denigratory thesis; and namely, that Neo-realism only lasted the length of a morning, or even worse. Setting aside my polemical tone – at times a paradox can be more effective than subtle reasoning, as a tool to effect radical change – what I meant was that there is, and always was, only one alternative: either a new cinematography is going to develop out of Neo-realism, taken to its extreme consequences, or the other type of cinema will prevail, the one all of us are resisting, or that is, at least, what we say they are doing. Nor do I state this with only the artist’s best interests in mind. Together, we must prevent the public from growing accustomed to the cinema’s hypocrisy and from becoming socially ineffective.30 Fortunately, despite attempts to shelve it, Neo-realism has bequeathed on us a narrative technique which is implicit in the events that it brought onto the big screen. Indeed, Neo-realism has begun to bring to prominence the sort of heroes who used to be ignored or misrepresented. Ordinary people have been the protagonists of our best films, but nobody ever wondered why that was. It was simply generally taken for granted. But now we have been forced to compromise.

The references are to accusations of advocating a utopian cinema or statements relegating Neo-realism to the immediate post-war period. 30 Overbey78 omits the whole paragraph, N79: ‘Se ho affermato ... costretti al compromesso’. 29

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As to style in a strict sense of the word, it seems to me that analytical narrative is what typifies Neo-realism,31 in opposition to bourgeois synthesis.32 I am referring to an analytical practice in which the human factor is a constant feature (and feel free to draw your own conclusions). But no one can escape our current responsibility, or at least, it would prove increasingly hard to do so. Synthesis within bourgeois cinema was the tastiest morsel, the best cut of the steak.33 By this analogy, I meant to say that filmmakers selected the choicest aspects of life, the most representative aspects within a situation of privilege and well-being.34 It is also necessary to critically analyse the contribution35 of Neo-realism – and this is something that is just beginning – in truth, with the growing participation of Italian culture. Nor could it be otherwise, given the increasing involvement of professional authors within the film industry.36 As to the nature of this collaboration, writers should not limit themselves to supplying novels for the screen, but should contribute to the language of cinema, which is as full of potential as the language of literature. Their collaboration is bound to result in a vast improvement of the cinema, with the proviso that writers take less of a short-term approach37 than they tend to adopt.38 They should consider that

This is a rebuttal of the imputation of bozzettismo, sketchy, patronizing populism, levelled by Muzii whose accusation is contradicted by the analytical nature of Neo-realism, which is contingent. What Zavattini is stating is that synthesis, advocated by Muzii and the Italian Lukácsians, is, by comparison, bourgeois, not oppositional to the system. Overbey78: ‘this principle of analysis’. The interpolated ‘this’ refers not to the previous paragraph, as the reader might suppose, but artificially links the argument to a paragraph about critical analysis in ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’. Cf. Zavattini (Overbey), ‘A Thesis on Neo-realism’, Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism, 71. But Overbey then cuts the sentence immediately following, N79: ‘analiticità ... attuale responsabilità’. 32 The distinction drawn by Zavattini is between Neo-realism, understood as materialist critical realism, as opposed to bourgeois idealist realism. Emphasis in italics in Italian. 33 Overbey78 omits the middle of the sentence, N79: ‘il boccone migliore, il cuore del filetto’ (lit. ‘the tastiest mouthful, the best cut of the steak’). 34 Overbey78: ‘directors’, but N79: ‘cineasti’ means filmmakers. The Italian for director has always been ‘regista’. Zavattini is accusing the film industry, not just directors, thus screenwriters, directors and producers who form the film production cycle. 35 Overbey78: ‘the range’. ‘Range’ conveys a neutral value (Wide range? Narrow range?). Whereas, N79: ‘portata’ (li. ‘range’) signifies aesthetic importance, overall contribution (from a critical perspective). 36 Overbey78 misunderstands the whole sentence: Zavattini does not say: ‘To understand critically the range of Neo-realism, one must stress the role played by Italian culture.’ Rather, Zavattini is pointing out that, first, a critical evaluation of Neo-realism is necessary; second, that it is underway; third, that Italian culture is participating; and fourth, that it could not be otherwise, given the growing professionalization of screenwriting, with the influx and contribution of professional authors who work in both areas (the cinema industry, literature and journalism). 37 Overbey78: ‘tentative’; N79: ‘provvisorio’. Zavattini’s point is about contingency and short term. 38 Overbey78 omits N79: ‘Pensino che come ... sono vari’. Overbey’s omission cuts out the original context for the text which was primarily a direct and critical response to Enzo Muzii’s ‘Realismo adulto’. Zavattini goes on to discuss the nature of the next stage in the development of Neo-realism, reportage and the contemporary moment, effectively a proposal for mainstream documentary features and essay-based films. 31

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the word has no limits and that there are no limits to linguistic style. Equally, there are no limits to the cinematic image and its styles either. Lamentably, by the time the debate over Neo-realism will have come to full maturity in all its critical aspects, we will discover a chasm, an enormous valley of tears, between our theoretical frameworks and our production. If we reflect on our need for truth, on the urgency in us to see all the things which were never shown to us before, the cinema will appear to us as the fatal medium, providential as far as our urgent need for the contemporary39 is concerned. For the cinema is the only medium capable of grasping the object exactly how you wanted to, since the space between intuition and production40 is minimal. The cinema can convey the nuances of words in a more immediate and convincing way. Should there be a competition, timed to the second, the cinema would come first. However, the cinematic lens can do even more: when a person’s image is projected onto a screen before a public, it can reveal the scope of that person’s humanity far more than how it is expressed by the person in normal circumstances. And, if it is true to say that art consists in man’s efforts towards self-knowledge, then let us flood Italy with awareness films.41 I have reviewed the variety of approaches42 the Neo-realist front has adopted. You must not believe, Muzii, that I reject outright a cinematic novel in the sense that you have described in Emilia. My point is that while you regard it as the only43 form to which Neo-realism should aspire, I consider it one of the forms. The relation between the past and the present – in other words – the correlation with tradition, which you speak of, can indeed exist; rather, it should exist, even in its other configurations, such as the investigative film, in which reconstructions of contemporary events made with authentic characters, taken from real life, hinge on authors’ archaeological talent.44 However, even if we accepted your point of view without reservations, all the current expressions of Neo-realism cannot be considered other than an indispensable, preliminary basis – an experimental laboratory – for the subject matter that would find its application in a cinematic version of the novel you have proposed. Furthermore, it is worth adding that of course the results vary in quality. Some of my films fit into the Neo-realist order of being, others don’t. In this respect, you wish to know about Stazione Termini [1953] (Indiscretion N79: ‘attualità’. Emphasis in italics in Italian. N79: ‘realizzazione’; ‘il minimo’, emphasis in italics in Italian. 41 N79: ‘lotta per ... identificarsi’. ‘Self-knowledge’ in the sense of ‘individuation’, though Zavattini was not familiar with C. G Jung’s theories, thus ‘self-knowledge’. N79: ‘film di conoscenza’. By ‘conoscenza’ Zavattini does not mean a collection of facts, of information. The context is not knowledge in general, but cognition, apprehension, insight, awareness. There is a sense in which Zavattini’s call was answered independently twenty years later by Roberto Rossellini in films like Augustine of Hippo or Socrates. Rossellini attempted to impart knowledge, while remaining within the limits of traditional didactic documentaries. 42 N79: ‘modi’ emphasis in italics in Italian. 43 N79: ‘sola ... una’, emphasis in italics in Italian. 44 N79: ‘scavo’, lit. ‘excavation’, an archaeological metaphor, applied to current affairs and succinctly arguing that investigative filmmaking requires, of necessity, the filmmaker to deal with the past. Emphasis in italics in Italian. 39 40

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of an American Wife) and other recent works of mine. All I can say is that I don’t consider Stazione Termini, as far as my contribution as a film writer is concerned, a document belonging to my Neo-realist career, in so far as the Italian-American co-production significantly watered down45 whatever Neorealist seed46 it contained, namely the scrutiny of a very limited time frame and space. Umberto D47 does belong, but only partly, to the extent that it seeks to study a very modest contemporary character. My next film, Italia mia, is a closer approximation to the Neo-realist programme, as I see it. It arises from the need to get to know our nation and from the absolute faith that encounters worth narrating are going to happen (worthwhile opportunities will increase the more the quality of perception increases, at a national and an individual level).48 Luzzara-Venezia,49 the scenario [Luigi] Zampa is going to film on the Po river and which will be interpreted by my fellow villagers from Luzzara, falls within the Neo-realist order of things, but only as a point of departure I read it to his friends from Bologna, together with some other material. Aspects of Neo-realism can be discerned in the main concept behind Love in the City and the Caterina Rigoglioso episode, which was intended as a genuine investigative film. Equally, We Women, despite the gross oversimplification the project suffered during production, belongs to the same Neo-realist impulse, if only for its profound ethical core50 exhibited in the need for dialogue, stated by women who are also actresses and who place themselves in the hands of the spectators.51 Faced with these confessions, the audience should be in a position to become aware of its own inferiority complex in respect of the actor-myth.52

Overbey78: ‘reduced to practically nothing’. But N79: ‘ha molto annaquato’. Overbey78: ‘the basic and original inspiration’. But N79: ‘quel qualche germe neorealistico’. Overbey chooses to ignore the specific context of Neo-realism which the whole passage is about. 47 N79: ‘Umberto D ... di oggi’. Inexplicably, Overbey 78 also deletes this specific and very important reference. 48 N79: ‘la bontà delle occasioni ... nazionale e umana’. Last part of the sentence omitted in Overbey78. Overbey78 interpolates: ‘my need to know and understand my own country thoroughly, and my absolute confidence in the adventures and encounters I would meet’. Zavattini’s point, though, is far subtler; the filmmaker’s personal growth affects the ability to perceive, and is ongoing. This is the idea that the physical and geographical journey, right across the country, is also a personal journey of growth. An important point, surely, testifying to Zavattini’s reflective diary film poetic, at the core of Italia mia, such that personal diary and fact-based research are combined. 49 N79: ‘Luzzara-Venezia, il soggetto che Zampa ... nell’ordine neorealistico’ (‘Luzzara-Venezia ... other stuff’). Omitted by Overbey78. 50 N79: ‘un profondo senso morale’ is mistranslated by Overbey78 as ‘a certain moral idea’. 51 N79: ‘si consegnano nelle mani del pubblico.’ Overbey78: ‘which inspires actors and their confessions to the audience.’ This wrongly anticipates the ‘confessions’ of the following sentence. In this sentence, Zavattini conveys a sense of vulnerability shown by the actresses who are willing to show themselves for what they are as human beings. 52 N79: ‘il mito-attore’. Overbey78: ‘the mythic idea of the ‘star’. Zavattini would have used the word ‘star’, current usage in Italian at the time, had he wished to do so. 45 46

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On this point, it is worth saying that there is no room for the high priest-style actor in the struggle against spectacle and scenario make believe.53 As I have said before, an actor should be a real person, such as Tonio, the man who puts his job on hold, for the time being, in order to face the camera, before going back to work. However, for as long as the cinema costs millions, or rather, billions, these are pipe dreams. Yet let us not forget that this condition, of being partly, in the Neo-realist order in one respect, but not totally (is a natural outcome dictated by an inevitable logic) is the proof of the ambiguity of all our film production and indeed of our society too. You can see all these aspects in any one film: its courage, its cowardice, its social preoccupations, its censorship, its self-censorship, in brief, all its compromises. There has been much criticism of the type of film I have called investigative film. Someone said it was ‘monstrous’ to make Caterina Rigoglioso repeat her deed. Well, it is precisely this kind of resentful reaction, this accusation of monstrosity that reveals the fear of looking carefully at every aspect of the truth, and the tension in many people about making such disclosures, albeit with circumspection.54 In future, realism will find other forms, but in the meantime, its purpose is to know, even if this requires cruel methods, to enable society to take positive action. Let us put an unemployed person in front of the camera and then watch the public for five minutes, while it looks at that image projected onto the screen. This is not allowed. They shout: ‘Cut!’ to ensure that the images flow, that the general public’s knowledge remains superficial, and ensure that the truth is not investigated. I am suggesting an unemployed person, but I could be proposing anything which requires an urgent intervention and for which the duration of our attention is always less than the necessity to really get to know it. This is the reason why my ethical commitment is completely directed at actuality, even if I carry the past within me. For I believe that to make an activity effective, one needs to circumscribe it, just like a surgeon carrying out an operation. The fact that such a categorical imperative of the contemporary is not far-reaching damages the development of Neo-realism. I have been criticized on the grounds that my preoccupation with the particular is excessive and risks distorting reality. I would like to point out that my work is not motivated by a search for the particular, but rather by an intense polemic against the general, in the sense that it has been understood up until now.55 It could well be that this is because I have lived through an era – and take my share of responsibility as its accomplice – in which everything was dictated by autarchy. Consequently, nowadays, if I am to carry out my work, I need to be N79: ‘A questo proposito ... costantemente tutto’. Overby78 omits several paragraphs. The first sentence omitted follows on to explicate and theorize the Neo-realist critique of the actor-myth. Italics for emphasis in Italian. 54 This consideration should be read in light of 1950s mores and outlooks. 55 The statement clears up a recurring misunderstanding about Zavattini’s Neo-realist outlook and its materialist foundation, squarely anti-idealist, anti-Crocean. (Benedetto Croce [1866– 1952] was an Italian idealist philosopher.) 53

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attuned to the anti-hierarchy of situations and I refuse to see everything in terms of lighting effects. I look at small events and find everything in them. If I were to proceed by making broad generalizations, I would never become familiar with the lives of real people and with the deeper meaning of each of their actions. Let’s get to know ourselves in our everyday actions, for this is how we can contribute to the defence of humanity. Should my investigation, observation and analysis lead to nothing more than a sketch,56 then it means that I have been superficial, or that the act of making compromises – due to pressure from the producer and the public, or due to bad conscience or to financial circumstances – has prevailed. Everyday events appear small, if our vision is restricted. Just as a poet doesn’t wait for inspiration, Neo-realism doesn’t wait for deadlines; it shadows reality, which is everything all the time. I have been working in Italian cinema since 1934 and I know full well that I have contributed to breaking down some of its clichés.57 If I can count myself among the few who believe Neo-realism is the most powerful appeal58 which exists today to turn our attention towards the real world, it is certainly not for any lack of imagination. I have too much imagination, in the traditional sense of the word. On the contrary, for me it is a struggle not to be carried away by my imagination. The fact of the matter is that Neo-realism demands that we apply our imagination to the street and to the contemporary moment, to the reality we are striving to understand, because social facts reveal all their natural imaginative power, when they are subjected to a thorough scrutiny. Only then do they become spectacle, because only then do they become revelations.

This is the point at which Zavattini deals with Muzzii’s accusation of bozzettismo. N79: ‘schemi usati’, Overbey78: ‘usual and traditional schemes’. Zavattini is referring to clichés. 58 N79: ‘neorealismo come nel più potente richiamo alle cose.’ Overbey78 mistranslates as: ‘neo-realism is one of the most powerful forces to which we can address ourselves’. There are two errors: first, ‘one of’ is not the same as ‘the most’, introducing a distributive term, where there is, unequivocally, a superlative. Second, it is Neo-realism itself which Zavattini equates with ‘a call’ (‘un richiamo’) for a radical change, another ‘rottura’ or ‘break’ for Zavattini. This is what Michel Foucault would have described as an ‘epistemological break’ and Alfred Kuhn, before him, ‘a paradigm shift’. In stating that Neo-realism is one of the most powerful forces to which we can address ourselves, Overbey, not Zavattini, completely misreads a crucial passage and the closing reflection of the essay. 56 57

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The Story of Catherine in Zavattini’s diary (1952)1

Context The following selection of diary entries show how Zavattini combined research with his film writing, practising what he preached, meeting the social fact on its own terms, as it unfolded and then sought for ways to produce it on the big screen. The Caterina Rigoglioso episode of Love in the City was based on a high-profile news scandal. Zavattini’s research took him into the courtroom, where the fate of Caterina Rigoglioso, under prosecution for abandoning her child, was to be decided.

Text I was at the trial of Rigoglioso, Section ix, courtroom 9. (She is the girl who abandoned her two-year-old child outside a church, but the following morning she went to look for him, found him, and is now being prosecuted.) I got this idea of flash films yesterday (an old one, but reworked) – films that re-enact a news item with the people involved – the most real of the real world achievable. I go and copyright the idea. I’m happy. I’m about to suggest it by letter to Rossellini, I write the letter, then I am undecided between [Luciano] Emmer or [Antonio] Pietrangeli (whom I met in the Rome Court of Justice). I opt for [Francesco] Maselli, on the advice of [Luigi] Chiarini who suggests we produce it together – I agree, and put the full proposal to Maselli and [Gastone] Fernanti (the producer of the newsreel Mondo Libero) who are excited about it, in the

1

Diary entry first published in Paolo Nuzzi (ed.), Zavattini, Io. un’Autobiografia, 176. Mondo libero was a newsreel, directed by Arnaldo Genoino and produced between 1951 and 1959. Its aim was to make a new type of newsreel, based on ‘truth and research’, as Gastone Ferranti, the producer of Astra Cinematografica, is reported as saying in the newsreel’s first weekly edition on 6 December 1951. Cf. Istituto Luce archive, https​:/​/ww​​w​.arc​​hivio​​luce.​​com​ /m​​ondo-​​​liber​​o/.

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presence of Chiarini. I go on to explain my idea and also to outline the potential of a series of flash films and they totally get the point instantly. * 15 August 1952. A woman eight months’ pregnant and with a two-year-old child in her arms was on the point of throwing herself out of a window a few days ago, as soon as she heard that her husband had been sentenced to two years’ prison. What is more, she has no money. She lives in those lean-to shacks, by the walls of Porta Furba, on the way to Cinecittà, where I saw a man selling watermelons for 20 liras each. The woman lives in a bedroom a metre wide, one metre eighty high, and two metres long. A man saved her that time she attempted suicide. He came to see her and wanted to go to bed with her, she refused, and he said: ‘there’s gratitude for you.’ I would like to make a film (I mentioned it to [Luigi] Chiarini and [Francesco] Maselli) in which you witness her getting up, what she says to her two-yearold little boy, how she combs her hair, the first words she exchanges with her neighbours, what the neighbour replies, and so on, her eating, her working, her sleeping. One needs patience to observe her closely and recognize the moments when you might take her by surprise. It is so clear to me that to make such a film you need a new technique. I believe that it is only a matter of patience. Neorealism is the greatest test of patience the cinema can offer. It’s just not true; it has nothing to do with sadness or poverty at all costs and such lies.2 * Meeting at the Astra Cinematografica. They really understand what a ‘flash film’ is – and how making it soon, fast, economically, free from bureaucratic constraints, is the main condition, even from an ethical point of view, of a flash film. But they are afraid to make it, since Rigoglioso is not that pleasant a person and her screen test was no good; she doesn’t know how to move. I tell them, based on what inspires me, that, as far as I am concerned, she is suitable; I say to them that I place my full confidence in how the real is more moving, because Caterina who restages herself – though not as an actress would – is truer than an imagined social fact. The Fernantis of this world get the point that the film can be done in thirty days, on the run, but it is too late – they are thinking in terms of a normal film, with all the ‘normal’ criticisms and all the ‘normal’ doubts. They took fright at all the negative feedback, by the way. Of course, the ‘Rigoglioso’ news story is not the most suitable for a reconstruction, but what we need are others that lend themselves better to the flash-film format, more conducive to eliciting emotion and the immediate lessons which reconstructions provide.3 Zavattini, ‘Ferragosto 1952’, Cinema Nuovo, no. 2, 1 January 1953, in Zavattini, Diario cinematografico, 82. 3 Diary entry, Zavattini, Io. un’Autobiografia, 191–2. 2

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Caterina. 27 June 1953. After midnight we went to ‘shoot’ in Via Panama with Caterina Rigoglioso on the lawn where she spent the night of her regret in tears. [...] The crane dipped gently towards Caterina who was lying on the ground weeping, not so much to please the director, but because she really was feeling remorse at having to relive the scene of her error. She is the girl who abandoned the two-year-old child outside a church, but who went to look for him the next day, found him, was sent to trial, and is now reconstructing her own story, it really is her in person. A few days earlier, I witnessed the hatred when we were filming in a house in Via Trionfale, where Caterina climbs the stairs to ask a housemaid and friend about a job. While Caterina was talking to the maid on the landing, right in the middle of the scene, a grey-haired man comes up the stairs. Everyone was asking him to stop, but he carries on climbing over cables, electricians – marching he was. As he got very close to the set, I watched him grimace like a whingeing child. The others made a barrier of gestures, in silence, because we were also recording the sound. It was as if he was among the dumb. But the man didn’t respond. He bent his elbows and pushed through stepping loudly on the stairs. He ruined everything and everyone mumbled something back at him. He shouted: ‘This is my home!’ He was clinging to this right to private property, since cinema with its showy appearances made him stand out as having one foot in the grave.4 * [1956] There are very many films that only actors can make, but there are also some films which need to be made without actors. I never said actors have nothing in common with Neo-realism, but only that they have no truck with the kind of Neo-realism that I envisage. For example, in the film Love in the City a professional actress was not suitable for Rigoglioso’s role.5

Zavattini, ‘27 June 1953’; Straparole, Cinema Nuovo, no. 15, 15 July 1953, in Zavattini, Diario cinematografico, 106. 5 Zavattini, unspecified article, 1956, in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 108. 4

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Voice-over

Love in the City and an excerpt of dialogue (1953)

Context The non-fiction film Love in the City opens with a series of photographs accompanied by a voice-over which serves as an equivalent of an establishing shot, framing verbally the unity of the film. The opening titles are very elaborate in terms of graphics, constituting a mock-up of pages, an illustrated magazinestyle design layout, with text and photographs organized on a grid, suggesting a printed magazine cover and contents page. The opening commentary accompanies a long series of full-screen photographs, followed by a visual prologue of ten-second episodes or ‘moments’. The text confirms what the opening titles and episode dividers clearly show: that the organizing principle for the film, made of several episodes, each directed by a different filmmaker, is the illustrated magazine, a signifier pointing to a programmatic preference for investigative journalism, and for non-fiction breaking out of its minority niche in the cinema. It comes across like a Manifesto. The audience is told that ‘the characters in our magazine are not movie actors, but ordinary people living in the city’, after being shown the posters of Hollywood films and stars, criticized for their Hollywood-style ‘manicured love, revised, improved upon, and scripted, to make you shiver with well-calculated passion’. The film came out shortly before the seminal Conference on Neo-realism, held in Parma, a time of tense debate, when Neo-realism was embattled, facing challenges from different quarters: from the orthodox, party-line communists who wanted to take it in the direction of Soviet so-called ‘socialist’ realism; from the governmental agency responsible for censorship, the Direzione Centrale della Cinematografia, which had been pressurizing filmmakers ever since the Christian Democrats had taken full control over the agency in 1947. They sought to turn Italian filmmakers away from social issues altogether in several ways, by denying subsidies, by denying export visas to films for international

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film festivals, by intimidating filmmakers, by discouraging producers, and distributors, and attacking them in the Catholic Right-wing press. The pressure didn’t only come from the ecclesiastical authorities, but also from their film critic minions, such as Gian Luigi Rondi, who followed the governmental line. Some, however, were in favour of a purely phenomenological approach, namely the above-mentioned Brunello Rondi, Gian Luigi’s brother, and Amédée Ayfré, the author of an in-depth article, devoid of polemic, published in Bianco e Nero the previous year.1 The texts that follow fall into two parts, the first two are the opening and closing voice-over which convey Zavattini’s polemic with Hollywood cinema and champion a different idea of cinema, drawing on Neo-realism and developing it in the direction of non-fiction or the documentary. The second part consists in the dialogue from the first very brief scenes which precede the main episodes and which have been ignored by critics.

Text The big city is made of stone, steel and people. Two million men and women, who live, toil, get upset and love each other – each in his or her own way and each attracting a different fate. This magazine of ours, put together with film and a lens, rather than pen and paper, is dedicated to the love of people in a metropolis. Not what you often see on this same screen [at that point, the screen features a poster of The City, starring Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell],2 interpreted by athletic men like Kirk Douglas and seductive women like Marilyn Monroe – a manicured love, revised, improved upon and scripted to make you shiver with well-calculated passion. The characters in our magazine are not movie actors, but ordinary people living in the city. We found them in everyday life, but we chose those very people who had a role in the events which we are going to relate. All of them have their own ideas, their own worries and their own hopes. * At a certain time of day, someone is waiting for them. Expectation, encounter and parting are the three aspects of love. Have you ever overheard what people say to each other on each occasion? What they really say when they believe nobody can see them or listen in? *

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Amédée Ayfré, ‘Cinema e realtà’, Bianco e Nero, no. 1, January 1952, 6–21. The film won six Oscars.

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– Well, are we going to the pictures? – No, listen, there’s something I need to tell you. – So, what’s the matter? What is it, eh? – I’m pregnant. – You’re expecting a baby? But are you quite sure? – Yes.

* Via Trasimeno 19, 7.30pm – Have you been with many women before me? – Well, yes. – That means that I’m only one of a number. – But with you it is something else.

* Trinità dei Monti 3.00pm – How can I be certain you will always love me? – But I have proved to you that I always shall. – Even so, how can I be so sure that you’ll still love me in ten years’ time, in 1963? – See, I’d like a man who can give me that certainty. – Well, I can give you that confidence. – My dear, if I don’t know, who else would? I know myself. In 1963, in 1973 – I just can’t do without you. I know very well. Look, if you don’t believe me, let’s just drop the whole thing. – Oh no, I believe you. Swear to me once more. – I swear.

* Gas works 12.10pm – We’ve been married one year and still no kids. – But it’s not the right time, darling. – And why not? – We’re both working. No, we’ve only been married a year. – Well, we’ll take out a loan. That’s how we’ll do it.

* The first issue of The Spectator ends here. While it hasn’t exhausted all the possible aspects of love in the city, it has deliberately left out the banal. Our magazine decided to research only the more intimate and authentic aspects of the real world, conforming to a style and the purpose of a new and selfconscious kind of cinema.

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Shadowing (1953)1

Context A response to an article written by Vinicio Marinucci in the daily Momento Sera, distinguishing between imagination and chronicle, the former suitable for cinema, the latter for documentary, a perfect opportunity to explain and justify ‘shadowing’ (pedinamento), a cinematic form of ethnography, partly due to the influence of Zavattini’s experience as a journalist and partly to Ernesto De Martino’s ethnographic field studies.

Text 4 May 1953. Vinicio Marinucci published an article on 17 April entitled: ‘Fantasy is a sister and enemy of chronicle.’2 Then he came to my home on 23 April, and we discussed that article of his, where my name is mentioned. Is the kind of Neorealism you are talking about documentary or a transfiguration? He too fears that there is no art left in a Neo-realism that reaches its extreme consequences. I tried to explain, and not in a doctrinal way. For it is too easy to beat me in a doctrinal discussion. Let’s take an example: a day in the life of a working-class family. Acting upon my point of view, I oblige the filmmaker to choose a genuine family, not to apply existing experience, but new experience, gleaned from within that family, cohabiting with that family. Isn’t making filmmakers leave their own home and make them shadow people an amazing development? It would be false to object that this always happens and has happened before, in the past, in some way or another. If I have to tell the story of a day in the life of this family, I can only do so, if I spend time concretely with this family, observing it patiently, and making the effort, using all the means at my disposal, to find out everything I possibly can about this family. Marinucci objects that this is a difficult thing to do, very hard work indeed. Actually, it is only difficult, if there is no clear objective, if, Zavattini, ‘4 maggio 1953’, in Diario cinematografico, 98–101. ‘Della cronaca sorella e nemica è la fantasia.’

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that is, you lack a genuine interest in the topic. If you have no real interest in the matter, then you’ll go back to your room and carry out the task, adopting preconceived ideas and choosing one of the famous thirty-two situations. If, however, you really want to film a family’s day, because you consider it worth telling, then you have to turn your back on your home, even to the point of severing your ties with it, and begin by going around looking for that kind of family. I don’t think this stage of research is boring at all. Working-class families are available here and now. You can see them at the windows, the doorways and on the street, where they are visibly present. Some will say no, but many more will say yes. Only later, will some difficulties arise, and the pioneers will write the first chapters of research about ambushing techniques, that is to say, on how to connect with other people in the course of their daily lives. At this point, Marinucci interrupts me again: ‘See what I mean? You need an artist. Only an artist knows how to find the holes to get into the badger’s set.’ I looked at Marinucci in amazement. What makes him think that you don’t need talented people for this type of cinema? The confusion arises from the use of the word ‘document’, which is taken to mean something you just find in situ, something anyone can use. The truth of the matter is that, for this type of work, apart from plain hard work, there is another kind of work which involves our other human faculties, a combination of body and mind, which comes into play the moment you abandon the privacy of your room. You have to move, you have to go and see for yourself, you have to spend hours doing so, days, even months, if necessary, in close proximity with other people, within earshot, seeing for yourself their gestures, breathing the sweat of their bodies, and becoming aware of all the subtle links in the midst of the family, in order to map out as an entity the family we are looking for. It is like a steep climb, no doubt about it, but climbers, since they love the challenge, won’t turn away at the obstacles. They’ll be equipped with the right kit. Likewise, for our enterprise, we also need the time it takes and all it takes. Obtaining the appropriate tools is, in itself, an important stage on a social level, at least as important as the film. Doesn’t it also take months, perhaps, to write a script, let alone work out a finished screenplay on paper? I’m not saying that you can’t work off location, in isolation, but you might wish to do so later. Come to think of it, it’s time to stop saying on paper, given that a few directors have proved that you can do it in your head, that you don’t need a room and a desk and that you can write a scenario, without the aid of any writing paper at all, and that these days, coming up with an idea or a gag in the screenplay, should be understood to mean coming up with an idea, as to how to get closer to, how to become embedded in this reality that you wish to narrate. No soon as the family gives its consent to go ahead, you will begin to realize what enormous problems crop up – call them of a practical nature – if you like. You should let the family carry on as normal, on its own terms, as opposed to begin acting out a part, from that moment on. To avoid creating theatre, you will have to use machines, just as dentists use certain techniques to limit the

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pain. Likewise, you need machines so as to prevent your physical presence being felt by the family. Let the poet figure it out. If the need arises for self-expression, make a hole in the roof, go and take temporary residence next door, pretending to be a worker too, become a street cleaner, or even a clown. Eventually, even a zoom lens will seem antiquated. I know for certain that the most wonderful thing to emerge before us is precisely field research and establishing a cohabitation. Let me say it again: it is a question of knowing how to find a way in. Then the family in question can be certain that that individual and that cine-camera aren’t there to make the kind of cinema they’ve been taking in for years and years, the cinema too many women are only too willing to lift their petticoats for, no soon as they hear it mentioned, and the men too, adjust their ties, and the mothers turn a blind eye. They must have a sense – because it is feasible – that it is another kind of cinema that leaves only the smallest of margins for vanity, or the bare minimum one would consider normal, to make space for a different kind of vanity, a more loyal kind, which is how people feel when they realize that they are necessary. If not necessary for the benefit of the nation, at least for that of their district, or town where they live. And their participation exemplifies that of many others, to come to grips with the infinite themes reality has to offer. A day in the life of a workingclass family is only the most straightforward example. The tough challenge isn’t developing ways to forge such relationships with the objects of our enquiry. It’s convincing ourselves of the need to make such contacts with others. Now Marinucci makes a new objection, pointing out that even if we do succeed in gaining access into the home, we must make aesthetic choices, and therefore, we are back to square one, as regards the opposite of Neo-realism. I responded that if we were able to see the uninterrupted flow of any event whatsoever taking place in a family, or in any other place where human beings are to be found, it would be little short of miraculous – a very desirable state of affairs. For it would mean the end of wars, since human beings would have become so continuously present that no space would be left for our human compulsion to humiliate others. Too good to be true. This stance, this synthesis, this choice is now crucial, provided it involves a genuine family and an authentic experience, subsequently narrated with the involvement of the same people who were the protagonists of the experience itself. For the time being, we can think in terms of reconstruction and, in due course, there will no longer be a need for this lingering part of convention. I could add that everyone is free to use that experience as they see fit (Marinucci is worried about such freedom); they might even be led, perhaps, towards abstraction. God knows what we’ll find when we start digging. I’m no prophet, but it would really be a step in the right direction to establish this as a basis for communication. I think it was ten years ago that, writing about cinema, I said that it would be desirable to focus again on people, as a source of the best spectacle. Yes, ten years ago I made the point that to learn from the contemplation of our equals in their elementary actions would be an important victory. This is the difference

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to which we Italian filmmakers can aspire. And it was also ten years ago that I wrote that diversity is the natural condition of art, and that you can achieve it first, provided that you pay special attention to the specifics of the material. The kind of Neo-realism to develop further is all about content, which is precisely what upsets politicians. Time was, when we were supposed to reject the definition of Neo-realism, for being a limitation of cinema, but foreigners were asking themselves: ‘What are they going to do next?’ And many Italians were listening to this and were saying: ‘It came to an end in 1952.’ In other words, they identified Neo-realism with desperation and their new cinema as hope. But the development of Neo-realism fosters genuine, not sentimental, hope. It would be an achievement if its themes were the small-scale themes I have mentioned, but if I’m only citing the bare minimal, as my preference, it is partly because it opposes those grandiose themes that attract anti-Neo-realists – themes which are light years apart from investigative filmmaking and the vigorous drive towards knowledge. To this opposition of 1952, my objection is that if the theme of a workingclass family seems weak, they should bear in mind that there are any number of other themes they might judge more substantial, such as the military, the clergy, pregnant women, a day in the life of a city, or of a nation, thieves, murderers, army generals, the world of soccer, banks, the night, the rich, the vices of our time, a journey from A to B, a morning spent in a court of law, the police, domestic servants in Rome, Milan and Naples, the birth and death of Italians, Turin, Venice, and so on and so forth, for a month. Do they want more themes still? How about peace, as a theme, war, hunger, hatred. In brief, the cinematic mode is an investigative approach which encompasses countless types, just as there are countless kinds of poetry. When more qualified people become involved in cinema, we shall become even clearer that the very same theme, the same investigative film, can be approached in as many ways as the number of well-qualified filmmakers willing to tackle them will allow. I don’t recall if I said all this to Marinucci, but I did say something along these lines. He says he is going to write a second piece in Momento Sera, summing up my ideas. ‘I’m acting more as a reporter here, than as someone conveying an antagonistic point of view’, he says. I shall keep up the pressure. I’ll tell people such as [Vasco] Pratolini, [Carlo] Bernari, [Domenico] Rea or [Elio] Vittorini – I could add more names of contemporary Italian writers – to go off and do field research for cinema about war, childhood, school or about a working-class family. Can you imagine what different perspectives and discoveries these writers would come up with, as diverse as their books are? But always about the real – always about the real, always about the real, about the real.

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Parma Conference ‘Neo-realism as I see it’ (1953)1

Soon after the release of Love in the City and We Women, the Parma Conference on Neo-realism was held at the beginning of December 1953. Zavattini was involved in its organization. His intervention followed several in the press and even on radio. So even before the time to give his paper, he had attracted a great deal of criticism and become the catalyst for debate. Zavattini was very brave. He was fighting an isolated, lone battle for New Cinema, one that drew on non-fiction, the documentary component of Neorealism, allied to a non-negotiable ethics of cinema. He brought to bear the arguments rehearsed in the press earlier, benefitting from the strong rebuttal published in Emilia only a few days earlier, against Muzii’s objections, where he defended Neo-realism from attempts to create a shift towards a form of literary realism. In the Muzii rebuttal, he referred to the unbearable reality of longterm squalid living conditions of I Granili in Naples. At the Parma Conference, his argument for an ethics of urgency of cinematic intervention referred to an ongoing parliamentary enquiry into extreme poverty in contemporary Italy, researched by Lorenzo Piersantelli, ‘Un’inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia’, begun in 1950, and by 1953, in its third year, to justify a socially engaged cinema that could respond to the urgency of such issues. No complete translation exists of this text, but a couple of pages of his paper appeared in Overbey’s anthology, Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism, compounded with two other texts, under the title ‘Thesis on Neorealism’.2 For this complete edition and translation, Overbey’s partial version has been compared to the Italian text and included in the apparatus.

Zavattini’s paper was published as ‘Il Neo-realismo secondo me’, Rivista del Cinema Italiano, no. 3 (March 1954), later in Neorealismo ecc.,121–32. 2 Zavattini, ‘A Thesis on Neo-realism’, translated by David Overbey, in Overbey, Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism, 70–1. Overbey translated c. 360 words from Zavattini’s ‘Tesi sul neorealismo’, from: ‘We must extricate ourselves from abstractions ... as they exist today.’ 1

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Text I have nothing new to say about Neo-realism, since nearly all the people who are closely involved in our profession are familiar with the three or four ideas that I have been spreading around for the last few years. I state them quite often in what I write or rewrite, here and there. I have also broadcast them to my friends, even on the wireless, and, just a few days ago, I explained them to Enzo Muzii who put them across really well in the magazine Emilia, with a grand title that filled me with universality: ‘Theses on Neo-realism’. Now here I am in Parma. You could almost call it my birthplace. Here I am, speaking before people full of discernment such as you. Furthermore, I’m concerned, fearful even, of repeating myself and, therefore, of falling into that trap Mario Gromo was talking about in this morning’s session. Another thing that is worrying me is that yesterday afternoon I was singled out by the panel – by Luigi Chiarini, I think – as ‘the Accused’, and also in frequent remarks about me, made by several speakers. So, I almost felt as if I had to extricate myself by saying: ‘Members of the jury, I’m innocent!’ and make for the exit. But then I changed my mind after [Paolo] Valmarana’s3 superficial attack, carried out a few hours ago, which was aimed at two films I care about, despite their conspicuous shortcomings, some of which are the fault of the political and moral climate which Valmarana opposes less, well, let’s say it outright: far, far less than I do, despite his sharp intellect. Let me get to the point: I value these two films even more, thanks to this Conference of ours, now that [Giancarlo] Vigorelli, [Luigi] Chiarini, [Giulio Cesare] Castello and [Guido] Aristarco have at least recognized that they are not altogether unworthy proposals towards a cinema that makes an effort to free itself from celestial and material conformism.4 Valmarana’s attitude has motivated me sufficiently to go over the lesson with you, to see if, at the very least, the rationale behind these works, however mistaken they may be, is also equally and manifestly unsound. It is no secret that I’m not a good speaker and that I’m also a bad theorist, and I think I can give you yet more proof of this. Well, at least I’m in good company, and if you’ll allow me to assume a confidential tone, I shall make it to the end of my honest presentation. Let me begin with a declaration of happiness. If I had any flares in my pocket, I’d light them: Neo-realism is alive and well. I’m talking about something alive in this very hall and nobody is going to dare make mournful insinuations, because they, the sectarians among us, know that the sincere question to ask Mario Gromo was a film critic who had a regular column in La Stampa. Paolo Valmarana was also a journalist and a film critic. 4 Giancarlo Vigorelli was an actor. He took part in La muraglia cinese (1958), directed by Carlo Lizzani. Luigi Chiarini was the founding director of the Scuola Sperimentale di Cinema in Rome and film critic and theorist, Guido Aristarco the editor of the film journal Cinema Nuovo, as well as a film critic and historian. Giulio Cesare Castello was a film critic who ran a series of radio shows on Italian Neo-realism and later published Cinema neorealistico italiano, Turin: eri, 1962 in which he discussed the spread of Neo-realism abroad. 3

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is not: ‘Is Neo-realism dead or alive?’ But: ‘How can Neo-realism go on living and developing freely, in harmony with the logic governing what emerged from popular sentiment and life?’ While we’re at it, let’s cheer once again, for there are experienced filmmakers – some present, others not – who are working together to draft a handbook of Neo-realism at last. That is to say, they seek to establish the crossover point of its assorted tendencies so that well-meaning Neo-realists can find within it both refuge and support. These exist – especially among young filmmakers – but the flesh is weak and, therefore, they shall deserve even more credit, if they succeed in resisting the temptations strewn along their path – by whom, one might wonder. For, if they succeed, they will be the ones to bring about the natural development of those glorious premises that were established by the older generation which is, perhaps, now somewhat out of the fray. So now let’s try to offer our modest contribution – I began with the pluralia maiestatis and now struggle to revert to ‘I’, for reasons of rhythm, during this ongoing articulation of my ideas, even at the risk of falling foul of my listeners. But clarity is what counts most, that same clarity to which the organizers invited us to aspire to in these truly memorable days. That the key to Neo-realism was the war has been said in print in many ways.5 That enormous event troubled us deeply and we all tried to transmit this overwhelming empathy, each in our own way.6 The war seemed particularly monstrous to us Italians, because we saw no reason for taking part in it. If anything, Italians thought that there were many reasons for not taking part. Such dissent was not only limited to the war. It was an opportunity for something more, for an entire revelation, an enduring one – I’d like to add – and namely, that war always offends the fundamental needs and human principles we value so highly. And this revelation was, in my opinion, the point of departure for a vast social movement. Your objection might be that such a revelation was not an exclusively Italian privilege. In my opinion, it was.7 Among those aspects of our people which many consider weaknesses,8 but which are, rather, its strengths, and namely, the apparent lack of solidarity and individualism,9 we can find the root causes for a calling: in other words, a passionate and uncompromising reaction against war,

Despite the title of his translation ‘A Thesis on Neo-realism’, only two pages from ‘Tesi sul Neo-realismo’ appear in Overbey78: ‘Fu scritto in tanti modi ... veramente moderno’, ‘Zavattini, ‘A Thesis on Neo-realism’, 68–9 and Neorealismo ecc., 122–3. To reiterate: the title is incorrect, since Muzii who formulated it with Zavattini’s approval was referring to ‘theses’, in the sense of several propositions which, taken as a whole, represent Zavattini’s idea of cinema and proposal for a further development of Neo-realism. 6 N79: ‘ciascuno’ (‘each of us’), Overby78: ‘directors’. An interpolation. N79: ‘trasmettere’ (‘transmit’), Overby78: ‘transpose’. 7 Overbey78: ‘I tend to agree.’ (N79: ‘Io credo di sì’). But Zavattini’s affirmation is set against the negation of the objection. Zavattini is clearly stating that it was peculiar to Italy. 8 Overbey78: ‘qualities’, N79: ‘difetti’. Overbey78: ‘essential virtues’, N79: ‘virtù’. ‘essential’ is an interpolation. 9 Overbey78: ‘extreme individualism’, N79: ‘individualismo’. Another interpolation. 5

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the supreme insult. The reaction didn’t come from ‘historical man’, that textbook character who figures in an endless arc of time, coinciding with the dates of past, present and future wars. Bear in mind that just as there are empty grave plots for the ones to come, there are also empty spaces for the dates of future wars at the foot of the page.10 No, it came from a man endowed with greater depth. At the same time, his action was motivated by the specific needs and circumstances of his time. I’d call him simply ‘Man’, if this didn’t sound somewhat rhetorical.11 But then, you might object that historical man and Man, devoid of adjectives, always coexist. I’m not so sure. Given my lack of preparation, I would be embarking on something which is fraught with difficulties. Let’s settle for their coexistence. Even so, their coexistence is only useful when, by Lavoisier’s principle of communicating chambers, they are inclined to place themselves at the same level as each other – one equipped with awareness, the other with a primeval desire12 to live. There are times, however, when life force is excessive. But that is not as problematic as when it dies off, for when that happens, a whole nation falls into decadence, that is to say, it is no longer able to contribute to the project of the renewal of humanity.13 I’d venture to say that other nations, even after the war, have shown themselves to consider mankind a predetermined historical entity, to the point of taking a fatalist approach and that this explains why they haven’t given us a liberation cinema.14 What I mean by that is a cinema that is totally concerned with the liberation from stereotypical ideas, along the lines of what our cinema was starting to do.15 While, for them, things continued as before, for us everything constituted a new beginning. While they regarded the war as just one of the many afflicting our planet, we, on the Overbey78: ‘that abstract character in novels which follows a course of action that is unrelated to a specific time ... on the contrary ...’ The parenthetic clause is omitted, just as earlier, the root causes distinction was omitted too, thus confusing the sense. 11 Overbey78: Sentence omitted. 12 Overbey78: ‘profoundly original drive’ N79: ‘la sua originaria voglia di vivere’. Zavattini doesn’t use ‘originale’. The distinction concerns human instinct and pulsions, not originality. 13 Overbey78: ‘The need to live, when it is rich and happy, can transcend its limits more easily when, as in this case, it inspires and enlightens an entire fallen people who seemingly could no longer make the smallest contribution to humanity.’ An interpolation of Zavattini’s passage which states that when vital energy is lacking on a broad, national scale it can lead to abandoning the project of enlightenment. 14 Overbey78: ‘a historical subject’. This is misleading: Zavattini is drawing a distinction between two perceptions of man – the first, as historical object, the second, as a subject endowed with agency and capable of bringing about change and a new social, even revolutionary, order. ‘Liberation cinema’, as opposed to Overbey78, ‘cinema of freedom’, points to the rejection and victory over fascism and dictatorship, but also a new cinema, what Lindsay Anderson, Lorenza Mazzetti and Karel Reitz were to call Free Cinema. In Italy and in France, liberation was a buzz word denoting the end of fascism and of the German Occupation brought about by the Allies. Zavattini points out the subtle irony that the very same nations bringing about national liberation lacked a liberation cinema themselves, in the sense of a new cinema. 15 N79: ‘tutto teso ... tutto cominciava’ (‘and namely ... to do’). Overbey78: omitted. Overbey chooses to omit an important distinction: between the end of the war as a new, revolutionary beginning, containing as it did the promise and potential of shaping a democracy after monarch and fascism and the view of fascism as an interruption of democracy. This is what was at stake: an entirely new cinema and an entirely new democracy. 10

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other hand, considered it the very last war. What were the consequences of such a discovery by this new movement16 of pioneers? The insights weren’t new. What was new was the fact that it was such a collective experience protracted over an extensive period of time.17 The outcome was that a new horizon opened up before us, the boundless problematic of humanity, not to be taken in any abstract sense, but as concretely as the men who had provoked or endured the war. We felt the need to understand how such terrible events could have happened in the first place, and, furthermore, we felt the urgent need to develop this kind of understanding, outside the usual narrow confines of culture. Which is why we turned to cinema, as being the most direct and immediate medium. For however illustrious culture18 may be, the fact remains that it was incapable of offering a suitable language to express immediately a refusal of the misrepresentations of age-old woolly ideals which were all we had to go on at the beginning of the war, preventing us from attempting any real form of contemporary challenge against it.19 I’ve spoken of the need for knowledge and – I’d like to add – the need to become familiar with people and places – the need to understand what we had done and what we were doing. And consequently, our painstaking avoidance of the language that failed us, ever since the war’s violent rupture. And the search for new words, a search which is still underway. We became aware of the constant centrality of Man, but not of some men rather than other men, but of all men being historical subjects. On other occasions, I’ve spoken of them as being worthy of narration. What kind of story am I talking about? The only possible story: one dictated by becoming familiar with the object of storytelling. Imagination has its place, in so far as it is needed in order to get to know the object of scrutiny, something which is only achievable through genuine cohabitation with it. I am proposing a form of contact that means actual cohabitation with one’s neighbour, and the kind of participation and solidarity which intellectuals could achieve today to renew culture, in an encounter with others which is motivated by a thorough investigative and therefore poetic approach. The plan would be to extend it in all the areas of everyday life, all equally important in every moment, in time and in space.

N79: ‘slancio’, Overbey78: ‘rush’. A mistranslation that obfuscates the point (a concerted movement, not a ‘rush’). 17 N79: ‘e [così] lungo’, Overbey78: ‘tenacious’. But the text simply says a very long time. 18 Overbey78: ‘other art forms’. But N79 is clear: ‘la cultura’. Zavattini’s distinction is between culture as a whole, as the site of intellectual analysis and cinema as a new cultural form, understood in a broader, liberated, sense, rather than as confined to entertainment. Ultimately, it is an ethical distinction. The ‘new culture’ (a translation of the nuova cultura of Vittorini’s post-war magazine Il Politecnico) was a catch phrase indicating the split between old (fascist, pre-war) culture and its connivance with power and the new (democratic, potentially revolutionary) culture. 19 Overbey78 includes in his ‘Thesis on Neo-realism’ only the paragraphs from: ‘The war seemed particularly monstrous ... “contemporary challenge against it”’. 16

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It was no longer a question of an individual knowing, but of knowing through extensive and tangible20 relations with the people you wish to get to know. Investigative journalism, which can comprise many layers of enquiry, is only one dimension of this investigative spirit. By comparison, cinematic research, given the huge distribution potential of the medium, demands our total commitment, including a poetic mediation. By poetic, I mean total, aimed at expressing as many dimensions of the reality under investigation as possible. If a filmmaker is tasked with visiting a city and asked to film the diary of this journey, the portrait of the city will depend on his interests and it would be offensive to list the hundred, thousand or infinite ways in which Milan, for example, could be portrayed, because these would reflect my point of view, whereas each person will have a personal approach, although there will be a shared understanding in the contemporary moment, as the purpose of the journey. At last I’ve mentioned the contemporary which in my opinion is one of the key adjectives pertaining to Neo-realism. Neo-realist cinema is the form of Italian cinema best suited to respond to the needs and the history of Italians at this moment in time. Disney cartoons are not Neo-realism, but we’ll gladly go and see them, just as we’ll go and see any film manifesting the human intellect, but we Italians prefer Neo-realism, not for purely aesthetic reasons, but because it cannot be otherwise. For absolutely no other cinema, apart from Neo-realism, has attempted anything different. From the beginning, it came into close proximity with reality. An approach to the real of this nature in no way equates with the one that has always characterized art up until now, for if that were the case, there wouldn’t have been that radical break with the past brought about by the war and which the experiences of these last few years have led us to create. No alternative has come from other cinemas either, despite the fact that, as regards the social order of things, a number of good films have been made. The Holidays of Monsieur Hulot is an extraordinary film, but it’s not Neorealist. Neo-realist ideas are circulating; there’s a tension towards Neo-realism among young filmmakers; but there are no films. Neo-realist films can only exist within the order of ideas I have mentioned, that is to say, on the path you have to take if you want to get closer to reality. Neo-realism has become increasingly less generic, in terms of rationale and of the theory that is being articulated little by little, whereas, it has become more and more generic, as far as films are concerned. The many reasons for this, I think, will emerge naturally during the course of this Conference. I mean to say that there is a stance, a position which requires one to adopt a particular attitude towards life, one which is not limited to the artistic sphere, but which makes art appropriate, relevant, in terms of contemporary historic needs, provided that life is lived in a particular way, or rather shared. I realize that the artist through the centuries carries no personal blame. But I think that filmmakers, in order to be on the same level as other artists, in

Italicized in the text.

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terms of an authentic ability to engage with reality, cannot be excused for an inadequate participation in contemporary social events. Participation, as it was once understood, is no longer enough. Participative presence is what’s required, whereby intuition is applied to the concrete object, rather than to the creation of the object, by a gradual build-up of intuitions, in the same way that Cuvier reconstructs a mammoth from a single bone. Man is capable of such wonders. True, however, we are asking for smaller one, labour intensive though they may be, such as the miracle of shadowing a man for a whole day and then writing up a report for us. But what if the outcome is not a poetic report? My dear friends, it may not be for Paul, but it will be for Anthony. But in the meantime, he can at least get started. By virtue of moving in a given direction, he will be putting his poetic into practice as well as applying a method. He must make a radical break with the past, so clear-cut that he’ll never want to turn back. He’ll follow him as if he were his own shadow, provided he doesn’t become his body. Yes, we’re all rather angry about the past, which is dotted with the wondrous achievements of poetry, of thought and so on. But when you come to think about it, they all fail to shed light on the next six months or, to put it differently, as a young person worthy of respect who recently graduated from university told me, ‘We lack any certainty whatsoever about the next six months.’ Well, it’s quite likely that we will never find anything of the kind, except, perhaps, in a material sense, ‘before us’, as we respond with a sense of urgency and decide to make our contribution to what is in need of a contribution. Fortunately, we have the illusion, let’s call it that, that in our social context, something entirely different is taking place. For the man before me, in state of suffering, is quite different from the man who suffered a hundred years ago. I must concentrate my entire focus on contemporary man. And I mustn’t allow the burden of history which I wouldn’t want to, nor could I, erase, even if I tried, to hold me back altogether from the intention of liberating this particular human being from his suffering, using all the means at my disposal. Such a person, and this is one of my recurring ideas, has a name and a surname, and there can be no doubt that that person belongs to society, and that this is relevant to me personally. And I’m so drawn to this person that I want to talk about him, and not about someone else. Nor do I want to give him a false name, since the false name would inevitably create a veil between me and reality. It is something that hampers a complete contact with his reality and consequently hampers the motivation to intervene, with a view to change his reality. You can say that I’m wrong or worse, but it seems to me that turning from falsehood to the real is a consequential progression for Neo-realism. The Neo-realist gaze and its proclivity to listen serve to meet the need of all those people who want to be present, and not only in the cinema, identified by their real name and surname, and want to be known. The word knowing again, activated by cinema. For no other medium like cinema enables us to know, providing unexpected insights, not, however, when we use it as a means of mechanical construction or reconstruction, but when we use it to convey the real directly. Through construction and reconstruction, we approximate a symbolic form which cannot

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possibly have the same properties of the original. And moreover, knowing how to extract from the original more than from the symbolic form depends on how much commitment we invest in seeking to know it. Clearly, mastery of new subject matter of this nature cannot be instantaneous. Practitioners and their forbears will have to establish their own techniques, and not without difficulty at that. However, they can rest assured that they will no longer have to do so in the splendid isolation of their ivory towers, for their style will develop through direct contact with real, named, people. And it won’t be exclusively those wearing the cassock who will gain access to these libraries of the living. I have explained time and time again that I’m not arguing that actors should not be involved in cinema. What I’m saying is that actors have little in common with Neo-realist cinema, at least, in the version of it that I am advocating. For Neo-realist cinema seeks people that it needs to get to know, and who are willing to let themselves be known, either in the course of an initial contact or through intensive contact. It doesn’t expect such people to possess the qualities of a professional actor. Indeed, their professionalism consists in professing their own humanity in their everyday lives. What they need is a growing awareness of this aspect. Yet it is clear that such awareness can only be generated or strengthened by self-knowledge and by getting to know others, something which can be achieved more effectively through Neo-realist cinema than through other media. The common objection, and the only one, is that none of this can become a film spectacle; and that it would be better to draw a line between spectacle and Neo-realism. But I disagree. Of course, if the press, that is to say, the second most powerful mass medium after cinema, insists on seeing cinema as a pleasurebased event, whoever wishes to make Neo-realist cinema is faced with a huge challenge. For who is going to support such a Neo-realist venture? Very few, that’s my impression, since Capital will only go as far as inviting filmmakers to compromise, to pursue other objectives, for obvious and time-honoured reasons. Equally, for the powers that be, Neo-realism is a threat to controlled order. For Neo-realism has a constant need to know, to turn Italy upside down, to investigate its cities, its homes, its problems. It has profound reservations about this civilization. It seeks to do something real, something long-lasting, for others. It increasingly avoids metaphors, preferring the protagonists of suffering to their simulacra. It incessantly raises the question of the viewer’s responsibility. Not even we writers and directors, filmmakers who are always willing to compromise, not even we do what we should do. The flesh is weak and our professional role in the film industry throws us all in together. We’re put off course by the pressure. Just as it takes a flood or an earthquake or something of that magnitude for even a shiver of solidarity to course down a man’s spine, by the same token, it takes what happened to Renzi and Aristarco – even the Parma Conference itself – to make us shudder in the face of the enormous responsibility we share. Guido Aristarco and Renzo Renzi have been locked up in the fortress of Peschiera on 1 September 1953, after publishing and writing, respectively, an article, ‘S’agapò’, in no. 4, Cinema Nuovo, on 1 February 1953. The scenario was about the romantic adventures of Italian soldiers posted in Greece to occupy

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a country reduced to hunger and misery. The two journalists were accused of contempt towards the Italian military and were tried on the grounds of a fascist law (later repealed) that turns anyone who was ever drafted into a citizen who is permanently subject to military tribunals. And yet, the Military Tribunal has found the defendants guilty and degraded them, despite the fact that Aristarco’s and Renzi’s arrest was met with indignation and protest by democratic forces. We mustn’t get discouraged while defending the Neo-realism I am talking about. We must have the confidence that we will succeed in creating a cinema, on the basis of these themes of social inclusion which concern us so much. For the more intensely we are aware of them, the more intensely we can express them with the intensity and mode of revelation that shares with the viewer the emotion of seeing an additional dimension of the object in question. I have often stated, even resorting to the extremes of paradox, that all you need to do is invite someone to sit down, and say to that person: ‘Look!’ to find ourselves already in the order of the spectacle of cinema. This paradox requires a mature viewer, the kind we need to nurture. But we must not be put off by early attempts in this direction which, needless to say, can never be pure, given the violent clash of competing pressures at the outset of film production, even in the case of a ‘pure’ film. It won’t help us to nurture a film culture. The new viewer is standing there, waiting for us, and really is waiting for us. Therefore, if, at the outset, we are going to say that we lack confidence in the viewing public, then what we are saying is criminal. It means that we have no confidence in people and in the very possibility of dialogue. It is tantamount to believing that we can only have a dialogue with certain people who are not members of the public. The viewer may come across as passive, silent or lacking individuality, when, really, you are faced with the fullness of expression of a person who has stored up things to say, as if for centuries and centuries, but always harbouring the inferiority complex of having nothing to say. Please forgive me if I cite my own initiatives, but it is the only way to show you, my friends, that in among what may well be my mistakes, there is, at least, some consistency. And if I go wrong, I do so even more often than you can imagine. In a different field, in publishing, I am editing a book of diaries of ordinary people. I didn’t tell my contributors to begin by finding out if those people, the servants, waiters, pensioners and others, had anything special to say. Oh no. My point of departure was the conviction that they did have something to say and, judging from the very first specimen pages, they have already demonstrated this, by giving a glimpse, in the course of their day, of at least a glimmer of self-worth, of existence, of being constantly in the spotlight. This will develop into articulated language and later song. Equally, in the cinema, those people who identify themselves by name and surname, who come forward with their personal stories, who are shy in their ways, because they are beholden to an acting tradition, will gradually begin to value seeing themselves, in order to show themselves to others, in short, to express themselves through the medium of cinema.

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No substitution, no matter how artistic, can equal the emotion a phrase can convey, and I do mean just a single phrase, in among many embarrassed words, the impact of a single phrase, uttered with a natural tone of voice, and the natural body language of a worker or of anyone else from our everyday theatre, combined with our strong reaction, when faced with the revelation of the real existence behind a character. Doubtless, in this case too, I’m talking about initial, tentative, efforts, both of those people who tell their own story or who are willing to be placed under observation in what they are doing, and also of the directors and writers who are tackling this new field. There is no point in complaining that the material is dreadful and inert, when it is the approach to the material that is imperfect. Just as the person whose story is being told is subject to development, an evolution also occurs in the person who is narrating. A specific method is required, but not one that is alienated from heart and mind. I am pointing to the most effective heart-based and mind-based technique to express what one has understood. It is a matter of training heart and mind to work with these encounters, contacts and range of different needs so that gradually we are going to be in a position, not only to choose but also to know how to choose, and, moreover, how to make best use of these individuals, just as today we make best use of actors. The same can be said for the social facts21 which they are interpreting and which we interpret, by applying a Neo-realist approach. For social facts, my dear friends, are always red hot, when they are real, and I’m not referring only to wars, or other such catastrophes. This is one of the insights of Neo-realism. However, it is also true to say that the war has allowed some to see clearly the new panorama of interrelated being, entirely extraordinary, entirely marvellous and not in a fairy-tale sense, as opposed to those who, without the excitement of make-believe, are unable to relate to their equals. And there is no need to say that we have had enough of these equals who are always poor; we have had enough of misery, of the unemployed, of events about suffering. It is not hard to respond to the kind of people we could describe as weary of life. Neo-realist cinema can easily dispense with extreme poverty and unemployment, with the working class districts of Naples, with sulphur mines, with Matera and the Padua Delta.22 As for Naples, why not concentrate on, say, the ilva factory in Pozzuoli, that is to say, on a thriving factory and on many other similar factories in Pagli or Sesto San Giovanni, where there is no shortage of employment, industrious activity and building construction going on? Alternatively, why not focus on the Scala Theatre in scintillating Milan or on works of art?

Emphasized in italics in Italian. The places mentioned were well known at the time for their poverty. As remarked earlier, Florestano Vancini’s documentary on the Delta had only recently exposed the inhuman living conditions of the displaced people shacked up in the Po valley.

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Don’t you understand that however much you shift the focus in any direction you like, it will not change a Neo-realist filmmaker’s standpoint? The conclusion which you are reluctant to hear – we need not be hypocrites about this – will always be the same. Namely, that one of the strengths of Neo-realism is surely that it can take on any subject matter, person or object of scrutiny, to always retrace Man’s footsteps. Nor can I be blamed, or at least not entirely, if the vast majority of people are still struggling against injustice. I was talking to a well-known critic a few days ago about my confidence – and, fortunately, not mine alone – in the multiplicity of reality constantly awaiting our attention. We will never be short of it. I said that after a film about a nation, let’s say, Italy, the next step would be one about Milan, for example, then about Via Depretis and then one about one’s next-door neighbour. The eminent critic paid me the tribute of listening attentively to my long argument and intervened with intelligent objections. But when I got to the point about the next-door neighbour, he cut me off with a sharp: ‘But now you are exaggerating.’ His objection to it was that ‘the next-door neighbour’ was a theme that could only result in a sketch, as if he was supposing that there would not be sufficient material and so it would require additional ideas that are entirely alien to a Neorealist approach.23 I explained that even a scenario like ‘the next-door neighbour’ guaranteed all the historic accuracy I needed, in the sense of presenting the complexity of elements, worth analysing and visualizing. The critic’s concern was that developing a project of this kind would end up in a series of anecdotes or mere details, lacking any deep internal cohesion and divorced from the broader societal context. However, let me emphasize that this is precisely what Neo-realists need to do, by showing how any specific theme they tackle fits into the broader context. Consequently, there is no such thing as a narrow or a broad theme, since both are driven by our narrow or broad outlook in exploring and expressing, in an appropriate language, the uniqueness and, at the same time, multiple nature of each person.24 To shed more light on this point, I would now like to quote a couple of sentences from the first volume of the Acts of the Commission of Enquiry on Misery in Italy: It is not a matter of lining up statistics in numeric tables, but to establish a frame of interpretation of social reality in its institutional and environmental The reference is to Enzo Muzii’s accusation of bozzettismo, sketchiness, in the cultural sense explained above. In the following sentences, Zavattini goes into more detail. 24 This is entirely at odds with orthodox Italian communists of the time and their leaning towards Lukácsian typological aesthetics. The closest approximation to Zavattini’s unorthodox Marxist outlook is Roy Bashkar’s theory of the social cube, which posits the individual as a complex entity, operating simultaneously at different levels which he visualized as a social cube. Cf. Roy Bhaskar and Alan Norrie, ‘Dialectic and Dialectical Critical Realism’, in Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie (eds), Critical Realism: Essential Readings, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, 561–74. 23

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dimensions, which can be enlivened by the language of numbers, thought through sociologically.25

Such a task should rest with Neo-realist cinema – if you will allow me to make such a daring connection. Even my superficial glance at these volumes, over the past few days, gave me some idea of the ‘objective’ immensity of facts with which we should be familiar, as men and as citizens. It is not a matter of abstract reflection, but, even if you lack the means to travel to such places, at least you can tentatively map the work of the Commission of Enquiry, and concentrate on a single social fact, a sample, exposed by them. Are we claiming that art has nothing to do with it? Then, we should keep telling ourselves: if we are artists, get out there, in the meantime, and nobody will stop us from making art. But go. And if, when you are on the spot, your imagination inspires you to make the connection between tree and the balcony of Verona or between Matera and Giotto, then we shall be grateful for that. Provided you went there yourself. I was saying that the Neo-realist’s task is not to frame shots or edit them in sequence, but to possess an interpretative frame of reference of social reality in its environmental and institutional dimensions, which can be enlivened by the language of statistics, and analysed in sociological terms. Statistics does not require art. Neo-realist cinema requires art. Having said that, it looks favourably towards other endeavours, including statistical sociology, because their aims and objectives are surprisingly similar, even though the ways and means are so different.26 All it would take is to leaf through these volumes of the Enquiry about Misery or the one about unemployment to see the evidence-based truth more and more clearly, proceeding from macrocosm to microcosm or vice versa, and reaching into the most private realms of social, family or individual life. In the overall picture that emerges, these dimensions of reality match, the tone is more authentic and very different from what we would find in a novel. If ‘the nextdoor neighbour’ I was referring to was assigned a name that was not his own, it would be tantamount to begin having sex in the real world, to then finish elsewhere – and what would ever compel you to do so? – in some kind of Limbo. At this point, I should draw my conclusions and endeavour to line up any number of examples of Neo-realist themes. Yet there would be no point, unless I felt happy with the way we formulated them. But I’m not here to play the role of Lorenzo Piersantelli, ‘Un’inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia’, https​:/​/lp​​iersa​​ntell​​i​.wor​​dpres​​s​.com​​ /2013​​/02​/2​​1​/uni​​nchie​​sta​-s​​ulla-​​mis​er​​ia​-in​​-ital​​ia/. The Parliamentary Enquiry began in 1950 and was completed in 1954. ‘Commissione Parlamentare d’inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia e i mezzi per combatterla (1950–4). Camera dei deputati’, Atti della Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia e sui mezzi per combatterla, Roma, 1953. Now available online: Archivio Storico della Camera dei Deputati, http:​/​/arc​​hivio​​.came​​ra​.it​​/patr​​imoni​​o​/arc​​ hivi_​​del​_p​​eriod​​o​_rep​​ubbli​​c​ano_​​1948_​​2008/​. Also available is a documentary directed by Giorgio Ferroni and produced by the Istituto Luce, Istituto Luce _ Inchiesta sulla Miseria _ Parte 1: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=Ikb​​​Apjfd​​9fc, accessed 2 August 2020. 26 Zavattini is arguing for the adoption of multidisciplinary methods, deploying diverse bodies of knowledge to cinema. 25

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the acrobat; rather, I’m here to look for a rationale we can all share. Let us find our common denominator, by, for example, coming to an understanding about the fundamental needs of Neo-realism. Life of a small village could be our point of departure. Twenty of us could share the same theme but approach it in different ways with the means we each have at our disposal. Individual filmmakers would approach the life of the village applying creativity to what they see and hear. What is more, some would be using 3,000 metres of film stock entirely indoors, others would be focusing on a hundred objects, others on a close-up of old women, and yet others would be seeking to constantly create any imaginable polarity, of an event and a lake or a weather phenomenon. Who knows? I could go on giving examples for at least a year. The point is that, if we are starting from the same premiss, there can be no limits for Neo-realists, on the proviso that they do not isolate themselves from the real world, and that they draw their inspiration only from what the experience of the real and coming to know it more profoundly can provide. Consider that the Preface to the other series of volumes, edited by the Italian Parliament, The Parliamentary Enquiry on Unemployment in Italy, the head of the Commission of Enquiry cites Lord Beveridge: ‘Unemployment cannot be defeated by a democracy, unless it knows what it means.’ In other words, the way to make miracles is with participative knowledge, involving a patient coexistence with what you wish to get to know, a spirit of enquiry that, let me reiterate, a Parliamentary Commission summarizes in statistical tables, which are, nevertheless, very eloquent and which filmmakers should visualize as equally eloquent shots. This is the point: poets should not have to hang their lyres on tree branches out of fear.27 Yet, the lyre is silent today. Even those who are singing all day are unable to make their voice a direct, immediate and active force. We need poets who are willing to explain what they are doing; not ones who are lolling around, listening to their own voice, in the way you listen to a mysterious echo of it in the Baptistery of Pisa. A few nights ago, I was in the Salone Margherita cinema watching Monsier Hulot’s Holiday.28 It isn’t a Neo-realist film, far from it. But I am one of those people who consider it a good film, fresh, intelligent and a product of an old cinema culture, which has given us so many superb films and which will give us even more in the future. The public was laughing, but not everyone. I was laughing too, more than I had laughed for a long while. When the lights came on, a ten-year-old boy got up immediately, seeking out his father with his gaze. His father was sitting far away, because of the crowd. He pointed his finger at The sentence contains a specific reference to a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo: ‘Alle fronde dei salici per voto, anche le nostre cetre erano appese’, published in Salvatore Quasimodo, Giorno dopo giorno, Milan: Mondadori, 1947. The point Zavattini is making is that, unlike what had happened in wartime (when the poem was written), being intellectuals, including poets, requires commitment to society, social engagement, expressed however differently in their work. 28 Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), directed by Jacques Tati. 27

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him: ‘Daddy, you see? And you didn’t even want to come!’ The father didn’t want to see Hulot, but his ten-year-old did. Let us take that as an example and allow me to use it to conclude my talk. The point is that the invitation to make Neo-realist films is coming from young people. We can all step in behind this movement, each one of us equipped with different expectations, if you like, but also with a new kind of experience which convinces us to consider ourselves responsible in a concrete sense.

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Zavattini’s first trip to Cuba in his diary (1953)1

Context Before the Parma Conference had even ended, Zavattini was winging his way to Cuba. He published an account of this trip in his public diary in Cinema Nuovo. This text, as is often the case in his diary, reads like a flow of ideas, impressions and descriptions. But this is deceptive. The published cinematic Diary often served as a site for new projects, a place for critical analysis, sometimes it conveys a choral representation of an ongoing debate. The linguistic register varies too, from informal to formal. The page comes alive with shifts effortlessly from visual impression to cerebral concept, to observation and snatches of dialogue. In this entry, wedged in the travelogue, and taking up nearly half of the narrative, is an account of an event that took place during his short stay on the island, the Havana Conference, in which Zavattini and the filmmaker Alberto Lattuada came face to face with a qualified audience of very knowledgeable film enthusiasts, from several Havana film clubs, and a professor of film studies at the National University of Havana, who was also the director of the Havana University film club, and had founded in Havana a well-stocked Cinémateque. There were also recent Cuban graduates from the Rome School of Cinematography who had recently returned home with high hopes of founding their National Cinema. Zavattini’s reconstruction of part of the Conference finds confirmation in Alfredo Guevara’s more complete transcription of the event, later published in Spanish in the Nuestro Tiempo film club bulletin, which is also included below. His intervention on the New Italian Cinema transcended its historic post-war origins, travelling beyond national borders, making Neorealism a shared destiny, an international aesthetic, predicated on ethics and empathy.

Zavattini, ‘Cuba 1953. 31 dicembre 1953’, in Diario cinematografico, 132–5.

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Text When we got out of the stuffy plane, it felt as if the whole world were equally hot, but the minute we set foot on the mobile stairway, we were confronted by a freezing wind that was strong enough to force one sideways, while you are struggling to walk in a straight line, as if you were towing a barge, one hand keeping your hat on, and the other trying to hang on to your suitcase, and all you can see are the fluttering tails of other passengers’ scarves. We rushed into the toilet at Gardner airport for a shave, then, at 12.45am, while we were flying over New York, I tried to spot the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers, but since my safety belt restrained my movements, I had to settle for the little I could see through the porthole. I have never set eyes on such an immense spread of identical little houses. In vain, you look for a green open space, where children can play and tumble – but maybe they do exist somewhere, though, from my vantage point, there seems to be hardly enough space even for grown-ups. The real city dwellers are reduced to the motorcars that can be seen from any altitude, whereas, when the airplane drops down to fifty metres from ground level, you can see nothing but human beings. In the airport, the customs personnel shoved their hands into the suitcases, as if they were a woman’s petticoats. The stopover lasted less than an hour, and at 2.00pm I was already on the next leg of the journey, heading for Havana. I sat next to a young man who was reading a book: ‘Breakfast in Italy is very straightforward and usually includes only a cup of coffee or milk or rolls spread with butter and jam.’ That was when I introduced myself. His name was Joaquín García. He is attending his second year in Italian language. He tells me that there is very good beer in Cuba and that you can get all sorts of drinks. Meantime, Miami looms over the horizon. The lower we fly, the more its abstract-looking landing lights sharpen into focus, taking on their real purpose. At about 10.00pm, I was shaking hands with the youngsters from the Nuestro Tiempo film club – at last I can make the extraordinary observation which inspired me to write this without delay – when they asked me this question: ‘What can you tell us about the Parma Conference?’ Lattuada was sitting next to me. I had been harassing him all day long about my grievances for my not being able to respond to all my critics, since I had to leave Parma, and also about not having done justice to my Conference paper, which bore the marks of corrections and more corrections, made between 3.00am and 10.30am, which is why, when I finally got up from my seat, the chair got up too, stuck to my backside as it was. I even complained that a page had gone missing, and [Giancarlo] Vigorelli retorted: ‘What a great actor you are!’ in the conviction that my behaviour was premeditated. Even though I lost the thread of what I was saying, Sacchi remarked: ‘You pulled it off’, just when I was collecting all my pages with the same sense of urgency of a person who pulls up his pants, when he realizes they’re falling down. And while we were flying over the Atlantic Sea, I wrote pages and pages of guilty notes addressed to Chiarini, although, truth be told, I was already planning to publish the first issue of the Neo-realist Bulletin, as soon as I got back to Italy.

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And now, at 6,000 kilometres distance from Parma, or perhaps 10,000, at a time when the Conference delegates still hadn’t gone home, there was this oliveskinned young man, standing next to a black woman, asking me: ‘What can you tell us about the Parma Conference?’ I felt intimidated by the question and elation, a desire to applaud, and even weep, in response to the affectionate, if exacting, smallness of the world. What I said in response, and I would have willingly gone on talking for a whole, year was: I have no idea what they decided at Parma, because I had to leave to be here with you this evening, but I think the main thrust of the Conference is to find common ground for the diverse currents. My objective wasn’t to allow one aesthetic tendency to gain ascendancy over all the others. It was primarily to reassert the existence of Neo-realism and for delegates to consider the potential for its further development, both in Italy and beyond national borders. Any cinema which seeks a close relation to the serious problems of contemporary society embodies Neo-realism and finds its unique expression in this movement. Neo-realism has become, at this stage, the conscience of cinema.

At this, someone wanted to know what we meant by the word ‘concrete’. I replied that ‘concrete’ means concrete, and I was just about to continue from where I had left off, when I was compelled to be specific, by the sight of those eyes fixed upon me, and so I went on to say that concrete means, for example, the opposite of that generic ‘Love thy neighbour’, which some people consider adequate enough a goal for the cinema. ‘At Parma’, I remarked – we reached out to the actual life of others and I cited, as a relevant source of inspiration, the volumes of The Parliamentary Inquiry into Poverty and Unemployment, because these statistics, conveying as they do all the misery, themselves the outcome of real time devoted to other people’s predicaments, allow you to enter into a new world, a world that is in fact ‘concrete’, a world that calls for urgent and concrete solidarity. This doesn’t mean only dealing with poverty, the unemployed, oldaged pensioners, the ill, and those on strike.2 Well-to-do people will be satisfied, because we also intend to concern ourselves with theatres, with buildings, with Sundays, with beautiful local sights, and with songs. But no, I’m wrong. No they won’t be satisfied, because they claim that the object of scrutiny must change, but the hinge they really need is the ethical standpoint from which the object is observed. What I said was: Neo-realists in Parma have two battles on their hands, both of which must be dealt with at the same time. One is the shared battle for the defence of Neo-realism and for ensuring its freedom of expression in whichever 2

Atti della Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia e sui mezzi per combatterla, Rome, 1953.

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form it might take, the other is the defence of one of several specific forms, considered the best, to get that bit closer to reality.

We walked the streets of Havana in the midst of a crowd of young people who kept on saying: una pregunta, in other words: ‘One question’, and one student remarked: ‘Sweet outside, bitter inside’, referring to Cuba, borrowing the line from a Cuban poet. Meantime, they were preparing for Christmas and all of us were drenched in sweat. In one of those brothels which, at first, look like bars that are no different from any other bar – except that afterwards you can go up to a bedroom if you wish – we came across someone who had started plying her trade in Italy, back in 1945. She said it was tiring in Italy, because of the stairs. Up and down the stairs, every time, and in Cuba it was also hard, because of the bad nights and the drinking. You had to drink far too much. Meanwhile, one of her colleagues was standing in front of a mirror and imitating Silvana Mangano. In Cuba, the man in charge is Batista.3 There are signs in the streets thanking him for the impressive public works the government claims are the work of Batista and of Batista alone. He states that he governs with the aid of three parties: the Yellow Party (the army), the Blue Party (the police force), and the White Party (the navy), leaving out the pueblo. The people are in touch with the students. In the university, we visited a room in the Federation of Students Association, containing portraits of all the student heroes, from Julio Antonio Mella to Ruben Batista Rubío, the first student to be murdered by the police in 1927; the second was assassinated in 1953. There were heaps of rubbish with people living in huts right in their midst. And even the huts looked like rubbish. I couldn’t bear to look at them for long. This has never happened to me before. I simply had to look away, as if I were falling and felt the compulsion to cover my face with my hands. There is enormous wealth and enormous poverty. The upper class are aware of the problem of racism, but not of the nation’s glaring predicament, the lack of autonomy from foreign Capital. We went to Chorri’s. Chorri is a black who plays jazz with the intensity of someone lying in ambush; his lip keeps drooping lower and lower, he stares at the legs of a table, then he stirs, and seems to be talking to the Lord himself, but then he suddenly bounces off a note, beating two drumsticks on anything within reach: bottles and chairs, the floor, a cow bell, and he’s off again, like a madman, and his drumsticks never snap, but metamorphose into two deafening clubs, and it crosses your mind that this man is never going to stop. But he does, quite abruptly, like a skater who displaces all the air in his path before coming to a sharp standstill, with only the slightest of steps on the skating rink, barely causing ice shavings to form and Chorri creates silence, though everyone else is still playing, whence, he begins to set another ambush all over again.

3

General Fulgencio y Zaldívar Batista. His dictatorship had begun in 1952 and was defeated on 1 January 1959 by the Cuban Revolution.

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We left Havana on 9 December. I flew over Yucatán, against a background of an emerald green sea. My nose was squashed against the porthole and I only turned around to invite the others to come and take a look. Little clouds that looked like puffs of smoke from children’s small bonfires began to appear from under the wing. One could imagine that it would barely take a breath to disperse them, but no, they grew into bigger clouds that might, perhaps, start a hurricane.

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Context Zavattini’s trips to Cuba first, then to Mexico, were funded by unitalia (Unione Nazionale per la Diffusione del Film Italiano all’Estero). In Cuba, Zavattini and the director and friend Alberto Lattuada met the Cuban film enthusiasts belonging to the film club Nuestro Tiempo. At the time, although Cuban film production was limited to a few pornographic films, the country had developed a vibrant and enthusiastic visual and film culture, fostered by Nuestro Tiempo and by many other similar film clubs, including the Havana University film club. These were meeting points for professional artists, musicians, composers, visual artists. At Nuestro Tiempo, Zavattini also met two graduates from the School of Cinematography in Rome. Zavattini and Lattuada were invited to give a conference at the Nuestro Tiempo film club. Fortunately, one of the organizers, Alfredo Guevara, took detailed notes. After the Revolution, Alfredo Guevara was to become the founder and director of icaic, the National Cuban Film Institute. Guevara later sent Zavattini a copy of the typescript for his approval for publication in the film club regular bulletin. This translation is based on the typescript in Spanish, sent to Zavattini. By comparison with the Parma Conference, where he was beleaguered on all sides, in Cuba, Zavattini and Lattuada were fêted at the airport, then at the film club, then at the university film club and at their joint Conference, as Zavattini reports in his cinematic diary. The Havana Conference was a question-and-answer session, quite unique at the time. Zavattini pushed the documentary line for a new cinema, while Lattuada defended a version which could include satire, in keeping with the film he had made earlier that same year, in collaboration with Zavattini who wrote the adaptation, based on Nicolai Gogol’s The Overcoat (1842), a fictional short story. It was typical of Zavattini’s film practice that he could imagine and campaign for a new cinema that eschewed narrative and literature, while ‘Conferencia de Cesare Zavattini y Alberto Lattuada (se produjo sobre la base de preguntas y respuestas, dirigidas indistintamente a uno o al otro)’, acz E 3/2. fols 9–19. Unpublished.

1

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working on such a literary adaptation of Russian literature. Then again, the way he did it and the way it was filmed, turned it into a Neo-realist film, making the story as relevant to the early 1950s as Umberto D. An important point which Zavattini addresses, and which Guevara dwells on during the Conference, teasing out a concept mentioned by the Italian screenwriter, was the difference between an intangible idealism and a concrete, tangible realism, of the kind Zavattini was theorizing and proposing as a model of cinematic practice for New Cinema, that is to say, a form of realism which departs from both the idealism of Soviet socialist realism, on the one hand, and, on the other, from the romantic idealism of mainstream Western cinema. Alfredo Guevara, though himself a member of the Cuban Communist Party, when it came to film practice and theory, defended Zavattini’s realism and had no truck with Lukácsian and Soviet realism.

Text What was the purpose and outcome of the Parma Conference? What were its resolutions and their specifics? Does it open new perspectives for Neo-realism, for the best Italian cinema?2

Zavattini listens patiently, gratified by the question. Only at this point do we gather how involved he becomes when he realizes the film club’s level of interest for the Parma Conference. He takes his time before formulating a reply. The expression on his face reflects the effort he is making to find the right words, suitably adequate to convey his rational impressions, without betraying his feelings. It so happens that every single sentence of his succeeds in this. There can be no doubt that we are faced with someone exceptional: intelligent, acute, well informed, equipped with a fertile imagination and strong powers of observation; concerned about all kinds of problems and their most diverse aspects; always dissatisfied, indefatigable, capable of giving his all, a poet, a creator, a philosopher. The main theme of the debate – according to him – was freedom of speech, threatened and attacked by censorship, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. The problem is that If the freedom of speech dies, if it is suppressed, Neo-realism will die with it. The two are interconnected. It is the air it breathes, its atmosphere which enables it to live.

2

Guevara’s note introducing his transcription: [N.B.] ‘What follows is’ the outcome of a question-and-answer session, indiscriminately addressed to one ‘Zavattini’ or the other ‘Lattuada’.

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Both Zavattini and Lattuada emphasize the following characterization of Neorealism, which they share: It is not only a matter of filming in the street, with non-professional actors, using scripts based on real life, and lived out by the very people who will interpret them, and relive them before the camera. While this is an important aspect, it is not incompatible with other aesthetic choices. We allow for a range of possibilities, as varied as life itself, and there should be better ones ahead, and many more to look forward to. The main problem, the very nub of Neo-realism, is content; finding and coming to know it, in an encounter leading to its retrieval, while at the same time retaining a sense of loyalty towards truth; its humanist purpose in favour of justice.

They emphasize research, encounter and loyalty towards truth. In their view, the process of discovery, investigation, further research and, ultimately, understanding cannot but result in an attitude of empathy, love and authentic and total understanding. ‘This deep and passionate contact with truth obliges one to defeat injustice and error’ – Lattuada explains – ‘identifying the process of clarification as a necessary aid for humanity’. He cites the example of heads of state, who are not aware, or do not wish to know, or are unable to know, or to understand the needs, the anxieties and the poverty of their neighbour, of their citizens, and who, as a result, are unjust, while having no concerns or qualms about it. They sometimes might go as far as perceiving the truth, getting close to it, but fail to get to know it intimately. This is why they become dictators, unfair, indifferent and prone to err in all kinds of ways.

Judging by his body language and attentiveness, Zavattini seems to agree in every respect: ‘It follows that you have to foreground truth, research it, express it, fight for it, in a word, love it.’ Zavattini goes on to consider different aspects of Neo-realism and its significance, in relation to truth, in a sincere and convincing analysis of society and its values. He ably rejects abstract conceptions of Man as unreal, relating instead to man as an embodied person, someone who is subject to a social context and to external circumstances, ill-served by the law, by poverty, by self-interest, but whose condition can be ameliorated by solidarity and understanding. He elaborates on Lattuada’s remarks: Such a contact with truth will lead to change and elevate man and humanity, reconnecting people with their own sense of worth and self, bestowing selfrespect and the ability to develop further.

At this point, they consider the case of war, which they both condemn as an act of barbarism. They share the conviction that situating truth where it belongs

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in the scale of values, rejecting conventional thinking and doing away with misunderstandings, can only be an aid against the outcome of human and social degradation, produced by violence, which will be viewed in future with the same horror provoked by cannibalism. Lattuada points out, not without a touch of irony (and he was not referring to the Resistance that he speaks of with admiration), that: The war we are fighting and enduring has produced serious damage. Nor could it have been otherwise. The Nazi Occupation, the destruction of cities and other inhabited areas, persecutions, hunger, poverty and death, taking place, or only waiting to happen, produced an intense and permanent climate of persecution. To expand, the people have felt the need for the truth, a tangible and spiritual need for justice, and for gaining an understanding of their situation, their problems and the potential for change; above all, for sincerity and truth.

Zavattini equates this permanent gaze on truth with Neo-realism, but doesn’t accept that there are limitations to what it is, nor that it can ever be exhausted; rather, he thinks that the work carried out so far should be regarded only as a beginning, as a foundation for works to come, better works, more complete ones. ‘It is right and necessary’ – he says – ‘to go further.’ We have achieved something, but not much. We are skimming the surface. Sometimes we even go beyond the surface; we analyse problems and go on doing so, from various points of view. But it is impossible to get to the heart of things without feeling inadequate. This tenacious and tangible effort to get to the truth is the future of Neo-realism. This is what opens it to infinite possibilities.

Such a logical conclusion takes us back to where we started. Zavattini’s words demonstrate enthusiasm, depth and a capacity for synthesis. When he broadens out the line of argument, he seems to have lost the thread, but then he always manages to come back to the key problems, the underlying, fundamental principles, and communicates them clearly. A movement like Neo-realism is bound to attract numerous enemies and particularly perpetrators of injustice and its beneficiaries, who attack it in a variety of ways, by creating a hostile climate and by invoking unconvincing explanations that fail to address the root of the problem. Furthermore, they carry out censorship openly, in order to silence what is noble and progressive in a film, or they go to the extremes of halting its production altogether, or allow it, but only on condition that it follows a particular line. This is how artistic independence is being constrained within narrow parameters. There is no shortage of overt, official censorship to support such a policy, treating it as a matter of course. But this is neither the only obstacle nor the most resistant, which is actually the industrial and commercial nature of film

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production. Indeed, producers generate the most lethal form of censorship and become its slaves. This is the most challenging problem. Lattuada gives an example that could not be clearer. A writer, a poet – he states – uses pen and paper, inspiration, experience and culture. These are the tools of the trade. They are neither expensive nor inaccessible: a pencil, paper. Clearly, they might not be published, they might be rejected, their ideas might be turned down; they might be persecuted. However, the work remains. Whereas filmmakers are faced with a different situation. It takes a lot of money to produce a film – hundreds of thousands of dollars. Consequently, you rely on finance. And, he goes on to say, you must face them to convince them, to win them over. In response, Zavattini emphasizes the value of Film Clubs, the importance of developing one’s own public, cultivating it and nurturing its level of aesthetic appreciation. Film clubs, and the public they create and orientate, once they have established themselves, can reach the stage at which they are capable of taking over the production of quality cinema, and succeed. Film clubs make the work of art an independent endeavour and provide a failsafe, a guarantee of quality, singling out a particular film from the rest of current production and contributing film criticism, discussions and suggestions. Quite simply, according to Zavattini and Lattuada, film clubs are a defence of good cinema and a resource for it. Directors, screenwriters and quality filmmakers will find their strongest ally in film clubs. The dual role they share is no accident. Alberto Lattuada is also the man who instigated the Milan Cinéthèque; indeed, he founded it. It is one of the best stocked in the world, and his previous job as a journalist and a film critic has contributed to making him a first-rate auteur (you need only see The Overcoat to be convinced that he is one) and also someone who is aware of the most effective possible relationship between public and filmmakers – both groups are in a position in which, due to the current climate, they have to show solidarity towards one another. By the same token, Zavattini, who is considered the most important figure within Neo-realism, is the president of the Italian Federation of Film Clubs, and their cultural organizer, despite the intensity of his artistic activity, and undoubtedly this role also benefits his work. Parma; freedom of expression; Neo-realism; good cinema; art and truth. Funding; production; censorship; film clubs; all this is in theory. When you consider Parma in relation to our Nuestro Tiempo, you might appreciate the ways in which these elements are interrelated, you might understand the nature of the problem and what criteria to adopt, to carry out research and seek out solutions. Did you deal with the Aristarco-Renzi case at Parma? ‘Not as a separate issue’, Zavattini explains. ‘Then again, we didn’t avoid it. It as a single, important issue, which, however, no matter how unique and significant it might be, should be viewed from a general perspective, in the light of the struggle for the freedom of expression.’

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He also made the point earlier that If we lose our freedom of expression, if this dies out and is suppressed, Neorealism dies with it. They’re interconnected. It is its atmosphere, the very air it breathes, which allows it to survive. What I can say is that we bore in mind this particular case in the way the meeting was organised.

A new question came from someone whose name I don’t know. He began by acknowledging the positive value of social conscience within Neo-realist cinema and its significance, but wanted to know what the overall objective of such a line of enquiry might be. Lattuada steps in to answer: Neo-realism is neither Fascist nor Nationalist-chauvinist, neither Imperialist (in the sense of being in favour of Imperialism) nor does it side with – or could ever side with – the indifferent, who exploit other people. It goes without saying that it works for justice, in so far as it equates with truth and progress. To bring out the truth, to let it be known, to make room for it and allow it to prevail, is tantamount to fighting for justice and the good.

The young man who asked the question narrows it down: Is Neo-realism always bent on exploring humanity’s social problems, singling out the poor as its role models? Is this how it goes about expressing its sympathy towards them?

‘There can be no doubt that on many occasions the situation of the poor and the disinherited is given centre stage and the main roles are assigned to them’, Zavattini responds. ‘Then again, it’s not a dogmatic approach. On the contrary, we are faced with a problem and a context that require a very open mind.’ Lattuada intervenes: I can add that, on other occasions, we should, and, indeed, must focus on the rich and on the indifferent, the parasites, and the heartless, who exploit other people or fail to connect with them. The meaning and the nature of Neo-realism remains as contemporary as the root cause of the problems mentioned above. The question of justice and injustice won’t go away any time soon. Nor have the unjust changed, the people who are to blame.

Lattuada champions satire. He thinks it is very effective. Applied to cinema, it makes it possible to fight bureaucrats and reactionaries, false conventions and obscurantism, a range of different weapons, both subtle and demystifying. Clearly, he is referring to his film The Overcoat, screened in Havana during the Italian Cinema Film Week, definitely a film in which sharp satire that hits the mark is accompanied by empathy and insight, resulting in a work of art.

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He tells us that such a film would not have been possible had he not chosen satire as the mode of communication. The theme of the mayor and the impersonal way it was dealt with, as typical, alongside Nicolai Gogol’s authoritative validation, has made a new direction possible. This is how to avoid censorship. Yolanda Pérez Nodarse begins to ask a different question: ‘And what about the ending ...?’ But Lattuada doesn’t let her finish the rest of the sentence: ‘A concession, up to a point’, he admits. ‘We made two endings. One is simpler, doing nothing more than suggesting what is explicit in the other. And besides, the concession does not affect fundamentals, nor does it offer a key for interpreting the film, which is completely consistent right up to that point.’ To support his satire thesis, Lattuada provides the example of ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! made in Spain under Franco’s dictatorship. Though subjected to censorship, it succeeded in overcoming it, teasing out and tackling problems which concern the Spanish people. The film conveys with irony and humour a sendup of the Marshall Plan and its representatives, as well as exposing or analysing legitimate hopes that had been aired, yet were ultimately denied. Zavattini intervenes, endorsing the same argument [Cino] Lo Duca had used during his cross between a speech and a chat in a previous event that same week: But satire is not always possible, in any medium or at any time. There are no examples nor observations which can prove that. It is a matter of potential use, effectiveness, resulting from subtlety and intelligent discrimination. It is just one of several options, not the winning formula. This is how we understand it.

With clarity, empathy and solidarity, Zavattini and Lattuada connect the problematic of man, humanity and a sense of balance with a Neo-realist approach that expresses loyalty to the fundamentals of truth. Between them, they express a positive and negative critique, which one of the participants tries to summarize, reaching the conclusion that Soviet cinema, once it reached its apex (in films like Battleship Potemkin, Ten Days that Shook the World, Alexander Nievsky and so on) – when you compare it with the Neo-realist school – is a minor movement, because it expressed the point of view of a single class. This made it inferior to Italian Neo-realist production, which offers a cinema of Mankind, a humanist cinema with a broader perspective.

Zavattini disagrees with these statements that are not based on specific examples, or better, not to the extent that they should be. He points out that Neo-realist cinema which expresses fidelity to the truth, and is alien to formulas that might distort it, must consider the clash between good and evil, and do so with courage. This it does whenever it sets its sights on poverty and exploitation. A humanist cinema of truth and justice can only come into existence when the causes cease to exist, and when those who aid and abet injustice are openly challenged. Neo-

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realist cinema is working towards such a time, by placing truth and justice at the centre of its inspiration. It’s the turn of a young woman in green – she is dressed in green and that is how Zavattini refers to her in his reply – who says she doesn’t want to ask a question, but rather offer a confirmation, by expressing her own opinion which confirms the views expressed by the filmmakers in the hall. However, she distorts the meaning of what they have said. She talks about Man and humanity, in abstract terms, beyond the realms of the real world. The way she expresses herself, both in terms of content and of her intention, produces a trail of confusion and error. Her contribution provokes a fresh question from Alfredo Guevara, expressed in the following way: I agree with the statements and underlying criteria expressed by Zavattini and Lattuada and I say so because I think I have understood exactly what they mean to say. But some people seem to be confused. This is the reason why I would like to ask Zavattini and Lattuada for a clarification. Can they confirm what they said earlier and repeat it, rather than give a reply? So, I ask that they be invited to speak. Does Neo-realism not capture man and society in a concrete, everyday sense? Are we not referring to a concrete person and a concrete society? Does it not engage with actual relationships? Isn’t the suffering of men, their poverty and their struggle, a material fact? Are we not considering solidarity, truth and justice, in a tangible sense? Don’t we mean real solidarity? Real truth? Real justice? Furthermore, when all is said and done, is the subject matter that inspires Neo-realism and its very objectives not empirical?

Zavattini says: I shall reply ... in a concrete way. The man who inspires us is a real man, a courageous man, reflective, equipped with a conscience, and willing to fight in society. This is the kind of man we would like to help nurture and, sometimes, we may meet someone just like this. The kind of society we aim to represent is as concrete as the relationships which result from it and originate in it. Neo-realism, I might add, should not limit itself to observation, but extend to action. To look and to act. This is the problematic.3

He expands on these concepts: The artist isn’t only someone who creates a work of art, but a person who lives in society, and creates the work within it; someone who seeks, discovers, communicates, and comes into contact with the truth; someone who lives a concrete life, in a concrete society, with problems which need to be resolved 3

The italics convey Guevara’s underlining in his typescript.

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in a concrete way. And moreover, this is someone who is obliged to become aware, and to act accordingly, without excluding personal experience. The artist’s duty is unlimited and never ending.

Zavattini rejects the approach of those artists who create a work, a book, a poem, a film, and then are prepared to wait years for it to be communicated and to accept that one of these days, it may reach the stage of taking on a meaning of some sort or other, a contribution, but only in the fullness of time, years later, or even centuries later: To see in order to act is not a matter of rhetoric, not an illusion nor is it a vague intention, to be put off until some putative time in the distant future. We live in times of urgency. It is the present moment that demands it of us; an important present that has the right to demand it. ‘Man’, yes, but concrete man, a very concrete person, both sensitive and needy of tangible human solidarity, of solutions.

Marta Santo Tomás wants to know what the methods and stylistic formulas of Neo-realism are. She recalls the question put to Lo Duca some days ago and his reply: ‘Why film in the streets? Because that is where you find real life.’ Zavattini and Lattuada pick up on this and follow the same principle, without limiting Neo-realism to this aspect (not that Lo Duca did so): In many cases, non-professional actors are chosen for the lead roles. They represent episodes of their personal, lived experience, or of their family, or social relationships, re-enacting them for the camera. It goes without saying that the emotional impact will be out of the ordinary. And this is what we seek: realism in form and content. It’s not easy to work with untrained actors. It stands to reason that the scenes take more time and effort to reach the desired effect.

The fact remains, however, that the results confirm such a choice. It is crucial to get close to reality, tap into its source. It is simply not acceptable to end up with a pre-packaged cinema, based on a ready-made reality, one which relies on works of literature, on plays or on the novel, to the point of being preconceived. If you want to represent a village, a community, monastic life, a human type, don’t adopt as a model the existing work (not to say that it should be excluded), of story tellers, novelists, playwrights, essayists or philosophers. You need to go where life is taking place, wherever real life is being produced. As far as cinema is concerned, poetry and fable are a means of expression. But such poetic modes should not be misunderstood as a concession, or a deviation, in respect of Neo-realist principles. The real problem concerns content, meaning, objectives. De Sica, for example, is a poet. In [Giuseppe] De Santis you will find both poetry and a critique of society, based on exhaustive documentary evidence.

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Zavattini goes on to mention Luchino Visconti and The Earth Trembles, a film he invites us to go and see The qualities of Neo-realism, its rejection of ‘ready-made formulas’, using conventional tropes; its refusal to falsify life and its loyalty towards truth, regardless of its complexity, are what determine the audience’s approval. After its initial shock, it recovers, and becomes engrossed in this form of cinema.

The main obstacle is due to habit patterns, and to the long stretch of time during which Hollywood produced a public equipped with a badly formed, even a deformed taste, through its false, conventional style. Its very emptiness, moreover, makes it weak and fragile. That is the reason why Neo-realism continues to conquer new markets and the public’s approval, a little at a time, but not without determination. Addressing Lattuada specifically, Alfredo Guevara says that he is aware, like everyone else in the hall, of the director’s achievement, and namely the Milan Cinéthèque, pointing out that our National University’s Department of Cinema has a film archive. He goes on to ask him: Can we film students and film club enthusiasts hope to make use of the Milan Cinéthèque film collection, through an exchange between that organization and the Department of Cinema of our University, with which Nuestro Tiempo maintains an ongoing and intense collaboration?

Lattuada replies that this is perfectly feasible, adding that it would be of great benefit for both the Italian and Cuban film club members. The matter will be discussed later. Footnote The text above constitutes my personal and free version which wasn’t produced from shorthand, but was based on my impressions, and on what I recall. I have tried to reconstruct – only with partial accuracy, most probably – the conversation and conference of the famous screenwriter and Neo-realist theorist Cesare Zavattini and of the director Alberto Lattuada (remember The Overcoat). It took place in the presence of members of the Cinema Section of the Nuestro Tiempo cultural association and their invited guests, of the film students from the University’s Summer School and members of other Havana-based film clubs. Also present were Dr Muratori and Dr Escalera, officials from the Italian embassy in Havana, Dr Fanfani from unitalia Films, the actress Marisa Belli, Prof José Manuel Valdés Rodríguez who is the El Mundo film critic, as well as the director of the Department of Cinema at the University, in addition to representatives of the film review columns in the press.

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Context This intervention for the Milan Conference was published before the event, in Zavattini’s regular diary column, letting in the readers on the secret: ‘This is what I’m going to say.’ He deals with two related issues. He draws a distinction between Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954) and its lyrical Neo-realism from the kind of Neo-realist, socially engaged cinema the country then needed, arguing that cinema had a decisive role to play in changing Italian society for the better and taking an active part in public discourse. He then offers a vigorous response to the Communist Party’s ploy to replace Neo-realism with an Italian version of Soviet realism, as formulated by Georg Lukács, giving the background of the dispute which had already emerged the previous year in his long exchanges with Enzo Muzii, the editor of Emilia. The background was that Carlo Salinari, academic and political activist in the pci, and Guido Aristarco, the editor-in-chief of Cinema Nuovo, now hailed Visconti’s historical film Senso, and Vasco Pratolini’s new novel Metello, as marking a shift from Neo-realism to realism, as Muzii’s article above had foreshadowed. Aristarco developed Salinari’s line of argument, adding that the shift from Neo-realism to realism consisted in moving from description and anecdote to character development and establishing a point of view through a fictional character, with all the promise and potential such a move would bring to cinema. Senso brought back opera, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, literature and the art of the nineteenth century, in a ploy to associate the ideas of Marxist politician and theorist Antonio Gramsci with the Italian Risorgimento, the previous century’s movement towards national independence.2 Visconti was candid about it:

Zavattini, ‘Roma, 24 febbraio 1954’, Cinema Nuovo, no. 30, 1 March 1954, then in Diario cinematografico, 138–43. 2 Gian Piero Brunetta, The History of Italian Cinema, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, 138. 1

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Senso is a romantic film clearly influenced by Italian opera ... . I transferred the sentiments expressed in Verdi’s Il trovatore into a story of war and rebellion.3

It seems extraordinary that this film was seen as the way forward for Neo-realism. A period costume drama? Opera? In hindsight, the arguments adduced by critics seem feeble. Zavattini’s response was to defend the urgent need for more Neorealist films, moving in the direction of non-fiction, to develop reportage, based on field research for investigative cinema, as a genuine political and ethical necessity, based on an understanding of Neo-realism as socially engaged, as a cinema of political commitment, dealing with the present and its problems. Why exclude the present? Why plunge back into the previous century when the present moment had so much to offer in terms of promising events? He cited as an example the spectacular factory occupation which began in 1950 at the Officine Meccaniche Reggiane, one of the largest factories in Italy. In October 1950, following 2,100 lay-offs, the workers gave rise to an occupation lasting a year. Zavattini gave his paper on 2 March 1955.4 The diary entry was based on a much longer version which only appeared in 1979 in Neorealismo ecc. and which is the right length for a paper of that kind.

Text This is what I’ll say, among other things, in Milan, at the Casa della Cultura, where I have been asked to discuss cinema. In the past few days, two events have struck me. A young producer on his way back from Paris, someone who knows what he is doing and what he wants, has claimed that Neo-realism is appreciated more abroad when it is lyrical, as, for example, in Fellini’s last film.5 Consequently, that producer claims he is going to produce more lyrical films. I find it touching that this producer has such plans. But he is going to have to admit that he is giving up on Neo-realism, since the lyricism he has in mind is light years away from the kind of urgent national needs that form the thematics of Neo-realism as recognized worldwide, not pertaining to cinema as a whole, but to a certain kind of cinema. The other serious news item – I don’t have documentary evidence for this, just a verbal statement – is that another very capable producer, who is on his way home to Italy from America, states that he has noticed the satisfaction in American circles over the weakening of Neo-realism. Not that he means to say that the Americans are glad that Italian cinema is declining, not at all. He Luchino Visconti, cited in Brunetta, ibidem, 152. Zavattini, ‘Conversazione alla Casa della Cultura di Milano’, in Neorealismo ecc., 175–80. The text published in his public diary is much shorter. A comparison shows that the author simply edited out some of the paragraphs, leaving the rest verbatim. 5 La strada (1954). Fellini’s film is named in the longer version. 3 4

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claims that what pleases them is that the decline of Neo-realism, as a fixed idea, as a focus on poverty and harsh living, suggests that at last Italian cinema can expand and make realist works of art like War and Peace. It is no bad thing that one film will veer more to the Right and another more to the Left. We are not utopians, fooled by the belief that soon films will only go in one direction, for, if that were the case, the social question would have been resolved, simple as that. No, we are no utopians, we are citizens in flesh and blood, consistent democrats, if we accept that both kinds of films should be made, and namely, the ones on the Left and the ones on the Right, since the space traced by the pendulum allows us to develop a consensual cinema which will serve to foster and consolidate a national cinema. But there is another novelty which has taken me by surprise. Only a few days ago, I read statements made by reputable people like Carlo Salinari and Guido Aristarco, which seem both serious and dangerous. Now, I might be wrong, and I am willing to acknowledge it without hesitation, if I were. However, as I write, in my view, these statements by Salinari and Aristarco are seriously damaging to genuine Neo-realism. Writing about Pratolini’s book, Metello, Salinari hails it as a masterpiece, marking a shift from Neo-realism to realism and Aristarco, in his review of Visconti’s Senso, also hails this as a masterwork signalling the shift from Neo-realism to realism. I’m also convinced that these two works are very important.6 I was never under the impression, though, that Neo-realism was such a specific entity that it had to change its name and evolve, after only ten years. Do we want its topics to develop further? Yes, of course we do. Undoubtedly, it has realized only a fraction of its original aims. But I don’t understand why an analysis of this kind and such an acknowledgement should require a name change. We shouldn’t change the name, just as, by the same token, you would never change the colour of your flag, while the battle is raging. Furthermore, the same carefully thought out Neo-realist objectives retain their validity. Unless, that is, the plan is to tie Neo-realism to a chair, tap it on the shoulder and say in a concerned tone: ‘You are in a critical state.’ And anyway, how can we abandon a word that is still so charged with purpose, which we have only just begun to address, and which stands for nothing less than Italian cinema, with all its battles, its victories, its naïve attitudes, its mistakes? Which stands for that crowded collection of events – not just the meagre fifteen films, but all the private and collective events which, from end to end of the Italian peninsula contributed to making those few, if symptomatic, films? 6

Guido Aristarco devoted his editorial piece to the polemic on realism. Cf. Cinema Nuovo, 25 February 1955, in which he cites Carlo Salinari’s recent article in the weekly communist magazine Il Contemporaneo, in which Salinari hailed Visconti’s history film Senso and equally Vasco Pratolini’s novel Metello as marking a new phase in Italian post-war realism. Salinari’s objection was that Neo-realism had stopped short at the surface appearances of contemporary reality, stuck in anecdote and chronicle. The way forward, he argued, was to follow the model of nineteenth-century realism.

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The task ahead for Neo-realist filmmakers should not be sidelined by aesthetic issues, but become ever more responsible, by addressing political and ethical issues, since ethics and politics are its foundation. Indeed, if Neo-realism and Neo-realists are in a state of confusion today – I am referring to those who are confused – let’s not complicate the matter in this way. This is no aesthetic confusion, it is an ethical and political confusion. We can sum up the current situation in this way: it is impossible to make a Neo-realist cinema when the state of the nation is longer Neo-realist.7 Scores of projects, hundreds even, were just waiting to be developed for the cinema, you know? Even though they were all different, they all revolved around a single, Neo-realist, need: engaging with the nation’s social reality. Which one, you ask? The reality that is relevant enough to inform parliamentary debates. But one by one, the doors are shutting it out, and even if, very occasionally, it may find a way in, through a window, say, the vast majority of filmmakers are turning their backs, preferring to embark on non-controversial projects. Today, we are very far from where we were in 1945 and 1946, much further than ten years’ distance would suggest. Actually, it only took a few years to wear us out. Yet we remember that time very well. We all emerged from a timeless Limbo and we all shared the confusion and delight, and even anxiety, born from the desire to do everything, I mean everything, which set us off on a journey to enjoy this gift, only hesitating briefly, barely a moment, in the face of the immensity of what seemed possible. But I must say that Italians didn’t linger that long. They didn’t fall victims to the paradox of Buridan’s Ass, and the Italian Constitution proves it.8 Conversely, I don’t rule out the growth of Neo-realism, given these premises, on condition that the investigative drive which animates Neo-realism develops, along the length and the breadth of the country. Don’t give credence to the notion that, since it visualized the problems of the South, however tentatively, or brought to public visibility the working class, its task has been completed. ‘There are no sciuscià anymore’, they say.9 But year in year out, or, indeed, day in day out, there are plenty of issues for Neo-realist cinema to address. If anything, it is honing its perspicacity to detect the basic demands – I’m not sure that we might describe them as existential – of most Italians, in among what seem to be ephemeral news stories in the constant, all too fluid, flux of time.

The remark concerns the reduced leeway for the freedom of expression in 1950s Italian democracy, dominated by a Centre Right political party, the Christian Democrats which, even before its 1948 electoral victory, had taken tight control of Italian cinema production, through covert and overt censorship, and, worse still, had also fostered self-censorship. 8 ‘Buridan’s Ass’ refers to a philosophical paradox of being faced with two equally desirable options and hence being unable to choose. Cf. Jack Zupko, John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master, Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003, 258. The Arab philosopher Al-Ghazali set the problem, but it dated back to Aristotle. 9 sciuscià references the film based on a scenario and screenplay written by Zavattini and directed by Vittorio De Sica. The objection was that Neo-realism was bound up with the war. Often, the bicycle was used as a symbol for Zavattini bashing, and for making the same point, pointing to Bicycle Thieves as topical, only in the immediate post-war. 7

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Neo-realism has conceded to being called chronicle, since it regards chronicle as raw material for art, and endeavoured to seek principles in it which are so entirely bound up with existence as to materialize within reality itself. The shocking reality was such that it demanded an ethical response, which required us to shoulder those responsibilities we share in respect of contemporary life. This has led us to make a radical change to our behaviour. The historicity of the contemporary moment, let us call it that, manifested itself so powerfully that we could not draw back from taking part in it, which is why we got so totally involved, armed with such determination and such desire for participation that a new Italian, a new citizenship, came into being. We distinguished the past from the present: because the past was tragic, having failed when it was the present. The way forward was to prefer making films that examined the present, with the awareness of the present, to making films that told an ancient story, albeit from a contemporary perspective, because this was a sure way, political in a sense, to influence the present moment. For Italian cinema to make a film about the factory occupation at the Officine Meccaniche Reggiane, on illiteracy, or agrarian rent control acts, meant distinguishing it from any other cinema, precisely because Italians were galvanized to respond to civic reality, which is the set of interrelations of our ongoing, immediate, and direct, contributions to this collective reality.10 We can say that the substantial merit of Neo-realism was precisely this: to tackle only topics close in time and space, which required one to come to grips, even physically, with the nation’s social fabric, increasing the knowledge exchange among Italians. Yes indeed, the national train network could be rebuilt, though not to transport us to see monuments, but to see other people. Consequently, the reason for the intensity and the passion of discovery was that artists and citizens were so united that the boundary between the former and the latter became unclear. What seemed to matter most was not the how of storytelling, but the what of storytelling, and, if such a shift postulated a focus on the person first and the artist second, the artist was only too happy to come second. But is this even possible? The artist follows the person so closely as to be like his shadow. And even if the artist felt reluctance towards commitment, the person, on the other hand, chose commitment, and found confirmation in the compulsion to produce an accurate narration, driven by the intensity of commitment. There is an admirable connection between wanting to face the present moment and social engagement, which is the most civilized approach to it. Consequently, Neo-realists no longer felt willing to settle for that form of presence which the growing number of people, who spend their time constructing

On the Officine Meccaniche Reggiane, cf. Anon., ‘Officine Meccaniche Reggiane. Dove si è scritta la storia’, https​:/​/ga​​zzett​​adire​​ggio.​​geloc​​al​.it​​/regg​​io​/cr​​onaca​​/2014​​/09​/1​​0​/new​​s​/off​​ icine​​-mecc​​anich​​e​-reg​​giane​​-dove​​-si​-e​​-scri​​tta​-l​​a​-​sto​​ria​-1​​.9901​​910​?r​​ef​=se​​arch,​ consulted 13 September 2019.

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alibis, considered a suitable justification for any artist. They no longer found acceptable that their artistic influence, however small, should reach society through those slow routes which were used by a book, say, a hundred years ago, and may have a positive impact, by the following year, possibly. The Hiroshima Atomic Bomb added something to Neo-realist culture. It was natural that the revolution that the atomic brought with it, in real terms, would touch all those people who sought to be well informed about current affairs. For, every so often, events take place very suddenly, and, if we are not ready to engage with them, we risk losing sight of them altogether. This is the reason why, among the insights and realizations the atomic bomb prompted, with the energy of a strong wind, the one that struck Neo-realists most was that it would be necessary to tackle the present, as if it were eternity, otherwise we could reach our conclusion when it is too late. The light of the Atomic Bomb, that unique ‘quality’, pertaining to the Second World War, was like a lightning bolt, suddenly lighting up the woods, exposing every small detail, and that was when we knew what had to be done, which is why, not to do it with a sense of urgency meant being reprehensibly too late. Such a recognition and such a will to take a closer look, with a view to do something about it – as I have often said – became the Neo-realist leitmotif. Now, there was a situation of emergency; now, there was a need to address social problems differently, and no longer by adopting what we might call a classical approach which would have ultimately involved our procrastination. To speak of revolution, as I am aware, is to say something very serious, something which, therefore, should only be done with discrimination. But the same criterion goes for the equally serious phrase ‘Atomic Bomb’. When we have to address themes such as agrarian rent control acts, or any other structural aspect of our contemporary society, I dare say that we would discuss such themes far more quickly, so quickly, that our approach would indeed be revolutionary, if, that is, the wake-up call of the huge Atomic Bomb mushroom was right in front of us. Our conscience, at this time, is Neo-realist, before it can be lyrical. Just as our fear of the Atomic Bomb is not lyrical, but Neo-realist. I have heard that the events of 1945 and 1946 were so violent that they spoke for themselves, the war was so violent that all it took to understand its horror and the lessons it taught was to see it projected on the large screen. But today, apparently, events no longer have the same incandescence. Only art can fix their coordinates, like a star in the sky that shows the way. That is not true. The reason Neo-realist films are valuable, is because they grasped current events in their incandescence. The selection criterion they followed, as to which events to film, I define as democratic. The sad truth is that Neo-realism has few works to its name. In the Neorealist clutch, there were so many healthy chicks and each one, despite its slightly different appearance, fitted into the same clutch, but the magician put his foot down, and they all scattered in different directions. There is, of course, the rare film that escapes entrapment, but you cannot form, let alone perfect, any movement whatsoever with only an odd film or two.

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No lasting national cinema can issue forth. They wanted to stamp out Neorealism and they have succeeded. It is a shame that these friends ours and of Neo-realism see its future in a name change, at the crucial time a battle is being waged, and despite the fact that none of the critical and artistic ambitions of realism are inimical to Neo-realism. Fortunately, our conscience can see clearly how it might develop further.

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Context The following interview appeared in La Rassegna del film, in June 1954, six months after the Parma Conference. What is striking is that, far from being deterred by his detractors during and after the Conference, Zavattini is planning a second film along similar lines as Love in the City. He covers the need for cohesion and commonality of purpose in making a documentary of such scope; he defends the choice of Caterina Rigoglioso as protagonist of The Story of Catherine, the episode of Love in the City about her. Caterina was a nineteenyear-old Sicilian adolescent who abandoned her baby and was taken to court for that. At the time, single mothers, adoption and abandonment of a child in the close society of the time were scandalous and topical. In the course of the second half of the interview, Zavattini criticizes the limits of the Parma Conference itself, his detractors, who were unable to see that Neo-realism consists in a multiplicity of choices and directions, fighting instead over which Neo-realism is or is not acceptable and why that is. The interview defends the purpose of Neo-realism and its international reach.

Text [Fernaldo di Giammatteo]: One could have serious doubts about the excessive ease with which one could enter into contact with individuals indiscriminately and with a journalist-style reportage agenda. How would you respond to such reservations? [Zavattini]: The film Love in the City is an experiment which tackled a sizeable range of issues for the first time. While it is true to say that it has some shortcomings, these have nothing to do with the film’s frame of reference, and Zavattini, ‘Neorealismo, fatto morale’, Rassegna del film, no. 21, June 1954, now in Neorealismo ecc., 144–54.

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everything to do with the circumstances. Before discussing the specific point Di Giammatteo is making, let us begin at the beginning. Let us suppose that the second issue of this so-called cinematic journal were, for the sake of argument, about the theme: ‘Is Christ alive or dead?’ Well, we wouldn’t make the same mistake we made for the first issue, which was not to generate a unity of purpose, to allow the journal to develop an overall style all of its own, one which would could still incorporate each filmmaker’s individual style. This is how it works in magazine publishing – in a weekly or a monthly publication – in which context all the contributors can express their originality, while accepting the general frame of reference. Whereas, we only rarely met as a group. Hindsight suggests that it would be best to gather in a single room all the magazine directors and film directors who will be developing the theme: ‘Is Christ alive or dead?’ It is a question of discussing and deciding together the scope of the theme, its objectives and its limitations. In a nutshell, this envisages genuine cooperation from the outset, the kind of dynamic which has never existed before, since directors always develop their own episode in total isolation from the others. This constitutes the ethical dimension of a film of this nature, because it elicits from the participants a disinterested approach, in so far as it fosters a collective interest, as opposed to personal self-interest – or at least it encourages a balance between the two approaches. It goes without saying that there would need to be an agreement over the theme, how convincing it is to the group and its ulterior purpose, which would be to examine modern society in the light of the ethics of Christ – of the values which Christianity has disseminated across the world and, furthermore, to tackle the failings of violence, economic inequality, and so on and so forth. In brief, the magazine’s line, its ultimate objective, should emerge from all the participants’ cooperation, which in no way limits their creative freedom, but aligns them all with a common ethical intent.2 If someone felt uncomfortable with such an ethical stance, there would be no place for that person in this project, no matter how good a film director. Naturally, we would still admire the work. [Fernaldo di Giammatteo]: One can draw a conclusion from the ethical imperative which you have put forward. The artist, or group of artists, and there is no difference whatsoever between the two, should have a very specific, detailed outlook, before any study of what objective reality has to offer can be carried out. Now, these statements alone, which I consider of vital importance, are enough to break the myth of reality speaking for itself, since reality can never speak for itself. So, may I ask you, Za, how do you reconcile this ‘new’ stance with your well-known views about reality?

2

Zavattini speaks of Love in the City and a putative future issue, as if he were discussing a review, a magazine. His outlook matches the opening titles of the film, and is confirmed by his prior experience as a publisher and editorial director at Rizzoli and later Mondadori, the largest Italian pre-war magazine publishers.

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Zavattini: Such a point of departure, let us refer to it as such, and not in any negative or falsifying sense, sums up my entire ethical stance. It has developed through direct contact with reality as it unfolds before us, a little at a time. Ethics is the driving force, which is why I find it ridiculous, when applied to me, that someone at the Parma Conference should be amazed that a writer such as I am, abstract in no small measure by nature, and also prone to be something of a dreamer, whose characters were entirely fictional, should today be so drawn to argue in favour of real, identifiable, individuals, the same sort of people we meet in everyday life. The explanation is that my idea and approach has been nourished by this unmediated experience of reality, even causing me to struggle with my nature and my own limitations. Whereas, my illustrious opponent who made the accusation lacks any engagement of this type and has remained within the literalist confines that I have tried to overcome as best I could. Clearly, it would be absurd not to bring together a group of people who broadly share a similar, albeit uncommon, an outlook, to make a film like this. When we made the first one, we didn’t ask ourselves this question, except in a hurried way, when we decided to work together. It wouldn’t make sense to say, at the outset, that all those who produced the first issue of the review, as directors, writers, and so on, are going to be selected automatically, for the second issue. This will depend on whether it is feasible to find a common basis of understanding. It is a fact that with some, this will not be possible, given the difference in our views, not even after long discussions. While, with others, although there are differences, we also share points in common, which could become a basis for working together. I wish to point out that there are certainly themes, such as society as you would wish it to be, if you had the power to change it, which would not be conducive to a commonality of purpose – between us, between you and me, Giammatteo. Since, while you recognize the value of a certain part of liberal civilization we cannot dispense with, I, on the other hand, feel instinctively the need for more radical changes. Whereas, I do believe that we could find a common basis of understanding for a collaboration and fruitful field research, if we stick to themes such as ‘Life along the length of the river Po’, or ‘How factory workers live in Turin’, or ‘The material conditions of childhood in Italy’. Up to this point, we are loosely discussing the choice of a theme and social facts. But then we shift from generic attributes to specific themes. This is the juncture where we have to acknowledge that research on this society, in relation to Christian morals in its best-known aspects, must be carried out by means of almost scientific field research. It would fall short of what is required to, say, be working on the theme of childhood and limiting oneself to a slim volume of statistics. No, what needs to be done is to devote time to the theme, co-habit with it, to the point of handling live, real material, unless one has already done so previously. Then, each can manipulate the material in accordance with personal artistic capabilities. Even Caterina Rigoglioso could have been treated in a hundred different ways, on the proviso that any one of these mirrored an authentic moral response

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provoked by understanding the reality of the social fact. If, in the episode directed by [Citto] Maselli (to which I contributed, while [Luigi] Chiarini collaborated on the script), there are some flaws, I wish to point out at last that no one has been able to prove to me that they invalidate the overriding principle. Any flaws are, at most, artistic, in so far as they pointed to Caterina being unusual, whereas, that could have been avoided. Someone else might have done a better job, and, rather than describe Caterina’s last two days, describe her last two minutes, or only analyse the time after she abandoned her son, or narrate all her vicissitudes from when she arrived in Rome from Sicily, up to the moment when she was incarcerated. Clearly, one could posit any number of permutations, based on artistic abilities. Equally, any other theme could also be treated in several ways. [Fernaldo di Giammatteo]: Can we stay with Caterina. Because this is the key to the polemical campaign which is being directed against you. I appreciate that you are going to take stock of all the experience gained and use it for the next issue of the cinematic journal. By looking closely at the most significant episode of the first, we can establish what to avoid and what not to avoid. For example, the main aspect you wanted to bring out in the character of Caterina was that instinctive attitude of hers. She seemed almost like a lost little creature plunged into an aggressive or indifferent society. Don’t you think that Caterina’s physical presence, someone with a real name and surname, has, in itself, reduced the reach of such an investigation? Do you not think that a Caterina who had not been interpreted by the real Caterina would have resulted in a more in-depth investigation on this psychological and social issue? [Zavattini]: But I must object that the participation of the real person acting out a character is not the only kind of Neo-realism I defend. They have gone so far as to claim that I fail to see any salvation for cinema, unless it is by virtue of names and surnames. Obviously, the pressing need for a real character was triggered by my violent reaction against all sorts of conformism which weigh on the cinematic spectacle, and my rejection of all invented characters. While it is commonly believed that a make-believe character provides more freedom to the investigation, in my view, faced with the reality of films being made, the opposite happens. I am never going to reject a film which resorts to an invented character, but which is the outcome of vibrant and topical social and ethical intentions. I do, however, think that, from a Neo-realist perspective, as it formed coherently immediately after the war, the time of the real character had to come. This type of character carries far more responsibility towards the viewing public than any other kind of character. The fact that, in Italy and elsewhere, in all the cinemas of the world, there were a few isolated instances, is neither here nor there. Indeed, the novelty of Neo-realism does not rely on a few sporadic, chance apparitions, but in a more conscious and shared understanding which involved the entire subject and the entire object of cinematography for a certain time. Otherwise, one could claim that Neo-realism has always existed, for even in a star-centred cinema from

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before the two world wars, there was some need for reality, and there are famous films which responded to such a need. But the actual novelty of Neo-realism, its birth as a new and determining social fact, consists precisely in its continuity, its distinguishing features, and its programme. The reason it spread across the world was that it was not the product of an individual, but of a human movement arising from the collective. As far as I am concerned, it is pointless to cite Four Steps among the Clouds or other films as predecessors. Since, where would we stop in drawing up lists of relevant films? It would be denying the value and impact of the war and of fascism for having provided the foundations of Neo-realist conscience. This is the reason why a Neo-realist conscience cannot be dismissed as an outburst, spent within a short historic time-frame, since it emerged from a long and painful gestation. Fortunately, it is a triumph, capable of facing all the obstacles which it is compelled to face, and drawing on its history as it does so. It may happen that the works are few and far between. But to defend its gains, it exists as an ongoing state of awareness of reality. This is, in itself, proof of the obstacles it faces, and of the relentless conflict with which it has to contend. It is equally true, a demonstration of the significance of the lasting nature of Neo-realism as an ethical stance before the real, that the conscience of what it is and what it should be is increasingly developing. As a result, new and valid filmworks are going to emerge, from its foundations. Consequently, it is not a matter of any presumed death of Neo-realism, but of no more than a pause, owing to the momentary prevailing of those elements which have failed to participate in the ethical development of Italian society. I don’t agree that a real character limits an artist’s manipulation. I think it is a new, unfamiliar tool and therefore not easy to use. Because it also demands a knowledge that we do not wish to acquire, out of intellectual laziness or false modesty, or because we are used to unscrew the head of one character we have invented, to screw it onto another character, and swop limbs to combine with different bodies, all in accordance with artistic intention. Whereas, there he is in the flesh, and no, he won’t allow us much leeway for any alchemic transformation. The truth is that an unequivocally human being offers the full scope of freedom to be creative. The catch is that to carry out this alchemy a wider knowledge of structure and context is required, something we usually lack. Coming to know the other person through patience and relating directly makes it possible to carry out all the manipulation that is required. One reason we find it easier to work with a fictional character is that there is a long, ancient, even eternal, tradition, of working in this way. Another reason is that to work with a real, identifiable human being is a very delicate operation, comparable to a surgeon carrying out a heart operation, who needs to be thoroughly prepared to do it well. Some say that Caterina’s performance was no more than mediocre, as an actress, and, in their estimation, this is because Caterina should only have been

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used in accordance with the mentality that dictates how a human being should be used, in terms of an acting performance. Instead, this spells the end of the viability of the concept of actress or it is a significant change of direction which involves the use of a character who has a real identity, a name and a surname. The physical emotions and the choices this person makes in moving the body are not the same as the ones required from an actress. For a start, the audience needs to realize that it is faced with the real character. This in itself may lead to a different perception which could modify or even revolutionize its conception of what a spectacle is. If we use real characters, increasingly, the whole thematic of the cinema will be enriched. And I have a feeling that going to the cinema will become a new experience, compared to what it is now. ‘Real characters’ means real events. But in no sense should we confuse real events with news stories, as these latter are framed by another outlook, that of journalism. When I spoke of the flash film, with in mind the plan to make films which could sidestep capital and avoid a form of production which is so tenaciously linked to the star system, I chose Caterina because that appearance of hers could disarm the producer. Her social profile also interested me. However, I stated that any social fact whatsoever, even the ones which do not appear in the press, containing a human interest and meaning, is worth become acquainted with and are suitable to be filmed. I went as far as envisaging a time, in the not too distant future, when every one of us would contribute to a cinematic reconstruction of an event in which he or she had taken part, in the case of past events, or even appearing in a social event still taking place in the present. My intent was essentially to disengage cinema from all the conformism and the obstacles currently related to the spectacle, which have reduced it to no more than a game – in the best of cases, an intellectual pursuit – with very few exceptions which have had little or no impact within the history of powerful economic interests and gargantuan film distribution. You can clearly appreciate that, if what I am saying is sound, then all the promising new filmmakers would be looking outwards, to seek and thus to know and participate in real-life events and train and practise how to work with real people at large. The need for cohabitation, which even at the Parma Conference met with the derision of some, calling it ‘the poetic of the hole in the wall’, springs from the need to work with real people in this new way. Those who claim they don’t understand what I mean by ‘shadowing’, and what I mean when I suggest making ‘a hole-in-the-wall’, as a metaphor for coming to know what was previously ignored, are not in good faith. I have no fixed ideas about what methods to adopt, since any given situation, any consequent need to know, can suggest its own methods. The will to know on each occasion, and in every situation, requires a specific, relevant, approach, which also involves a risk, in the course of experimenting with, and interpreting, a person, or of engaging with an object, or of reading a given situation with which one has decided at the outset, long last, to engage.

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Consequently, if my plan is to work on the theme of a labour strike, I could develop it by spending the whole day on the day of the strike in the company of the striker’s whole family. In this case, ‘shadowing’ and ‘hole-in-the-wall’ involve the striker’s family. I am not concerned with the practicalities of how this would unfold. What interests me, rather, is whether the ethical imperative is there to come to know that family. It follows that if my resolve is genuine, I will be open and willing to adapt to any unexpected change. Whereas, if I choose to film the day of the strike, and do so from a factory worker’s viewpoint, I will have to shadow the person. This involves seeing everything from his perspective. Clearly, my shadowing and ‘the hole-in-the-wall’ approach must be done bearing this in mind. And even should I have to turn my attention in another direction, because however coincidental, it becomes relevant, these actions will work better the more effective my shadowing has been, that is, the more I have become truly familiar with the object of my inspiration as a film writer. Someone has objected that, by creating a close contact with a stranger, as if he or she were one’s next-door neighbour, one risks enfeebling reality, stunting a choral thematic, which would embrace thousands of neighbours. It seems to me that if I intended to film a strike, for example, as a choral event, I would be bound to get to know thousands of participants one by one. But it would be materially impossible to do so. For even in that instance, whatever knowledge I have been able to accrue through cohabitation will allow me to identify the elements that I need for my project, which I can apply equally to thousands of individuals or to a single person. In either case, whether applicable to thousands or to a single person, the objective is to reach the same purpose of illustrating the strike, in terms of what inspired me to focus on the strike in the first place. Because I am speaking for myself, whatever choice I make will be a reflection of my particular conception of the world which I can gradually develop further, and refine, thanks to my experience. [Feraldo di Giammatteo]: I am wondering why it is that these needs, which you sometimes convey in paradoxical terms, should be more pressing now, and why you think they might typify, or should typify, contemporary art. For there is no doubt that art consists in, and always has consisted in coming to know the world. We could not be more in agreement over this. At the same time, it is equally true that such knowledge of art has taken different forms across the various epochs of history (Homer, Dante, Dostoevsky, and so on). So why is it that that particular form of artistic knowledge which you have outlined should appear to you to respond to a fundamental need of today? [Zavattini]: I think there is a growing sentiment, however confused, perhaps, to cease to assign to art – be it sublime art or tragic – the value of a holiday. But, rather, to make art coexist with life itself. Until yesterday, there was life and there was art, and even if art wanted to reflect life, it was always something you went to see on stage, as an entirely separate experience. The emotion it would

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provoke would come to an end when the curtains dropped or else it would linger within, and eventually, and indirectly, influence us over time. Whereas, I think that today there is a need for immediacy, which is why art has become the most active event we experience. Not because it reflects life, but because it sheds light on it: on the object we reach out for or on the path we choose and resolutely stick to without delay. The operativity of art is so linked to time that it no longer disdains being didactic in the highest sense; rather, it wishes to be that. In other words, it seeks to be normative in its actions and consequently tends to dispense with anything that gets in the way, no matter how slightly, of knowing the object of enquiry, not understood in a metaphorical sense, but in its actual, social, context. What is at stake is attaching much greater importance to human beings, to the individual, to the point of feeling the need to appreciate the person, in the sense of: being with him, getting to know him, exploring him without intermediaries. The way I see it, realism is also this momentous shift towards real people and real events, because it encompasses all the elements of struggle, of confrontation, of dialectics, which are the condition of realism. But it also affords a new dimension, which wasn’t there earlier, since there was always the need to complete the object of enquiry with something else, which is to say, with art, which functioned in parallel with life, but never engaging with it directly. Today, as it comes face to face with reality, the gaze is so keen, so contented, that it doesn’t feel the need to shift to a parallel existence, where everything is so carefully selected and ordered. Instead, it prefers to follow the main route. To put it differently, today, exploring the social facts concerning a human being, discovering all his relations, his solitude, oneness and multitude at one and the same time, or interconnectedness, if you will, all elements elevated to the dignity of storytelling, all this is pleasurable. What is beyond our reach is not out of reach because a particular creature, or creatures, or social facts, do not deserve to become a story. No. The problem is caused by our shortcomings, by our inability to perceive their narrativity, that is to say, where they fit in to the general frame of existence. Even those cases considered limit cases, and thus unsuitable for a narration, because they are viewed as too particular, are viewed in that way. However, it is only an error of perception and of judgement. Actually, there is no such thing as an a priori limit case. That is our empty rhetoric speaking, defining it always already as a limit case. It is down to our narrow outlook and our indolence which lets it languish in its Limbo existence of being a limit case. In brief, I am sure that all the things I have said can be contested, except one. The so-called neighbour theory cannot automatically be reduced to an anecdote or an untypical case, unworthy of attention. [Feraldo di Giammatteo]: One could make the observation at this stage, in accordance with your clear exposition, that we are going through a truly decisive historic period in time; a time when it is no longer feasible just ‘to play’. And if today the necessity for an art which is as close as possible to life seems stronger

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than ever, it is probably because the period we are living through really does constitute a fundamental crisis, perhaps the worst human civilization has ever known. Faced with such a crisis, how would you define the specific function of the artist and what distinguishes an artist, as a vehicle of knowledge and producer of art, from other intellectuals? What is the artist’s specific contribution to resolve such a crisis? In what way can the artist reaffirm the value of dignity and establish it for everyone? [Zavattini]: Perhaps the answer can be summed up in a short sentence. Artists shouldn’t proceed from art, but from life. In the sense that artists should participate in facts pertaining to the social sphere. They should wish to take part in them, as I have always said, instead of only representing them. The more artists are nourished by such a civic sense, the more they will be in a position to represent social facts and the more their knowledge can make a contribution to society. Neither are artists on vacation. Therefore a life which is not on vacation will be represented. Someone may wonder if such a representation is likely to be boring, less fun than earlier ones. The doubt will most certainly be a very strong one for anyone whose outlook is still stuck in the past. If, however, we come to grips with the concept that we really are exploring human beings within their social environment, then this exploration will become enjoyable. I really do mean having a good time; just what producers, for example, care so much about. Any field research you might wish to carry out, be it about a city or about an individual, consists in very enjoyable investigations, the more one’s awareness grows. You may notice that young people always need packaged entertainment, whereas, with age, even just going for a stroll or having a chat, typical of life as we know it, becomes entertaining. This is to argue that the more one’s civic sense increases, the more it will find whatever springs from this kind of direct, human, exploration truly spectacular. [Feraldo di Giammatteo]: There are many film directors who often come up with the excuse that they are not artists. And I cannot say that all of them belong to the category of conformists or yes men. There can be no doubt that such people are capable nevertheless of making films in the common interest. [Zavattini]: Conformism is the shadow that follows even the most courageous and most original actions. And between the hero and the conformist often there is but a small step. Some loners are able to reach the line of resistance on their own, but by and large, you reach the line of resistance through solidarity, that is to say, through social engagement. Cinema has become a test bed, although it lacks any culture, according to some writers, as if it were born on another planet. Its defeat, then, given its blatant popularity as a medium, spells the defeat of something fundamentally important. Experience teaches us that we do better when we have bearings; think of children. The less they are left on their own, the better.

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It is not easy to be audacious. That is why I would have preferred the Parma Conference to have closed its proceedings with a more promising, and less restrictive, motion. True, it was a very good thing to see the existence of Neorealism reaffirmed. But they also warned: ‘Avoid deviations.’ ‘Watch out for this, watch out for that.’ Whereas one tenet of Neo-realism – having agreed its overriding principle of being a civic cinematography – consists in allowing the freedom to pursue a variety of avenues, and, moreover, going as far as offering new ones to master a cinematic language which can express new needs even better. If that motion was also written with me in mind and those who have worked with me during these years – and I have every reason to believe so – in the light of all the personal attacks against me, then I have to say that it is unjust, since my cinema, to put it into plain words, is primarily a cinema of social analysis, of social concern, and of problems which are of national importance, not what knowledgeable Americans describe as escapism.3 At the Parma Conference, critics should have at least acknowledged that I am not concerned, first and foremost, with my particular form of Neo-realism, which they refer to in terms of a ‘poetic’, but that I primarily seek to contribute to a defence of Neo-realism in its entirety, employing whatever modest means I have at my disposal to do so. This is the one cinema which equates with Italian cinema, and is its raison d’être and defining character, which hundreds of people over these years have furthered, through their efforts, and which is renowned and respected all over the world. I am among those who have realized that defending Neo-realism equates with defending Italian cinema in what it has achieved and with having faith in what it is going to achieve in the future. I among those who have the strongest conviction that Neo-realism will meet the challenge of years to come. We are witnessing important events such as war, and, should we wish to alarm the usual suspects, we could mention the bombs; we could draw their attention to the clash between continents and to the fact that new wars are breaking out all the time and to how terrifyingly pointless all the amazing events of the past actually were. A holiday? No, this is the least suitable time for a holiday. I won’t comment on any other time, but this one seems laden with problems, for us who are living through it, problems which no government can dismiss, unwilling to do more than chuck some petty legislation at it, while claiming that everything is just fine. So, yes, the cinema is faced with serious challenges ahead, and no treachery could be worse than insisting on blocking it from the Neo-realist direction it has embarked on thus far. The fact is that if you repress it in this country, it will surface in another country. And if it is repressed there, it will emerge somewhere else again. Bestowing such a specific duty of scrupulous critique and a duty

3

Zavattini coins the word escapismo, to make his point. Cf. ‘Neorealismo, fatto morale’, in Neorealismo ecc., 153.

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to investigate contemporary society has itself, by now, become a global event which everyone agrees to call Neo-realist. We have barely opened our eyes onto reality and they want us to close them again. They cannot claim that this gaze on society is depressing, painful, and dark, to the exclusion of everything else. On the contrary, this union with reality is such a joy, such a celebration, and stems precisely from an acquaintance with society, however daunting it may seem. Neo-realists – be they Italian or Japanese – are individuals who choose to live in the midst of other people, who are deeply concerned for their country, who are alert to reality and hopeful about the future. You would have to be reckless to turn your backs on the breadth of themes cinema is capable of, for a pittance, for a miserable, time-bound political reason (such as, for example, staying in government a week longer), with the excuse that anything that smacks of socially engagement, such as tackling how cinema has reached this juncture and how it wishes to proceed, is already at the outset deemed antagonistic to the government, anti-Italian and anti-spectacle. A genuinely democratic cinematography would have been an honour and is still something to which we must aspire. There is a proviso: there exists a precondition to realize it. All of us would have to be democrats. Cinema is a test bed for individuals and for democracy as a whole. We are preparing the Neo-realist Bulletin which seeks to become a regular affirmation of this direction for Italian cinema.4 A signal of this kind is required so as to generate a sense of greater unity, to promote growing solidarity, and a stimulus to spur us all on. If the Neo-realist Bulletin succeeds in improving even just a single one of a hundred new films and in creating only one more instance of resistance to the norm, at a time when Italian cinema is under pressure, whether directly or indirectly, to be reduced to nothing but a spectacle, taken in the old sense and to the exclusion of all else, then it will have carried out its purpose. The Neo-realist Bulletin will make it publicly known abroad that we have not lost the conscience of what we have achieved, nor of what we must now do. Its pages is where the dialogue with other nations can commence, given that today cinema is increasingly an international phenomenon, and is better versed than diplomacy at abolishing the many frontiers. More and more young people are becoming interested in cinema, more and more writers, and it seems to me that what attracts them is a particular type of cinema, the opposite of a cinema which is estranged from the social, as it was for so long. The growing, and much hoped for, influx of so many better qualified writers in the cinema is proof of this constructive development discussed earlier.

4

Two issues were published as inserts within Cinema Nuovo magazine.

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Transcendence in Zavattini’s diary (1954)1

Context The following text takes the form of a letter, sent from Spain, and beginning ‘Dear Di Gianmatteo’, but published in Zavattini’s cinematic diary, which he used as a site, or a container, for so many different addresses to his readership, some direct addresses, like the one immediately above, others not. This entry constitutes, as Zavattini says, the second part of an interview. The first part was recorded by the film critic Fernaldo Di Gianmatteo. It contains Zavattini’s replies to several questions about Neo-realism, and was published in Rassegna del film, no. 21, June 1954. In his cinematic diary, Zavattini discusses the remaining question, concerning transcendence, while abroad, on a field research trip across Spain with several Spanish filmmakers, with a plan in mind to make Espana mía, based on Italia mia, and to begin with the journey, not the written page.

Text Barcellona 4 August 1954. Dear Di Gianmatteo, you asked me a seventh or eighth question about Neo-realism, as to what I thought its connection with transcendence might be. But instead of replying, I went to Spain. It is a fact that the two of us are having an informal discussion in your magazine, to help us understand Italian cinema more clearly, but your last question would make me want to escape even further afield than Spain, which it takes less than four hours’ journey to reach. It would require someone other than yours truly to respond to such a delicate question. And my relations with God aren’t very clear. I must confess to you that I sometimes exchange a few words with him when I least expect it, and it takes me by surprise, when I suddenly realize that I was talking out aloud, during what I thought was a personal inner reflection. And when I switch off the light, trying to find the most comfortable spot on my pillow, I might happen to say

1

Zavattini, ‘Barcellona, 4 agosto 1954’, in Diario cinematografico, 157–9.

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out of the blue that he makes me a better person, since it is too hard on my own. But I never know where exactly to send my prayer: further up? A little further down? In such a state of confusion, I never know which is the cause and which the effect. Dear Di Gianmatteo, which transcendence are we talking about? There is transcendence of Him there and me here, and the transcendence of being entirely here, which subdivides into several subspecies. So far so good. It seems to me that Neo-realism is willing to accept and to engender worthwhile actions, which is to say actions carried out by people and motivated by their social commitment, from whichever direction they might come. Last Sunday, I walked into a church at Cuenca where they pointed out to me a woman who, for years and years, has been the first to arrive and the last to leave. She is wearing a black veil over her head and stands so still in the shadows that you could easily bump into her. I was thinking about it in the hotel that gives onto a sheer drop as the famous building in the city also do. And the river flows down from the mountains that make the city dwellers wealthy with pine trees – in Cuenca they pay less tax than elsewhere – and some lights came on, the lights from the prison built on the rocks that are a hundred metres high overflown by flocks of crows, carried over by gusts of wind. Doubtless, this woman is a human event and admirable. However real she may be, she is distant from us, from Cuenca, from Teruel, which I visited yesterday, and during the Civil War, you died there, from gunshots, more than from freezing cold; fingers, red or white, would bloat and bloat and burst like figs. Too remote: not that anyone is denying that a work of art could emerge, even from such a ‘situation’. But shouldn’t we limit the field to Neo-realism? Whoever seeks to work within a Neo-realist frame of reference should be guided, regardless of creed, by participation in the material world, not by the inner self. The mayor of Florence, for example, could write masterful Neo-realist stories, even though he is a devout Catholic, but so could an Indian or a Tibetan if, like a Member of Parliament, La Pira, they were aware of their earthly duties – the ones I am referring to even children could tell you – and men are no different in how they ignore them, but they distinguish themselves in doing, or failing to do, that which these require them to do. And now. Quod differtur [non] afertur.2

2

Zavattini misquotes the Latin motto, which requires the negative. ‘What you keep putting off won’t go away’, plying on the internal rhyme of the verb ferre.

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Neo-realism and Italia mia Correspondence (1952–8)

Context As is often the case in Zavattini’s work practice, the theory is embedded in the practice and is explained in the scenario itself. This is certainly the case of My Italy, Italia mia, a Neo-realist project, as Zavattini told the publisher Einaudi in December 1952. The original plan was to develop non-fiction filmmaking in the same direction and Neo-realist fiction, with films about the real world, based on field research, based on interviewing strangers on site. The project was sold to Vittorio De Sica first, then to Roberto Rossellini. Several young Italian documentarians were keen to develop it when De Sica and Rossellini changed their minds for similar reasons and even later, at the Parma Conference, Zavattini was still referring to it as a viable project. He also brought the idea abroad, to Spain, Mexico and Cuba. But Zavattini, alongside his activity as a film writer, also had a background in publishing, working throughout the 1930s for the two major Italian publishers, first Rizzoli, then Mondadori, while moonlighting for a third, Bompiani. But he chose a fourth to propose his Italia mia book project, Einaudi. In book form, Zavattini’s plan was that it would also serve as a mapping exercise, as political geography, to map Italy, by photographing different Italian cities and combining the images with text. Zavattini would act as the commissioning editor and editorial director, as he had done full time before the war, and commission several film directors. The publisher, Giulio Einaudi, was very interested in the series, and published the first book. A selection of the correspondence concerning the project is very revealing; the first letter below contains a detailed publishing proposal for a group project to be overseen by Zavattini himself, effectively as acting commissioning editor. Years later, writing in retrospect, in a letter to the Italian film critic working in New York as a foreign correspondent for Cinema Nuovo, Giorgio, or George, Fenin, Zavattini told him that, if the film project Italia mia, integral to his vision for socially engaged cinema, never developed into a film in its own right, it was for political reasons: ‘Obstacles confirm that cinema is either political,

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polemical, a battle, or it is nothing at all. A negation.’1 As it happened, Fenin was also involved in the new American cinema scene, writing for Jonas Mekas’s Film Culture (1954–96).2 This correspondence also shows how integral to the Italia mia project the film book made in collaboration with Paul Strand actually was.

Text Italia mia: Letter to Giulio Einaudi, 28 February 19523 Dear Einaudi, I have been thinking about a series of books that is a bit like an obvious, if brilliant, solution to a problem. The title is Italia mia. The books consist entirely of photographs. Generally speaking, the format should be about 32 × 21cm and the extent should run to roughly 200 pages. The theme for each volume is the city. For example, Rome, by Roberto Rossellini. Naples, by Eduardo De Filippo. Milan, by Luchino Visconti. We’ll select the other film directors to commission for Florence, Venice, Turin, and Palermo, from the following pool of names: [Alessandro] Blasetti, [Giuseppe] De Santis, [Alberto] Lattuada, [Michelangelo] Antonioni, [Renato] Castellani, [Augusto] Genina, [Pietro] Germi, [Gianni] Franciolini, [Luciano] Emmer. I would begin with just three or four cities for the time being: Rome, Milan, Naples, and Venice. We can then take a view. At a later stage, in addition to the cities we could do books about specific themes, such as women, children, workers, and so on. But I don’t want to lose the focus. For now, as I said, three books would suffice. It seems to me that it is a question of publishing some Neo-realist books, in the sense that cinema can become a book. You can appreciate for yourself the significance of the enterprise, as well as its commercial value. In this day and age, cinema is topical and conducive to books of this nature. The authors’ names, directors all, are seriously well known all over the world. What needs to be said to the directors (who will be only too happy to make a work that is less fragile than celluloid) is something like this: ‘Tell me the story of Milan, of Rome, of Naples, from a human point of view, in your own way, and as best you can, including its inhabitants, their occupations, families, arguments; whatever contributes, in your view, to a contemporary portrait of the city. Any monuments or the landscape should be a function of the events of the city. We cannot tell you to follow and photograph a woman in Corso Buenos Aires, on her way to purchase a pair of shoes, or the expressions of people in a cinema in Venice, or a political demonstration, or a child sticking its feet in a puddle for

Zavattini to Giorgio N. Fenin, Rome 26 March 1958, Una, cento, mille lettere, 203–4. Cf. Online: Jonas Mekas Interview, 30 August 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​ =Hwf​​​APMpo​​5xs, consulted 27 October 2019. 3 Zavattini to Giulio Einaudi, 28 February 1952, acz E/87, fol. 103. Unpublished. 1 2

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half an hour, or a strike. We can’t tell you that, precisely because you are free to do as you please. What you are making is a film of sorts. But we do want to see in clear images Milan, Rome, and Naples, especially their daily life.’ Each book will have a short preface, with statistics, data, of the number of births, death, litres of milk consumed, prostitutes, money in the bank, the number of crimes, of sick people, the number of kilogrammes of bread baked, of unemployed, gambling houses, the lowest salary, the highest, the lowest rent, and so on and so forth. There is no reason why a professional writer couldn’t write the preface, even a poet, perhaps, if such a person would be willing to go to the statistics office. And there will be captions below the photographs, long, very long, or even short ones. The writing should reflect the need to know the surnames of the people we see in the photographs, and the names of the places, when the photographs were taken, and many other informative and concrete elements, to be provided below each image. You will be accompanied by a shorthand writer to collect phrases and so on, which relate to that place and those people we see in the photographs; and we shall put them in the captions. For example: a square and a man crossing it. Who is this man? We interviewed him about where he is from and where he is going and how much he has in his pockets, and what he is thinking right now. And so on. But, naturally, each filmmaker will be free to make decisions, once we are agreed on the general principles. My idea was inspired by Italia mia, the film De Sica will soon be making based on my film script. For the title, I was thinking of the very same one, Italia mia and De Sica and I would be the authors, just as the two of us are the authors of the film. This first film is to develop along the way, during the journey across Italy that De Sica and I are going on. We shall see. I haven’t told De Sica about it yet, because for now, there is the planned trip to America (departing in the next few days and returning after one month). If you are interested, please let me know straight away. During my absence, think it over, so that, on my return, we can perfect it and put it into practice, in the sense of getting the commissioning started. As for our business relations, shall we just say that we are bound to find an understanding. It seems to me that we can do something worthwhile and innovative which will be of interest, both nationally and internationally, and not so difficult to organize. It is best not to talk too much about it before we have the first two or three signed contracts with the biggest directors, don’t you think? Or do as you think best. Goodbye and give my regards to [Italo] Calvino. Italia mia: Giulio Einaudi to Zavattini, 28 June 19524 Dear Zavattini, Forgive me if I’m only just getting around to replying. I was counting on going to Rome and seeing you in person. I would be willing to develop the

4

Giulio Einaudi to Zavattini, 28 June 1952, acz E/87, fol. 16. Unpublished.

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following six: [Eduardo] De Filippo, Naples. Visconti, Via Emilia. [Mario] Soldati, The Railworkers. Blasetti, Rome. [Paolo] Monelli, Sundays for Italians. I would also be willing to do The Servants by Volpini, if we manage to overcome practical difficulties, in which case, it could replace one of the above. Apart from Volpini, the others are all film directors, so that the problem of photography costs is purely theoretical. Since you are in the thick of it, couldn’t you find the most practical and cost-effective solution? I’ll let you have a draft contract. I hope to see you soon in Rome, to agree all the details. Italia mia: Zavattini to Arturo Lanocita, 20 December 19525 Dear Lanocita, You know perfectly well that even at the heart of Italia mia there is the impulse to continue to pursue the real aims of Neo-realism which discourse, in my view, has been interrupted. How many Neo-realists have there been who didn’t even know that that is what they were? Very few were aware of what further developments of Neo-realism there ought to be. Italia mia: Zavattini to Giulio Einaudi, 27 February 19536 Dear Einaudi, These are the facts: although they are interested, the filmmakers are unable to find the time for Italia mia. I have waited for opportunities like a cat ready to pounce, but this is what life is like for these directors. If one of them ends up in our net, all well and good, otherwise we’ll have to do without them. If you still have confidence in the idea – I have, more so than ever – let’s make a decision right now. I’m willing to get started with writers, journalists and documentary filmmakers especially, some of whom are excellent, young people who have completely understood the project. I don’t think its success will necessarily depend on the names of the directors. The winning factor is the rationale for the series, its originality and usefulness. If you are worried about getting bogged down in too costly an enterprise, consider that you could still produce a small book. I’m thinking in terms of the format envisaged at the preliminary stage, but wider than the Universale series. But I would like to see the Universale format mock-up you wanted to have done, following up on your letter of 13 May. I’ve never seen it (but not a landscape layout for the photographs. I think that would be irritating).

5 6

Zavattini to Arturo Lanocita, Rome 20 December 1952, Una, cento, mille lettere, 172. Zavattini to Giulio Einaudi, 27 February 1953, in Zavattini, ibidem, 404–5 (partly integrated with missing paragraph from original manuscript, acz E87, fol. 110).

Neo-realism and Italia mia. Correspondence (1952–8)

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Among these topics, we could choose the first or the first two: The Servants (Milan, Rome, and Naples); Journey along the Po, Children, Life of a town, Sulphur mines, Via Emilia, Lucania, Love in Italy, Naples. I spoke to Mrs [Natalia] Ginzburg, to find out if she would be interested in doing The Servants. She gave me her reasons for declining. She would prefer Women as a theme. It’s a good theme, one of the best. It would require some time, perhaps a month, and travelling around to several places. Don’t hesitate to let me know if you’re no longer able to do the series, as, among other things, it wouldn’t upset my plans, since I have another publisher on standby. But needless to say, once again, that I would prefer that the two of us clinched the deal. Still, I do need your go-ahead, once we’ve agreed on the format. If we don’t produce at least one, we’ll be stuck. So, let’s commit ourselves to one, or two, at most. I don’t believe that to commit to one or two would represent a worrying cost. If you tell me you agree, even if we don’t have the collaboration of any film directors, I’ll let you know in a matter of days who the first are going to be. Even [Alberto] Moravia would be happy to do one. I’m off to Spain, but I’m back on the 9th. Italia mia: Zavattini, ‘To Potential Contributors’ (1953)7 Dear x, This series seeks to contribute towards a better understanding of Italy and Italians. Images are always a direct and concrete witness of what happens around us. Whoever is willing and capable of narrating through images is invited to collaborate. Its relation to the New Italian Cinema is self-evident. This is how the spirit of cinema can also inform the book and give it a shape. It is inspired by an attentiveness and empathy for what happens, and which is worth retelling. Potential themes are endless. There isn’t a single metre of our land and of the people who live in it which doesn’t warrant more attention, research, and being communicated. This need to see and to get to know one’s country as much as possible, beyond the constraints of preconceived ideas and rhetoric, is perhaps one of the most important hallmarks of the post-war period, which has taught us and revealed to us through the experience of the war that our morals consist in never refusing to know. Often, words get in the way of the object. We hope that the object, its image and the words for it, combine, so that we can feel the phenomenon in its entirety, feel the importance of other people and feel how our country is the sum total of millions of people who form the people all together, every single one of whom, however, is individually important, with singular issues and living a reality which is no less important than our own, if not more important. Filmmakers, writers and journalists, famous people and young people who are just starting out are involved in this series. What they all have in common

7

Zavattini, ‘Agli eventuali collaboratori’, 1953, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, 405–6.

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is the desire to discover in our dear country just one more image, just one more metre, just one more need. Italia mia: Zavattini to Giorgio Fenin, 26 March 19588 It could be that Italia mia means something only to me, as is wont to happen with some letters concerning our frame of mind at a given time, letters we never posted, but which contain more honesty than the ones we did post. That project, which is only a project, like the initial idea for a story, and nothing more, has had the significance of a statement of love for my country, but also for all the places on earth inhabited by at least two people. Let’s begin with Italy, my own country, I said. It was the need to escape from a geography which was either too buried underground or too heavenly, the two extremes of the pendulum I have oscillated between, for far too many years. I realized that my knowledge of Italy was based exclusively on books, or on preconceived ideas, and therefore it seemed to me that the only way to get to know its history little by little was to have the patience to travel to places and meet people and get to know the concerns of so many, with whom I had so much in common. Cinema was the great ship that could accompany each of us on this journey of detachment from ourselves, one could say, from the monologues, the abstractions, the habits, from one’s hearth of domestic living, to seek out, in among unexpected insights, a resolution of the social question. It was cinema, then, that could lead to face the same problems, more or less eternal, through real contact, not with man, too grand a word, that, but with a few citizens. The joy of such a modest and ancient discovery was so great that it came over me, as if I were an adolescent experiencing the first kiss. I talked to everyone about this new necessity of mine, and I was almost ashamed of any narrative idea that came into my head, because it seemed to me that it is only legitimate to bring stories into being, after the experience of seeing and hearing. Rather, seeing and hearing were perhaps the new story on the horizon. In planning Italia mia I gave examples and an itinerary of sorts, while at the same time I also had the feeling that it was wrong to give any examples, because they belonged to a culture that pre-existed this passion for the concrete, so to speak; to put it differently, a culture from a period pre-existing this conscience and faith in the real, which was bound to be different from any preconception, simply for being met with the desire of touching it, even in a physical sense. It is not the case that it was difficult to make Italia mia. What faced serious political obstruction was a certain kind of cinema of which Italia mia was only one aspect. One could therefore be led to conclude that if that is so, let us make visual art. Whereas political obstacles confirm that cinema is either political, polemical, a battle, or it is nothing at all. A negation.

8

Zavattini to Giorgio N. Fenin, Rome 26 March 1958, Una, cento, mille lettere, 203–4.

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Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village. Correspondence (1952–3)

Context Zavattini devised a book publishing project called Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village, as a part of the book series Italia mia, covered in the previous selections. The plan was that Zavattini would carry out the field research, while Paul Strand, whom he had met in Perugia in 1949, at the Conference on Neo-realism, would take the photographs. The project appeared in two, very different, layouts. The first dictated by the magazine grid in Cinema Nuovo, and the second, in the layout dictated by Paul Strand, in book form, published by Einaudi. On 28 February 1952, he sent Einaudi a detailed plan of work, clarifying the function of the text accompanying the photographs: The text in the book will comprise my Preface of ten pages or so and then about fifty statements (or confessions) made by people from my town which are a kind of very succinct autobiographies, as I explained to you some time ago. Taken as a whole, their combination should convey a feel for the town’s identity, but in no sense do I mean folkloric.1

In a letter to Strand, Zavattini stated: Clearly, as far as I am concerned, while Luzzara is indeed my home town, I consider it just like any other town in the world; the fact that I was born there provides me with a more precise insight, but also one that is more heart-felt and certainly an authentic tone.2

Zavattini, Letter to Giulio Einaudi, 30 October 1953, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, 411. Letter to Paul Strand, 23 January 1953, in Elena Gualtieri (ed.), Paul Strand Cesare Zavattini. Lettere e immagini, Bologna: Comune di Reggio Emilia-Biblioteca Panizzi and Fondazione Un Paese and Edizioni Bora, 2005, 64. 2 Gualtieri, Paul Strand Cesare Zavattini, 65. 1

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Einaudi gave him the go ahead.3 The publishing contract referred to the series already covered in the previous correspondence given earlier, not a stand-alone volume. Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village was intended as part of a larger plan of several film books. As the prior correspondence makes clear, Zavattini’s agenda was that they would be illustrated proposals for film scenarios, and indeed, that slant is borne out by their first publication in Cinema Nuovo, which didn’t conform to Paul Strand’s strict art book layout, but treated text and image as a vibrant, dynamic whole on the page. Un paese: Zavattini to Bruno Fortichiari, 27 November 19524 Dear Bruno, Next Saturday or Sunday, Paul Strand will be stopping off at Luzzara on his way to Paris in his car. You may not have heard of Strand, but he is a famous documentary filmmaker, a great photographer, and a man who is progressive, in the best possible sense of the word. He is in his sixties and was born in New York around 1890. He is going to be in Luzzara for a day or two. Why? You need to know that Paul Strand travels around the world seeking interesting themes. Only a few days ago, an attractive book of his came out, with a commentary by Claude Roy. He told me: ‘I’d like to make another book, one about Italy and I’d like you to write the text.’ I said yes, and then we began to search for a theme. After some thought, I suggested Luzzara. A book about Luzzara, in other words, an Italian village seen in its different aspects. He replied: Why not? Let me have a look on my way to France and then I’ll let you know immediately. In the meantime, if there are any photographs I can take, I’ll do so; but I’ll take most of the photographs this spring.

I’m very pleased. What this involves is a book to be distributed all over the world, not so much thanks to my humble work, but thanks to Strand’s. A beautifully designed book, like La France de profil. It’s also an exceptional opportunity for Luzzara, I might as well admit it. My intention is to produce a text, based exclusively on the words of the Luzzaresi villagers, the result of thirty, or forty, or fifty, interviews which, when combined, will convey the village’s identity and its outlook. And I have no doubt that I’m the right person to get many, if not all, of my fellow villagers to be sincere and confide in me, and that I’ll be able to ask them the kind of questions that will make them open up. A book called Luzzara should come out of it, which is a village I consider no different from any other ones. However, a village, every village, is a worthy object for a story and can reveal interesting insights for anyone, if, that is, the research is thorough.

3 4

Giulio Einaudi to Zavattini, 28 June 1952, acz E/87, 16. Zavattini to Bruno Fortichiari, 27 November 1952, acz F/401, 10.

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So Strand who doesn’t speak any Italian – he and his wife speak French and English – will want to see a few sights there; the river Po, obviously, a dairy, the bicycles that are everywhere, Luzzara seen from the embankment by the bakery in the evening and in the midst of the fog, and the puffs of smoke from the chimneys, fishermen, hunters, mushroom pickers, labourers, women weaving, women making hats, the card players, particular rows of poplars, farmyards, a barn where they play games with ducks, some farmers and so on. He should be shown something, though most things he will see for himself when he spends a whole day going places.5 Now I thought it was the right thing to do to write to you and ask you to pass on all the above. I’d be satisfied if Strand were to get a good reception during the couple of days he will be spending in Luzzara. If the municipality is willing to put him up for these two days, I shall step aside. Otherwise, I’ll step in. In other words, I’ll settle the hotel bill for his stay in Luzzara. He is the kind of man who would even be happy with a room at La Torre or at La Buca and dine in one of these two places. But if he would rather go to Guastalla, we can put him up at Hotel Stella instead. I’m dropping a line to my nephew Franco Berni at the same time. He is going to place himself at your service and provide any money required on this occasion. It might well be that for you the whole thing will turn out to be a nuisance. But I felt instinctively it was a good idea to write to you. I’m sure the mayor will be pleased that you will be acting as an intermediary for me to consult him. You are going to meet the nicest and simplest man and woman one could possibly imagine. It would be very good if you can find someone who speaks English. But you will see that you won’t have to waste any time with him. You will only need to provide directions, when he arrives, and more, later on. I forgot to mention that the book, if we do go ahead, will be published by one of the most distinguished European publishers and that Einaudi will bring out the Italian edition, in all probability. Dear Bruno, I have dictated this letter very fast. Now I’m getting qualms: won’t I be upsetting Bruno’s peace and quiet? If so, all you need to do is introduce him to the mayor, whom you can thank in advance on my behalf. All the best to you and my kindest regards to Gina. My mother, who is right here now, remembers you both and apologizes for leaving Luzzara without paying a visit to your home. It was just that her departure was very rushed.

5

Zavattini always wore several hats, and his outlook reflects this. Ever the publisher, the editor as well as the writer and screenwriter, in this instance, he was already visualizing the photography, in accordance with a Neo-realist point of view. When Strand produced more of the same, more of the pre-war photography which made him famous, Zavattini invited him to take additional photographs to give a sense of community living, something which Strand’s iconic, even hieratic, stand-alone shots, beautiful as they were, failed to accomplish. In Strand’s work, the worker, the villager, is the Other, not the Same of the Neo-realist eye. The Other is silent, mysterious and as remote as Strand’s beautiful black and white portraits convey.

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Dear Mister Strand, I’m glad your trip to Luzzara was a good one. My friend [Bruno] Fortichiari wrote me an accurate account of your stay in my hometown straight away and, in that connection, so to speak, made me very happy; even your words and your image-memories, which crop up in your letter make me feel that your book, or our book, if you are adamant about it, has already come into being. Should we concentrate on Luzzara or on that trip we might call of the two bridges, from Viadana Bridge to Borgoforte Bridge? I don’t know, or rather, I would prefer to let you decide. Luzzara was a very easy choice for me. I chose that theme out of affection for my places mostly, but also out of laziness. The kind of text I had in mind – which I still think will be the text I shall be doing for either Luzzara or for the theme of the two bridges – will consist in interviews. Briefly put, I aim to convey everything it is best to know about those places by means of thirty, forty, or fifty interviews with local people. It goes without saying that I am going to be the covert director of what will come out of the mouths of those people, but I have such confidence in what other people are ready to say that, ultimately, I shall be nothing more than a coordinator, leaving each person to make the selection. Indeed, the very idea of making any contaminating interventions appals me. It seems a rather unusual formula, despite the very common external appearance of interviews. I would like the words, the stories, and confessions of the inhabitants to elicit reality in its most concrete form, wherever we meet them, either in the street, or in their own homes, or even at the bar, during long or short interviews, difficult ones or easy, as they may be. My preference would be that the locals also put across essential information, of a historical or geographical nature – of the kind no reader can do without. If it were up to me, I would concentrate on the villages instead of the towns. That is why my second choice after Luzzara is the theme of the Two Bridges, because within that area there are only villages. It would be an enterprise of such grand proportions to tackle the towns that I would find it overwhelming. I mean to say that, even if we do Luzzara, other images in addition to those of Luzzara could be, or even should be, included in the book, taking Luzzara as the main theme which can be illustrated by giving information about what surrounds the town and contributes to its life: in other words, people and places on its borders, so to speak, both along the main road and along the river Po. There could even be, merely to cite an example, a couple of images of Reggio, Parma and Mantova, the three cities with which Luzzara (like many other small towns) has strong connections and customs in common. Clearly, from my point of view, although Luzzara is indeed my hometown, I consider it no differently from any other town in the world. The fact that I was born there provides me with greater insight, but also a more heart-felt and, 6

Zavattini to Paul Strand, 13 January 1953, in Gualtieri, Paul Strand Cesare Zavattini, 64–5.

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certainly, an authentic tone. But I have no objection, dear Strand, to developing the theme of the Viadana-Borgoforte Ring with you. I must emphasize that you have my full commitment. The news about your book, La France de profil, doesn’t surprise me, because the book is so clear and eloquent and, fortunately, good eyes and ears are not scarce in the world. By now, you are accustomed to this type of success and I don’t know if I shall be able to make the kind of contribution that would be worthy of you, instead of only being a burden. Let’s hope so. Write to me with your latest thoughts on the enterprise and I will be only too happy to listen to your advice. I have no intention of holding on to preconceived ideas in our collaborative work. And do let me know the dates of your trips. I am not sure if I am going to Cannes, because, should any of the films I have worked on is selected, I would have to withdraw from being a member of the Cannes jury. My regards to your wife who left such an excellent impression among my Luzzara friends. Farewell. Un paese: Paul Strand to Zavattini, 23 January 19537 Dear Zavattini, Thank you for your so fine and so full letter, reflecting so much thought about our book and the problems of the theme. A young Italian girl and her husband, who is an American, gave me a very clear translation of your words. Your idea, expressed in Between Two Bridges (Entre Deux Ponts) we find very fine, both as a concept and as a way of enlarging the photographic area, so to speak. At the same time, it can well enable us to concentrate, focus upon Luzzara. And very interesting too is your thought that perhaps some material from Parma, Reggio Emilia and Mantua could be included, as the villages are supplied in many ways by these towns. In fact, my American friend thought that Fra due Ponti was in itself a challenging and possibly interesting title. I am also completely in accord with your ideas about the text and how you plan to get the people themselves to speak. This all, seems to us, to be indeed the birth of something truly fine. Now as to definite plans. First, to tell you that our time in Italy may be limited and that it will be wise to act as though it is. That is to say that we may have to leave Luzzara not later than May 9th and return to France. The reasons for this I will explain when I see you. This means a very intensive schedule. To begin with, we plan to be in Rome about 15th March for a few days only, going to Luzzara to be there the last week in March, not later.

7

Paul Strand to Zavattini, Paris, 23 January 1953, acz S584bis, 3a and acz S584bis, 3b. Handwritten letter in English.

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It would be very desirable to spend the early weeks of our stay in Luzzara with you, so that we start together in every way. For what we begin will of course condition and affect all the work. I hope it will be possible for you to arrange your time to make this possible. Once our plan of work is clear, then I can go on alone as of course I know how busy you are and how many other commitments you have. It will be very fortunate if you do not have to go to Cannes in April, fortunate for us. And finally, I am in a position to tell you that there are three good photographs from our brief stay in Luzzara. Landscapes – and all useable – I think that you will agree. We shall probably leave Paris on February 12th to get a ship sailing for Genoa to Palermo. If I could hear from you before we leave, whether the plan of work is possible for you, would appreciate it very much. We look forward to seeing the Fortichiaris and other friends in Luzzara. And to seeing you and working with you. Mrs Strand joins in best greetings to you and to your wife. As always Paul Strand Un paese: Zavattini to Einaudi, 30 October 19538 Dear Einaudi, After my two long phone conversations with Calvino, what follows is the current state of play. Strand has already finished working in Luzzara and has about 120 photographs to show for it, of which eighty or so should make it into the book. The text in the book will comprise my Preface of 10 pages or so, followed by about fifty statements (or confessions) made by people from my town, which are like very succinct autobiographies, as I explained to you some time ago. Taken as a whole, their combination should convey a feel for the town’s identity, but in no sense do I mean folkloric.9 The title of the book could be: Un paese. I do think it could be part of the Italia mia series. Italia mia: we shall get there, if we don’t give up. We must resist other people’s inertia, bad will and worse still. In the meantime, we can do the book on Naples: De Sica is willing to go ahead. It so happens that he will be staying in Naples from 1 November. So he will take the opportunity to work on the book. De Sica is asking for a simple contract which won’t make him responsible for the cost of the photographs and he is not asking you for any advance payment.

Zavattini to Giulio Einaudi, 30 October 1953, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, 411–13. Editorial deletions in the published edition have been restored by consulting the manuscript in the archive. Zavattini to Einaudi, 30 October 1953, acz E87/113. 9 By ‘folkloric’ Zavattini meant stereotypical, as in films about travel of the time. The intention was doubtless to characterize the film book as unique in this precise sense, setting a new standard, an alternative. 8

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I shall also be in Naples and will help, since I’m the Series Director. The photographer will be Patellani who would come down from Milan especially. His fee would be 300,000 liras, plus whatever percentage of royalties you decide. Though I do think the cost can be contained within the 300,000 or 250,000, plus a percentage of royalties. What do you think? As for Rossellini, I shall say it once again: we mustn’t give up. To this end, I suggest that you send him the following telegram: Please reply if possible, since seriously intending to publish book on Rome with about 100 photographs can put photographer and journalist at your disposal to collect information relevant to individual photographs stop given your experience and knowledge of city estimating four days’ work adequate to produce material for your long-awaited book to inaugurate series. Cordially, Einaudi.

I know Rossellini and it could well be that a telegram like this will get him going. As for the journalist, I shall choose the young man who will assist him, taking notes, collecting information and news on the locations and the people they photograph, to produce those captions that will form the text (we can ask Rossellini to write a single page Preface later). As far as Visconti and Milan are concerned, if I were you, I would give it a few days, until, that is, De Sica and Rossellini really get started. My advice is to write and tell him that the other two have begun, and that you are waiting for his go-ahead, to have the set of three books so as to establish the series, in accordance with the plan. Renzo Renzi: the theme I gave Renzi ‘Journey along the Po’ (from its source to the sea) is a good one, but I understand your objections which is why, for the time being, let’s stick to the three big names. Three volumes constitute a major commitment, but we’re talking about three big names and, furthermore, ones that are well known abroad as well. Don’t let’s give up. It is worth all the trouble. Look into my eyes, dear Einaudi: how many times do I feel like turning my back on people who expect to be invited over and over again. But it is worth it, which is why I patiently put up with it. If you try and be patient too, you never know, we might end up in a paradise of sorts. We will certainly do the Italia mia series. As Calvino will have explained, the reason I didn’t send a young person on a journey across Italy (who could have been [Michele] Gandin, [Citto] Maselli, [Valerio] Zurlini, [Giovanni] Ferrari, any of the young, effective documentary filmmakers I told you about), was that it looked like the production of the film was going ahead and we were going to embark on the journey ourselves. In that case, so many practicalities would have been resolved automatically, since I would have been travelling with these documentary filmmakers. But less than a month ago, Costellazione suddenly went back on its word for political or economic reasons, or out of fear, perhaps.

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Setting aside all this, we have three names (two are practically hooked, the third, you’ll see, will tag along too). If I do make the journey for the film (I’ll know either way, by tomorrow, and I shall put the decision in writing), we can also make a book out of it for the series (and tv and rai want to be part of the project). I think I have covered everything. As you can see, one has to be so flexible to make it possible to adapt to a changing situation, as well as adapting other people’s lack of confidence, their lack of enthusiasm and poor motivation. And now let me take you into my confidence to encourage you not to give up. Nobody had any confidence in Siamo donne (We Women). The result was what it was. It had its shortcomings. A year’s anxiety. But the film did well. I did tell the producers, saying this idea would be successful, that it is not limited to a poetic idea like Umberto D., and it would also be a box-office success. And that is what has happened, despite its weaknesses. During the year of trials and tribulations I told you about, we had given up on [Anna] Magnani, but I insisted: ‘Don’t give up on Magnani!’ We got her in the end. They didn’t want to make the first episode, the one about the young women. I wrote express letters, I spurred them on: ‘Do it, otherwise the film will be too short and won’t make as much sense.’ And I was successful. I said to Mondadori: Italia domanda could spell success for Epoca. The editorial team and editorial consultants boycotted that rubric and downsized it. Only a few days ago, Mondadori phoned me to say that a nationwide Doxa poll proves that Italia domanda accounts for 80 per cent of Epoca’s success. We can only hope that they will put my old suggestions into practice. Why am I citing these two recent examples? To tell you that I know what I want and that we need to go ahead with the Italia mia series collaboration, because it is sound, useful and will sell. Write back straight away and give my best wishes to Calvino.

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Zavattini, ‘Strand the Photographer, 13 April 1953’1

Wherever you looked there were peach trees and wild jasmine bushes to brighten up even the most run-down farmyards. Down by the river Po, Strand and his camera came to a halt in front of woods that had been cut down. Since the tree stumps stuck out by a couple of feet, if you squinted, they looked like men or marching soldiers. Strand is serene. He gazes at the object, then suddenly up at the sky. The way he devours images makes me think of an anteater. The impression he left was of a man walking back and forth among people in black cloaks, noticing everything, like a taxman; touching a bolt or a door jamb and tracing the line of a wall with a finger. Strand and his wife – she is from Massachusetts and he is from New England – would often consult the map of Luzzara the mayor gave them. I’d never looked at it in my life. It was in their company that I began to get to know my hometown, the names of the outlying districts and of the farms: Bruciata, Samarote, and Cornale. I had always ignored them, so what was it that I loved? If I saw a woodcutter on his way to the Po, I would say to myself in a cursory way: ‘He’s off to the Po’, whereas he was off to cut back the wood for the first, second, or third time and, in each case, his thoughts and what interested him would not be the same. Strand stood outside the saddler’s shop waiting for the wind to subside, otherwise the finery swings back and forth and the kind of photograph he likes requires it to be stock still, as if it could last forever. In the meantime, I was praying in my own way that God would spare me my eyes and would not make me feel bitter about other people, because if that happens, it would be the same as not having eyes at all. Along the Po, by embankment number 18, a bend in the river, defined by the tallest poplars in the place I’m from, loomed up in the silence opposite Dosolo. I saw a puff of smoke suspended in mid-air coming straight from a shotgun. Why a little smoke set against the black of the woods can cause such joy I have no

1

Zavattini, ‘13 aprile 1953’, Diario cinematografico, in Cinema Nuovo, no. 10, 1 May 1953, now in Zavattini, Opere, Cinema, 2002, 135–7.

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idea. I saw the smoke first, then came the sound of the shot, and then the hunter broke into a run. We came across a line of farm hands pushing wheelbarrows full of bundles of wicker shoots along the bank they are shoring up. They want to channel the Po to prevent it from striking against the town: they drop bundles of wicker with stones inside them and, when they have managed to form a solid bed, they are going to build a dyke on top of it. During the flood, all it would have taken for Luzzara to have been submerged was an extra two inches. In the afternoon, we went to Boretto. There was dancing on the barge on the right bank. Meanwhile, from the left bank, came the incessant ring of bicycle bells from hundreds of young people on their bikes, bumping over the planks of the bridge. The men at the bicycle hire depot had fastened the tags in such a hurry that now they looked like butterflies. And the girls who had been in the saddle for ages snapped at the hems of their skirts to free them from their thighs. Strand and his wife went arm in arm and danced a little. In the evening, we went to see the Marghera Circus. There were no lions, but there were six dancers, chubby young girls they were. The lights were flashing on and off. ‘They’re going to blow a fuse’, I said to myself. But it was a ploy to get people worked up. Meanwhile, the frenzied music was playing Cuba Cubà and my countrymen were getting hot under the collar, when the six girls were trying to make their shoulders shuffle, so that their breasts would jiggle around, cupping their hands and turning their heads to one side, like Egyptian frescoes. And Strand was laughing. With the gaze of a patriarch he could hold anybody’s stare. Later I went for a stroll up and down the empty town with Antonio who wanted to know what Neo-realism really is. As I was off to Vicenza early next morning, I replied in a hurry: For example, I would like to tell the story of your day, a manual worker’s day. I shall observe you, look at you closely; but it is going to take me more work to understand, and know how to describe your day. Anyway, I shall take some time and pay attention to your way of life. Now I want you to imagine if, having done all that, I decided not to call you Antonio, but Paolo, and put someone else in your place. Well, Neo-realism doesn’t put anyone in your place.

He wasn’t convinced, but I had already turned the key in the lock. Last November, I was under the arcades in this very same place and was turning the key in the lock. The curate and the archpriest dressed in his white surplice and his yellow and black stole were walking along, behind two altar boys, to fetch the dead body of an eighty-five-year-old woman. I was convinced that, in these situations, priests are unable to see what is going on around them, but that instead, they just press on, and never get the address wrong. I took off my beret and put a serious expression on my face, as did the others, when the archpriest, standing in the middle of the road, turned around to face me, and, with his psalmodic voice shouted (because he was quite far away) in dialect: ‘Cesare, you will die, remember that you will die.’

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Zavattini, Introduction to Cinema Nuovo photographic stories (1955)1

Context In 1955, the film journal Cinema Nuovo made a selection of the photodocumentaries it had published over the past two years, including what was to become the photo-book Un paese, by Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini, which came out later that year.2 The title of the magazine version was ‘25 People by Zavattini and Strand’ (‘25 persone di Zavattini e Strand’). The magazine preview version fitted in with the purpose of the photo-documentaries which was to serve as visual scenarios or film scripts, to entice producers to fund a film. The book by Zavattini and Strand was a cutting-edge intervention, not because of Paul Strand’s photography, which still conveyed his pre-war vision of portrait photography, practiced as a form of art photography, in which the Other is transferred to a pictorial surface, using a large-lens box camera on a tripod, in the stillness and fullness of time. No, the intervention was ethnographic, evidenced by Zavattini’s accompanying text to the photographs. For, when you read the words of the text accompanying each photographic image, you form a second picture. They are the words of the real person who is brought to life, where ‘real’ refers to a historic individual, someone who is part of a community, whose thoughts, words and feelings, and also memories, bridge the gap between iconic Other and Self. Zavattini orchestrated and initiated the fieldwork and edited the words people said during face-to-face interviews, with the sensitivity of a testimonial writer. He wrote the following text as an introduction to the collection of photodocumentaries. Where one might expect to find the key to the overall project, the book, one finds, instead, yet another of Zavattini’s editorial interventions, in keeping with his pre-war activity as a magazine editorial director, effectively, a publisher and commissioning editor. A text which might serve as an effective Zavattini, ‘I racconti fotografici di Cinema Nuovo’ (1955), in Silvana Cirillo (ed.), Gli altri, in Zavattini. Opere 1931-1986, Milan: Bompiani, 1991, 1630–1. 2 Zavattini and Paul Strand, ‘25 persone di Zavattini e Strand’, Cinema Nuovo, no. 53, 25 February 1955, 137–44. 1

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introduction to the photo-documentaries can be found elsewhere, in the form of a commentary to one of the features. It was written by Michele Gandin, the assistant editor of the film journal Cinema Nuovo, and one of Zavattini’s closest associates at the time. Gandin wrote: It isn’t true that Neo-realism has exhausted itself. It isn’t true that Italian reality no longer offers themes as powerful and enticing as those from the immediate post-war period. To claim this is tantamount to claiming that Italy is dead, and Italians are dead. On the contrary, it is true, instead, and stands to reason, that the themes have changed because reality has changed. Ten years don’t go by in vain. However, you need only view this reality with the very same ethical commitment, the same freedom, the same love, the same expectation of truth of those days, because it offers us stories which are equally human and equally dramatic. Take this one, for example. It’s all true and all documented. Such a film wouldn’t cost more than fifty million. Are we going to find a producer willing to make it?3

This is what one might have expected. Whereas, Zavattini, in his introduction to the collection of photo-essays, most of which form a visual story, an illustrated film scenario, does something very unexpected. He relates photography to school education, or basic education, stating that photography is so fundamentally important and integral to society that it should be taught at school. This would bridge the gap between study and life. It is less surprising when one considers that Zavattini, it must be remembered, was the pioneer of visual culture in Italy, or at least one of them, Gillo Dorfles and Bruno Munari, others still, people whom Zavattini had commissioned before the Second World War.

Text I can think of no more than two or three film directors in Italy for whom the image is the determining factor. And there isn’t a single one, just as there is no film writer, me included, whose story proceeds from the image, instead of translating into images at a later stage. This limits horizons. While there are millions of cameras, photographers of this kind are few and far between. The fact is that the still camera remains, in its most popular use, a tool to photograph a First Communion, a means for commemorating events. Nobody has ever considered introducing cameras into schools, to close the gap between studying and life. No one has ever thought of setting a school essay to be done using a camera. If that happened, teaching would be required to be

3

Michele Gandin (commentary) Enzo Sellerio (photographs) ‘Borgo di Dio’, in Aristarco (ed.), I fotodocumentari di Cinema Nuovo, Milan: Cinema Nuovo, 1955, 458–64.

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more relevant to reality and teachers themselves required to become proficient in using a camera. For the camera has a religious scope and that is why photography is daunting and why I myself do not know how to use a camera. This lack is one of the kinds of fear which reality sometimes elicits from me and which makes me more inclined to think about reality than to see it and face it. This is why I believe that introducing photography into schools would also be a useful way to develop a pupil’s character. Soon the day will come, dear Aristarco, when we will be publishing children’s photo-documentaries and not only those of older people, which you are publishing to our edification. Even though, the more you see, the more you wish to see. So we would need one in each issue, and more pages given over to them. Otherwise, doubt might arise in some confused mind that the sound themes worth covering, are only the twenty you have collected in this volume, not the three million there are. Remember the eternal school essay: ‘A Walk to School’? Can you imagine if children wrote it using a camera? How much tangible advice from the teacher would they have to receive, before, and feedback later? Why don’t you suggest to some company or other manufacturing cameras that they give away a few free cameras to a class of primary school children and let us wait and see what happens?

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Alfredo Guevara, ‘Cuba’, Cinema Nuovo, no. 51, 19551

Context A concrete sign of Zavattini’s transmission of New Cinema to Cuba appeared in print, in Cinema Nuovo, in a short-lived Neo-realist Bulletin, edited by Zavattini and included as an insert (on pale blue paper, to distinguish it from the rest of the publication). Guevara’s piece is a quote of an excerpt from a talk by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, given in 1954, which makes the crucial point about Neo-realism not being a style, but a more ambitious entity, something that is capable of being exported, even as far as Latin America, not only for viewing but also as a model of practice. As Guevara’s account of the 1953 Havana Conference has already demonstrated, and Gutiérrez Alea’s quote underlines, the Cubans, who had met Zavattini in Havana while the Parma Conference on Neo-realism was still going on, were well up to date with Italian cinema, but that the transmission of Neorealism to Cuba and, more specifically, Zavattini’s version of a socially engaged cinema had already begun.

Text The New Cuban Cinema (as in newborn) is coming into being under the banner of Neo-realism. This is demonstrated by the discussions, debates and polemics that followed the film screenings during the Italian Film Festival held in Cuba during the months of October and November of last year. To give a sense of the perspective of all those who seek to create a Cuban national cinema, it is worth citing the words of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, spoken during a recent conference in Cuba: The Italian experience is particularly significant because, when it stopped copying other formulas, especially the North American model, and began Guevara, ‘Cuba’, Bollettino del Neo-realismo, no. 1, Cinema Nuovo, no. 51, 1955.

1

‘Cuba’, Cinema Nuovo, no. 51, 1955

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to speak in its own language, Italy was able to stabilize its industry and succeeded in penetrating foreign markets. Of course, we don’t intend to resolve our problems by copying Italian formulas. But we do intend to bear them in mind as a starting point. Neo-realism is neither a style nor a formula. It is a frame of mind that forces us to direct our attention towards life and reality and discover typical phenomena. And anyway, adopting sincerity in our approach to life will inevitably lead us to discover our own language and create a cinema which is profoundly national in content.

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Guevara, letter to Zavattini, 2 April 19551

Context This letter to Zavattini consolidates the points made in the previous text. Having understood the scope and purpose of Italia mia, Alfredo Guevara proposes to Zavattini a Cuban equivalent: Cuba mía. When Zavattini visited Cuba again that same year, he worked closely with Guevara and the other Cubans of the Nuestro Tiempo circle on Cuba mía, and, towards the end of his life, in 2002, Guevara published the scenario. In addition to this sign of Zavattini’s profound influence at this early stage of Cuban film history is the 16-millimetre documentary El Mégano, which subsumes Zavattini’s teachings and the work on Cuba mía, applying the principles and ethnographic practice of Italia mia. The same people who worked on Cuba mía made El Mégano: Alfredo Guevara, Julio García Espinosa, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, graduates from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinema of Rome and others.2 Guevara’s letter provides the background. El Mégano is viewable online.

Text My esteemed and distinguished friend, Although your latest news tells me you are currently in Spain, working with [Luis] Berlanga, I am writing to your usual address, in the hope that this letter will be forwarded. And months have gone by and I haven’t written to you. I keep putting it off, and now I realize that the delay will be even longer, due to your absence. But I shall post it anyway. I received La Rassegna del Film no. 21, containing the ‘Conversation with Zavattini’ and, more recently, your Report for the Circolo Romano del Cinema.3 Guevara to Zavattini, 2 April 1955, acz Corr. G 583/3. Unpublished. Cuba mía, in Alfredo Guevara and Cesare Zavattini, Ese diamantino corazón de la verdad, Madrid: Iberautor Promociones Culturales, 2002, 285–381. 3 Guevara is referring to the article published by Fernaldo di Giammatteo, ‘Conversazione con Zavattini’, Rassegna del film, no. 21, August 1954, later anthologized as ‘Neorealismo, fatto morale’, in Argentieri (ed.), Neorealismo ecc., 144–54. In addition to developing 1 2

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In the meantime, [Guido] Aristarco has sent me the first Neo-realist Bulletin with some paragraphs of one of my letters. The Bulletin has not disappointed me. It seems an excellent means of getting to know Neo-realism from the inside and the general attitude it implies, the opportunities it opens up, without diminishing the basic bulletin format. The Italia mia section seems the most interesting; the one that offers the most complete lesson, partly because it conveys your various notes that lead to ‘a village in Calabria’, or a factory in Bologna, but also for the underlying intention behind the field notes. Actually, we need a Cuba mía section in one of the newspapers or magazines published down here, to function as a vehicle for getting in touch with the customs, problems, concerns and the aspirations of our people. This would help us find out a great deal and, further down the line, study and select, in the profusion of news and anecdotes, the most typical and revealing, allowing us to show the real world more effectively, in an artistic way and with the greatest precision. Clearly, a few specific references would hardly be enough. They would only serve the purpose of attracting our attention. The main or mandatory source will be living and breathing concrete reality itself. What better contribution to suggest and inspire stories? This is one of our most urgent needs: to find stories and also find the route back to the real, an inexhaustible source of form and themes. And if I am emphasizing urgency, it is because, yet again, after a few months of stagnation, it seems as if there are new opportunities to convert current production which is both sporadic and mediocre, into a dynamic cinema. In truth, it would be a crime, if all the economic advantages, obtained by the associations and the unions of artists, authors, technicians and producers, should translate into a failed attempt. This is something that could be avoided only if, in setting up new organizations, film crews, and the institution of official funding, serious selection criteria were followed. Decree no. 2135, issued by the Council of Ministers, is a directive to set up an organization called The National Institute for the Development of the Film Industry in Cuba (Instituto Nacional para el Fomento de la Industria Fílmica en Cuba). This will consist in fourteen representatives, seven producers, film distributors and seven representatives among artists, technicians, authors and employees. Its regulation has not yet been made public, but the word is going round that the State will subsidize the Institute’s activities with a sum of between one and two million pesos (the Cuban peso is equal to the dollar). At that point, the Jaimanitas research will be over. This is how the industry is set to create solid material foundations, but more is needed, since we require stories that can conquer the market, which is a separate problem. There are a few producers who understand this premise and are showing symptoms of healthy concern, seeking out better stories, necessarily realist and national in content, with a view the discourse of Neo-realism further, towards the documentary, the interview contains an in-depth analysis of La storia di Caterina, episode of Love in the City (1953).

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to making better films. This is the only way we can really build our cinema, based on a serious and stable film industry with a unique character. For our part, we are making a small effort ourselves; small in relation to the powerful economic apparatus of cinema, but huge, if and when you consider what means we have. It is a twenty-two-minute documentary in 16 millimetre which shows the lives of the charcoal workers in the South of Havana, by means of a story that is very simple, but in my opinion, very strong. Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, graduates from the Centro Sperimentale in Rome are shooting it. If we have succeeded in keeping alive the polemic in defence of Neo-realism, theirs is the merit above all, given that sometimes good, high-quality Italian films are in the minority among the films screened in our cinemas. In order to choose the location, the story, and the interpreters of the documentary, we visited inland villages and other locations, including swamps, whence tree trunks are extracted, and farms, where people live and produce charcoal.4 We were met with the warmest welcome among the carboneros and their families – a trait which is quite typical of our countryside – and we spent many days living with them in harmony and sharing their humble fiestas called guatesques. We were working hard and we got to know their family relations, their relationships, connections, the specific character of each person, their big and small problems, their worries about their children, their concerns about beauty, about the rain, the draught, about events one will never forget, events which they remember in their poetry and songs, about their daily struggle for survival, under the constant impending threat of becoming slaves. At the end, while we were making every effort to communicate reality as faithfully as possible, we felt very close to their lives. Even in such working conditions, we managed to exchange notes and observations, and some of us made a note of several stories on paper. We chose one of them as a starting point, after many discussions, much analysis and experiences. As to the documentary, I plan to write to you soon with more specific information, photographs and the story. Finally, I want to let you know that in the selection of the best films in 1954, the artyc (Association of Drama and Film Writers) [Asociación de Redactores Teatrales y Cinematográficos], Nuestro Tiempo and the Lumière film clubs, have chosen Miracle in Milan, as the most important film of the year. I shall say no more and await your response, Cordially yours

Guevara doesn’t quite explain the process. On the bed of the swamps lay the tree trunks which were pulled out and burned slowly over specially made open-air furnaces to make charcoal, hence the name carboneros, the charcoal workers.

4

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José Massip to Zavattini, 26 April 19551

Context José Massip also wrote to Zavattini about their collective project to apply the Italian filmmaker’s Neo-realist principles to Cuban everyday life, seeking to break with spectacular and folkloric representations of mainstream cinema, following Zavattini’s guidelines in the texts for Italia mia, which he had sent them.

Text Havana University Letters and Philosophy Faculty Cuba, Havana, 26 April 1955 Esteemed Friend, I hope you haven’t forgotten me. I am ‘the olive-skinned young man’ who, together with others – whites and Blacks – met you at Havana airport two years ago, during the Italian Film Week. I am sorry I didn’t write to you sooner, unlike my comrade Alfredo Guevara. The fact remains that I could not have found a better occasion to write to you. The occasion is connected to your return to Cuba (everyone here is talking about it everywhere) and with Mr Barbachano’s projects and with the work the Nuestro Tiempo film group is doing which – most importantly – will be underway when you feel our soil under your feet. Thanks to Alfredo, you will already know about the presence in our midst of two young graduates of the Centro Sperimentale: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa and of the initiatives we have been taking regarding Neo-realism and its diffusion in our country. I wish to tell you about our little 1

Massip to Zavattini, 26 April 1955, acz Corr. M 369/1. Unpublished. Letter on University letterhead. Massip studied in Cuba, then Harvard. At the time he was a lecturer.

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16-millimetre film we are making (a Neo-realist film), but, above all, I want to inform you about our work, connected with Mr Barbachano’s plans and his forthcoming Cuba visit. It is important for me that you should be as up to date as possible on the short twenty-five-minute film that we are making. I have dared to call it: The Toil of the Charcoal Workers. Following the public talks, the flyers and the published articles, debates and the evening screenings we arranged on the outskirts of Havana (where we organized a matchless debate about the ‘cost of life’ with a provincial public), after all this, our objective has to be this kind of film, short and simple, but full of our ideas, right up to the last metre of celluloid (saturated with your ideas, to be honest) full of what a national cinema attempting a profound form of realism ought to be. That is to say, a cinema that, in the same way a tree feeds on the soil, springs from, and feeds on, our history and our people. I am happy to state, and not without a certain pride, that we are able to begin this work, because we are young and because our youth is inspired by sincere love for our nation and our people. Otherwise, we would not be able to tackle such an endeavour (‘like Romans’ they say in our parts) that demands extraordinary efforts and sacrifices. This film concerns the life of Cuban charcoal workers (carboneros) who live in the Ciénagas area, near the coast. We do realize that the carboneros don’t represent the most typical aspect of our people; however, the Médano – or Mégano – where they reside was an ideal location for a film, because we knew that we wouldn’t be disturbed during its production. And anyway, the story we have thought up (picked from among the five written by Alfredo, Julio, Tomás and I), accentuates characteristic aspects which our film seeks to reflect, by showing, through the carboneros’ very harsh living conditions, the life of our people. Above all, though, to demonstrate to potential distributors within our new industry that the best cinema (for both producer and public) is a cinema which sets out to meet reality, not cinema which distances itself from it. We seek to show them that we must abandon rumberas films, ‘comic’ films, or films about themes which have nothing to do with our national identity, so that our industry can grow and develop. We want to show them that only with a Neorealist cinema will we be in a position to conquer a place in the international market (this is the only way our industry can survive; a national market isn’t enough) and compete successfully with Hollywood and other cinemas. We think our public’s reaction – and that of the critics – when we screen this short film, will be our best ally to make the producers see what we are trying to achieve. This, then, is our objective, a grand objective, mostly threatened by our limited experience in film technique, greatly compensated by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García and by the young cameraman Jorge Haydú. Nevertheless, our main enemy is a lack of experience and limited equipment (I forgot to name our ‘producer’ Moisés Ades, another young person). I wanted to tell you all about this difficult creative work we hope to have completed before your return to Cuba, to convince you that after you left us, we

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never stopped fighting hard for Neo-realism in general and, in particular, for our own Neo-realist cinema. We also want you to see that your brief stay in Cuba has been an inspiration for our work. Tomás will send you the photographs of our work for El Mégano. And now let’s move on to what is most important. After a conversation with Mr Barbachano, we Nuestro Tiempo members committed ourselves to carry out some research for you to use as material later, for a story for a Neo-realist film that Mr Barbachano wants to shoot in Cuba.2 This task consists in collecting the largest possible number of themes, ideas and stories that might be useful to you. We have already started. First, we organized a call for entries from the general public, to provide us with a number of themes, ideas and storylines. We then went to see the best Cuban writers, to glean what ideas, topics or stories we could from them, some of which we have already sent to Mr Barbachano. Then there are the stories we developed ourselves. We are even selecting the best short stories and novellas within our literary tradition that could be used for a modern adaptation. Our next objective will be to classify all this available material. We are also planning to take a series of photographs of places and people to attach to the more promising and interesting stories. We could go and visit these places with you, and some more, in the company of Onelio Jorge Cardoso – one of our most famous writers, who could act as a guide. We could introduce you to people who might later become characters in the film or whose personal stories might feed in to your story and screenplay (one of the most precious insights we have had was that the simplest people from our country, some of whom have never been to the cinema, show the potential of being excellent actors). We shall take you to places where people sing and dance, so that you can feel our music, which is both liturgical and folkloric in nature – this wonderful African inheritance of ours. You can have a conversation with Algeliers León who can give you profound insights about this music, on a separate occasion. You are going to be talking to our best composers, whose music is based on a rich quarry of traditional music, and speaking with our writers, painters, and playwrights. All in all, we want you to immerse yourself in the world of our country. We want you to shake hands with intellectuals and campesinos charged with the same energy. This is how, we think, you can ‘discover’ Cuba, a discovery we need so much. And, who knows? Perhaps we’ll end up with the kind of film that will signify for us and for our cinema what ¡Que Viva México! meant for the Mexicans. And obviously we want to organize an event with you at Nuestro Tiempo and furthermore, if possible, we would also like you to write an article for our magazine (a copy of which we sent you by mail).

2

Their plan mirrors the interaction between Elio Petri and Zavattini who briefed Petri to carry out the initial field research and write it up for Rome, 11 o’Clock.

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It is urgent that you write to us about these plans. That you let us know what you need from us before your return, so that your stay in Cuba is as productive as possible for all concerned. Finally, it would make me very happy to receive a letter of yours. This is my address: José Massip, Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, University of Havana, Cuba. Please forgive me for sending you such a long letter.3

3

Massip was a lecturer in the Arts Faculty.

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Guevara, letter to Zavattini, 4 May 19551

Context The following correspondence, relating to this mid-1950s stage of Cuban contact with Zavattini, requires little or no introduction, except to say that Zavattini was under contract with Teleproducciones Barbachano Ponce to write several stories, including one or two about Cuba. He came up with an initial idea for a film which became Cuba baila, drawing attention to the two Cubas in Cuba, middle class and working class and their different approaches to music. The other idea came from Massip, about the long months of unemployment on the island, from one sugar crop to the next, in which the cane cutters were laid off. The correspondence is related to Zavattini’s up and coming second visit to Cuba, which was only a few days long, but very intense, in terms of cultural and cinematic transmission of knowledge. These two scenarios, and Cuba mía, also based on Zavattini’s Italia mia ethnographic project, were to become the focus of attention. During his stay, El Mégano was screened at the University of Havana, in Zavattini’s presence.

Text Distinguished and esteemed friend, We already know you will be in our company towards the beginning of June. The producer, M. Barbachano Ponce, has brought us up to date about his efforts to secure an agreement and a contract with you to commit you to write the stories for two films. You can imagine our enthusiasm and emotion at hearing this news and you can imagine how committed we are to put ourselves at your service. We think your trip, and the work you will be creating, will benefit us enormously. For Cuban cinema, the kind of contribution you can offer is essential. It will help to direct attention towards our complex, rich, reality,

1

Guevara to Zavattini, 4 May 1955, acz Corr. G 583/4. Unpublished.

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which is virtually unexplored, from an artistic viewpoint and is also one which most producers and screenwriters drown in, given their total inability and lack of sensitivity. Since what hinders the development of Cuban cinema is a problem of not choosing the right direction, we are certain that your words and the exemplarity of your work will take on the significance of a call to order. This is exactly what we need. This opportunity comes at a good time, because, as I was telling you in my previous letter, the film industry which was totally paralysed in the past few months, has received a new lease of life with the promulgation of Degree no. 2135, which has led to the creation of the National Institute for the Development of the Film Industry (infic). In point of fact, the nature and scope of infic have not been established, because the Decree is very vague. Moreover, this law favours the interests of established producers and only a few others. Clearly, it will lead to seeking credit, national subsidy, and the reconstruction of film studios. But we think that the opportunity for Neo-realism could not be greater, given that the working practice of following established formulas of mediocre cinema, devoid of content, artificial, insensitive to real life and unable to analyse it, as it is, has proved itself ineffective, in terms of creating a film industry and opening it up to the international market. Given this context, I think the film Barbachano is going to produce, based on your story, has the duty to open up a new pathway. As for us, we have no intention of standing by. Barbachano has given us a genuine opening: to nominate an ‘Editorial Board’ in Nuestro Tiempo and combine it with those of us who are making the experimental documentary about charcoal workers I already mentioned to you. This Editorial Board, if that is what we are going to call it, is going to be responsible for collecting, selecting and classifying stories, themes, ideas, anecdotes and facts which might be helpful for the definitive story or even just to help you get to know the Cuban context; whatever works best for you. We are already in the swing of things, what with visits to writers, novelists, short story writers, television and radio script writers, all of whom we have invited to contribute Cuban themes, or whatever suggestions or ideas they wish. At the same time, we have taken the initiative of collecting, classifying, and writing commentaries about these Cuban writers’ stories, novellas and essays and other potentially useful material. We have even formed two groups who plan to take photographs of the Cuban environment – city and countryside – to create ‘typical’ situations and pinpoint ‘typical’ aspects, and develop themes of their own. Some of us have been working on topics and ideas, a selection of which are already in the hands of Barbachano. We are not in a position to evaluate the quality and scope of this preparatory work, because it has only just begun, and it is also fraught with obstacles. But we are doing all we can in the sincere hope that it will be useful.

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The carboneros documentary is well underway, though it is threatened by the seasonal rains that are going to reach our shores quite soon. We want it to be ready in time for screening when you come, so that you can give it your critical appraisal. Julio García Espinosa came up with the basic theme and the story. I have great hopes for him, not so much in terms of this documentary we are producing, against all odds, but for his skills as a screenwriter and his clear understanding of Neo-realism, of the needs of our cinema and, above all, for his deep-felt and sincere drive in seeking to penetrate reality, our Cuban reality, which, however specific it might be, is not an entirely separate world of its own. García Espinosa’s best and most admirable trait is the fact that his ‘attitude’ is not just a posture, but integral to his nature, and will stand him in good stead in pursuing his profession. Come to think of it, it isn’t so much this letter I am submitting to your attention, but the scenario for El Mégano that accompanies it, in addition to what we are going to show you, when you come to see us. I am volunteering this information because I have a genuine interest, or should I say enthusiasm, in finding out what you are going to think about the work by someone from whom I expect only the best. As for the location, the environment, and the people in the documentary, I am sending you now, via airmail, a set of photographs which are not, in themselves, sufficient to appreciate what we are doing, but at least will help you get a better idea, when you view them in conjunction with the story. I think it is better that I say no more, since you are having to spend time organizing your trip and the many things that will need to be resolved before your departure. While I await the opportunity to demonstrate my genuine affection and sincere admiration, I remain yours truly.

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Zavattini, letter to Guevara, 12 May 19551

Dear Guevara, Please will you also forgive me, as I have asked Massip to do, for my very brief reply. I just want to say that I am profoundly committed to the ‘Barbachano’ Project. I am not coming to an unknown place, but a place where I have memories, some friends, and we also have many things to say to each other. Rest assured that I shall make whatever I know available to you. You can count on my good will. I am keen to see the carboneros documentary and I think that the Editorial Board is one of those ideas that demonstrate your concrete intentions very well. Your passion fascinates me. The value of my stay in Cuba won’t be the result of the ideas I shall be contributing, but of what my presence will help spark off. I am referring to your projects and how I can help intensify your strong collaboration and assist in grounding in tangible reality your great passion to make cinema the most powerful national means. You shall see. I realize that you have met with obstacles and that you will continue to do so. We get some of those even here. But I know you well enough to say that these are not going to stop you from going forward. These words may sound rhetorical, but nothing better comes to mind. I was impressed by Cuban youth for its cohesion, its modernity, you know exactly what I mean, and for its simplicity: the way you could shift the focus from the most cultured topics, already translated into actions, to a dance, to that offer of extraordinary fruit. In all your physical and non-physical behaviour, there was a simplicity, spontaneity, power and sense of unity. It was, in other words, characteristic. Say hello to everyone. Greetings to Professor Rodríguez, to your friends who attended the Centro Sperimentale of Rome which is a film school with a tradition of its own, despite the current director.2 I am seeing Barbachano here in Rome next month, but I think we shall talk over the phone (he is going from Cannes to Paris). It seems that the day of our departure from Europe is 10 June. I shall be ready. Warm greetings on my behalf to Chorri and if you see my fellow countrywoman Clelia, say hello to her too. 1 2

Zavattini to Guevara, 12 May 1955, acz Corr. G 583/22. Unpublished. After Umberto Barbaro and Luigi Chiarini were ousted by the Christian Democrats who gained total control over the film school, the Catholic Mario Verdone was appointed director and the magazine Bianco e Nero changed overnight. Zavattini’s reference is to Verdone.

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‘Letter from Cuba’ (1955)1

Context When the film director Elio Petri published an abridged version of the field research he had conducted, on Zavattini’s instigation, about a disaster that happened in Rome, in 1951, which became the basis for the screenplay of Rome, 11 o’Clock, his book included a Preface, in the form of a letter from Zavattini, later also published separately, given its importance, in a magazine. Zavattini clarified his central role in the making of Giuseppe De Santis’s film and the advantages of field research, of cinematic film research and in a specific context. Petri had interviewed Zavattini, while still a cub reporter for L’Unità, the communist daily, the year before, in 1950. Incidentally, the film in question was a great success in Cuba.

Text Dear [Elio] Petri, I wanted you to know that here in Cuba, and in Mexico too, Rome 11 o’Clock is considered one of the major achievements of our cinema. Tell De Santis – and the remark you hear on everyone’s lips is ‘How true, that is’. As to verisimilitude, I know that one could discuss it for hours and hours and could ask the kind of question the enemies of Neo-realism love, but De Santis and I who collaborated with him, keep things simple. We know that in this instance the veridicity the Mexicans and Cubans refer to with such warmth and simplicity, is something we saw and heard. We met those girls who fell from

1

Zavattini, ‘Lettera da Cuba’, in Elio Petri, Roma, Ore 11, Roma: Edizioni Avanti!, 1956, 13–15. The date is missing, but it must be after 5 September 1955, during Zavattini’s second trip to Cuba. It was first published in La Risaia, 23 March 1956. It was reprinted again as ‘Roma ore 11’, in Cesare Zavattini, Gli altri. Interventi, occasioni, incontri, edited by Pierluigi Raffaelli, Milan: Bompiani, 1986, 20–2 and Zavattini, Opere, 1931–86, Introduction by Luigi Malerba, edited by Silvano Cirillo, Milan: Bompiani, 1991, 1633–5. In the second, recent, edition of Petri’s book, published many years after his death, Zavattini’s letter was removed and no mention of it made, as if it had never existed.

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the stairway after the event and listened to their stories. If we hadn’t possessed a more developed socially engaged conscience, one provoked by the new events of Italian history and subsequently by cinema, we would have seen and heard far less than we did. There would never have been that contact with places, with the protagonists of the news event of Via Savoia, and you would not have gone to interview them, the typists, I mean; you wouldn’t have produced the booklet that is about to come out in print, a document that reveals a whole mindset, a modern way of relating to other people. Do you remember that morning in Via Po, when we carried out that experiment, which was called ‘cruel’ by respectable people, of attracting a hundred typists with an advertisement, identical to the one which caused the tragedy? A girl left the queue in a rush, and weeping, because she realized that the others were better than her, but she needed to get a job, and she was leaving with her face hidden by her hands. Lucky you, dear Petri. At little over the age of twenty, you took to these things like a duck to water. I came to understand that an investigative approach was the top ethical priority very late, when I was approaching fifty, almost in old age. Why so late? Because my generation had some kind of fear of establishing such contacts, dreading that ultimately it could lead to the need to change many things, perhaps everything. My generation feared that the wings of the imagination would be dragged down by these data, statistics, recording, ‘shadowing’, asking questions, replying to questions. But no. An investigative approach of this nature, which demands of us that we upset our daily schedule and habit patterns, which completely modifies how we organize our time in a practical sense, and demands that we direct the imagination in different directions, to the point that we can no longer call it imagination. But what does it matter? It is no longer called art either. This is the other way we live, and later we shall find the name, from the things that will be born. Society is unwilling to accept that a different method can be applied to enrich our experience, yet we acknowledge uranium, plutonium and methanium, which doesn’t exist, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Every day, we look forward to new discoveries. We are soon going to learn what is faster than thought, and maybe we have already reached the moon, we just don’t know it. The objection we hear is that if we did, morals would be challenged. Undoubtedly, more or less dialectically worked out as it is, the ultimate purpose of our investigative field research is to change all the things, which, taken as a whole, are generally referred to as the contemporary ethical outlook. But we don’t want to change all these many things through intuition, we want to come to grips with them, one by one and get to know them well. In terms of intuition, there is no problem, for it has already resolved everything. By virtue of intuition, we already live in a better world, and yet, social facts continue to happen, as if we still lived in the ancient world. We shall meet again in Rome around the fifteenth and I’ll have so many things to share about my journey with you, with Peppe [Giuseppe De Santis] and [Gianni] Puccini. It was wonderful, and rather exhausting.

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Here in Cuba I’m witnessing something exemplary: a large group of young people have collected a great deal of research material on the life of their country. They have seen it from many angles; they have really explored it, investigated it. And I have in front of me the results of this serious commitment, that is to say, hundreds of photographs, press articles, statistics, and above all, the demonstration that in order to collect so many documents, they had to live with the people of their country, in a completely different way, compared to the way they normally would, if they had not been doing field research. They want to make a film, but the choice of the theme must result from all their one-to one-contacts with other people. To me, it seems very touching, as well as very promising. I’ll tell you more about it.

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Paris Conference ‘Useful Cinema’ (1956)1

Context In May 1956, Zavattini attended the International Conference of Authors in Paris, and gave a paper by this title in which he discussed beauty in relation to usefulness. His defence of a socially engaged cinema anticipated by many years something similar, a famous Latin American Manifesto, written by Julio García Espinosa: ‘Towards an Imperfect Cinema’ (1973), in which the Cuban filmmaker argued that Latin American cinema needed to be ‘imperfect’.2 His argument was that only in an ideal world could cinema be art for art’s sake, and have the luxury of being disinterested or autonomous from society.3 Clearly ‘useful cinema’ is also far from autonomous. ‘At this juncture’ – Zavattini observes – ‘cinema doesn’t want to make art; it prefers to be useful’. He went back on the problem in 1959 and 1960, in Cuba, and in direct contact with Espinosa, as the relevant texts published further will show.

Text Traditionally, governments don’t appreciate useful films, but they do love beautiful ones. In a way, from a purely aesthetic point of view, governments are

‘Il film utile’, Paper read out at The International Conference of Authors, Paris, 12–18 May 1956, in Neorealismo ecc., 374–5. 2 Julio García Espinosa, ‘Por un cine imperfecto’, Caracas: Rociante-Fondo Editorial Salvador de la Plaza, 1973, English translation: ‘Towards an Imperfect Cinema’, in Michael T. Martin, New Latin American Cinema. Vol. 1. Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, Detroit: Wayne State University, 1997, 197. 3 Kant is in the background, having drawn the distinction between mechanical art and art as an aesthetic endeavour. While the first is functional, aimed at a practical end, the exclusive purpose of the second is to engender pleasure and beauty, which are both disinterested aesthetic feelings. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, translated by W. S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982. 1

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the real defenders of beauty. This is the reason why they claim they are the ones defending freedom, since people should be free to express themselves in the field of art, in any way they wish, and in any way they are able to. I dare say that at this juncture, cinema doesn’t want to make art; it prefers to be useful. En route to utility we shall discover art. Now it might seem that I am putting forward some theory here. I ask you to forget what I have been saying up until now and to judge my proposal, overlooking the fact that it is a rough and ready draft, though it is one that responds to current needs within cinema. This is my proposal, then: let us all, filmmakers in attendance and filmmakers who, though absent, share our point of view, conduct an experiment, over a period of a year. Since we too, like everyone else, need attractive definitions, the sort you get in children’s games, let us call this serious game ‘The Year of the Great Experiment’. We pledge to make a binding agreement to make exclusively useful films. Some films are useful in a broad sense, others in a strict sense. In a broad sense, any film in which we show our inner being with sincerity and style is useful. Let’s take a remarkable example: René Clair’s The Grand Maneuver is a 1955 French drama film, written and directed by René Clair, which I have watched so many times and it seemed to me that I was like a boy who walks into a garden. The whole film is indeed a garden. Again, and again, I considered René Clair a master, whose footsteps I followed with my own tentative ones. But does this work of art fit in to the order of films which I call useful, in a strict sense? That is, in the sense of this thesis which I am trying to explain? My short answer is emphatically no. The reason I have chosen such an illustrious and perfect example of art is that it makes my explanation easier. Am I saying that such films should be removed from circulation or be undervalued? Absolutely not. All I ask is that, for the duration of the year of the great experiment, those who are willing to carry it out refrain from making films like The Grand Maneuver, but direct their efforts at making films with a social purpose, which tackle those problems which in Italy we call problemi scottanti, burning issues, contemporary problems, problems concerning a man among others, not individual man in lowercase, but Man in uppercase, who doesn’t want war, yet makes war nonetheless, the man who is ready to be indignant against violence, but who more or less consciously carries out violence; the man who gives employment and the man who seeks it; the man who goes to vote, but is clueless as to whom to vote for; the man who hates other men, because all around him reasons for deep envy arise and he himself offends others every hour of the day.

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‘The Economic Conference of Cinema’ (1956)1

Context On 16 September 1955, Zavattini wrote, in a letter to Fernando Gamboa: The situation in Italy? Still unclear: but I’m not despairing. It’s important to stay on guard and never demobilise. We plan to turn the Circolo Romano into the Circolo Italiano del Cinema, to give it more clout, by including intellectuals from all over Italy, so that it can become, as is indeed possible, the nation-wide workshop of freedom for cinema and not only cinema (freedom isn’t compartmentalized). As for Venice, this is what I know: they want to devalue the Venice Film Festival, be restructuring it differently.2

The following year, in 1956, the plan to expand the existing Italian professional film association into a nationwide network came to fruition. As part of his overall vision, Zavattini also worked towards creating a constructive dialogue between different parts of the film industry, traditionally (and still today) operating in isolation, in an attempt to steer it towards quality and ethical conscience, by facilitating an exchange of views among producers, distributors and filmmakers, screenwriters and directors. He called his initiative the Economic Cinema Conference. Its purpose was to take to task the film industry as a whole, question the imbalance of power, over means and relations of production, to pave the way for the makers to have more say and more control in determining its prospects. The three texts below chart how Zavattini framed the debate. The first text, dated 15 June 1956, followed up his invitation to organize an Economic Conference of Cinema. At the same meeting, there were two important discussions. One centred on a proposal to broaden the remit of the film circle, [§1] Zavattini, ‘Il Circolo Italiano del Cinema’, in Neorealismo ecc., 183–6; [§2] Zavattini, ‘20 settembre 1956’, in Diario cinematografico, 218–20; [§3] Zavattini, ‘30 ottobre [1956]’, Diario cinematografico, 220–3 (NB. An incomplete version of §3 also in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 188–92). 2 Zavattini to Gamboa, 16 September 1955, acz E/72, fol. 3. Unpublished. 1

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by making it a national association (the first step in trying to effect change, by consolidating the position of makers in respect of producers). The second discussion concerned the plan to organize an Economic Conference, having already established internal cohesion among filmmakers. Thus, the two proposals are closely linked, which is why they have not been abridged. The second text, which appeared in Zavattini’s public cinematic diary, maps the critical situation of Italian cinema and the threats due to the us dumping product and to the distributors’ tight control of cinemas. The third text comprises his inaugural paper, given at the two-day seminar held on 30–31 October 1956, in preparation for the Conference itself.

Text 1 The plan of transforming the Circolo Romano in Circolo Italiano del Cinema began some time ago, two years ago or so. It seems to me that time has worked in our favour, in the sense that today, more than ever before, there is a need to link our Roman Cinema Circle to all those national forces which could join up to form a unified conscience of our profession, our art, and its function. This is not a mere name change. It is true that, even under the old name, such a change could have been made. However, in my opinion, by using the word ‘Italian’ the overarching plan of widening the panorama and tasks of our Circle becomes crystal clear. The history of our recent cinema has obviously revealed the lack of popularity, shall I say, as far as the nation’s public opinion is concerned, of our choices, our finest choices. While we have undeniably worked hard during these years in our meetings to stay united, we have done nothing to help public opinion actually acquire a stake in these ambitions of ours, these long-term plans we have, which, when the time comes, should make it possible for us to ask for solidarity, loyalty, and fair play. We are alone and public opinion is alone, since the press, in most cases, follows criteria which rarely coincide with the dissemination of a unified conception of cinemas, or worse, opposes it, swamping everything in a climate of scandal and anarchy. Are we agreed that a cinema that strives to be rooted in the nation must find a consensus among all those responsible within its different sectors? From government to production and so forth, to all the creative and commercial elements, right up to the public, there is a common denominator in all. To be more specific, I am speaking of the awareness that a national cinema is only such if, and only if, it expresses to the world at large values which are specific to the country. You can appreciate that this is a huge area of activity, one in which each person may express personal talent and interest, but I say that this is the emphasis – it has to be – even if no one can get in the way of exceptions, nor would anyone wish to.

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As the Circle of Italian Cinema (cic), we would seek out an ongoing relationship with all those people who wish to be informed, more accurately and more systematically, who wish to swop their knowledge for ours, in a reciprocal exchange between those who, in political terms, are known as the organizers and those who form the base. The Bulletin which was circulated in few and forgettable issues should become a bulletin that reflects the urgency of setting up these relations, at a time when we are all about to face the situation openly and with renewed confidence. You should not feel isolated in order to make good films. In this bulletin of ours, all cic members should set down their ideas, currently dispersed in chaotic complaints, made in coffee bars, or in the virtually deserted corridors of production houses. You also need good viewers, when it comes to making good films. I have said so before. While I don’t believe in the public imposing on the artist, nor in the artist imposing on the public, there should be a natural process of cooperation and reciprocation. I think frequent contact with our correspondents, our members spread across the whole of Italy should reap benefits for us all. This is the principle of a network to come, which will, over time, grow more and more tightly knit. If it does, it will mean that our cinema has found its way again. I am putting forward this idea to you, which presupposes a series of entirely new marketing initiatives, to adopt, develop and perfect. Early days, but you could make this become an entirely new event. In this respect, the new Advisory Board has a novel and challenging task ahead. * The idea for the first Economic Cinema Conference came from the very same need to utterly transform the scope of our Circle. Our dire predicament did not require from us yet another response in the form of a Cinema Manifesto, but something that would bring the players in question face to face.3 I have already stated that our Circle is the most fit for purpose, and has both the duty and the right to launch this initiative and, even on this occasion, this Circle of 3

Zavattini is referring to a public initiative, a Manifesto, drafted in 1955 by the then Board of Councillors of the crc. These included major figures of the time: Sergio Amidei, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alessandro Blasetti, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Luigi Chiarini, Lino Del Fra, Giuseppe De Santis, Vittorio De Sica, Luciano Emmer, Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Michele Gandin, Alberto Lattuada, Carlo Lizzani, Mario Melloni, Pietro Notarianni, Antonio Pietrangeli, Paolo Stoppa, Antonello Trombadori, Luigi Zampa and Zavattini himself. It was signed by the majority of Italian filmmakers. The Manifesto expressed their rebellion against the attempts at spreading a climate of ideological and political intolerance in how culture was being organized, demanding respect of democratic principles embedded in the Italian Constitution and calling for a democratic law to regulate the national film industry. Specifically, this 1955 Manifesto demanded that fascist censorship laws still in operation be banned – parliamentary control and overseeing of decisions concerning national cinema and such economic state provision that would stop government agencies from instrumentalizing funding for blackmail or to create a climate of fear. Cf. Mino Argentieri, ‘Il Circolo Italiano del Cinema’, in Neorealismo ecc., 186–7.

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ours has distinguished itself for being the first to broach the issue and to be in full agreement over it, nor could things have gone any differently. What the Circle’s willingness and attentiveness demonstrates is that technicians and artists within Italian cinema are still very responsive. Now, I am not suggesting that we get bogged down in enquiries which, however useful, lack a common ethical perspective, though this is the point we are keenly striving to achieve, and I believe it may well emerge from the Conference, which is the most concrete plan of work that has ever been carried out. I have called this Conference ‘Economic’ for a good reason. Italian cinema was born from ideas, not from industry – and I am speaking of that cinema which we all agree to describe as Italian, in a positive and constructive sense, and which came about after the war, characterized by an intimate integrity all of its own – born from ideas and things to say, that were waiting at the gate and which have since led to an industry. I aim for a cinema whose economy is determined by values. If industry is capable of recognizing the primacy of ideas, then it will be capable of structuring itself on the basis of the typical product and, in this way, help develop it. In other words, what is required, yet again, is collaboration. But the need for collaboration – a point worth emphasizing – cannot but involve all parts involved in the Italian film industry. This is the reason why the Conference exists and why Italian cinema is gathering around the same table, so to speak, before public opinion, at a time when public opinion is waiting for clarification. To provide clarification to public opinion entails clarifying our past, our present and, as I said in the letter of invitation to this assembly, above all, our future. I believe the best and most eagerly anticipated part of the Conference will be the stage when we discuss proposals. After such an intense and dramatic experience as the one endured by Italian cinema, proposals will surely be forthcoming. We have reached such extremes, as I pointed out in that letter, that I dare to believe that from evil only good can now come. All of us are being called to give a demonstration of civic sense at this extreme juncture. And it would be painful to think that the reaction would be any different, from the makers of a cinema that has wished to be, and wants to be, a civic cinema, a democratic cinema. This Conference which, in my opinion, should address the issues exhaustively, and not restrict itself to an academy of recrimination, but lead to a concrete outcome, should last two days, and take place in Rome, within a month from today. Let us hope that nobody will come up with this objection, to complain that now is not the time for this, since summer and torrid temperatures are on their way. We should be responding to the needs of cinema, not to the sun. Likewise, I hope that we tackle this evening’s meeting with patience and forgetting about the last bus. The plan is to leave here with the certainty that this Conference is going ahead and that you will launch it this evening, through your participation and constructive criticism. Then we will know that it stands a chance.

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2 I’m being asked the same question by a number of people: ‘is the Economic Conference of Italian Cinema also going to discuss censorship?’ I don’t know. Nobody can guess in which direction the discussion will take, during the two important and free days of conference activity. I do know that everyone is doing their utmost to prepare and from this, in itself, as [Leonida] Rèpaci would say, many hopes can arise, like butterflies from a peach tree. The Conference is a big trap we are all getting into of our own free will, in the foreknowledge that to get out of it, we are going to have to pay a price and in public. They say that remorse is wafting over our cinema. Let us hope that some of it will land on each of us. It is a fact that no other country as much as this one occasionally feels a real sense of collective will; an ethical impulse, which indicates that faith in a common destiny of Italian cinema has not disappeared altogether. But I’d like to say a few words about my point of view in respect of censorship in view of the up and coming two days of 30 and 31 October. Censorship is a theme which excites passions, as we know, it is a topic in Parliament, no different from any other, and one which the Opposition holds dear. In my opinion, it can be dealt with technically, which means neither ambiguously nor inadequately. But it does mean objectively, researching its influence on the film industry, an investigation which can only be advantageous, in terms of opening up possibilities of new content. I once wrote that poetry was the only issue that mattered, as regards Italian cinema. Today, I would make a correction, in light of the fact that poetry has manifested in the work of several young and older directors, in the work of several screenwriters, young and old alike. Namely, that the only issue – but I surely must have said this too in the past – should be that censorship relents its grip, as much as possible. I’m convinced of this. If we take into account the specific values of our cinema, the human ‘ingredient’, called human in every part of the world, but which in this country had, and fortunately still has, a unique meaning, more than elsewhere, not just shared by a few people, but by the nation, something which drew us in entirely, with the novelty of reform, with the joy of new-found vision. It was Italian everyday life, shown as spectacle. But we had only begun. Now censorship affects at least 50 per cent of all the shares of Italian cinema. For this reason, then, it would be problematic not to include censorship among the topics on the agenda in preparation for these sincere sessions of work. Actually, nothing should be excluded a priori. What counts is the spirit with which we decide to tackle matters. Therefore, I find it hard to give credence to the rumour I heard that an official at the highest level has requested that the Conference should avoid discussions that deviate from economics, using an interpretation of economics that is too restrictive, brutally so, out of fear of ethical, aesthetic, and political discussions. We hope, and our hope is not completely unfounded, that the cinema industry will demonstrate a ‘different’

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conscience, truly economic, by which I mean constructive, and do so by showing the willingness to put on the agenda a ‘forbidden’ topic such as censorship, in a timely fashion for this first extraordinary cooperative experiment. Cinema needs no advocates nor scalp hunters. The only ones to blame are those unable to participate in the Conference, those who fail to see in it a guarantee for its future salvation and the dawn of vast originality, which harbours an ambition to create a truly democratic cinema.

3 As I read out these pages, I am inaugurating the preparatory work for the Economic Conference. I am happy to welcome you, on behalf of all the members of the Italian Circle of Cinema, who were in favour of organizing the first Economic Conference of our cinema, at the meeting of 16 June. We of the Italian Film Circle are confident that the work of today, 30 October and tomorrow 31 October and the further meetings of 16 and 17 November will be very useful. What makes us certain of this is the simple reason that we are here today, after so many years, after positive and adverse fortune and polemics in which, at times, each side has refused to listen to the other, to calmly and sincerely discuss our fundamental issues at stake. This means we can begin to exert within our industry that unified conscience, which is a central aspiration of this Conference. It means that the word cooperation becomes essential in the technical and ethical vocabulary of the life of the industry. It means that we come to realize in public what our immense responsibility, at a national level is, and, lastly, that we feel the urgency to extricate ourselves from the quicksand in which we have been sunk. During these meetings of ours, we are going to travel down a road signposted by numbers. That is fine. So, by all means, let’s be rigorous, precise, concrete, but let us also light up these numbers with the thought that cinema is – whether we like it or not – the expression of the spirit and character, of art, and of the living history of our nation. Cinema is an industry. Agreed. But it is an industry in which the raw material is none other than the history of this country, directly or indirectly told, willingly or unthinkingly. Old stuff, I know. We shall endeavour to listen again with new ears. What is it that we are trying to achieve? Perhaps we can sum up our future economic programme like this: we want to earn money with some good films. None of us, not even the poets, set out to produce a cinema that makes a loss. The plan that will be most acceptable, it seems to us, to the majority, is one that seeks to make the interdependence between quality film and earnings a constant. We know this already too. And yet, in the past, there were those who believed that if, to secure a profit, it would be necessary to make a poor-quality film, then a poor-quality film would be made. It is true that no one has the secret formula for profit nor for quality cinema. By frequently comparing notes among organizing members of this Circle, we have reached a consensus, as regards what constitutes a quality film, and I am now going to convey this opinion to you. First of all, it means an Italian

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film, in the sense that it expresses Italian intelligence, imagination, and tradition. I said Italian, and not Neo-realist, to clear up any misunderstandings over a prejudicial aesthetic, although Neo-realism is certainly not limited to a group of thirty or forty people, but, by now, it is the very aesthetic of Italian cinema. Also, we have to thank Neo-realism for the positive satisfaction of finding ourselves here today, since Neo-realism helped us define ourselves to ourselves and to the world, politically, in the highest sense of the word, by postulating a social conscience, a profoundly Italian conscience, in all sectors of the cinema industry. If we had no such conscience, we would not have had the justification, or the drive, to organize these meetings, thanks to which we hope to establish principles for working collaboratively, without belittling anyone’s individual initiatives. Having paid homage, as we should, to Neo-realism, let us resume the explanation. To make Italian cinema, to choose to make Italian cinema, means having confidence that in our witnessing of ideas and emotions at a national level, there is worthwhile raw material and there are filmmakers who are capable of turning it into stories. In other words, we are confident that we can make a cinema which is distinct from other cinemas, just as each nation contributing to the development of civilization is both distinct and original. Either you have such confidence, as firm as faith, and then certain organizational consequences – economic to be precise – derive from it, or a single direction, and the only possible way forward, for a cinema with a future will be lacking. The alternative is to plunge back into uncertainty. This statement, making Italian cinema, when you take the trouble to ponder over it, embraces so many themes, a novelty of themes, an infinity, almost. I would venture to call it an explosion of themes – and modes of expressing them. However, once this Italian seam has been identified, it needs to be tracked in all its implications. This requires a capillary exploration of that object of investigation that is Italy, with its public and private attractions, with its perpetual ‘movement’, encompassing the comic and the tragic expressions of its own unique humanity. To deny this, is to deny a varied, typical, and modern Italian ‘presence’.4 The worst heresy that can be uttered about Italy is that it lacks poetic and film-worthy dimensions. I would say that it is down to our weakness – I am referring to the twenty or thirty people who have the monopoly of suitable topics – in connecting with this type of Italy. What does a lack of inspiration signify, if not the inability to engage with reality? It is precisely when there is a very limited ability to connect with reality that neither style nor form can be found. A film writer is no amoeba. Clearly, to make an Italian cinema requires one to seek the appropriate form and style. For being Italian means more than a birth certificate can mean. It requires action, and even in an artistic context, a conquest. To have a sense of what makes our product different from that of others, that is, its intrinsic and constant Italian nature, leads to spiritual,

4

‘presence’, meaning: being, present-ness, defining character.

‘The Economic Conference of Cinema’ (1956)

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technical, and an economic practice which cannot be improvised. When writers, directors, or producers lose this understanding, they are like birds who have lost their way, wandering from branch to branch. They will never find the nest and will become prey to whichever hunter arrives first on the scene, a local, perhaps, or maybe an outsider. In sum, we of the Italian Cinema Circle are convinced that it makes for good business, in the specific sense of accountants and bankers, to know how to access Italian subject matter in all its potentialities, and in all its moods. Naturally, to spot genuine Italian substance takes perception and self-discipline. Producers often lose heart, because they don’t see any gold nuggets in among the dirt. But the gold is there and, fortunately, all you need do to get it is to reach out for it. We need these eyes and this self-discipline to sidestep habitual behaviour, since when cinema becomes habitual, that is to say, when it loses contact with the constant flow of life and of the country, it turns into a vice, a vice for those who produce it and a vice for those who consume it. Dear friends, if the reason we are here is to defend a cinema outside this Italian ambition, we wouldn’t be venturing to request laws and safeguards. You have a right to ask the government for protection only if you are striving to make an Italian cinema, which, that is, aims to serve the nation’s needs. We are also assembled here to find ways to make this protection ever more effective (and there are those who will call this matter too, one that is exclusively limited to the sphere of economics). But we are asking protection for a good product, a product which represents the nation, and therefore we must think in terms of a product which represents the country. Otherwise, let the dead bury their dead. What would it take for government to assist the development of Italian cinema in the above-mentioned ways? All its relevant legislation would aim to facilitate a cinema that would be the custodian and the interpreter of Italian life, of its customs, expressed in accordance with local context, not mimicking distant lands with powerful instruments of media propaganda, cinema being its most effective. Therefore, government is expected to do its part in creating a particular climate and conditions which will favour ongoing experimentation, in the scientific sense of the word, such that neither success nor failure would be the determining factors in relation to the policies of production houses. Instead, the new climate would be less and less conducive to individual ‘cases’ and more and more conducive to films which establish the current pulse of the nation and national concerns. What is implicit in this line of thought is the conviction that economy and art are interdependent in the field of cinematography. And if some of us have stated that ideas should influence our cinema’s economy, we didn’t intend to belittle economy. On the contrary, the thrust of the argument is that the economics of cinema should boast a leading role in inspiring ideas and making them flourish, not condition them. There is no financial competition at stake in film festivals. There is primarily a competition of ideas, of content, which we strive to express through spectacle. If this were not the case, participation in film festivals would not be

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spontaneous, but robotic. But that is not how it is. Instead, even a small nation can harbour cinematic ambitions. Some filmmakers have made good films with the equivalent in millions of liras that it would cost to promote a bad film in Italy and anywhere else, to present their country in the best and most lasting way before an admiring international audience.5 It is not a question of being greedy for capital investment, but a matter of judicious choices in spending. We are greedy for whatever help is going to assist artists and producers in making the best quality films possible. This statement is not naïve nor is it abstract. The intention of making top quality Italian films, a commitment involving all the players working in the industry, including the press – which carries so much responsibility for how it induces laziness in public opinion – is by no means a mechanical choice. Nor is the wish to make money from good films. Nor is the desire that the public should feel proud of the national output, rather than escapism being the sum total of its involvement. It is worth emphasizing that the sole purpose for some is economic gain. The destiny of cinema is to become a better cinema and despite terrible obstacles of different kinds, it is clear that, from its early days until today, cinema has been inclined to become a better cinema, an affirmative, not a negationist cinema, revolving around the human being, as the centre of all things. Italian cinema has worked in this direction. Therefore, by all means let us pay attention to the statistics we are going to be shown, we really should consider them carefully, and even go as far as manipulating them to our advantage, but let us always bear in mind the aim that Italian cinema should continue to support this orientation and do so more systematically, and in all possible ways, ever closer to its best traditions.

5

Zavattini is probably thinking of Vittorio De Seta’s award-winning documentaries, made at his own expense and whom Zavattini greatly admired. A retrospective of his work at moma in New York recently brought De Seta’s poetic documentaries to the English-speaking public’s attention, such as De Seta’s very first film, Easter in Sicily (1954), and Islands of Fire (1954), filmed while a volcano was erupting, off the Sicilian coast. After making the Zavattinian Diary of a Schoolmaster (1973), De Seta was ostracized by the Italian film industry until his eighties, as was Giuseppe De Santis.

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‘The Loneliness of Zavattini’ (1958)1

Context What follows is from an interview dating from the year before Zavattini’s last trip to Cuba. Zavattini provides an assessment of Neo-realism. The selection of five excerpts from this long interview with filmmaker Giuseppe Ferrara condenses Zavattini’s critique. His response can be summed up in an observation he makes, at one point, that there was a time when Neo-realism was the conscience of cinema. Now it had become its remorse, in that filmmakers had reverted to art pour l’art, artistic autonomy.2 However, current events continued to offer any number of stimuli to develop an ethical, political, socially engaged cinema. The excerpts are numbered, and the references given in the footnotes.

Text 1 [Giuseppe Ferrara]: Let me begin by asking you for an explanation. I have a letter of yours here, where, among other things, you state: ‘Neo-realism is there. It is waiting at the threshold. And not even our mistakes can eclipse it.’ Well, and please don’t say I am aggressive, can we begin by clarifying what are or what have been ‘our errors’. In brief, I am asking you for self-criticism, yours and of the entire Neo-realist movement? [Zavattini]: Our mistakes ... let me begin by clarifying that I am ad-libbing, and that it is a blunt question, at point-blank range. But I shall try to be honest and accurate. Our errors are – and I include myself among those who erred – errors of fidelity to something in which you believe. We kept going for a while, shouting, being polemical, and reaching the inevitable point of giving Neo-

Zavattini, ‘La solitudine di Zavattini’, interview with Giuseppe Ferrara, Film, no. 11, 1958, later in Neorealismo ecc., 193–204. 2 Italics for emphasis appear in the interview. Zavattini, ibidem, 196. 1

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realism a strictly political frame. The fact of the matter, and I am referring to the cinema, precisely what we were able to develop with our resources, was inferior to what it should have been. It is not only the fault of censorship and a negative climate engendered by politicians. It was also the fault of those who preferred to go their own way and be free. Whereas, fidelity to Neo-realism forced them to be consistent, which is so very demanding. In other words, within Neo-realism itself, the situation led to an opposition within from those who no longer felt able to defend it and develop it further. I think this also happens with those who are deserters, so to speak of a particular theory, and later become the worst enemies of the idea they rejected. [Ferrara]: You speak of fidelity. Is there not also an excess of fidelity, seen from a different angle? [Zavattini]: No, no. I am trying to say something different. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I shall say it anyway. I simply want to say this. I think our ethical conviction is out of synch with our ‘technical’ intuition of what constitutes Neorealism. In the following sense. Let us consider my case, because it is the most straightforward and I can resort to specific examples. From a strictly theoretical standpoint, I think that I am one of the people who have very clear ideas about Neo-realism. By no means in a philosophical sense, since I lack the professional cultural backing for that, nor do I possess the relevant language, but in a more generic sense. Therefore, in essence, I simplified all the relevant issues, and I am very clear what they are, to the extent that I would say that I am one of very few who never strayed off from the Neo-realist political line. Furthermore, had I only had more support, I would have taken it further, with the assistance of others. On a practical level, however, when it boils down to producing films, I don’t think I was equally consistent and energetic. Making a film and painting a small picture are not the same thing. If you want to paint a pear all red, you can go ahead and do so, for next to nothing. In the cinema, there are several financial demands you simply cannot avoid. Could I, who was so convinced of the sound theoretical basis of Neo-realism have done more to get to grips with social facts? I think so. And this is where I must speak of shortcomings.

2 [Ferrara]: Do you think that deserting our responsibilities cost the defeat of Noe-realism as a movement? If so, what are the consequences?3

Zavattini, ibidem, 195.

3

‘The Loneliness of Zavattini’ (1958)

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[Zavattini]: Right now, I think we are back to square one. There is nothing, apart from the conviction of very few filmmakers. Neo-realism is in a trance-like state. We spent too long ignoring the issue. We have reached the point where one dare not even suggest making a collective endeavour. If one were to say: ‘Let us organize a Neo-realist conference?’ Can you hear how out of date this question is? They have well and truly succeeded in making it unpopular, or, we have succeeded, to the extent that each one should take on a degree of responsibility, should I say.

3 [Ferrara]: But you say: ‘Neo-realism is right there’. Do you mean that it is an event – be it in trance or dead, as the case may be – which exists, regardless? [Zavattini]: An event. Look, it is not an event we created. I have said so and put it in writing again and again. It may seem paradoxical, but we did not invent Neorealism, we invented that Neo-realism should be practised. Two very different concepts. It follows that Neo-realism is more alive than ever before, because it consists in a critical stance, a cognitive stance, in the face of reality. Can we say that in these years, seen from a perspective of thought, of philosophy, of political events, the world has taken a different direction? Can we say that the need-toknow reality stems from a philosophical principle or from events which are such that they drive us all in the direction of non-reality? Now, I should attempt at explaining what you have put so succinctly: ‘it is there’. Yes, it is there, despite the fact that we act as if it were not there. As I recall, I conveyed this idea in a slogan. This is because, given my nature, a slogan serves to synthesize my thought. In this respect, I said that Neo-realism, which was once the conscience of Italian cinema, has now become Italian cinema’s remorse, and I think this phrase sums it up well.4 That said, it doesn’t seem that active a remorse, actually. Perhaps it is, but only in a couple of individuals. But the vast majority, and even very blatantly, are biased in favour of art for art’s sake; this tired old formula, right? In other words, they maintain that what counts is to make ‘a good film’. But today we well know what it means to make a good film. It means making a film you like, with no other concerns in mind. Never mind if the problems are festering inside. I don’t believe for a moment that anyone can act without, more or less explicitly, communicating a problem. But there is a host of problems and the ones which are communicated today are absolutely irrelevant. By contrast, and this is the crux of the matter, Neo-realism, in any one of its tendencies, one substantial constant: a keenness, an ethical preoccupation to attend to contemporary problems. So how can Neo-realism not be there? Social facts should not exist, there. Needs should not exist; should not be there. There should be no need to know

4

Zavattini’s emphasis in italics.

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them, there and then. There should be no ambition to express it, using an artistic, or intellectual, means of communication, at one’s disposal. [Ferrara]: You are talking from a cinematic standpoint? [Zavattini]: Yes indeed, cinematically! All this is from the perspective of cinema.

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Zavattini, letter to Guevara, 2 January 19591

Context On 1 January 1959, General Fulgencio y Zaldívar Batista, the Cuban dictator, was toppled, defeated by a ramshackle, ill-equipped army of Rebeldes or rebels. He fled the country, taking his embezzled millions with him, while Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Fidel Castro and others headed for the capital city, Havana. The following day, Zavattini wrote this letter, published here for the first time, to Alfredo Guevara, who was living in exile in Mexico, with advice for setting up a revolutionary Cuban cinema to come. Zavattini’s idea of a revolutionary cinema is that it is authentic and avoids didacticism. It is political, but politics is mediated by a poetic means of expression. He advises Guevara on the first steps to take: to film critical material on the country’s current situation, and not to worry about the aesthetics, for the time being. The last part of the letter refers to Italian arms trafficking with the Batista government in December 1959, which Guevara had alerted Zavattini to in a cable. The writer succeeded in getting the story published first in the Italian press, using his personal contacts with the communist L’Unità and Paese Sera. Only then was the issue raised officially in Parliament.

Text Dear Guevara, I am writing to you with great joy in my heart for the wonderful news, that Batista has fled the country. My joy is even greater, because I think of your joy, and that of my other Cuban friends, and of all those I knew in Cuba who expressed their position against the dictatorship, through their love for a Neorealist cinema. I am certain Fidel Castro will use the cinema – so hindered by Batista – as the most effective means to get to know Cuba’s problems, and to 1

Zavattini to Guevara, 2 January 1959, acz E 2/4, fol. 1. Unpublished.

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make them publicly known: this doesn’t mean – let me say it once again – a didactic cinematography, but simply adopting a particular set of themes, both relevant and historically interesting, within the area of cinema. Anyway, we are all agreed that the way to renew the language of cinema and cinema itself is through the energy, honesty and authenticity of its content. You find yourselves in the ideal situation, just as we were immediately after the fall of fascism. You are now in a position to divorce cinema from its industrial constraints and make it become the political and poetic means of expression of the great democratic adventure you are moving towards. In this first phase, in my modest opinion, the most useful and beautiful action to take for a group of people like you and our friends, would be to travel the length and width of Cuba, carrying humble 16-millimetre cameras and bring back to the Capital, (surely one of the most over-explored locations), critical material on the country’s situation. There will be those who will work on school education, those working on the agricultural situation, others on contemporary history, on documentation about the Revolt, or on crucial aspects of your lives, but not limited to only the negative ones, of course. What is significant is that you now have a timely opportunity to provide your people and foreigners too with a body of work, drawn from this vibrant period. This will doubtless advance the making of films out of all the ideas that were fermenting in the progressive spirit of these last years in Cuba. Don’t worry about the aesthetics for the time being. I am more and more convinced that if you communicate with passion and with dedication you will find art somewhere along the way. All my best wishes to you and our dear friends. And I await their news directly from them as to the days you are living through. Some good news from Mexico, as you have probably heard. It would appear that our dear Barbachano really is going to go into production with Mexico mío, which Velo and a worthy group of contributors were working on in 1958. Were you also involved in those meetings? I received your cable on 22 December. On 23 December I consulted with friends on what to do and we decided that the best thing was to publish your cable immediately, with only a few words of commentary by me, making it known at the same time, furthermore, that some Government Ministers, having been alerted, would table a question on the matter in Parliament. It was published on 24 December in Paese Sera, then on 25 December, in L’Unità. As you know, these are two papers of the Left; anyway, for the very reason that the initiative was mine, no other paper would have taken the matter into consideration. In fact, they didn’t.

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Fernando Bernal, letter to Zavattini, 29 May 19591

Context By May 1959, the icaic, the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry, had been set up and Zavattini officially invited to Cuba to help. He arrived on 11 December and stayed for over two months, teaching, researching and writing scenarios. Before his arrival, he was issued with an official contract from icaic, after approval from the Cuban government, and members of icaic sent him outline stories, as the following correspondence documents. As Alfredo Guevara’s September letter states, he was asked to carry out screenwriting supervision too. But Guevera then goes on to also say to him: It is no longer a question of making one or two films and to evaluate some others, but to make a cinema (hacer un Cine).

When Zavattini writes to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, he makes an important distinction between timely propaganda and timeless cinema. He advises the Cubans to tackle the Revolution in such a way as to ‘bring to the surface its broader aspects’, while also making films polemical targeted to Cuba alone, for local propaganda, immediate consumption.

Text Esteemed Sir, Following the creation by the Revolutionary Government of The Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry, an institution set up to promote film industry in our country and begin the production of a truly artistic cinema, we find ourselves faced with the difficult task of having to carry out a preliminary 1

Guevara to Zavattini, 13 June 1959, in Guevara e Zavattini, Ese diamantino corazón de la verdad, 42–3.

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economic estimate. Therefore, we would like to continue to count on your help now, just as you helped us during the difficult time of mountain warfare. All the financial information or sources of information you can provide regarding the production, distribution, funding, and so on, is going to be very useful for our work. I take the opportunity to express our warmest affection, awaiting your response, Yours, Fernando Bernal, Economic Consultant2

2

Bernal’s letter is followed by a brief handwritten note by Alfredo Guevara.

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Guevara, letter to Zavattini, 29 September 19591

My dear Zavattini, I received today your letter dated 23 [September]. Marco [Zavattini] was kind enough to make a copy and this made me realize immediately what dangers there are. I didn’t need a translator and I am about to answer. I don’t think it is necessary to insist on the importance for us of your presence in Cuba, at the very moment production is beginning and especially by virtue of your specific, and direct, intervention. As I explained to you, it means a lot to us to be able to count on your creative cooperation in preparing two or three films (story and screenplay) and in the supervision of all our plans. Since we are not in a position to delay the beginning of our work, because it would seriously damage the prestige of the icaic, contributing to cool the enthusiasm and the expectations of the whole country for the birth of our film industry, we insist on the proposed dates and, only with a degree of concern and disappointment, do we accept to put them off until after 15 November, perhaps until 1 December, but if it is possible to come sooner, that would be better.2 We completely understand your reasons and your prior engagements and, above all, we know that your work in Yugoslavia and the other proposals you have been made will be a triumph for good cinema and a reason for pride and validation for us. Be that as it may, our situation has very particular aspects. The Revolutionary Government and, above all, Fidel, are giving strong moral support to Cuban cinema, both privately and in public. Fidel and Raúl are talking about this enterprise on television, in their speeches and interviews. They have succeeded in translating our efforts and plans into published articles with large titling, polemics and popular enthusiasm. I have just got back from

Guevara to Zavattini, 29 September 1959, in Guevara e Zavattini, Ese diamantino corazón de la verdad, 47. These are Guevara’s words: ‘Estamos interesados en contar con su colaboración creadora en la preparación de uno o dos filmes (argumento y guión) y de la supervisión de todos nuestros planes.’ 2 In italics in Spanish. 1

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Ciénaga de Zapata, where I spent the weekend with Fidel and Raúl. This was when I told them about the outcome of the European trip.3 Fidel’s enthusiasm has grown, if that is possible, considering the complexity and importance of his responsibilities and concerns, and I do believe we don’t have the right to let the party organizers down on this, or our own people, for that matter. This is why I have no scruples in being insistent, in the hope that, once your prior commitments come to a conclusion on 15 November, and that, even if you cannot leave on 1 December, you catch the plane without delay, in the knowledge that it is no longer a question of making one or two films and to evaluate some others, but to make a cinema (hacer un Cine). This is what we are counting on, with the help of your art and extraordinary humanity: it will be the best gift of your friendship. As for the financial contract, Doctor Saúl Yelín will deal with that. He is an old friend from university and film club days, a very knowledgeable comrade who works for the icaic. He has already explained to you that we could use your contracts with Manolo [Manuel Barbachano Ponce] as a template, or other similar agreements that you might wish to consider. In practice, we don’t want to lay down conditions, nor do we want to get stuck in minutiae. As for everything else, we know you will be fair and that you understand perfectly the significance of our endeavours and our need to do the very best for Cuba, beyond ridiculous limitations, while at the same time not making excessive demands. Give my warmest regards to your wife and sons who were so attentive and cordial towards me in Rome. My dearest good wishes to you, certain as I am that I shall be seeing you very soon, and equally certain that this trip and the work will be more significant than the previous ones.

3

Alfredo Guevara’s reconnaissance trip to Europe for support. He went to Cannes and singled out Zavattini as an adviser to help set up revolutionary Cuban cinema and met up with him in Rome where he was a guest in his home.

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Zavattini, letter to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1 November 19591

Dear Tomás, I received your two letters that provide even more proof of the passionate awareness you all share, my old friends, yet still so young. It is now certain that I shall arrive at the beginning of December, or, by the 15 December, at the latest, and I am really looking forward to it. I would so like to maintain an intense correspondence with you from now on, but how can I, dear Tomás? For if I write to you, I will not be finish all my other commitments here in time to meet my deadlines, which would then mean having to delay my departure. This is not something either of us would wish. I think the letters I have sent Alfredo, García Ascot and Yelín may be useful for the whole group. There are always such shared interests and purpose in your group. The scheme of work that you have begun to prepare is very detailed and rooted in your reflections and deep-seated feelings about your revolution. Clearly, what you should aim for – and I should too, in so far as I am committed to help you in this – is developing the Cuban and revolutionary theme in a way that will bring to the surface its broader aspects or to use a well-worn word, universal dimension. Doubtless, however, your general plan will also include a particular type of film, strictly for national use, for local propaganda, for immediate consumption, polemical and time-bound, by which I mean produced ‘in a matter of months’. This said, however, we probably all share the view that in this area too, one can succeed or fail, that is to say, you can attract the attention of a few viewers or of many, even beyond the scope of the immediate purpose those metres of footage are aimed at. As I already pointed out to someone else, your plan to accumulate as much material as possible first, to then effect a rigorous selection later, seems both very generous and very worthwhile. There comes a time when events, even the most noble and the most authentic, need to be contained within a measure, so that they can be expressed; and if it is true that everything is worthwhile, it is also

1

Zavattini to Gutiérrez Alea, 1 November 1959, acz E 2/5, 10–11. Unpublished.

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the case that the man behind the camera must know what he wants. You could say that the very fact of being amazed is a confirmation of one’s conscience, not the opposite. But let me cut short theoretical digressions of this nature. It seems to me that in all your preliminary ideas there is a valid social logic and there are specific targets for contemporary satire. For example, The Little Dictator is a sitting target we would all like to aim at: it would be all too easy to adopt abstractions against dictatorship and there are many precedents that do just that. But in [Rafael] Trujillo’s case, it is essential to draw on real events, to combine satire with history and give it that contemporary bite that alone can justify it. As for Tiempo Muerto, I hope to find the time to read the book by Ramiro Guerra (Azúcar y población en las Antillas).2 Attack against the Moncada Barracks is an important topic that had its echoes in Fidel Castro’s speech outside the law court, where he was condemned for that very assault. The racial theme is so central that you could be really ambitious and deal with it in such a way as to shake the whole world’s inertia. Generally speaking, the world is not racist, but it does next to nothing to challenge racism. The Invasion is a classic theme, so epic that it could be told with the rawness of a documentary. Regrettably, I know nothing about Frank País, so I shall try to find out the basic facts by when I see you. As for the air attacks carried out by North American planes, the Italian press covered them, but clearly only Left-wing journalism is willing to do more. A dear friend of mine, [Antonello] Trombadori3 who carries much authority in that area of the press, will publish some excerpts from your letters, and will find the way to reignite the debate that has been smothered by political concerns closer to home. I will know by tomorrow how they want to play it. It seems to me that there is a lot of sympathy for contemporary Cuba among the people, but I also get the impression that little is known as to what Batista did and what he represented. What was it like to live in Cuba before the Revolution? What traditional game of ugly, big business were poor Cubans indirectly embroiled in? Among other functions, cinema could fill this need for information. As for my country’s intellectuals, they are rather tired and disorientated. They remind me of that children’s game called ‘Outside the hole and inside the hole’. Their finger no longer knows which hole to stay in. And to shift them you would need moons, suns, planets, and maybe, after a while, they might return to feeling doubts and hesitations on a more material plane. At least, that is how I see things. Granted, there are exceptions, but we are always talking about the same ten people or so. I shall keep you informed about the follow up on any plans here. My best wishes to all. 2 3

Ramiro Guerra Sánchez, Azúcar y población en las Antillas, Madrid: Cultural, 1935. Antonello Trombadori (1917–1993), a senior figure within the pci and a member of the Cinema editorial committee before the Second World War.

53

‘How to Write a Screenplay’ (1959)1

Context The choppy nature of the following text is explained by its origin: it was a short talk aimed at Zavattini’s icaic Cinema Seminar in Cuba. He was tasked by the icaic to teach and to write screenplays. In the event, he trained a team from the Cuban film institution, wrote new stories and screenplays and sifted through Cuban proposals for stories. He also corrected work in progress by the few experienced writers. The typescript transcription is not dated; however, given the introductory and generic nature of the talk and the reference to the weeks ahead, there can be little doubt that Zavattini gave the talk soon after his arrival in Cuba, for his third and last stay in the island, from 11 December 1959 until 26 February 1960. He begins by shocking his young, and, mostly inexperienced, audience, by declaring that ‘Screenwriting is the easiest thing in the world’ and that ‘There is no such thing as technique’. In a few weeks’ time, they will all know how to write a screenplay. What are they afraid of?2 Content is the difficult part. The point of Zavattini’s talk was to question the mystique surrounding how to write, the craft and, instead, place the emphasis on what to write, and on the social and political engagement of the writer. The context for the talk was extraordinary: in December 1959 the Revolution was less than a year old: The first and the best technical course you could possibly attend is a Revolution like yours. It’s a potential source for the best themes and provides ideal conditions for writing brilliant screenplays. How you go about it, the technical side, is something you can pick up in a matter of weeks. But without a ‘revolutionary course’ of this nature, an interesting screenplay will never come into being, no matter how many techniques you study.3 This text from the icaic archive was first published (in Italian translation) by Stefania Parigi in Bianco e Nero, where Parigi states that it is the transcription of a talk given by Zavattini. Cf. Stefania Parigi, ‘L’Officina cubana’, Bianco e Nero, lx, no. 6, November–December 1999, 102–3. 2 Zavattini, ‘Come si scrive una sceneggiatura’, 102. 3 Zavattini, ibidem, 102. 1

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After Zavattini’s departure, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Bouvoir, the French critic Georges Sadoul and the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens visited Cuba, later in 1960. Ivens returned the following year.4 Like Zavattini before him, Ivens was an official guest of the Cuban government. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given both their political orientation, in 1961, Ivens repeated Zavattini’s advice: let the Revolution guide you: If you let me give young Cuban filmmakers some advice, I would say that this is the best lesson in cinematography for you. Forget technical and stylistic issues. These will be resolved in good time. The main thing is to allow life into your studios, so that you don’t become film camera bureaucrats.5

What did they both mean? In their shared understanding of history, the experience of living through and witnessing the Revolution constituted a unique teaching in itself. Zavattini argued that changes in cinema are the result of the involvement of artists, an approach he recommends for a revolutionary cinema. If the Revolution itself offers the most important and timely subject matter, it must take precedence over the autonomy of art. After his initial provocation, eventually the Italian writer and theorist conceded that ‘technique is a matter of time, experience and application’.6

Text There is no set formula to write a screenplay. It is the easiest thing in the world: you can do it in a week, or in a year. The difficult part is what you put into it: the human, social and political ideas ... Technique is not really important; it’s not a problem. If I had to teach how to go about writing a screenplay, I would end up suggesting that it be done completely differently. It is like a syntax for grammar. I am not saying that one should not know these things; they’re necessary. But you need to know them to then allow yourself to write freely, that is, without having to feel constrained to write within pre-established norms. Young writers should develop their own linguistic creativity, together with whatever innovative content they wish to express. Approaches to scripting are bound to vary. The rules are basic. I’m convinced that you can learn how to write one in just a few weeks. How many times have I heard: ‘There is no such thing as a screenwriter.’ It is not true that there are none. The problem is that they don’t know what to say. It is an ethical and political problem. If you have the courage to say what you think, then you might become a good screenwriter.

Hosé Hernández to Zavattini, 4 June 1960, acz E 2/7, fols 28–32. Unpublished letter. Joris Ivens, ‘Joris Ivens en Cuba’, Cine Cubano, no. 3, November 1960, 22. 6 Zavattini, ‘Come si scrive una sceneggiatura’, 103. 4 5

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When I leave Cuba, you shall know everything I know. Seriously, I’m telling you that I’m ignorant, as far as technique is concerned. I don’t understand why some young people are fearful of the technical aspects of screenwriting, given that the first and the best technical course you could possibly attend is a Revolution like yours. It’s a potential source for the best themes and provides ideal conditions for writing brilliant screenplays. How you go about it, the technical side, is something you can pick up in a matter of weeks. But without such a ‘revolutionary course’ an interesting screenplay will never come into being, no matter how many techniques you study. The artist’s never-ending tragedy is the difficulty of making one’s personal life public. For years it was thought that cinema could only be made by mysterious men. Now we know it can be made by whoever has something to say. We owe the contemporary development of cinema to the participation of poets and writers. The more cinema seeks to become a means for the transformation of a nation, the more it needs to rely on the collaboration of artists. Technique is a matter of time, experience, labour, whereas art is a question of awareness, will and even patience. Everything takes time. You could write a poem in a minute. But you can never do cinema in a minute. The need for a ‘Cuban-style cinema’ doesn’t mean that all Cuban artists must make films in the same way, but that they ought to respond to a political and human consensus. Another writer will share the desire to communicate essentially the same values. The direction of a Cuban cinema should be aimed at a freer art form, compared to art from anywhere else in the world. Such a freedom is possible in Cuba because it is consistent with the basic principles of the Revolution. But it is also necessary to give a direction to critical analysis, which needs to issue from freedom. The change needs to be a radical change, in line with what happened with the transformation of the Armed Forces here, so different from other conventional armies. This is important for the whole of Latin America, where the way existing armies are organized is key to the destiny of society.

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icaic Conference, 15 January 19601

Context A month after his arrival in Cuba spent working for icaic, on 15 January 1960, Zavattini gave this Conference at the icaic. Presiding were Alfredo Guevara and the president of artyc (Agrupación de Redactores Teatrales y Cinematográficos) Professor José Manuel Valdés-Rodríguez, head of department of cinema at the National University of Havana and one the founder members of Nuestro Tiempo in 1951, whom Zavattini had met in 1953. Shortly before the Conference was due to begin, Zavattini was interviewed by Cuban television. He cited a verse by Cuban national hero and poet Martí to define ‘an aesthetic concerned with the relation between politics and art’.2 His interview served to set the agenda for the icaic Conference which built on Martí’s aesthetic of socially engaged and political art: ‘What else should cinema be concerned with, when everything is being transformed and renewed?’3 He argues that after the Revolution José Martí’s aesthetic ‘should be the aesthetic of Cuba and of its cinematography’, in which ‘the highest goal equates ethics with aesthetics’. Zavattini explicitly draws attention to the lessons he taught the Cuban filmmakers in 1955, pointing out that their work in progress brings to fruition the approach he and the Cubans had established during his previous visits to Cuba, suggesting that his teaching, which was a transmission

Zavattini’s official speech at the icaic, acz E 3/2, fols 2–8. Unpublished text. The typescript is the outcome of a transcribed sound recording. The typescript omits comments and queries addressed at Zavattini but names the speakers who raised them. Unfortunately, Héctor García Mesa, who transcribed the sound recording, omitted any of the comments or questions of the other participants whose names he lists. It would have been very interesting to know, for example, what José Manuel Valdés-Rodríguez, professor of Cinema at the National University of Havana and president of artyc, had to say. However, judging from the questions, one can safely assume that Mr Rafael Suárez Solía’s question was about the state of Italian cinema. His next question must have been a comment to Zavattini’s answer. It was followed by José Manuel Valdés Rodríguez’s rejoinder. Since Zavattini’s reply to both concerns the international response to the Cuban Revolution, one can guess their questions. The same can be deduced from Zavattini’s response to Valdés Rodríguez and a Mr Ubieta, a report on his teaching and collaborative writing activities in Cuba to date. 3 Zavattini’s reply is repeated in his official speech at the icaic, acz E 3/2, fols 2–8. 1

2

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of new Italian cinema making the connection between cinema and contemporary society, brings cinema towards the Revolution, in defiance of ongoing debates about art for art’s sake, also known as ‘artistic autonomy’. However, he warns that in embarking on such a course, Cuban cinema must avoid political propaganda. Everyday life offers ample opportunities for artistic expression, as he had always maintained. In particular, is not the Revolution part and parcel of contemporary everyday life in Cuba? This leads to the question of how you go about filming the Revolution. His advice is to seek out the human dimension in each event, the personal dimension, even in the ongoing Agrarian Reform.4 Such an approach is in tune with what Ernesto Ché Guevara was writing at the time. Namely, that the Agrarian Reform is such a crucial revolutionary intervention that only when it has been carried out will the historic remit of the 26 July Movement be complete and only then will the Movement itself have fulfilled its purpose. When, that is: ‘not a single landless campesino exists nor a land to be found that is idle’.5 And all the more so ‘today, when we already have the shot set up?’ Zavattini goes on to say that the establishing shot is the Revolution itself. He then reports on the collective work with the Cubans in his Seminar.

Text (Opening remarks by Alfredo Guevara, icaic president) (Opening remarks by José Manuel Valdés-Rodríguez, artyc president) [Zavattini] I must thank you for the opportunity that you have given me and which so many Europeans would like to take up, and, namely, the chance to spend some time in Cuba, not for tourism, but to work here. I consider myself a fortunate man for the opportunity to live at the heart of a concrete event, one of the most concrete, which is both as absolutely real as it is absolutely legendary in our contemporary world. For over and above the overarching political significance of what has taken place in Cuba, this political moment is one that captures the imagination, typified, as it is, by amazing feats. It comes across as epic in its quality; an event which, given the heroism involved, one could imagine as having taken place in the distant past. Earlier, when I was speaking on television, I referred to your Martí, to our Martí. He said that, unfortunately, we Europeans are not so familiar with Latin American literature; and that, by and large, we ignore the wealth of meaning it contains, and furthermore, that Europe should know what the people from these parts have already achieved and also what they are currently doing. Last

4 5

Zavattini, ‘Cuba 1960’, Paese Sera, 18 April 1960. Ernesto Ché Guevara cited in Zavattini, ‘Cuba 1960’, Paese Sera, Saturday 23 April 1960.

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night, while I was reading Martí, I came across one of his aphorisms that more or less said: ‘After the sea, Man is the second greatest marvel in the world.’ And when I became more familiar with the achievements of these people, when I learned about the extent of their heroism, I began to realize that his words contain a hidden meaning and that he lived in a similar era to the one we are living in today. If I can interpret to the full the sense of Martí’s words, it is not only by virtue of the fact that I have been working with some very enthusiastic young people who are able to decipher this text, but also because it has been my good fortune to have had conversations with ordinary people, and especially with many youngsters who fought in the War of Liberation with boundless conviction, generosity and humanity. Another of Martí’s insights struck me. I found it in a verse of his poetry. So powerful was it that, in spite of my awful memory for things of this nature, I forced myself to remember it. In my opinion, it is absolutely contemporary and contains a great deal of foresight, not only with regard to what is going on in Cuba right now, but also in relation to everywhere else in the world. It goes like this: ‘Either they condemn us all, or we are all saved.’ It seems to me that, in essence, this line condenses an aesthetic concerning how politics and art are interrelated. Martí’s aesthetic should be Cuba’s aesthetic and the aesthetic of its cinematography: ‘a cinema for humankind: if cinema is saved, man is saved and so is the poet.’ Perhaps today more than ever before, we are in a position to understand Martí’s message, which is so very contemporary: namely, to equate the poet and the work, art and mankind, to consider them as one and the same, on the basis that one corresponds to the other and therefore their destiny is a shared one. Please forgive me if I dwell on Martí, but if it were up to me, I would speak of nothing else. And, in any case, it seems right to cite Martí, since his words anticipate everything I wish to say. To put this differently, such an interpretation of life, seen as a combination of ethics and art, is the goal for cinema. Not that I want to labour the point here, but perhaps it might interest you to hear what I said on television a little earlier, when I was asked a question about cinema in Cuba. I made the point that I have every confidence in these young filmmakers who are involved in Cuban cinema and represent it. It is clear to me that their work – both what they have already done and what they are currently doing – follows on directly from the approach that we initiated a few years ago, when I was last in Cuba. If I can say that I feel confident, it is because these young people are inspired by the new spirit of the times. It would not make sense that such extraordinary events, so new, so profound, just like everything that is taking place in Cuban life, should not be reflected in Cuban cinema. Then again, what else should cinema be concerned with, when everything is being transformed and renewed? We are well aware of the heated debate in today’s world about this. There are those who are tortured by doubt over ‘the value of art and of its purity’ who adopt the view that cinema ought to limit itself to art for art’s sake and who

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condemn out of hand the very idea that cinema could be brought into contact with man’s contemporary reality and social context, out of fear that reality would fail to provide all the ‘artistic potential’ they seek. On this point, I want to say that I do not question the intrinsic value of the events that have taken place in Cuba, especially in recent times; I have every confidence in their artistic potential and consequently in the quality of any finished projects. The Agrarian Reform, for example, could serve as an endless source of inspiration for poetry, for prose and for cinema. And Cuba offers many other amazing themes such as this one. Its wealth of complex dynamics, given the existing context of liberty in which they can be expressed, and, given the freedom and the will to communicate them, are a guarantee for all the future success of Cuban cinema. In any case, as I have said on several occasions, creating political propaganda is out of the question, for that would be a serious mistake. It is, rather, a matter of drawing from within the themes the human, personal, individual and poetic dimensions, if you like. You need to choose the specific anecdote, you need to discover, especially among the events that have taken place, the one that strikes you the most, and you need to find a way to express it, with all the beauty and poetry you can muster, and adopting a completely personal style of your own, never betraying the real nor your inspiration. Because if you do so, it cannot be ruled out that the result will be agitprop, since, when you deliberately betray reality, you are making propaganda. (Mr. Rafael Suárez Solía) [Zavattini] I don’t wish to talk about Italian cinema, because I would prefer not to explore the similarities. Nevertheless, what happened in Italian cinema is, without a doubt, both positive and encouraging. I am not saying that a strong economic backing is necessary to guarantee production. That would definitely be an exaggeration; the kind of phenomenon that takes place in ‘abstract’ nations, in which everything happens by virtue of ‘guarantees’. In Italy, cinema was fortunate. At a certain point in time, a historic and decisive moment in their lives, the Italians had something to say to the world. Speaking as a foreigner, I have every confidence in Cuban cinema, not because I am familiar with its economic structure. Indeed, I didn’t come here for this purpose, nor do I know very much about it, but because very solid foundations have already been established and because there are ideal conditions in the country. You have made a Revolution – that isn’t something that happens every day – such a novel event, which, in the eyes of Europeans, seems to be something from the past, something that could never happen again. Because up until now, run-of-the-mill politics could be done unhampered, while here you have made a Revolution, with all the inconveniences and limitations this involves. It is not my job to be knowledgeable about the economic structure. I have seen a group of young people working with Guevara, some of whom I know really well and I know that they are enthusiastic, responsible and

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dedicated to their work. I am familiar with their projects and I am up to date with what they are doing, and this is why I have every confidence in Cuban cinema. The world is anxious to learn more about Cuban reality, a uniquely Cuban reality, cubanissima I would like to call it, because it is so singular, yet it is this very particular reality to which I am referring, manifested in its broader values that are the deepest and, at times, the very ones which can be generalized, insofar as they can be shared by Europeans. I wish to mention once more those who are concerned about betraying ‘good taste’. In my view, you don’t betray good taste when the cinema you make is the one that finds a correspondence in us and which is clearly the one the whole world hopes is currently being developed in Cuba. Good taste won’t be compromised nor, by the same token, will the events that have taken place in reality, so dense with meaning. Prior to this public meeting, the young people from the Institute of Cinema have been showing me a great number of themes and outlines for stories they have been working on. They all seem good, though the quality of some of them draws on the intrinsic value of specific historic events. Consequently, while some events are good, in the sense of being newsworthy, it would be a different matter altogether to make them work artistically. That is not to say that you cannot make a film on all kinds of topics. I remember something we said five years ago, when we were debating among ourselves; namely, that the most wonderful thing about life is that you can tell a story about anything. And what would we say today, now that we already have the establishing shot? To us Europeans, a Revolution like this one already looks a bit like a story. (Rafael Suárez Solía) (José Manuel Valdés Rodríguez) [Zavattini] Different nations see the Cuban Revolution differently, in light of their vested interests, and of national and international political structures. You don’t need me to tell you that ultimately, in Italy, public opinion is divided on these international events, divided into what we could define two wide areas, broadly speaking the Right and the Left, bearing in mind that each can be subdivided into distinct tendencies, conservative and progressive. Even among conservatives, one can detect some degree of sympathy for the Cuban event, for what is generous, new, inexperienced, and even extraordinary about it, that the Revolution expresses. As for deeper conflicts of interest, namely economic ones, then the only ones to express solidarity are the progressives. There are also a few interest groups who responded positively at the outset, but are now withdrawing their support, as is also happening here. For example, I find the growing hostility against Cuba that we are witnessing in North America very shocking. Now it could well be that this will change today, or in a week or two, but as we speak, this is the reality we are witnessing. However, just as there are hostile forces to progress, there are also forces showing their support. As far as I am concerned, just like millions of progressive people around the world, my own contribution is my personal support.

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What is taking place here is no child’s play. The whole world trusts Cuba, because such an extraordinary experiment is giving the world confidence: a small island like this one represents something very large that amazes everyone; what has been done has been done very well. The very same commitment and effort demonstrated in fighting during the war is being shown in time of peace, with a commitment to labour. All this should be communicated and there are many ways to do so. The themes are all around us. The Agrarian Reform, the Literacy Reform and many others. To put it differently, there is a single theme, but many ways to put it across. From an artistic and human perspective, the themes need to be broken down into their constituent factors, depending on the artist’s ability. It would be absurd to ask an artist to develop a given topic, without offering a guarantee of complete freedom. It does not make sense that the very event that signifies such a level of social freedom in its revolutionary context would impose restrictions and limits to artistic expression. (José Manuel Valdés Rodríguez) (Mr Ubieta) [Zavattini] From the moment I arrived, our work has followed these stages: first, I examined all the materials the young icaic writers had prepared, which was fortunately a sizeable amount, and we worked on this for several days. Second, it was important for me to become better informed, since, as you can imagine, what I knew about current events was hardly enough, based as it was only on what appeared in the press. I spoke to a large number of young Cubans every day and with ordinary people and, little by little, I found my bearings. The first twenty days were spent trying to understand the historic context, or better, the human context. I travelled through the provinces, I got to know other people, and places charged with meaning. After all this time spent working on field research, we reached a consensus regarding which story line we liked the most. We are currently developing this story which we hope to have completed within the next two or three days, so that we can embark on the final screenplay. You can write a screenplay in a week, in two, or in a month. Sometimes it takes seven or eight months; it depends on a number of factors. Sometimes, even Chaplin took two years to write a screenplay. We are confident that we will be in a position to complete it in the next fifteen or twenty days – a good screenplay. It is about a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy who goes to the Sierra Madre. It is an amazing theme for a foreigner. And we will work hard to transform it into an interesting film. If we fail, it will be because we have failed. That does not mean that the story of the young guerrilla rebel isn’t a good one, from an artistic point of view. It will mean that we have failed in our task as artists. Otherwise, you would have to conclude that the Cuban Revolution is no good, simply because it is incapable of inspiring works that are good from an aesthetic point of view. Shorthand notes by Héctor García Mesa

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Zavattini, letter to Gaetano Afeltra, 15 February 19601

Context This letter to an old friend was written a month after the icaic Conference above, when Zavattini was still working in Cuba. The other letter to Count Valentino Bompiani, his publisher, was written immediately after returning to Europe. In addition to insights, and a divergence of views over l’art pour l’art, or the autonomy of art in respect of society, they also provide a sense of the atmosphere of the time.

Text Dear Gaetano, 1.40am, 15/2/60. I worked until 10.30pm with the young filmmakers of the Institute; then for two and a half hours I listened to Che Guevara talking on television, you know who he is. In this place, they talk for hours and hours about unspoken things that need to be said, explained; and the people are listening. They feel he is talking to each one of them personally. I’m here in the hotel hall, where only seventeen out of thirty-five apartments are occupied. The proprietor lives in the United States and is paying his employees less than their full salary. He is a very rich Batista supporter who, among other things, owns two newspapers. I think it is a way of weakening the morale of these workers. Dear Gaetano, can you imagine that the ones who are waging the angriest anti-communist campaign are two or three daily papers that are essentially anti-revolutionary, and always were, even when there was no Revolution. Their actions are seriously aiding communism, just like North America, because the population is beginning to say:

1

Zavattini to Gaetano Afeltra, 15 February 1960, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, 221– 2.

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Well, if they are accusing the government of Communism for carrying out the Agrarian Reform and confiscating ill-gotten goods, and opening schools where there were barracks, surely that means Communism is not that fairytale monster they have been saying it was for years.

That is what a black taxi driver said to me driving me home tonight. He was so black that I could only see his suit, while he was driving, and he must be thinking about what they did against his race with the Encomiendas and hundreds of other unfair tricks. Maybe Fidel won’t be able to put into practice all his promises, but he is never going to do anything evil, because his Revolution has cultural roots – at last the word ‘culture’ can be used in the fitting place it ought to occupy – so many legitimate, modern needs addressed which have always been ignored: an intuitive communism, Latin, simple, less bloody, because the context makes it possible, and, given the small population (6,000,000 against 400) less complex, because it is transparent and explicit, direct, healthy, aiming to realize the altruistic dreams of our childhood and adolescence. We are still living in the pure, heroic phase, in which the sentiment of glory is all good, constructive, wholesome, generous and fearless. For now, petty-minded calculation is absent, so in this island you can now witness how word and action coincide in the government, by comparison with Europe which has no such illusions. I have renewed all my illusions here, dear Gaetano, including Neo-realism, including a new art that will depend on a new social context, and my confidence is due to the Cuban laws of today, but also owes something to what I read in Cuban books.

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Zavattini, letter to Valentino Bompiani, 7 March 19601

Dear Bompiani, I got back on 29 March, then I went to Luzzara, and the house where I was born, which I was in a position to purchase, having sold that piece of land you know about. That has made me happy. Of course, what I have bought are very sad anxiety-ridden memories, but that is what we are like, and, as I say, I am happy about this pervasive melancholy. I found your letter, but I don’t recall what I wrote to provoke it. And yet, you express your point of view so perfectly and rigorously. Think about it, and you will concede that it would suit me down to the ground to agree with what you say, but there is something that makes me go on looking, makes me go on hoping that the Adam and Eve inside each one of us might form a union and become one and the same being. The problem has followed me all the way to Cuba where, on the day before I was scheduled to travel home, I came up with an idea for a story: Colour versus Colour, in which the protagonists, who are specifically painters belonging to various artistic trends (while at the same time being involved in the struggle against Batista) are desperately debating among themselves to try and figure out the relation between politics and the world of art, between freedom and artistic freedom, between a particular colour and a particular mark, in relation to the ‘Agrarian reform’. It is not a matter of finding out the truth, but of representing a passionate and furious debate which seems so laden with potential, even on a purely expressive level: an almost completely grey film with colours on canvases which turn into dramatic test beds. The real challenge is to find a way to translate an intellectual problem of this kind into a narrative, and do so, moreover, in an accessible form, that is to say, to ground it in what underlies even the most ineffable states of mind. I told you before that to go on living with these thoughts is taking its toll. Maybe my creativity is undermined by such thoughts and I shall reach a

1

Zavattini to Bompiani, 7 March 1960, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, 221–5.

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conclusion that is devoid of creativity, mistakenly believing that I haven’t been depleted at all. I can say to you, dear Valentino, that as far as I can tell, Letter from Cuba, to a lover who betrayed me, the book I plan to send you before my return to Cuba,2 regardless of quality, came about in a moment when so-called inspiration combined everything, a heap of things, adding them all up like a calculator, things brought together with difficulty and contradiction, sometimes unknowingly weighed down, by all the good and the evil passions that we are capable of feeling. The fact is that I was invited there by a Revolutionary Government. Among the various projects I valued the most, was a documentary I was planning on the Revolution (an investigative film which I would so much like to make – remember Italia mia? – but no one lets me make it). But never, not for a single moment, did I give up on the idea that I would do it my way. I embraced the theme, became totally involved in it, but this never resulted in any surrender on my part, neither of the writer nor of the filmmaker. I kept saying to those young people that the Revolution demands its own stylistic form and my dream was that the radical sense of rebellion and change of any political revolution would be transferred across to its poets, to the point of experimenting – we can settle for this verb – and taking it this much further than others have done, by translating the apparent initial hesitation of vulgar politics into a more vigorous and total dynamic of change. At the same time, it should be grounded in the political, to say the least. Yet I do think that it would be a mistake to reject all this out of hand. It would demonstrate a lack of generosity and would be out of step with contemporary events. I am here now to write the adaptation of Two Women which, as I mentioned to you, seems to contain excellent ethical, national and cinematic elements, though it is well-nigh impossible to convey all this on the screen, without making changes, for contingent reasons, such as the fact that the protagonist is Sofia Loren, not a virtually frigid thirty-five-year old, and because I would like the return of the two women at the end, to be less impalpable, and making Michele appear less strange would be more effective from the viewer’s perspective. This is just a passing mention, since I happen to be working on it today. If I could, I would go on writing for hours, because of how well you have framed the issue. But I can’t, I have to cut this short, overwhelmed as I am by affairs that I am getting worse and worse at administering. I spent two days in the sunshine of Luzzara. Or should I say that I was the one who brought the sun – nor could it have been any different, so happy was I feeling. Ciao.

There is a discrepancy between this statement and the fact that Zavattini left Cuba on 27 February. Further on in the letter, he writes ‘now’, referring to his work back in Rome. So the letter must have been sent after Zavattini’s return, despite the date.

2

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Cuban filmmakers on Zavattini, Cine cubano (1960)

Context The inaugural issue of Cine cubano, a key publication for New Cuban Cinema and indeed for Latin American New Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, includes three texts concerning Zavattini’s two and a half months presence and transmission of ideas in Cuba. The following text consists in the feedback from the ‘Zavattini seminar’ participants, discussing his teaching methods and approach, including a contribution from José Massip, one the founding members of the Nuestro Tiempo film club whom Zavattini first met during his first trip to Cuba in December 1953. Massip was a senior figure in the seminar and acted as the recorder of the lessons, and liaison between Zavattini and icaic.

Text Zavattini is a very personal kind of artist, with his own vision of the world, so communication is not easy ... . I would say that his contribution from the point of view of those of us who worked with him has been the renewal of concepts. Humberto Arenal I believe that Zavattini’s presence in Cuba, in a two-month stretch of time, has been very important for the education of young Cuban screenwriters. Working in collaboration, we have been able to achieve a much greater relationship with the real world, something only a man who has lived in touch with the vital warmth of life itself is capable of doing. Fausto Canel Working with Zavattini, for two and a half months, has been a rare opportunity which thousands of young people all over the world would wish to have. And not only for what it means in terms of apprenticeship, but also in terms of getting to know such a talented and deeply knowledgeable person like him so closely, and in the thick of creative activity. This would, in itself, be ample justification, but also – and this is much more important – for his generous and indiscriminate way of behaving. Héctor García Mesa

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For young Cuban writers it has really been our good fortune to be close to Zavattini. We have learned a great deal about cinematic form. Mercedes Cortazár It is quite possible that Zavattini’s presence in Cuba has begun one of the most brilliant periods of our culture: the flowering of our cinema. His work has been only one aspect of his contribution towards it, the other his development of the film writers he has worked with. José Massip I have been able to see how Zavattini went about writing the story of a short life, of a young hero. I think it was an interesting experience for all involved. Amaro Gómez Walking anywhere with Cesare Zavattini turns into a surprising experience. The everyday takes on a new meaning. The smallest of events, as he sees them, grow to such an extent that they can fill an entire film. Manuel Octavio Gómez The most impressive thing about Zavattini’s working method is his imagination. From a single word, from a suggestion, Zavattini is capable of finding in a matter of five minutes the structure of a ninety-minute screenplay. René Jordán The first lesson we learned from Zavattini was to develop an attitude and ability to work collaboratively with others, to work like good comrades, devoid of petty vanity or arrogance. Someone who is acknowledged as one of the great creators of cinema – and one always finds Zavattini’s name in the company of Chaplin and Eisenstein – taught us the lesson of creative humility, whereby ideas and constructive contributions to the work in hand are all that matters. José Hernández Like all brilliant men, Zavattini might seem like a man whose personality and ideas are contradictory, and so someone who is difficult to sum up in a few words. This is why, bearing in mind the limitations of space, I can only state how extremely interesting it was for all of us to collaborate with him and get to know his methods from the inside, during the process of developing a story for cinema. Néstor Almendros

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Héctor García Mesa and Eduardo Manet, Cine cubano (1960)1

Context The inaugural issue of Cine cubano begins with an introduction by Héctor García Mesa and Eduardo Manet, the latter also a member of the pioneering Nuestro Tiempo film circle. It was written on the eve of Zavattini’s departure, at the centre of a long interview which he gave to the two co-editors. They had both taken part in what they described in their introduction as ‘The Zavattini Seminar’. They pointed out that Zavattini worked as an educator, as well as a researcher, in the field. They also touch on the topical issue of art and political commitment, and acknowledged Zavattini’s transmission of knowledge, effected through his ‘Socratic’ teaching, working collaboratively with the icaic participants.2 In reminiscing on the Zavattini Seminar in 1999, Massip also used the same word ‘Socratic’, to define his teaching methods. It is quite apposite, because it evokes his persistent questioning of his interlocutors, in order to pursue a problem. For the sake of clarity, Socrates’s method used maieutics, on the principle that the truth lies within the innate mind of every human being, but only by tackling problems through a patient process of answering questions will it be born, given birth to, as the Greek word birth-giving, or μαιευτικός, clearly signifies.

Text Good day, Cesare Zavattini. Zavattini arrives in Cuba. He gets here. He looks around. Gets passionate. Goes on a journey. Returns. Comes back to meet a Héctor García Mesa and Eduardo Manet (eds), ‘Un’intervista con Zavattini’, Cine cubano no. 1 February, 1960, then in Stefania Parigi (ed.), in Bianco e Nero, LX, no. 6, November– December 1999, 104–14. 2 Massip, Cine cubano, no. 1, 1960 and Massip, ‘Cronaca cubana’, Bianco e Nero, lx, no. 6, November–December 1999, 54. 1

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new Cuba: Cuba the Revolutionary. This event – the Revolution – was bound to hit a passionate chord in a man like Zavattini. And that is what happened. One day, Zavattini set off to shadow the island. He climbed up a mountain and down to the valley. He spoke to the Barbudos.3 He began to research every site. He became absorbed in everything he contemplated. And he filled this special department in his head with a hundred (sometimes a thousand) stories, to be transformed into a hundred (thousand) films.4 But since the real world forces a limit on everything, and because you are faced with reality, and have to make a choice, one day, Zavattini decided to seclude himself with a number of young people and from then on, every day from 2.00pm until 9.00pm (sometimes until 11.00pm), they studied, criticized, scrutinized scores of ideas, with the objective of finding a story worthy of developing into a screenplay. That was the beginning of the ‘Zavattini Seminars’. There was something Socratic about these production meetings and something else, something far more important, crucial for our young filmmakers: in two months’ work they were given the opportunity to take part in the demystification of creative work. Those of us who had the good fortune to join in the collaboration at Zavattini’s meetings understood that writing a story is not the same as sitting in an armchair awaiting the Muse, but rather grinding away at ideas, taking apart all the details, arguing with the situations and the characters. Creating is a virile act. You can compare it to the work an athlete does. If he had only left us his teaching, his example would have been enough to merit our gratitude. But he has also left us a story, a treatment, and any number of ideas for stories. In other words, he has left us a concrete body of work we can rely on in the future. Zavattini is leaving. He is going back to his Rome. Once again, he will be collaborating with Vittorio De Sica. The story could not be more typically Roman: the adaptation of Two Women by Alberto Moravia. On the eve of his departure, we went to see Zavattini to collect his last Cuban interview. Four hours later, he was still talking to us about Cuba, the Revolution, and the ‘pure’ artist versus the ‘engaged’ artist.

The Barbudos: the revolutionaries fighting in the mountains who became known as ‘the bearded’. 4 The above text was first translated into Italian and reprinted in 1999. It omitted the introduction by the Cuban editors of Cine cubano, which is included here. 3

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Context Most of the editorial space dedicated to Zavattini in the inaugural issue of Cine cubano was given over to this text, in which the Italian writer and theorist discussed the internal dynamics of his Zavattini seminar, with its three factions: the Zavattinians, the Nouvelle Vague fans and those in favour of political propaganda, applied to feature filmmaking.1 From the outset, he had been confronted by an obstinate opposition concerned with the nature and the legitimacy of political commitment. The following year, this problematic came to public attention in Cuba, when, in January 1961, Pasado Meridiano or p.m., a 16-millimetre short, was screened on television, as part of the cultural programme hour by Lunes de Revolución, and caused a major controversy concerning the very same issues.2 The year before, Zavattini had already tackled the issue of autonomous art or l’art pour l’art, throughout his stay, arguing that, in the circumstances, filmmakers had to make choices which, inevitably, involved ethics. He devoted much thought to this problematic, egged on by the objections coming from some members of his ‘Zavattini seminar’, and tackled it head-on, as the main issue in his final Conference, held shortly before his departure. He said the Cuban Revolution was an exceptional event, a break with the past and a catalyst that redeemed national dignity, after colonial and postcolonial rule. It was also an ongoing event; full literacy and distributing land to the dispossessed takes time. Zavattini said: We can see that in a small corner of the world someone is really doing something: that words and actions are being made to coincide.3

Hosé Hernández to Zavattini, 4 June 1960, acz E 2/7, fols 28–32. Unpublished. Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993, 381. 3 ‘Per una discussione con i “non impegnati”’, 106. 1 2

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If anything, icaic risked not being revolutionary enough, since the problematic of art and commitment was topical, because the Cuban Revolution was topical, with repercussions stretching beyond national borders and raising the issue of freedom throughout Latin America.4 He objected that to opt for art for art’s sake was individualist. It exposed a lack of courage in the face of contemporary reality, a reality and a historical moment that could not be ignored. But instead, they were seeking refuge in their ivory towers.5 The opposition had objected that there had to be an alternative model, which, they thought, existed in the work of Eugène Ionesco and Jack Kerouac. Zavattini’s response was that these writers were negationist, therefore not relevant within the Cuban context where what was required was an affirmation of a new reality, a new cinema that would spread the sense of hope kindled in Cuba by the Revolution right across the globe. Critiques of the American Dream or of post-war French colonialism were relevant in a European or North American context, which celebrated the diversity of a subculture.6 Adopting negation as modus operandi in the face of the Revolution was tantamount to its censorship. It meant you lacked confidence in any alternative to the mainstream, hegemonic capitalist myth.7 He proposed that the New Cuban Cinema should eschew political propaganda, and instead opt for a personal approach, that is, making films about personally witnessed social facts, ‘The way I saw them’,8 he said, and inviting the audience to ask themselves: ‘Who is looking?’ in what he called ‘indirect speech’, somewhat anticipating Pier Paolo Pasolini’s idea of a ‘cinema of poetry’.9 Zavattini’s alternative was socialist, committed realism, hence concrete realism (as he and Guevara had already suggested back in 1953, having no truck with Soviet realism). The kind of realism Zavattini had in mind would translate the real into the language of cinema, which of course raised the problem of representation. The New Cinema should avoid, this was his advice, a direct (or indexical) representation of events, which he considered no better than ‘a repetition’, a replication of events. The artist is ‘not someone who repeats the facts’.10 So, for example, he claimed that the proposed film entitled The Attack against the Moncada Barracks should suggest what caused the attack.11 The New Cinema would be capable of tackling any subject and doing so through the register of drama, satire, science fiction, romance, even allegory, going to the

6 7 8

Ibidem, 106. Ibidem, 105. Ibidem. Ibidem, 112. On first-person, subjective cinema, cf. Rascaroli, The Personal Camera, 111–13, in which the author recognizes Zavattini’s role as a pioneer in the history of cinema in this respect. 9 ‘Per una discussione con i “non impegnati”’, 106. 10 Ibidem, 104. 11 Ibidem, 109. 4 5

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extreme of contemplating a film about doubting – Zavattini’s reference to Color contra Color, the scenario he proposed in his seminar. What emerges is a nuanced political cinema, one which would be able to ‘give a voice to this big event that concerns six million people and many more million’.12 ‘Our ambition’, he wrote, ‘is a cinema that takes this message everywhere, but it should do so by filtering the real, using film language to create distance between event and narrative.’13 His 1960 defence of a politically engaged cinema anticipates by several years Julio García Espinosa’s famous Latin American Manifesto: ‘Towards an Imperfect Cinema’ (1973). Espinosa was to argue that Latin American cinema needed to be ‘imperfect’.14 Espinosa’s premiss was that only in an ideal world would cinema have the luxury of being disinterested, or autonomous, from society.15 Espinosa was to conclude that filmmakers needed to deal with societal problems in their work, which, inevitably, meant that the New Cinema was imperfect.16

Text When I decided to come, I might have supposed that I would be indifferent to the theme of the Cuban Revolution. That didn’t happen. Instead, I gave a lot of thought to the ways in which I could translate it into the language of film and chose the most direct way.17 However, my ambition was to avoid a pure and simple representation of the facts, opting instead for an interpretation of my feelings: revolutionary events ‘narrated’, the way I saw them. To put it differently, at the outset, I found the events so deeply moving that I felt something that rarely happens: all my faculties combining into the one: political, intellectual Ibidem, 112. Ibidem, 109. 14 Julio García Espinosa, ‘Por un cine imperfecto’, Caracas: Rociante-Fondo Editorial Salvador de la Plaza, 1973, English translation: ‘Towards an Imperfect Cinema’, in Michael T. Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema. Vol. 1. Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, Detroit: Wayne State University, 1997, 197. 15 Kant is in the background, having drawn the distinction between mechanical art and art as an aesthetic endeavour. While the first is functional, aimed at a practical end, the exclusive purpose of the second is to engender pleasure and beauty, which are both disinterested aesthetic feelings. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, translated by W. S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982. 16 Espinosa, ‘Towards an Imperfect Cinema’, in Martin, New Latin American Cinema, 197. 17 This translation is mostly from Cine Cubano, no. 1, 1960. It also includes paragraphs not included in the published article, which were translated into Italian in 1999. The complete text dated February 1960 is entitled: ‘Para una discusión con los no-comprometidos’, in the icaic archives, comprising sixteen typescript pages, published in Bianco e Nero, November– December 1999, 104–14. The Italian translation integrates the version published in Cine cubano with the excised paragraphs in the original text, highlighted in italics. In this edition, the same text appears in roman font, and signposted by square brackets, deemed less obtrusive. The Italian edition and translation also include separate editorial cuts which are signposted here by an ellipsis within square brackets. 12 13

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and artistic. Only events, regardless of whether they are large scale or small, have this knock-on effect of combining and reconstituting what your [Enrique José] Varona calls (I have just been reading a few pages of his works) the unity of the soul.18 When an artist or a writer hears someone shouting: ‘They’ve ousted Batista!’ there is no point in running home to write: ‘They’ve ousted Batista!’, or you would be only replicating the event in its rawest form. Because an artist is not someone who repeats events. At the very point in time when an artist is taking part in a protest march which is about to cross the road, someone shouts: ‘They’ve ousted Batista!’ and – maybe for the first time in his life, on one of the rare occasions such a thing could ever happen to him – he feels like climbing down from his ivory tower, to feel joy or suffering. Just then, owing to a chemical process triggered inside the private self of an intellectual – clearly it does not happen exclusively to such a type of person, but could happen to anyone; though an intellectual would probably tend to give it more time, ‘professional time’, I would venture to add – instead of stopping short at the exclamation: ‘They’ve ousted Batista!’ he would try to find out the context of this yelling and, in the same way a stone flung into a pond draws a series of rings in the water, he might look for what surrounds it as best as he is able. This way, he is bound to find out much more. How many new forms, new sounds, new aspects are bound to emerge! To put it differently, it is not a question of receiving the news in the way a printer mechanically makes copies of what the customer demands to go on his posters, but of going as deep as possible into these events, to investigate them thoroughly, to the point of discovering their underlying principles. Therefore, when I arrived in Cuba, I could hardly have been more surprised at the political content of the stories the icaic had chosen for production, given that we are dealing with cinema here, that is to say, a means of communication the most pressing function of which is to connect with the masses. In the wave of elation that accompanies victory, there is a revival of obsolete words such as victory, peace, war, a people, and justice. Their original meaning is now being restored and we can now utter them with no danger of falling into the empty rhetoric of men of letters. At a time when the Revolution was happening and is still ongoing, when we can see its first ethical and tangible results, but also the ruthless reaction against it, [...] in the face of all this, how could one not tackle icaic’s pressing themes such as: The Attack against the Moncada Barracks, The Attack against the Presidential Palace, Two Years in the Sierra Madre, The ‘Granma’ Landing, The Battle of Guisa, The Assassination Attempt against Cowley, The Death of Frank País or Batista’s Escape? icaic’s intention was to narrate all these events, and if it were possible to make films with a fountain pen, I have no doubt in my mind that they would have made them. Who knows? Perhaps one of these days it will be possible. Had 18

Enrique José Varona (1849–1933) was a Cuban philosopher, lecturer, who joined in the struggle for Cuban autonomy from Spain. He published, among many other works, Philosophical Essays and Literary Criticism Aesthetics (1918).

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they been made, as viewers, we would all have become witnesses of a series of stories, brought into spontaneous existence, by the need to repeat to one another that those events were as important as life itself, that they deserved our time and that something new was happening inside us. But these were not the only icaic story outlines. These we could classify as the outer ring of stories. I also found the first signs of an analysis of Cuban society; some themes were the same ones that we had worked on in Cuba several years earlier, but which, at the time, were impossible to produce, for obvious reasons. I could almost say, echoing a slogan, that all those themes which were banned until yesterday are acceptable today. Yesterday, there were many who passively accepted such a situation, who never called for the ‘freedom’ which they begin to demand today, because they feel that the ‘game’ has been going on for far too long as it is, and they now wish to retreat to their solitary ivory towers. As I sat listening to the proposals of the young icaic filmmakers, I noticed that day after day the word Revolution came up, Revolution as an event came up, and the enquiry into its meaning began to develop. The more we got to know the events we sought to describe, the more our discussion of what they stood for deepened, instead of being belittled. Rather, it grew in significance so that – to use my analogy of the rings in the water – even the outer ring managed to merge with the more distant ones. Therefore, the challenge was never a problem of setting aside the struggle closest to us, but to narrate them in such a way that they appear as distant as possible. This is the artist’s problem. This is his modern challenge, since the polemic about art being autonomous from politics, no matter how ancient its roots, has become topical in Cuba once more, where the Revolution is used as a catalyst. [...] I have always been against any hierarchy applied to current affairs, because these are always created for the benefit of propaganda, in its worse sense. This is why, although I shall not exclude any news event, however, by the same token, I refuse to exclude out of hand any number of events which the artist ought to deem worthy of attention. What the artist is being asked to do is to bring the spirit of the Revolution, as well as a personal response to it, into the work, by the treatment of whichever event might seem relevant. It goes without saying that, while this concerns Cuban artists, the context is, after all, the Cuban Revolution, an artist’s universality can only be reached through such paths, however concealed, that hark back to one’s place of origin. The Revolution takes power. The Revolution concerns itself with cinema. What does this mean? Someone says to me: The Revolution. Great! Long Live the Revolution! But as an artist, I want to make a film about a man who loves a woman who doesn’t exchange his love. In the end, this man commits suicide. I feel the pain the man feels for having been rejected by the girl.

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I disagree: Yes, of course you can make the film; but you don’t address my problem. My problem is to see if it is possible to make a film that coincides with the revolutionary event.

If the Revolution means something new, different, and important, in ways other than social, but also from psychological point of view, then I need to make films which express these new situations. The artist must ask what the Cuban Revolution is. The answer is multifaceted, since the Cuban Revolution is no one thing, but a set of things. It transcends its immediate and simple sense, in so far as it also means the emancipation of Latin America; a better distribution of wealth; a literacy campaign; a sense of national dignity; the dignity of Man. Are such themes worthwhile for the artist? Yes, they are. How can they be developed? This is a matter of artistic expression. Yet, the ‘Disengaged’ say: ‘No. These themes are no good, they are not artistic. There are people in the world like Kerouac ... like Ionesco ...’ I reply: It’s true that there are people like Ionesco and like Kerouac. There is certainly so much going on in the world. But here and now there is something equally valuable, real, honest, and vibrant: the Revolution. It is waiting for artists to draw free inspiration, not castrating inspiration. The situation Ionesco or Kerouac convey is not contingent, it is a dialectical situation rooted in history.

[...] Take, for example, Ionesco. I believe he has a useful function, since he reveals the disintegration of a society. This explains why he has no need for transformation and for the discovery of new realities: the counter-myth is a good myth, it’s useful. In Cuba, however, the time of the Revolution cannot be a time for doubt, but affirmation. If you were to apply the sense of Kerouac’s or Ionesco’s work to our reality, you would be censoring the Revolution; it is tantamount to saying that you do not believe that the Revolution can offer the means to build a myth of the New Man – not Eternal Man – one which the New Man can rely on. Consequently, it is not the case that the Revolution is diametrically opposed to Ionesco. Just that opposition is only one of its consequences. In the face of the dissolution of the world (a world which lacks the courage to do what it considers right, that settles for words and for an inoperative Christianity, and an indeterminate socialism), we are also faced with the Revolution. In light of this critique which results, above all, from standing on the sideline, we can see that, someone, somewhere, in a small corner of the world, really is making a difference: we can men making words and actions coincide. So how can we not fervently and passionately believe that an event of this kind ought to influence art and especially the art of cinema, which is a mass medium? In this sense, cinema is like the Revolution. It is has no resemblance to mere introspection, mysterious and decadent.

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[Fidel Castro succeeded in making certain events happen, events which are very different from contemporary events in Europe. Why would you not want cinema to express this feeling, this awareness? There are infinite ways of expressing it. An artist will express it in the form of art and a propagandist in the form of propaganda. They are two entirely different things. The error consists in opposing such a possibility, and rejecting it out of hand. The fallacy of today is for an artist to think his work should not overlap with the politician’s. All the great literature of the past is based on this separation. But today, in such a totally different situation, the artist needs to endeavour to connect with the politician. That doesn’t mean illustrating the events of the Revolution. No. [...] He should harbour the desire to maintain a critical position in respect of the Revolution. His dissatisfaction will accompany his revolutionary sentiment. [...] There is no need for him to have a conformist reaction. [...] While mediocre artists turn the Revolution into a bourgeois phenomenon, the best ones, those who are authentically revolutionary, always go further: they are extremely useful even in politics, because they subsume it into themselves. [...] You might represent an event that took place in Stockholm, that is set there, and connect it perfectly to the spirit of the Cuban Revolution. Or you might begin with Cuba, so as to convey a message, which is equally valid for the North Pole. The intensity of interest, power, and reality you can give will always depend on how much art you put into making your film. I give you the freedom to be open and to do whatever comes into your head. You decide the technique and the language. I’m not imposing any limit, other than this one: do not betray the deepest reality and have confidence in Man, given these new circumstances. [...] Don’t talk to me directly about the Moncada Barracks, tell me instead about the depth of this new reality. Tell me about the factors that have led to this change: about what has provoked the Revolution in Cuba today, what triggered the Resistance in Italy yesterday, about which factors determine the situation in Algeria]. The Cuban Revolution is simply the most explicit and exemplary event representing, on a popular level, certain feelings, ambitions, ideas which are not exclusively Cuban, but exist in different parts of the world. This is why our ambition is to make a cinema which takes this message everywhere, which is capable of communicating this reality, this hope, to other nations, which finds a way how to express those sentiments we call constructive. [What is Neo-realism? A film is good when it invents something, when it produces, when it helps, when it is consistent with reality. This was Neo-realism: wherever it went, it produced consequences, neither erratically nor casually, but systematically, to serve as an awareness of cinema, as a social medium]. Some young filmmakers could ask: ‘if, in 1960 we wanted to charge against the Moncada Barracks, what are we going to do in 1962?’ My reply is: ‘in 196[2]19 Cuban cinema will address the themes 1962 has to offer.’ ‘1960’ in the text, but this must be an error, as Zavattini’s reply concerns the date 1962 mentioned in the objection.

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In my modest opinion, the error lies in thinking that to tackle an explicit theme like The Assault against the Palace, for example, won’t make a ‘good film’. I think that if you take a look at the works of art in the cinema of the past, starting with Battleship Potemkin, it is clear how it is possible, as Italian Neo-realism proved, several years later, to make excellent films based on specific political events. When we speak of Hiroshima, Mon amour20 and say it is a good film, we say so because the ideas and sentiments it expresses are of a social order. Currently, Fellini’s La dolce vita, which succeeds in avoiding any ideological ambiguity, and offering up a mirror to a particular reality, as a reflection of a certain kind of society, is attracting both strong praise and criticism. Where does this criticism originate? Mainly, from Clerical and fascist circles which defend a strongly autobiographical approach. [We can say that today Neo-realism means, firstly, a cinema willing to tackle social reality and the relation between the artist and the community. In Cuba, there is a Neo-realist situation, since the relation between individual and society has deeply changed. [...] There is what we could describe as a ‘State’ cinematography, which makes a certain level of participation possible. If I decide to make a given film in Italy, I cannot make it exactly the way I would like to make it or, at the very least, I will have to face several obstacles. Well, I can make it here, I certainly can. Now, it could be that in a year’s time the situation will have changed, leading to a contradiction, for any number of reasons, between what the Revolution has said, and the actual state of affairs. In that case, we probably would not be able to make the film we can now make and, if that film is never made, we will be to blame. In Italy, many have struggled and lost, having fought bravely, to then, eventually, give up. Cinema was engaged. While it is true that a film about the Resistance is an act of courage, just think how many other themes could have been addressed. Filmmakers settled for what the political constraints allowed them. I repeat: they settled for that. They were not revolutionary enough. This is the danger: not to be revolutionary enough here. Now, we are in a phase of joy and enthusiasm, when you tell the story of what has happened. But later, there will come a deeper, more analytical, phase, one in which these events will need to be analysed from all possible angles, to make it possible to continue to draw inspiration from them. This holds true for politics, for life and for cinema. What some young people here fail to understand is that, within reason, anything is possible, but, above all, the constraint serves to help us discover our real thoughts and feelings, our ethics, our philosophy, our individuality, in the face of the individuality of the environment. And we notice that individualism is so strong that art for art’s sake has become deeply rooted, to such a point that the artist has come to believe that, by taking advantage of the opportunity provided by the context, and working along the lines of this new direction, the

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), directed by Alain Resnais.

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muse is going to be betrayed. They think they are defending art, when, in actual fact, they are defending a fear of everyday life, a psychological fear of the real world. It will be hard for them to face the risks. Such an artist claims that it is more spontaneous and easier to talk about flowers and butterflies. This is how such artists defend their world, their psychology, their unquestionable comfort. They refuse to make the effort, they don’t want to take on the fight for life and the danger, and the commitment to the real. However, when one resolves to make a go of it, despite the difficulty, and even allowing for mistakes, what an excellent demonstration of confidence and of life that is! Varona says a new art is made possible by a new society. His statement bridges the gap between society and poetry, between reality and poetry. We must adopt such confidence, leaving behind individual preferences, to reach the other side, where the conception of art and reality retains something mysterious and uncertain, and yet, is far from uncertain on the level of humanity. So then, the problematic for the artist is limited to only a part of his being. That is when the human dimension emerges and merges with the environment. Some amazing artists have done so. It is a multifaceted, logical and natural phenomenon. Just as a society generates new poetry, a new poetry will help generate a new society. Poetry influences human character and the artists’ social context is no different from everyone else’s. The cinema possesses human, social and political qualities. It possesses commitment and exerts an influence on all these fields, even if this is something that is not publicly acknowledged. Some say it is like a sonnet, but we know that this is not true. Even individuals like me, who were inherently individualist, at least up to a point, developed as citizens by virtue of the cinema]. Each movement operates within its own illusion of time and space; we shall settle to call it that, an illusion. And it must maintain this illusion, or else the theme will be lost. You have to believe that you can situate yourself in a given time and a given place. Neo-realism never thought it would exhaust the history of eternity. It sought to shed light on the events taking place around it. This is how it was able to explain so many insights to a wide range of people: it made many needs known. The priorities of ethics and politics come first; poetic priorities of poetry come second. I believe it is possible to develop a critical understanding of the historic event and to communicate this knowledge: to get to know it with an openness towards elementary truth, justice or the common good, ancient values which assume an ever-changing appearance. And it is part and parcel of the artist’s ability to convey this connection between old and new, ancient and modern, identifying it in this oscillation between eternal moments. In the Cuban Revolution, just as in the Italian anti-fascist Resistance, there are contingent factors and absolute factors. The task of the artist is to move the public, drawing on whatever is going on in the surrounding world. And especially, to draw on what is happening here and now. [Let’s take as an example a Cuban artist who makes a film about sex: a man and a woman on a bed. This film should, by means of the sexual act, show

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what lies beyond a material representation of life. Who says we have to do The Assault Against the Palace? No, if we want to, if we need to make a film about sex, we can go ahead and do it, but do so without intentionally betraying the frame, betraying psychological space, betraying ethical space, betraying the real space where this story occurs. Let us show such spaces, and by doing so, we are going to add value to our work.] I think it is right to say to artists what was said to me before I even arrived in Cuba: ‘Make whatever film you like, provided it is inspired by the spirit of the Revolution.’ You could even shoot a science fiction film or one about lovers, refugees, peasants, or about the psychology of a ten-year-old child, a drama, a comedy, a tragedy, a historic, or even biblical film. The point is that whatever the film, it should somehow give a voice to this big event which concerns six million people and interests many millions more. What is happening in Cuba is felt in Africa, in Greenland, in the whole of Latin America and even in the part of America that is not Latin. Everyone, each nation, will then interpret it, assimilate it, adapt it, to its specific circumstances and concrete needs. How can anyone deny that an event of such a scale should be analysed and constructively criticized and interpreted? Who can maintain that such an event cannot serve as a source of inspiration? To those who doubt this, I ask: ‘if you have doubts, why not make a film about your doubts. Then you can enquire, study and gain a deeper understanding of them?’ This endeavour would also lead to a useful film for all. [Go right ahead and make a film about doubt. As generous, sincere and poetic as you wish, above all, a film that teases out all the things that make you tentative, that make you suffer and create. Go ahead and make that film. We shall go and see it.] Today, there are many artists who let Doctor Jekyll roam around their soul. In some cases, this condition might be permanent; but we don’t think it always has to be like this. We believe this only happens when you have refused to enter the fray, when you have turned your back on the real world. [Cuba is a colonial nation. The rich are still the enemy of the poor. They have bought out the press, burned sugar cane crops, and bombed villages. Artists have a duty to let these facts be known. What else should they be doing? Contemplating the sea? Counting the petals in a flower? Making love in dark corners? Painting a self-portrait? [...] Artists here seem to be seeking out mysterious voices, secrets which sometimes materialize and sometimes do not, like the wind. They live in their illusion of creation, never bothering to plant the seed in the earth. [...] It is useful to prove to them that the topics relating to the Revolution can be handled with tremendous freedom; to show them that, in their defence of the ‘freedom of the spirit’ and ‘absolute freedom’, they perpetuate bourgeois psychology and conformist psychology]. Even the most Surrealist of artists can be a son of the Revolution. But you hardly need a magic wand to find out. To maintain that he is not, doesn’t smack of a murder mystery and suspense-style statement, but is simply to establish one of the stages in clarifying the dialectical polemic which aims above all for progress.

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Consider that today the question of non-representational versus representation art is still topical. It is not a theoretical problem of limited relevance, only concerning a single clique, but, rather, a technical problem. It is a human problem that should interest us in so far as it makes us act, love, hate, suffer in one way or another. How is it possible that in the climate of the Cuban Revolution we don’t seek to translate such a theme into its human and popular dimensions, and that we do not seek to investigate it, given that even the many masters of both factions have never done so themselves, their defence of their position consisting only in an attack, based on received, rather than considered opinion? It may be that such a theme is very ambitious, doubtless, a very difficult one to develop. However, that it could be developed here in Cuba, this year, is, in my view, very appropriate and equal to other themes under consideration which are in the air and in life, and which cinema has the power to conjure up before us, with the sheer force of its concreteness. Let me say to you that I side with neither the figurative faction nor the abstract one: I side with all those artistic forms in which you can perceive the effort of an ongoing enquiry. The impetus of transformation, investigation, and analysis of abstract art seems closer to the climate of a political revolution, by comparison with the work of certain painters who illustrate a rocket travelling towards the moon. But right now, regardless of how great they may be, artists who lack a social and political conscience are not loved. Today we want artists to have a stronger sense of critical awareness; artists who know why they do what they do. There are many painters who have failed to find the ideological connexion between their painting and the social. It is no coincidence that they were recruited en masse by the bourgeoisie. This is how you end up with the following psychological monstrosity: since the market is middleclass, and the prizes and honours bourgeois, they refuse to admit to themselves in their everyday selfcriticism – I mean in the context of their own work – that something different has taken place, something they would immediately include in their work, if only they possessed the awareness that their painting is a political act. The adversaries of abstract art fall into the opposite error, denying any social meaning to abstract artists. This may be because abstraction does not take the form of an art movement, but art itself. When, really, it is only art because it is born from the infinity of matter. Among the worst crimes an artist can commit, the worst is to be an abstract artist whose work smacks of the Academy, whereas, there are always attenuating circumstances for the figurative artist. We have had many discussions on this idea, about the relation between the abstract artist and the figurative artist. Sometimes we became very passionate, leading us to a plan for a screenplay called Colour against Colour. Consequently, there is no scarcity of themes. The difficulty is developing them sufficiently to give them an artistic form. But there can be no doubt that the themes are worthwhile. It is simply a matter of tackling them, as we have said, with the force of concentration only an artist possesses.

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Zavattini, letter to Lino Miccichè, 2 November 19771

Dear Miccichè, I have read your Preface to the Cuban Film Programme. As far as I am concerned, it seems to me that you have omitted to mention whatever was positive about my collaboration with the young Cubans working with Alfredo Guevara; a collaboration which began with the film about the charcoal workers that led to their incarceration.2 I spoke about it in public and in situ, during the Batista regime. Apart from ‘the evidence which might seem too personal’, that is to say, my Cuban filed reports, the novella inspired by Cuba which cost me years of work, there is something specific, which I hope neither critics nor historians of your calibre will forget. I am referring to the fact that I spent many weeks there (almost two months), not only that, and not only to write the screenplay El Joven Rebelde, but to discuss, in an organic fashion, during many hours of the day and of the night, the theories that at the time I was passionate about and which I found convincing. You know the ones I mean. I was always surrounded by the people who represented and who still represent Cuban cinema. These theories were known and shared to such an extent that I was called to Cuba to convey them, to explain them by means of incessant dialogues, open discussions, which I found wonderful, How much has Cuba, Castro, and those young filmmakers meant to me in my life! It is not pride that makes me add that it was ‘unforgettable for the Cubans as well’, given that they made those statements about gratitude for my teaching, which you should be familiar with, since even the Italian press wrote about it, and namely, Biraghi, the Corriere and others, during the last visit of a Delegation of ours in Havana. [Sergio] Amidei, who was an illustrious member of it, wrote me a memorable letter about it and the director of unitalia confirmed it officially. Do you realize that during that short, but extremely intense period of daily and collaborative work, at least six or seven stories and projects were developed, Zavattini to Lino Miccichè, 2 November 1977, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, 329– 30. 2 El Mégano (1955). 1

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right up to Revolución en Cuba which summed them all up, and could have been, and should have been, in terms of content and form, the ideal Neo-realist fusion of the Italian and Cuban experience? We even wrote a treatment for a satirical film about Batista’s escape (I have an archive containing all the papers here, in support of what I am informing you about). Among the worst mistakes of my life as a filmmaker, the first and foremost was interrupting my stay in Cuba (at the very time when I suggested Revolución en Cuba), to return to Rome to do the screenplay of Two Women. It was good, but what a different destiny, if I had had the strength and the determination to finish my Seminar – let us call it that – with Revolución en Cuba, which was progressing really well (my attenuating circumstance was that I had a prior contractual engagement with [Carlo] Ponti and a moral engagement with De Sica). For this reason and many more besides, dear Lino, your two lines, albeit not openly negative (well, on second thoughts, they do come across as negative) struck me as unfair (exposing how poorly informed you are, something which does not suit your style).

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Zavattini, letter to Benito Alazraki, 30 October 19541

Context Benito Alazraki Algranti directed Raíces (1953), a film that was produced by an independent documentary and advertising producer, Manuel Barbachano Ponce, who is mentioned in the following article. Fernando Gamboa was a museum curator who promoted Mexican muralist art, until he was fired from his State Museum job and later hired by Producciones Barbachano, to assist in the production, writing and other aspects of the company’s film projects. Zavattini met Gamboa in 1951, at the Venice Biennale, where Mexican revolutionary muralist art was on display. Alazraki fell out of favour with Barbachano in 1955, during Zavattini’s second Mexican visit. The reference to a script and to Spain concerns a two-month trip to Spain that same year, in which Zavattini and Spanish filmmakers visited different parts of Spain, with a view to making a Spanish Italia mia, entitled España mía. In 1953, Zavattini was present at a screening of Raíces, which was subsequently re-edited, partly as a result of Zavattini’s critical observations and suggestions.

Text Dear Alazraki, As regards Raíces, I am sending you the opinion of Vinicio Marinucci. Marinucci’s address, in case you might wish to write to him, is: c/o Momento Sera, Rome. Most of the people who have watched Raíces are convinced it is an important film. During [Fernando] Gamboa’s visit, given the occasion, and other concomitant circumstances, it was not possible for me to do as much for Raíces as the film deserves. All the government’s many affiliations are pitched 1

Zavattini, 30 October 1954, in Gabriel Rodríguez Álvarez, Cartas a México. Correspondencia de Cesare Zavattini 1954-1988, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007, 43–4.

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against the best cinema, due to their reactionary stance. Unfortunately, a few days ago we found out that the government doesn’t want to send Umberto D. to London, despite the fact that in London it was reviewed by The Academy of Criticism and Film Science and awarded an important recognition, far beyond one’s expectations. Gamboa asked me for half a page article about Raíces. I noticed that they used my name for the Presentation and I am very pleased. Gamboa also asked me for a review and I did one in just a few words; I referred to what I already said in Mexico, that is about the Gioconda episode and a few details in the other three episodes, the Guercio that I was not familiar with and which I don’t rate very highly. As to your projects, let us hope for the best. Gamboa, [Manuel] Barbachano and you form a group which must not waste the benefits of your first feature film. So now we are all waiting for the follow up. I think the idea of a city is excellent from every point of view. Gamboa told me that with all probability, we will be able to do something together later on. I am currently working on the second version of The Roof for De Sica. He bought the story himself and will be shooting it in May. I do think I shall have completed the screenplay by February. [Luis] Berlanga and I are fairly satisfied with Little Spanish Stories.2 I wrote something like forty pages right after my return from the trip. I saw about one-third of Spain and now Berlanga, having agreed to [Muñoz] Suay’s collaboration, is trying to make them fit together so that we can then work on the treatment in collaboration later. It is already clear that this will be a film that, even only in part, has a strong affinity with Raíces and a good and useful film will be the outcome, that is, if the censors don’t get in the way. The situation in Italy is not so good. The majority is against Neo-realism for political reasons. And the general public is the politicians’ biggest ally. Anyway, all we need is enough good will to educate a lazy public, pitted against anything that requires a little concentration. By means of ad personam attacks, the government is corrupting producers, who are dependent on the capital which the government administers. And the bigger they are, the more vulnerable they are to this sort of blackmail. Moreover, everyone is having anticommunist nightmares, that is to say, everyone is afraid of being taken for an anti-communist. In the last few days, I am trying to set up a company with twenty other people to make a free film, for as long as the law allows it, a film made in collaboration with all the members. We want to make an anti-war film, but as accurately and directly as we can. May God help us! One thing is for certain: we must not give up. All it takes is a single well-made film, you know the kind I mean, to give courage and strength to a lot of people.

2

A collection of stories written by Zavattini, Ricardo Muñoz Suay and Luis Berlanga, following their extensive trip across Spain. They formed the basis for a putative España mía which was too far removed from Berlanga’s approach.

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My best wishes to you and your friends, and please do tell Gamboa that although I wasn’t available during his stay in Rome, my heart was always with him. I have such wonderful memories of all the friends I got to know. The five days he spent in Rome served as the most effective promotion for the best of Mexico.

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Prologue and Epilogue El Neorrealismo cinematografico italiano (1955)1

Context Zavattini met Pío Caro Baroja, the author of El Neorrealismo cinematografico italiano, in Mexico City, during a brief visit there in 1953, as he states in a letter to this film journalist and author who took excerpts, on the Italian writer’s permission to form Zavattini’s preface and epilogue to his book which Zavattini endorsed wholeheartedly. This is hardly surprising, given that so much editorial space is dedicated to the Italian screenwriter and to his film theory. Indeed, many passages from Zavattini’s writing appear in translation, within Pío Caro Baroja’s book-length study, which comprises a study of the different forms of Neo-realism, with a strong bias in favour of Zavattini’s frame of reference, foregrounding the everyday, the particular and his durational approach to the cinema. This preface presents core ideas and principles for an ethical and socially engaged cinema, directly translated by the author from Zavattini’s writings. As Zavattini puts it: ‘A cinema of presence can develop in opposition to a cinema of absence, a Neo-realist cinema pitted against a conformist cinema’, and, consequently, a socially engaged cinema. The text which forms the epilogue is from a letter to the author from Zavattini. It vividly captures the moment of mutual excitement, when the Italian writer and filmmaker met with several Mexicans who were keen to embrace Neo-realism as the way forward towards a New Mexican Cinema. Among them was former museum director and curator Fernando Gamboa, now working for an independent documentary production house, and Benito Alazraki Algranti, the director of the closest to Neo-realism the Mexicans could achieve in 1953, the episode-based film, Raíces.

1

Zavattini’s text appears in Pío Caro Baroja, El Neorrealismo cinematografico italiano, Prólogo y notas de Cesare Zavattini, Mexico City: Editorial Alameda s.a., 1955. It is neither anthologized in Zavattini, Gli altri, Milano: Bompiani, 1986, nor has it ever appeared in Italian before. Nor is there a copy of it in the Zavattini Archive in Reggio Emilia.

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Text 1 Prologue. I think the world is getting worse because we ignore reality. Besides, the truly authentic choice for a man, in this day and age, is to get involved in the radical analysis of the problem of knowing the world. To this end, the most urgent priority of our time is ‘attending to the social dimension’. How? By coming into direct contact with what exists, not by relying on spokesmen who mediate reality more or less effectively. Filming someone who is starving or is humiliated by poverty should entail filming a real person with a name and surname, not telling a story in which a starved person appears, because it is not the same thing. It is neither as ethical nor as effective. The real function of cinema is not telling stories. The genuine role of all the arts has always been to express the needs of a time and a place. This is not to say that reality cannot be analysed through the medium of fables. I have nothing against fables: however, if Neo-realism wants to be consistent, it should persevere with the same ethical commitment which singled it out at the beginning, but now working towards analysis and commentary. Think about it. No other medium possesses this unique, built in ability to photograph things which, as we see it, deserve to be conveyed in their ‘everyday’ aspect, which is to say, in their genuine duration and extent. As it happens, the film camera finds everything ‘in front of it’. Yet it fails to perceive the concept of things, only the things themselves.2 At least it is a step in this direction. No other medium like cinema has the potential of making these things known instantly and to a larger number of people. Such a formidable potential of cinema also presupposes some responsibilities: each frame must be used judiciously. What I mean by judicious is a deeper penetration of reality, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. Therefore, one can say that cinema is ethical, only when it approaches reality like this. Moreover, the ethical challenge, which equates with the artistic challenge, is to be willing to look at this reality, not to invent it, for that is always, as I have said before, a form of ‘escapism’. Naturally, anyone who comes to understand this, even when limited to imagine an ‘invented’ story, in time-honoured fashion, for various reasons – some of them valid, others not – will try to insert some sparks of these insights into the narrative. This is exactly what happened with Neo-realism in Italy in the work of some. The first task was to simplify the story, reducing it to its elementary nub, and I am inclined to add, its most ‘trivial’. This was only the beginning of a course of action which has been interrupted. Bicycle Thieves provides a typical example of it. The child follows his father along the path. At a given moment, he is about to be run over by a motorcar, yet the father doesn’t even notice. Although

2

Another observation in which Zavattini opposes mechanical indexicality to mimēsis.

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the episode was invented, it was, nevertheless, created with the intention of inventing something which happens in everyday life. It is such a minimal event; indeed, so minimal that even the characters give it no importance, but, it is, doubtless, a vital event. It falls into the category of life we spoke of earlier, of such importance as to induce us to struggle with all our strength against the other kind of life and against the other type of events brought onto the silver screen over half a century and, as often as not, false, coarse. From this phase, one of compromise, hopefully only transitory, it is necessary to shift to a further phase, in which cinema will tackle objective reality directly, and this is the phase we want to reach.

2 Epilogue. I was just about to take this book to the printers, and was already walking down the street on my way there, when I received this letter from Zavattini which I am reproducing in the form of an Epilogue, convinced, as I am, that these are the best words – the noblest and the most generous – to end this essay on Italian Neo-realism. [Pío Caro Baroja].3 Dear Pío Caro Baroja, I have just finished reading the synopsis of your book about Neo-realism and am now really looking forward to its publication. We Italians should be very grateful to you for this research, nor should we be the only ones to feel gratitude, for Neo-realism is not a school, an aesthetic, or the philosophy of a single country; rather, the meeting point of people from all over the world who wish to demonstrate, by means of cinema, their faith that the world could be a better place, if only the dreadful experience of war and the sublime fear of another war could be converted into the desire for knowledge, knowledge, knowledge ... This way, a cinema of presence can develop in opposition to a cinema of absence, a Neo-realist cinema, pitted against a conformist cinema. I remember meeting you in Mexico City in the company of Francisco Pina, Custodio, [Fernando] Gamboa, [Benito] Alazraki and [José de la] Colina: how else would you define our friendly and natural encounter, if not as an expression of our ideological affinity and common purpose, despite the fact that we were speaking different languages? We talked about Neo-realism, always about Neo-realism, and when we were lost for words, we resorted to hand gestures; but somehow, we managed to understand one another. Neo-realism means something very accessible – that explains why we were able to understand one another – something that already exists in the conscience of many. It can be considered the norm for anyone who believes that commitment should involve one’s social environment and is always concerned with the brave

3

Zavattini, ‘Epilogo’, in Baroja, El Neorrealismo cinematografico italiano, 273–5.

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history of men: never for a moment forgetting that intolerance, the seed of all evil, is rooted in ignorance. This is why the main purpose of Neo-realism is to employ free artistic expression to get to know the real concerns and uncover the actual conflicts of contemporary society. Filmmakers cannot fail to be at the forefront, always at the very heart of the struggle, because you cannot expose problems and convey them, unless you have first seen them with your own eyes and lived through them yourself. This type of definition would seek to set out an ethical and permanent imperative. By the same token, we can explain in a nutshell what Neo-realism means at a time like this, a time when dictatorship is rife – overt or covert, as it may be – a time so rich in the choice of coercive modes, so full of old threats and new weapons. It is nothing less than a passionate and constant desire for peace, a desire that can only get stronger – and forgive me, if I repeat an old phrase of mine – through the generosity of time devoted to it, through a constant exchange of looks, of constant listening, in order to get to know one’s fellow human being. Furthermore, faced with the sheer volume of such subject matter for detailed narrative and in-depth analysis, the Neo-realist movement will never be killed off, for as long as we do not run out of courage or of memory.

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Mexican Bellas Artes Conference, 24 August 19551

Context Towards the end of his 1955 trip, Zavattini gave a public conference in the Belles Artes Conference hall, in Mexico City. It was a memorable occasion, according to the critics and journalists who were present. Like the Havana Conference of 1953, it was also run as a question-and-answer session.2 A Latin American filmmaker asked the questions and Zavattini answered, following his prepared answers. At one stage, though, he turned the question to the audience and turned the session into a very modern cabildo apierto, an open session, which was commonly used in Latin American town halls to have a two-way discussion. To prove that there was no shortage of inspiration for films, Zavattini picked up Novedades and read out the headlines, while giving a running commentary.3 His strategy was to break out of existing definitions of Neo-realism, as locked into post-war Italy and reduced to technical choices. Instead, he saw it in broader terms, as an ethical cinema, a cinema on the move, a cinema ready to emigrate. As he puts it: ‘It is only a direct and immediate acknowledgement of life itself, and therefore, of its human and social problems. There is no reason it cannot be exported.’4 He told his audience that ‘Neo-realism is an unfinished project. Neorealism is the cinema, as a form of expression, faced with itself and its destiny.’ His perception of the fate of cinema as a whole has a prophetic ring which

Zavattini, ‘Appunti per la conversazione del 24/8 Mexico d.f.’, acz E 7/1, fols 1–11; acz E 7/1, fol. 12: ‘Projecto de cuestionario para entrevista publica al sr. Cesare Zavatini’. 2 Alvaro Beltrani, ‘No lo extrañe a Zavattini qe lo espere un mitotini’, ‘Flecha Neorrealista’, Novedades, 21 August 1955. Zavattini to Alvaro Beltrani, 16 September 1955, acz E/72, fol. 18. Unpublished. Sandovál was the author of the carefully crafted questions. Anon., ‘Entrevista publica con Zavattini en la Sala Manuel M. Ponce’, Novedades, Mexico City, 22 August 1955. 3 Zavattini, ‘La terra e la luna’, Il Contemporaneo, 24 September 1955. 4 ‘Projecto de cuestionario para entrevista publica al Sr. Cesare Zavattini’, acz E 7/1, fol. 12. Unpublished. 1

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anticipates the register of Jean-Luc Godard’s equally prophetic Historie(s) du Cinema, and by thirty years.5 Zavattini claims that the role of cinema is to support civic participation in the public sphere and, in the context of Mexico, to continue the interrupted Mexican Revolution. Attractions, in the cinema theorized by Zavattini, serve a social dialectic.6 What matters is how you tackle your subject. The situation in Mexico was just waiting to be told. In Italy, he told his audience, Neo-realists were called the Antichrists. He turned the definition on its head: We are Antichrists, whenever we decide against action, every time we block our ears and avoid listening to accusations that we are accomplices, levelled at us by daily events.7

Editorial note: this text, published here for the first time, has been reconstructed from two separate sources. One forms a typescript questionnaire, the other, a set of Zavattini’s handwritten notes, in response to these same questions, made prior to the Conference.8 They have been collated to reconstruct the questionand-answer session of the Conference.

Text Questions to lead the public towards the theme 1. What is cinematic Neorealism? 2. Which are the films that characterize it best? 3. What is the antithesis of Neo-realism? I would be grateful if you would allow me to give a familiar and friendly character to this conversation of ours. Conferences frighten me. It even happens, at times, that while I am searching for the right word, I find myself suspended in mid-air for several minutes. This is a daunting experience, because it takes place in such an illustrious venue, and among such illustrious foreigners. I am no theorist, nor am I the father of Neo-realism, as everyone insists on calling me – I am only, possibly, the person who has most faith in Neo-realism, or at least the one who voiced such faith most consistently. Nothing more than that.

Ibidem, fol. 12. Zavattini, ‘La terra e la luna’, Il Contemporaneo, 24 September 1955. 7 Zavattini, ‘Appunti per la conversazione del 24/8 Mexico d.f.’, acz E 7/1, fols 1–12; fol. 12: ‘Projecto de cuestionario para entrevista publica’. 8 The notes are in Zavattini, ‘Appunti per la conversazione del 24/8 Mexico d.f.’, acz E 7/1, fols 1–11. The questions appear on the typescript on fol. 12: ‘Projecto de cuestionario para entrevista publica al sr. Cesare Zavatini.’ 5 6

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Fortunately, Neo-realism is not a phenomenon that is limited to two or three individuals, but an attitude, an impulse, a frame of mind, call it what you will, which has found, in Italy, the necessary historic conditions to put down roots, to establish itself,9 a little earlier than elsewhere, but which belongs to all men of good will the world over and which manifests itself in the desire and the need for consistency, at long last, between words and actions. We often express an opinion on the events of our time: when we read the daily paper we are constantly reacting in an open and lively way, following our instinct or our culture.10 Then what happens? Well, in the case of screenwriters,11 we end up forgetting the sheet of paper on our desk and write an article claiming there are no themes to write about.12 Neo-realism has established that there is no shortage of stories, what is lacking is the courage to tackle them. In our press, there was talk of the Antichrist: in my opinion, we are Antichrists whenever we decide against action, every time we block our ears not to hear the accusations levelled at us by daily events in which we are accomplices. What it means to be a Neo-realist is to refuse to go on living at the margins of history, to choose instead to tell the story of history as it unfolds, and get across its continuity – and at this point I am going to say a word we Neo-realists have used hundreds of times – its everydayness.13 And, for example, I use the word familiarity ‘or gaining intimate knowledge’.14 Neo-realism is no formula: you realize that the ethical fact can be resolved in so many different ways, each as different as each individual film form: [Luchino] Visconti’s, [Roberto] Rossellini’s, [Vittorio] De Sica’s, [Giuseppe] De Santis’s, [Michelangelo] Antonioni’s, [Alessandro] Blasetti’s, [Renato] Castellani’s. And yet, they all share one and the same ethos, and, by the same token, Espaldas mojadas and Raíces, two Mexican films which, despite their different form, tried to focus on the most urgent and touching Mexican problems. In this sense, these two films are Neo-realist.15 It is a broad definition, therefore, and I shall tell you an anecdote: Umberto D. [the maid episode].16 Words in italics were underlined in Zavattini’s handwritten autograph. Deleted: ‘always in the sphere of those sentiments.’ 11 Deleted: ‘let’s throw away the daily paper.’ 12 A red circle in pencil on the left-hand margin around ‘themes’ marks his emphasis. 13 Quotidianità: literally, ‘everydayness’. The everyday. 14 This is an abbreviated marginal note, in the handwritten Conference paper, and thus a draft. Zavattini uses the word confidenza. In this context, it doesn’t mean ‘confidence’, but intimate knowledge. 15 Espaldas mojadas (1953), directed by Alejandro Galindo, was produced by ata Films and Atlas. It was distributed in Mexican cinemas in June 1953. Bracero Rafael Améndola crosses the border with North America illegally, to look for work, but fails to find happiness. 16 This is the most likely example, much cited at the time and since. It is not typical in the Lukácsian sense, but symptomatic (moving from a particular observation to the generalizable condition, shared by others, in the Marxist sense). For example, the durational episode of the maid in Umberto D., in which she carries out an everyday task which previously would have ended up on the cutting room floor, but in De Sica’s film, indeed in Zavattini’s story, treatment and screenplay, points instead to her future changed status as a single mother in 1950s Italy, with all the social stigma and consequences attached. 9

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4. Can Neo-realism be applied to art in general? Yes – it is not an artistic intuition, but a way of life, which involves living in total relationship with the world.17 You have [José Clemente] Orozco, [Diego] Rivera, [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, Mender – this is Neo-realism. Eisenstein says: The most beautiful feeling we can experience is a sense of mystery. It is the fountainhead of all genuine art and its distillation. Whoever has never felt this emotion, whoever is unable to contemplate and be struck in timid admiration, is as good as dead to the world and his eyes are shut.18

He is right – when this statement is cited, it is done to criticize Neo-realism – as if the very intention of Neo-realism were not to demystify the mysteries that delay the progression from private individual to social being. This, however, does not pertain to a single art, but to all the arts, of the entire new life and new culture.19 There is a will to move from an ill-defined spirituality to commitment.20 5. In a previous journey to Mexico, you stated that Neo-realism is: ‘Only a direct and immediate acknowledgement of everyday life in itself, which entails human and social problems.’ So, could films which raise human issues include the problems of millionaires, who have no concerns about the social, if we agree that the direct and immediate acknowledgement of their lives should be considered Neo-realist? Of course. The constant is not the object, but the way we approach the object, regardless whether the subject matter is a day in the life at Hotel Del Prado or a day in the life of the Ciudad Perduda, in Tacubaya.21 What is key is the Neorealist point of view, which reduces things to a common human denominator, in other words, to our rational responsibility to intervene. Whether your point of departure is a pair of shoes or the story of an interplanetary voyage, Neo-realism will be drawn to these themes, by the need to research them,22 salvaging them from that Limbo, where only leaders can exist, be they good ones or not.

One word is illegible in the autograph. It has been substituted with the conjectural ‘corrente’ ‘current’ that fits in with the overall sense of the sentence. 18 On the right-hand margin of the autograph, p. 1, there are these three annotations connected to Eisenstein: ‘a public figure. – Do away with mystical nebulosity, concrete instead. – Yes to getting to know the mystery.’ 19 Deleted: ‘that tends to identify itself with today’s concrete needs’. In Italian, nuova cultura is a key phrase, a revolutionary signifier, harking back to the famous first issue of Elio Vittorini’s communist magazine Il Politecnico of September 1945. 20 Zavattini sets up a dialectical tension between Christian spiritual compassion and secular and politics within the social sphere. 21 Reference to the abject poverty of shantytowns, specifically, Ciudad Perduda. 22 Deleted: ‘studiarli, di conoscerli, di fronte alla nostra coscienza civile’ (‘getting to know them, in respect of our civil [political] consciousness’). 17

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6. In December 1953 you also said: ‘Neo-realism was nowhere near attaining its highest expression. Do you think this has now been achieved?’ Far from it. Neo-realist films are few and far between – there are so many obstacles in the way. The daily papers are brimming over with themes, but we miss the point, we digress. How can it reach its fullest expression with no training? While everyone else gets a chance to train, in this type of work, only a few manage to sidestep governmental snares. I have my own suggestion: name and surname – but don’t let’s talk about this right now. Suffice it to say that a good alliance between cinema and the public sphere23 would be worth pursuing – the general public is well informed about contemporary issues. Those queues we see, and which struck me – of people who seem to be walking into an opium den – but no, it is not like that: there are so many causes – and if we tried to get to the bottom of things, we would have to come to the conclusion that those in power don’t like criticism. 7. You also said: ‘Neo-realism is cinema itself, as an expressive form, faced with itself and its destiny’ adding that: ‘Because it is a modern form of expression, it is inexhaustible, since the observation of everyday life is inexhaustible.’ Will Neorealism continue to be an intense phenomenon within Italian cinema, or do you think there will only be sporadic expressions of it in mainstream production? Is this not the continuation of pregunta24 number 6? Everything still remains to be done – in Italy we have been blocked – and there has been a brave show of solidarity among filmmakers. But, as you can imagine, there comes a point when you have simply had enough. Those in power rely on this fatigue and make the most of our shortcomings. So, it is true that there are those who have really given up. Ultimately, only two or three films a year of our kind make it on to the big screen. The very possibility of a national movement, powerful enough to the point that Neo-realism could be supported by government, has been foiled. [Mario] Scelba was never going to be the right man to achieve such a result.25 All Scelba cared about was that cinema would continue to follow its time-honoured formula – ‘ultimately, of not being critical’.26 Will it survive? This partly depends on the Neo-realists themselves – and on the history of our nation. The more progressive the nation becomes, in terms of enlightened governance, the more Neo-realism will be able to discover a wealth of new possibilities.27 8. ‘Neo-realism’ – you went on to say – ‘realized that cinema ought to tell the story of minimal events, without relying on the imagination.’ What if cinema

Deleted: ‘sintonia’ (‘symphony’, in the sense of harmony). ‘pregunta’, question in Spanish. 25 Mario Scelba (1901–1991), Minister of the Interior and Christian Democrat (1947–55), the years he vigorously attacked the Left, his political adversary. 26 Deleted in ball point: ‘non fosse critico, infine’ (‘ultimately, that it should not be critical’) has been reintegrated, because it forms the conclusion of his thought. 27 Deleted: ‘le sue’ (‘his’) and substituted with ‘richezza di’ (‘wealth of’). 23 24

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were to convey important events ‘without relying on the imagination’, would it still be Neo-realist? I don’t believe I ever said that the imagination should be excluded – ‘or perhaps’ the imagination developed in isolation?28 The imagination must be nourished by reality: by an investigative approach. When we speak of a documentary spirit this doesn’t mean passive reproduction, but making choices, within the broadest possible panorama, of what, from the point of view of our role as citizens,29 we consider a necessary object of investigation. To do so,30 you need to establish a relationship of what I have dubbed ‘cohabitation’ with what is going on – easy to say and hard to carry out – the energy and charisma31 which Graham Greene lacked, perhaps, here in Mexico; if, as I’m told, it is true that his book is only full of contempt.32 I must reiterate that my first impression was that everything seemed static33 and picturesque to me: I saw a woman walking down the street, first and foremost, as a colour. I also noticed people staring at me, for being a foreigner, which is off-putting. But all it takes is a friendly wave and a chat and suddenly the situation becomes animated, and the man in the street, in whose hands the future of Mexico lies, emerges with all his needs and common concerns.34 Someone said to me: we Mexicans, what are we? Whatever does it mean to be Mexican? I was deeply upset by this insult. There was perhaps an enormous ambition, the need to distinguish. But it is in the taverns, the comer, where I become familiar with so many problems, expressed with anger and suffering, coming to know this man, to go deeper (and when I say ‘man’ here, I mean a tangible, specific person which is what I equate with being a man, once you try to overcome superficial impressions).35

Ballpoint addition: ‘la fantasia cresciuta in un bozzolo?’ (‘The imagination developed in isolation?’). The addition implies the phrase added in angle brackets above. 29 Deleted in biro: ‘nuova educazione’ (‘new education’) and replaced with ‘posizione di cittadini’ (‘role of citizens’). ‘Nuova educazione’ is also reminiscent of ‘nuova cultura’, renewed culture and renewed education, with an understated reference to the Resistance. 30 Deleted: ‘per nuova educazione s’intende un rapporto col prossimo meno astratto, meno libresco, di una volta’ (‘by new education, what is meant is a less abstract and bookish relation with others than in previous times.’) 31 The word reads: ‘cariesma’ following the Christian and political analogy, carisma. On the online Treccani dictionary: il c. di un uomo politico; un attore dotato di grande c.; avere, non avere carisma, http:​/​/www​​.trec​​cani.​​it​/vo​​cabol​​ario/​​c​aris​​ma/, 26 July 2016. 32 Zavattini is referring to Greene’s book set in Mexico, first published in the United States. Cf. Graham Greene, Labyrinthine Ways, New York: Viking Press, 1940. The title was later changed to The Power and the Glory. 33 Deleted: ‘vecchio superficiale’ (‘old, artificial’) and added: ‘e pittorico: una donna ... prima di tutto’ (‘and painterly: a woman ... first and foremost’). 34 Illegible word. Deleted: ‘bisogni’ (‘needs’), replaced with: ‘requisiti’ (‘requirements’). On the left-hand margin, a long note in tiny undecipherable script. 35 Deleted: ‘al di fuori’ (‘on the outside’). ‘Ma nele comer con dolore e furore che io sento tanti problemi; affrontare questo uomo, essere sempre più a fondo per il [...] (illegible), vuol dire essere uomini’. (‘But it is in the taverns, the comer, that I hear about so many problems; to come to know this man, to go deeper for the [...], is tantamount to being men.’) Conjectural rendering: ‘It is in public places that I get to know about so many problems. I think that coming into contact with this man, intending to go beyond the surface, when I say “man” 28

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9. Do you think you have achieved pure Neo-realism? I think this question overlaps with the previous one. Cinema is not the same as publishing. However, anyone in the world with any confidence, would say yes. How can there be peace ‹though›, without a free cinema?36 Real peace is a scientific concept whereby each person has an individual role, just like in a beehive.37 – Yes, let’s go to the moon – hurrah! – I would give my life for being the first to see what’s up there. But if, for example, the rocket is taking off from Texas, I would wish that, on that marvellous night, at a time when we should be rejoicing for the amazing results human beings can achieve, we would no longer hear howling dogs along the Rio Bravo, hunting down men whose only desire is to have enough to eat each day.38 10. Is Miracle in Milan Neo-realist? Is it the story of a minimal event? Miracle in Milan is Neo-realist in the broadest sense – it would have been more so, had it retained its ending about private property – I shall write other such screenplays.39 ‘There is a’ focus on the destitute – but it is generic. Films can be rated in terms of their degree of Neo-realism. For example, Maria la Voz40 is not Neo-realist, nor is Subida al cielo.41 The Pearl is Neo-realist – it’s a good film, as far as its central purpose is concerned.42 11. Can Stazione Termini be considered Neo-realist? If so, why? If not, why not? Stazione Termini? It is and it isn’t. Reality appears in flashes – On the other hand, it is not, insofar as the issue of this couple’s absent, egotist, love, separate in terms of others, and in its everyday reality – exists somewhat out of time and is disconnected. De Sica made it work. But I didn’t do it for De Sica. 12. Rome, Open city was a narrative and a narrative in which many things happen. At the same time, it was an extraordinary film. Is it Neo-realist or not?

here, I mean a tangible, specific person, is what I equate with being a man.’ This reading is partly conjectural, due to a lacuna in the autograph handwritten text. In other words, to be a man means to show understanding and try to go beyond surface appearance and behaviour in order to get to know the Other. 36 Deleted repetition: ‘Senza che ci sia’ (‘without there being’). 37 Ball point addition: ‘Pace vera ... alveare’ (‘a real peace, alveolar’, meaning capillary, at every level of society). 38 A poignant reference to braceros, illegal immigrants and seasonal workers who were hunted down on the us and Mexican border. 39 The reference is to Il giudizio univerale, The Last Judgement, the closest screenplay in terms of theme to Miracle in Milan. The former was imagined towards the end of the Second World War. Fifteen years or so elapsed before it was made into a film in 1961. Cf. Callisto Cosulich, ‘Sedici anni a bagnomaria’, La fiera del cinema, no. 4, April 1961. 40 Maria la Voz (1955), directed by Julio Bracho. Zavattini saw the film soon after his arrival in Mexico on 29 June 1955. Cf. acz E 6/2, Fernando Gamboa, ‘Viajes de Cesare Zavattini y Fernando Gamboa en Mexico’. 41 Subida al cielo (1952), directed by Luis Buñuel. 42 Deleted: ‘Se l’indio F. farà di film. Ma’ (‘If El Indio F[ernández] will make films of this kind. Who knows?’). La perla (1947) directed by Emilio Fernández, based on the story The Pearl by John Steinbeck.

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Rome, Open city. Yes – a great one – This is where invention happens, but is always tempered by feelings, experiences that have really taken place. The Italian people figures in it, genuine Neo-realist, at its best. 13. What should the role of photography be in a film? What kind of photography should there be in Neo-realist films? There is an intimate relation between photography and content, colour and content – photography and colour should be inspired by what you want to say; it is not an a priori decision – even in the case of chiaroscuro photography, which exists in the real world – therefore, if it is relevant to the real and helps explain and communicate, it is welcome. 14. Have you seen any Mexican films which come close to Neo-realism?43 Above all, I have met Neo-realist people – seriously interested in the country’s problems. There is a Neo-realist situation just waiting to be told. And what is more, Emilio Fernández two months back, in an issue of Mañana, (Mañana of 11 June)44 set out a plan for the development of Mexican cinema. And I fully subscribe to it. His call for the mobilization of all Mexican talent into cinema proves that he has completely understood the need for the industry to employ the best; for cinema can go either way, either towards excellence or towards its opposite. ‘Only a cine verdad45 can be universal’, he says. Fantastic! He doesn’t take national cinema in a narrow sense, but as an investigation of the common man I mentioned earlier, concentrating on specific events and national concerns. 15. In your view, to which topics and contexts should Mexican cinema give precedence? Allow me to turn the question around; I’m asking you: to make Mexican cinema Neo-realist. – This way, this Conference can establish themes which are important to young Mexican filmmakers whose many interesting plans they told me in person – so that they might enjoy the support of such an authoritative meeting and will no longer be accused of having no themes to write about. Just look at today’s papers!46

In the typescript, Zavattini has crossed out question no. 14 and added a ‘sì’ (‘yes’) in the lefthand margin and renumbered as no. 15. However, in his answers, Zavattini includes the last question. On fol. 11, there is a heavy red pencil mark at the top of the right-hand margin. 44 The reference is to the magazine Mañana, accurately cited by Zavattini. Emilio Fernández (1904–1986) was known as ‘El Indio’. Zavattini had referred to him in an earlier, deleted handwritten note. 45 inverdad (‘in truth’) heavily underlined in red pencil. 46 Deleted: ‘guardate il giornale di oggi’ (‘look at today’s newspaper’). Since press accounts of the Conference refer to Zavattini saying this, the phrase has been included. 43

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Interview ‘Three films by Zavattini in Mexico’, 5 September 19551

Context An interview dating from just before Zavattini’s return journey to Italy from Mexico, where he spent the summer of 1955 carrying out field research. Zavattini sums up the ideas for three films, contracted by his Mexican producer, Manuel Barbachano Ponce. Most notably, he refers to México mío as: A film in which the Mexican people won’t be reduced to an object, but are going to become contributors in the narration of their own contemporary history.

To suggest this in 1955 was unheard of. Zavattini speaks of his aspiration to ‘contribute to the development of Mexican cinema, which has already going down its main route forward’. Twenty years or so were to elapse before this could happen. Mexico was a pseudo-democracy, ruled by the same party since the 1920s until the beginning of the twenty-first century and its cinema was a closed shop. While an independent production house such as Producciones Barbachano was tolerated for commercials and documentaries, the only attempts at New Mexican Cinema came about through Zavattini’s innovative, and even experimental, efforts, be they direct, as in ¡Torero! (1956) based on his story, and directed by Carlos Velo, and, later, the contribution of the Grupo de Nuevo Cine, which theorized a new viewer, as an essential prerequisite of a new Mexican cinema. The filmmakers involved were none other than those who had worked closely in Mexico with Zavattini in the 1950s, including Jomí García Ascot, one of the founders. They launched the magazine Nuevo Cine in

1

‘Tres peliculas de Zavattini en Mexico’, Interview with Zavattini, 5 September 1955, acz E 7/4, fols 1-2.

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January 1961 which contained the very Zavattinian film manifesto.2 The written Manifesto had a cinematic counterpart in a film directed by Ascot. It was a Zavattini-style diary film, En el balcón vació, a personal memoir, spoken and acted by his wife playing herself, in her vexing experience of being a fugitive from Francoist Spain and of emigrating to Mexico. En el balcón vació won prizes at the Locarno Film Festival (1962) and the Sestri Levante (1963) Festival of Latin American cinema.

Text Before returning to his country, Cesare Zavattini, the famous Italian screenwriter, spent some days working in Yucatán. When he was about to board his plane, he made the following statements to the press. I am going home, after spending about seventy days travelling across Mexico during my second visit. These have been intense days, in which, thanks to the help of so many friends I met here, I have tried to form a view of Mexican people which is as concrete as possible. I still don’t believe that I have managed to envisage a complete portrait of this people, but I do think that I have begun to get to know it, and, consequently, to love it. I hope to come back at the beginning of next year. In the meantime, I am taking with me a large number of documents that I have been given by well-informed people, documents which will be vital to deepen my relationship with Mexico. I’m in a position to say that the subject matter Barbachano Ponce of Teleproducciones will be producing has been decided. The first story is about a key problem of life in Mexico, to do with industry and agriculture. The second, tries to represent social conflict within the great Mexico City. I have been assisted by the frequent contact with the inhabitants of working-class districts and all their satire, expressing something not so different to what you see in the circus or some of Posada’s works, to name just one artist. After making our careful casting among new actors, I think Humberto Cauich from Yucatán, given his self-confidence, ability to convey marvel or action, could be the lead for this kind of story. The third is a humane film, owing much to documentary, showing a country-wide panorama of the people’s 2

Acevedo-Muñoz, Buñuel and Mexico, 149. Asier Aranzubia, ‘Nuevo Cine (1961-1962) y el nacimiento de la cultura cinematografica mexicana moderna’, Dimension Antropologica, vol. 52, May–August 2011, 101–21. www​.d​​imens​​ionan​​tropo​​logic​​a​.ina​​h​.gob​​.mx/?​​p​=689​​ 3. The Manifesto signatories, whose text was published in the first issue of Nuevo Cine, January 1961, were José de la Colina, Rafael Corkidi, Salvador Elizondo, J. M. García Ascot, Emilio García Riera, J. L. González de León, Heriberto Lafranchi, Carlos Monsiváis, Julio Pliego, Gabriel Ramírez, José María Sbert, Luis Vicens. The author, Asier Aranzubia, fails to even mention Zavattini or the professional and cultural ties between J. M. García Ascot, José de la Colina and the Italian screenwriter. Yet there can be no doubt of his direct influence. Also, De la Colina was encouraged by Zavattini, during one of his visits, to develop and formalize the loose Mexican film club scene, forming a national organization.

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labour, very close to the real world of the peasant, the miner, the chiclero, the crude oil worker, the refuse collectors, and the janitors; all seen in their everyday actions, emotions and different states of mind. To develop these themes, I have decided to spend the coming months, especially as regards the third theme, and in agreement with Teleproducciones, launching a nationwide enquiry, to highlight such aspects which, according to the Mexicans, should not be missing in a cinema-verdad,3 to adopt a phrase recently used by Emilio Fernández.4 This is how we are going to make a film in which the Mexican people won’t be reduced to an object, but will become contributors in the narration of their own contemporary history. I don’t look back on my Mexican journey exclusively from a professional point of view. It has been a fundamental experience of my life. I am leaving with the hope that, to the extent that I’m able to do so, I might contribute to the development of Mexican cinema, which is already proceeding on the main path. I am referring to taking a direction in which you meet people from all over the world who are working towards a different cinema, flexible enough to vary from country to country, seeking to establish the substance of an integrated, contemporary, Man, and concerned with his needs and aspirations. This struggle should be seen more and more in cinema. Cesare Zavattini, Mérida, Yuc[atan].

Spanish for: cinéma vérité, or cinema of truth, a phrase which harked back to Dziga Vertov’s assertions and non-fiction film practice, but Zavattini uses it as a key signifier to make the connexion with the producer’s work in independent documentary filmmaking. The phrase was later used in the 1960s, to refer to French non-fiction, Chronicle of a Summer (1960), and Chris Marker’s cinéma directe response, Joli Mai (1962), and parallel developments in Canada and the United States. 4 Mexican filmmaker, the closest to Neo-realist ideas, who, it would seem, never met Zavattini during his Mexican trips. 3

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Zavattini, letter to Alvaro Beltrani, 20 October 19551

Context Zavattini sent two letters to the cultural attaché at the Italian embassy in Mexico City, Alvaro Beltrani. There are no replies in the Zavattini Archive, yet his correspondence shows, however, that he considered this official contact worth pursuing. Proof of this was that Beltrani had facilitated his 1955 Mexican Bellas Artes Conference, indeed, had been directly involved in organizing it, and had written at least one article in support of Zavattini’s interventions. The Italian filmmaker provides an unusually detailed report based on his prolonged contact in the field with ordinary Mexicans, as well as an analysis of the Conference. He also wrote about the vital function of film associations to further the cause of art cinema, discussing his initiative in encouraging a Mexican coordinated effort. He wrote again some time later, presumably not having received a reply to his first letter, since he repeats some of what he had already written in it, but also adding something to it. What is also particularly interesting are the reported effects of establishing two-way communication with his audience, in that the Conference audience identified what they considered the real, most urgent and relevant themes for Mexican cinema, because they were asked. This was unheard of in film circles, and would have been the basis for developing the México mío Zavattini was envisaging – not a foreigner’s portrait, but a collective (Mexican) portrait, rooted in ‘concrete’ reality. The letter also includes an impressive raft of potential, highly topical themes for a film about Mexico, demonstrating the extent of Zavattini’s ethnographic field research and revealing that he had broken the surface of folkloric superficiality and identify the nation’s burning issues.

1

Zavattini to Alvaro Beltrani, 20 October 1955, acz E/72, fols 19–20. Unpublished.

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Text Dear Beltrani, As soon as you get to Mexico City, please give my regards to all the friends, especially the ones who, on the felicitous evening of 24 August, in the Bellas Artes, intervened during my Conference with such spontaneity and intelligence. This is one of the best memories I take back from Mexico, and I always relate it in Italy, as a very tangible example of real participation in this country, in the civic sense of the word. All it took was a single occasion to destroy the legend of a Mexican public which is disinterested in the actual problems of its own country. It demonstrated its passion and, above all, the proof of a very specific awareness of the constructive function of cinema, a cinema’s national function. You yourself will have noticed that far from expressing generic patriotism, it identified in a rigorous, almost scientific way, those events which, however humble in their outward appearance, convey fundamental Mexican needs on a social plane. Having said this, before the Bellas Artes event, when I happened to ask artists, politicians and people in the street what kind of film they would like to see produced in their country, in the event that they had the power to get it made, everyone immediately replied by choosing a genuine political theme, never haphazardly, but reflecting the need for unity and expressing common concerns. This seems such a rare and generous sentiment these days. These are the topics people have suggested to me so often: The living conditions of children; the illiterate; the rural situation (in other words the need for agrarian reform); the peasants’ internal migration from countryside to city; the women’s vote;2 the history of crude oil nationalization; the condemnation of bureaucracy; overcoming individualism with its attendant psychological shortcomings, believed to be conducive to slowing down the development of citizenship; the history of crude oil as an affirmation of the extraordinary potential of the new citizen; the phenomenon of marvellous craft, which is still being exploited by foreign tourists, as well as by some Mexicans; the ever more dangerous detachment of the middle class from the working class; the still worrying isolation of ethnic Indios; the dramatic adventures both at home and abroad of braceros. Furthermore, the sometimes tacit anxiety, but visible nevertheless, in hundreds of situations, of wanting to express one’s thoughts and feelings, creating the kind of culture which finds its most apparent expression in murales, that is, a culture which is capable of taking part in major progressive modern events, and capable of leaving behind the introverted complexities of a more and more remote past. All these topics, to reiterate, demonstrate that in Mexico, as in few other countries, people know exactly what miracles can be worked with cinema, in respect of their country’s ideal and real structures, when, that is, it is used with full awareness of its enormous power.

2

Mexican women gained the right to vote in 1953.

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I would have listened to those people who were so enthusiastic, for hours and hours. All their proposals were doable in the sense of making cinema, regardless of how you conceive it, because the Mexicans have a natural artistic ability to immediately translate a concept into an image. I must say that I have read some very perceptive books about the Mexican character, written by Mexicans, and not devoid of harsh analysis, showing that it is exemplary for its honesty, including their xenophilia and machismo and I know not what other isms.3 However, these extraordinary essays seem to concern a type of man who has his head screwed on backwards. The Mexican of today isn’t someone who can do away with his internal shadows in an instant, an declare that everything has miraculously been resolved, but what he can say is that he is now totally involved in the concrete world, while, at the same time, seeking his Mexican identity, by carrying out a sequence of actions we might call extrovert, that is, ones which lead to political consequences. I would like to add that, as far as I can tell, even the most pragmatic of Mexicans do not ignore the historic background to the national character, their being so contradictory, so excitable. But they want to effect a decisive change to this character, with the pretence of disregarding age-old ifs and buts, and placing it, with the confidence of pioneers, in a reality which is created precisely when it is affirmed; the reality of a national civic life that purifies and burns off all those shadows and cogitations I have just mentioned. There is nothing like cinema to wipe the horizon clean from this psychological fog, to reveal a Mexican who spends his day so spontaneously connected to everyday collective events, that he lacks the spare time to fall back into the well of uncertainty. There were those who proposed to continue those conversations, that is, the research and the debate around useful themes for Mexican national life. There can be no doubt that to do so would be splendid and unprecedented. There would be a frequent, relentless, and growing exchange of ideas, with the participation of film directors, writers and the public. This would lead to a broad-scale national film conscience, and would be instrumental in the birth of a new public, which is the condition for a new cinema, a cinema aimed at, mostly, but not exclusively, tackling and making generally known central issues of one’s country. I was so surprised to witness the fact that, despite the wealth of ideas among film directors, writers and actors, among journalists and even among the general public, there is no gathering, no film association to bring these people together, even physically, under the same roof, one which could provide a stable space and opportunity for that exchange of ideas to which I was referring earlier. Little by little, through natural and frequent cooperation, this would be conducive to creating a commonality of purpose. Whereas, I get the impression that

3

Zavattini uses the term malinchismo (‘xenophilia’), not an Italian word. It is a calque of the Mexican term used by Alfredo Guevara, cf. Guevara, ‘Ese poeta que andaba por el mundo’, in Guevara, Alfredo and Cesare Zavattini, Ese diamantino corazón de la verdad, Madrid: Iberautor Promociones Culturales, 2002, 287–96.

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everyone is separated, living in isolation, and that only rare meetings in a bar, or in someone’s home, facilitate a collaboration of this kind. This is the reason why so many ideas and projects go no further, when they would be perceived as necessary and urgent for all concerned, through the build-up of a longer gestation. Look at the case of Raíces: it served as a wake-up call for Mexicans. But if they enjoyed a more frequent and systematic exchange of ideas among themselves – this is what the providential function of a cinema association consists in – Raíces would no longer be an exceptional case, but the expression and consequence of that given cultural climate. I have witnessed what happened in Italy. There is a cinema association, as you know, and nearly all filmmakers are members of it. I do not wish to cite it as exemplary, however, I will make the point that, if this association didn’t exist, we filmmakers would never meet. Whereas, there are ten to fifteen annual meetings which, on the whole, help to establish a natural exchange of views and always provide encouragement, advice, constituting a kind of collective conscience. Not to mention the incalculable benefit for all concerned in sharing ideas. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there is an extraordinary willingness in Italy to take an active role within associations, as I am sure you already know. It was very hard to launch the Circolo del Cinema ten years ago and keep it running during these ten years. But it was started and has continued to live and, we believe, it has succeeded in carrying out this connective function. But I would hate to come across to my Mexican friends as the person who is always giving advice, for I myself have learned so much from the Mexicans, beginning with the Neo-realism of their painters, as well as the democratic lesson of the noreelección (there’s even a street called Noreelección in [Ciudad] Obregón). It is only that often talent alone is not enough. Talent needs organizing too, especially in the film industry, which is ambushed in its progress by the most dangerous sirens in the world, who try to make us forget what we have to do. Dear Beltrani, Give my regards to my dear Mexican friends. I am going to give talks in December about my journey across Mexico in four Italian cities, Turin, Genoa, Milan and Rome, and I hope to convey the affection, the respect, and interest which this country has inspired in me. Admittedly, I also saw its shortcomings. There as many as in Italy, although of a different nature. And one of these, in my view, is precisely the lack of organization among filmmakers, as I keep repeating, in other words, the lack of a Film Association in Mexico City which can facilitate meetings such as the one at the Bellas Artes, meetings which would be instrumental in systematically developing a Mexican film culture.4 This is a good moment, a very favourable one for Mexico which, in 1955, has shown signs of such an important revival in cinema.

4

‘che porti su un piano sistematico la coscienza cinematografica messicana.’

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Carlos Velo, letter to Zavattini, 7 November 19551

Context An important letter in which the documentarist Carlos Velo, who worked for Barbachano Producciones for most of his career and with Zavattini from 1955 until 1959, privately acknowledges the Italian filmmaker’s advice in the making of the Mexican documentary ¡Torero! (at this stage the film was called Toros). ¡Torero! is a non-fiction film which is ostensibly out of style and out of keeping with Velo’s previous work. The Mexican thanks him for his help in reducing the voice-over, which crowded out matador Luis Procuna’s genuine voice. In Zavattini’s able hands, a film project about a real person’s life became a film told by a person about his life. ¡Torero! was transformed, in the wake of The Story of Catherine, into a Zavattinian personal film. The body of the letter, however, is about another project, and namely the Mexican production house’s work in developing one of the stories Zavattini had given them, El Petróleo, a fiction, based on primary field research carried out by Zavattini in the company of Fernando Gamboa in the Mexican oil fields. Part of Carlos Velo’s feedback is quite telling. He comments on ‘the main character’s primitive, wild, dark nature’ that ‘produces an uncomfortable impression’. His observation gives away the difference in cinematic gaze between Zavattini’s Neo-realist approach and that of his Mexican hosts. Their discomfort is produced because Zavattini’s fictional character is far from an ideal Mexican. Their apparent support towards developing Mexican Neo-realism was very limited to say the least. Take the other project mentioned, México mío. It was planned as an experimental, open-ended, documentary, applying to Mexico the framework of Zavattini’s Italia mia. But a battle of wills ensued, lasting more than three years, in which, once again, the Mexicans tried to force an Orientalist, spectacle-based, narrative structure on what was an open-ended, experimental,

1

Carlos Velo to Zavattini, 7 November 1955, in Rodríguez Álvarez, Cartas a México, 87–9.

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non-fiction, about the real Mexico of ordinary people. In the end, Zavattini lost his battle, but the Mexicans also lost out.

Text Dear Zavattini, Your friendly letters addressed to Gamboa have been translated, analysed and discussed in detail, by the Teleproducciones Group, informally chaired by Barbachano. I thank you for your praise and hope I don’t disappoint you too much in my filmmaking. Up until today, when at last the end is in sight for the film Toros, I haven’t been able to work on El Petróleo, let alone Mexico mío, as I would have wished. The body of advice you gave me regarding Toros has been decisive, for me to reach the logical decision that there is a need to ‘create’ real dialogues and to reduce to a bare minimum the narration and monologue voice-over. In this way, I believe that my film has gained a lot, in terms of truth and genuine emotion, casting off the format of classic documentary. Barbachano is planning to take Toros to Cannes. What do you think about such a brave decision to ‘set up a Mexican corrida’ in France? I am sending you a synopsis of El Petróleo. Writing these ten pages has been very painful for me. First of all, I organized my notes and I wrote a rough treatment, based on the story that you dictated to us at Chichen-Itzá. Then Fernando Gamboa added his precious facts on concrete places, actual key dates, political events and new sequences, drawn from the north-bound migration, which have improved the treatment. Barbachano and Ascot contributed ideas and final corrections. In our view, the El Petróleo synopsis is no more than an ambitious summary of the ideas and situations you narrated to us. However, we also think we need to analyse them very carefully, especially the following aspects:

a. The lack of balance in the conflict: on the one hand there is the psychology of a man somehow fighting to establish himself in life, and, on the other, there is a foreign company which is exploiting him. Which of the two is more important to maintain the viewers’ interest? Or is the element which will make this story clear and appreciated the conflict itself, between a concrete and identifiable individual and society? b. Andrés’s journey and adventures – I have ventured to give him this name provisionally – are many. They have been developed to provide a focus to the scenarios you specified, together with Gamboa, and, it goes without saying that they are going to be deleted in the new integrated storyline. c. The main character’s primitive, wild, dark, nature produces an uncomfortable impression. We suppose there will be a slow transformation over twenty years of struggle with himself that will make him appear human and friendly.

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I’m attaching a press cutting with details of the competition launched by the producers of Espaldas mojadas. What you need to do to deposit your stories in Mexico, at the Authors’ Union, in the Education Secretariat is sign the papers accompanying this letter, and send them to us, together with five synopses of twenty pages of the Anillo Meravejoso. Clearly, it would be best to do the same for El Anellito (signed with your name at the foot of the page), bearing in mind, however, that since this is an original work, there’s less danger that anyone is going to steal the theme. The field research for Mexico mío has already begun. I’ve received the copies of La Rassegna del film and you have given me a strong impulse and a torrent of ideas, as to how to plan out the work, thanks to them. As soon as I have been able to get something tangible down on paper, I shall write to you.

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Zavattini, letter to Felipe Carrera, 29 January 19561

Context Felipe Carrera was a political refugee from Venezuela living in Mexico City. In August 1955, he invited Zavattini to give a talk at the Cine Club Progreso where Mexican and Venezuelan students used to get together. Zavattini’s letter is very encouraging, pointing out the long-term benefits of creating a federation of film clubs, with a view to creating a Mexican film culture and a New Mexican Cinema.

Text Dear friend, You have every right to be angry with me for my long silence. And now I’m going to give my excuses. I forgot to send you the telegram I promised on the occasion of the foundation of the Mexican Federation of Film Clubs, because the five days I spent in Havana were so intense. In five days together with the young cineastes of Nuestro Tiempo, Barbachano and Gamboa, we carried out no less than a month’s work, which explains why Mexico receded, and there was only Cuba with its film problems looming large, as well as the enthusiasm of those young Cubans, so similar to your enthusiasm. Then I received your letter, just when I was coming and going in Rome, and travelling all around Italy, while the messy heap of mail on my desk grew bigger and bigger. Only today, have I found the time to write to you, long last, and I’m so happy I have. I remember our farewell at the airport, and I still have your paper knife before me, what a nice token of your friendship. As you probably know, Barbachano came to Italy in December, and together we are getting somewhere with those film projects you know about. I think it 1

Zavattini to Felipe Carrera, 29 January 1956, acz E/72, fol. 52 and Rodríguez Álvarez, Cartas a México, 222.

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is going to take two or three months to complete our work. Important events like the birth of your Federation are conducive to the success of sound projects, because you will help create a climate in which a certain kind of project no longer seems absurd or too difficult, but rather natural and worthwhile. Perhaps you yourselves don’t realize it, but the birth of this Federation is an extremely positive event, demonstrating the concrete vitality of your film culture. You could say that the more film clubs there are, the more high-quality films can be made. Doubtless, the Federation will serve to collect and coordinate all the impulses, desires, and positive attitudes which I saw and heard in your country, by which mean a growth centre, an established entity that inspires confidence. Its constructive purpose is particularly important now, because all over the world, cinema is at a standstill, in the sense that it represents contemporary reality less and less. And therefore, to see a new generation of film clubs means that not everything is blocked, not even for foreigners. The impression I received during my two months’ stay in Mexico was that there are many who are deeply aware of cinema’s tasks ahead and of the very strong potential for a Mexican cinema in a realist sense. But their energies are scattered, and they all need a common focus, in the geographic and physical sense, in my opinion, which is why the Federation serves as a nexus for your cultural life, and a decisive one at that. As I have already stated, I think the Federation should work towards the birth of a professional film association, albeit still connected to the Federation, with the remit of bringing together all Mexican cineastes, actors, writers, directors. It would have an important role to play, in increasing the number of opportunities for meetings among the people who are active in Mexican cinema, on an explicit cultural basis, or we could say more simply, of people who share a sense of responsibility towards their job. It’s not a question of forming a union, but a professional, artistic and human body. I hope I can come back to Mexico City, even for a very short while. I don’t know when, but I would like it to be soon. All the best to you and your friends. Keep up the good work. I hope you can put into practice everything you have written in your Progreso film Club Statute (and I know you will succeed, because you have already achieved so much por el desarrollo de un autentico cine mexicano, for the development of an authentic Mexican cinema).2

2

In Spanish in the typescript.

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Zavattini, letter to Velo, 5 October 19581

Context This last letter to the would-be director of Mexico mío exposes the crux of their clash, the very root of the problem preventing the film to go into production, despite years of development, from story, to treatment, to revised treatment, and a screenplay of sorts, written up by Carlos Velo himself. The sociopolitical slant informing the original idea, in common with the basis of Italia mia, caused both to be censored. Zavattini’s reference to ‘never offending the considerable sensibilities of our Mexican friends’ says it all. Yet none of these problems emerged in the 1980s interviews to the Producciones Barbachano directors and staff.2

Text Dear Velo, Barbachano is about to leave and I want to add something to what I wrote the other day. This time, my meeting with Barbachano has been all too sudden and over too soon. Yet, I can assure you that it has strengthened our conviction that Mexico mío is a worthwhile enterprise and that we must not delay in getting it into production, and I am confident that you are going to make a film full of love and knowledge. You can therefore imagine how pleased I am that are coming to Rome for the final exchange of ideas on the written material which you are working on with so much acumen. We shall contrive to do a preliminary edit on paper, to shape a sense of pace and content, and mark a limit to the vast, almost endless, bulk of material. By ‘content’, I especially mean that feeling for Mexico which we both share equally. And namely, a sense of a grand Mexico and of course 1 2

Zavattini to Velo, 5 October 1958, acz E/72, fol. 28. Unpublished. Two undergraduate students, conducted a series of interviews to the staff of Producciones Barbachano, as part of their research on Zavattini’s activities in Mexico, for their undergraduate degree. The thesis was supervised by Manolo Barbachano’s brother, Miguel Barbachano. Cf. Tarcísio Gustavo Chárraga and Elvia Vera Soriano, Cesare Zavattini en México (Un documento para la historia del cine nacional), Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985. [Unpublished dissertation].

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of a marvellous Mexico, but, above all, an everyday and popular Mexico, which works, sweats, struggles and in which, as in other countries like Italy, for example, visions of power and progress alternate with visions of backwardness. I don’t think the desire for truth which inspired this film will, in any way, diminish the spectacular qualities this film needs. It will find them instead on a deeper, more humane level than what can be found in trite exotic films. We will try not to attenuate neither the local colour nor the poetry, which are so often present in Mexican imagery, but always bearing in mind the purpose of what we are saying, the overall vision, which comprises a whole day, from the stars to other stars, as a peasant from Calabria once wrote, in which a man’s life and the life of the heavens are fused. We are talking about the life of a man with its births, its deaths, its weddings, its funerals, its struggle for food, for health, for a roof over one’s head, its entertainments and, even, its magic. I am fully aware of all the political and commercial difficulties a film of this kind can come up against and I have no intention of leading you towards an adventure which would be disastrous from the outset, towards a film, in brief, for the select few, and therefore tendentious, and unsuitable for the markets. But as I said to Manolo who carefully explained these difficulties without giving them too much importance, we should aim to represent a Mexico which, while never offending the considerable sensibilities of our Mexican friends, is aware that if it revealed to the world only its positive aspects, as if all the routes the Revolution had indicated had already been followed, would be tantamount to limiting the country to a cultural role, confined to exterior propaganda and tourism. Whereas we hope to carry out real propaganda for this country, in which the timescale of a day really does take on an emblematic meaning to express the wealth of universal and contemporary themes there are in this Mexican day in the life. Keep going, dear Velo, with the help of your pick of the best and most daring Mexican collaborators.

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Elio Petri, letter to Zavattini, 1 April 19621

Context Elio Petri became a film director after working with Zavattini as a researcher in the field while he was a cub reporter on L’Unità, the Italian communist national daily. During a visit to Argentina for the Mar del Plata Film Festival in 1962, Petri saw Fernando Birri’s feature Los Inundados and the documentary Tire dié and wrote to Zavattini to openly acknowledge Zavattini’s influence, knowing nothing about the personal contact between Birri and Zavattini.

Text Dear Za, I found your note moving. In a way, I didn’t really deserve it, because I don’t get in touch with you as much I could. I do hope you didn’t really destroy those ‘doodles’ of yours of the bride and groom: as you know, I have a very nice Zavattini collection, and so it would be a cruel gesture on your part, to deprive me of new pieces. Here at Mar del Plata, there are reminders everywhere of your visit.2 Everyone, young and old filmmakers alike, remembers you with great affection. If each nation were to send an ambassador like you around the world, wars would be avoided once and for all, without having to rely on the un. I saw a couple of Zavattini-style films by the Birri-Camusso group: Tire dié and Los Inundados. The first is brilliant. It takes its place next to classics of the same genre, such as films like Terre sans pain,3 and the documentaries by [Joris]

Elio Petri to Zavattini, 1 April 1962, acz P344/3. Handwritten letter on plain paper. Unpublished. 2 Zavattini was invited to the film festival of the previous year. 3 The medium-length documentary Terre sans pain by Luis Buñuel, also known as Les Hurdes (1932). The film exposes, in a somewhat satirical and detached way, the extreme poverty of the inhabitants of a remote part of Spain, living in the village of Las Hurdes. This place was notorious for inbreeding and had been photographed in the popular press. Petri’s comparison only works in part, with regard to length and subject matter. The typical 1

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Ivens. At the same time, there can be no doubt that it is the most Argentinian film you could see. As soon as we get back, my wife and I, dear Za, would be very happy to meet you, if you have the time. My best wishes to your wife, your daughter, Arturo [Zavattini], and Marco [Zavattini].4 My wife sends you all her love. Affectionately yours, Elio Everyone here says that I giorni contati5 resembles Umberto D. I wish it did! E.

dossier-style approach advocated by Zavattini is entirely absent in Las Hurdes. In Zavattini’s approach, shadowing, understood as getting to know the filmed subjects, sharing experience with them, exercising patience in a process leading eventually to the film after protracted contact in which the filmmaker is immersed in the subjects’ environment and in contact with the people within it. However, Petri’s comparison serves to place the film, understood by him as an important work of an international stature. 4 Two of Zavattini’s children. 5 In I giorni contati (1962), a middle-aged plumber quits his job after witnessing the heart attack and death of someone of his age, on his way to work. The situation leads him to change his way of life in order to give it more value.

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‘An Act of Courage’ (1960) and ‘On Censorship’ (1960)1

Context The next text is an excerpt about censorship from the second instalment of an interview entitled ‘An Act of Courage’, with Tommaso Chiaretti for Mondo Nuovo, published on 11 December 1960. A second text follows, ‘On Censorship’, which is closely related to the scenario, and was published as an appendix in Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti!, 1979, 313–16. The scenario appears in Volume 1. Zavattini’s cinematic diary also includes an entry on the subject: ‘Roma. 15 dicembre 1960’, Diario cinematografico, 1979, 342–8, and publishes a version of the scenario. The second text is closely related to the first. Zavattini concentrates on explaining the rationale for the scenario, arguing for the need for immediate action, and even going as far as using cinema as agitprop. This was, after all, the year he had witnessed the Cuban Revolution, and, moreover, had directed discussions at the new Cuban icaic, where he had defended the role of oblique political cinema, be it fiction or non-fiction, and had led discussions on art and autonomy versus art and commitment. The scenario contains a proposal for counter-cinema. He mentions in passing Arialda (1960), by Giovanni Testori, a play directed by Luchino Visconti, a play that had just been censored for obscenity, just as that same year, Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960) was also targeted. The year 1960 was a turning point; Zavattini’s call for the defence of free speech was timely, given the swing to the Right, when the Christian Democrats, in power since 1947, sought support to prop up their government by forming a coalition with the Movimento Sociale Italiano (msi). In June 1960, riots, which were to last several days, broke out in Genoa, where the Neo-fascist 1

The two texts, and indeed a third, appearing in his cinematic Diary, are closely related and two of them have been brought together, and edited, to avoid overlaps and repetitions. Zavattini, ‘Un atto di coraggio’, interview with Tommaso Chiaretti, Mondo Nuovo, 11 December 1960, later in Neorealismo ecc., 226–7, and ‘Censura 1960’, in Basta coi soggetti!, 313–16.

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msi planned to hold its annual Congress. This choice of venue was intended as a provocation, since Genoa had been active in the wartime Resistance and was still proudly anti-fascist. This confrontation led to a new wave of militant anti-fascism across Italy, with demonstrations taking place in several towns, met by police retaliation, using live ammunition against the crowds, in Sicily and Reggio Emilia, and causing several deaths.2 In the midst of growing pressure for social and political renewal, as the country moved away from the Centre-Right, the Tambroni coalition government fell. However, central control over the media remained non-negotiable. The Caso Lonero concerned Emilio Lonero, the Catholic director of the Centro Cattolico di Cinematografia, appointed in 1960 to be the director of the Venice Film Festival and held responsible for vetoing Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Fellini’s La dolce vita in March, causing a strong reaction. This was the tense political context for Zavattini’s initiative, to do something, ‘to act’, as he puts it, and finally, as he also remarks, to work towards Antonio Gramsci’s idea of a nuova cultura (new culture).

Text 1 [Tommaso Chiaretti] And now let’s talk about a painful issue for all of us: censorship. What do you think Italian filmmakers should do to resolve this problem?3 [Zavattini] Censorship is, as we speak, the key issue of cinematic life. It goes without saying that it is vital to demand new legislation and that we keep up the pressure to secure it. But the problem has deeper roots which go way beyond legislation. Often, ‘Le leggi son, ma chi pon mano ad elle?’, ‘Laws do exist, but is anyone applying them?’4 Censorship is the expression of a moral regime which totally disregards the democratic élan which came about in the nation after 1943. What we mean by the word democracy is a different way of life, by comparison with the past, a time when all the moments of a citizen’s entire day were imbued with ambiguity, substantial hypocrisy, in other words rhetoric. If the change had been truly radical, today, we would not be witnessing more of the same, or better a continuous development of Catholic dominion in Italy, in the sense of its deep infiltration, so capillary as to determine most public and private

John Foot, The Archipelago. Italy since 1945, London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, 130–3. 3 Zavattini, ‘Un atto di coraggio’, interview with Tommaso Chiaretti, Mondo Nuovo, 11 December 1960, later in Neorealismo ecc., 1979, 224–9. 4 Zavattini cites the character Marco Lombardo, in Canto xvi of Purgatory in The Divine Comedy. 2

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actions. We should say Catholic praxis, rather than Catholic spirit.5 Indeed, its influence is yet again of a specifically social order, in defence of crucial interests, as the case of cinema clearly demonstrates, whose authors have been vetoed from embarking on critical themes, which, if its research had been allowed to develop, would have inevitably let to investigating the relations between church and state, between religion and the individual. The most serious problem, I think, is that the state of censorship today is that it is conducive to a process of self-castration. And it might seem strange that I make such a claim at the very time when, we must admit that that a few courageous films are being made. But is precisely the very questionable and devious nature of the objections that are made which allow us to comprehend the scale of the problem and, in spite of everything, the narrow parameters of what is allowable in the current historic panorama. Let me explain what I mean by providing an example. If a director had made a film about the general elections, if one of the many young directors emerging in the field of cinema had taken the trouble to go walkabout the day of the election, with a cine-camera, to go and see, from a personal point of view, what is or is not democratic about the life of our country, by coming into contact with symptomatic cases, by talking, looking, interviewing, we can safely assume that, in the current climate in which we live, such a film would not get past official censorship. But this is not the point. For, thus far, we have only been making suppositions that are hardly worth making. The point, which illustrates the gravity of the current situation, is that no one even imagines making such a film. And yet, ideas of this kind should be entertained. For if they did, the struggle would be on a broader scale and focused. What is needed is action.6

2 This idea came from the need to create an object, let’s say – which could not be misinterpreted for what it is, and, namely, a rallying point for a freer cinematography, one which rejects current censorship, both in its most flagrant manifestations, as well as its creepier manifestations.7 For years, filmmakers have battled against the current system of censorship, but have never gone as far as rejecting it outright. This system is political, in so far as it represents a specific interpretation of the life of the nation, existing in the way that it is deemed that it should exist, that is, in accordance with the practical needs of the dominant party and class. We have always hesitated at the threshold of a decisive act, a hazardous act, an act that would be an accurate reflection of a clash between what we call the

Zavattini’s italics for emphasis. Zavattini’s emphasis. 7 Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti!, 313–16. 5 6

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culture of post-war Italy, founded on an entirely new historical state of affairs, and the culture perpetuated by the paralysed morals8 of fascist Italy. We were content with a few works of art that witnessed the fire under the cinders, with no concern for defending at all costs the growing number of works which, taken as a whole, including those less artistically valid, shared the ‘new culture’ [Antonio] Gramsci mentions. The negative impact of censorship is not primarily to be found in seizures by order of the judiciary, but in more elusive forms of intimidation, in more sustained covert pressure, aimed at filmmakers. Consequently, an effective way to gauge the severity of the situation would be to make a list of the films which do not make it into production or, better still, a list of the themes we avoid out of self-censorship, and we can leave it at that. We are perfectly aware that even filmmakers who are in good faith in believing they enjoy creative freedom, are, nevertheless, subjected to constant pressure, because the industrial environment in which they work is structured along capitalist lines. The consequence of this is that attempts to break out of the stranglehold, restrained as they are, are interpreted as proof of an increasing freedom of expression. However, when measured against the dictates of our conscience, and against the values of the Italian Constitution, they appear less impressive than they might have seemed. The year 1947 was the year censorship was born. It was also a political date. That is when a break occurred; when it became evident that, if culture intended to really become a creative and determining factor in Italian society, it could only occur if government demands were not met, and if an opposition to government came into being. Theatre and cinema are the most effective and striking cultural media. To defend them is to defend what we want our country to be and to repulse what we don’t want it to be. Therefore, what is at stake is a radical struggle that cannot allow censorship to be viewed as entirely separate from the rest of national life, but one which must expose censorship as its most typical and far-sighted emanation. I have asked myself if the play Arialda, for example, might not be a key opportunity for a call to intellectuals, asking for their total commitment.9 I am not familiar with Arialda, but let us suppose for a moment that it possesses all the necessary requirements we would want it to have, to the point that we are willing to fight its cause, to show our solidarity to [Giovanni] Testori and Visconti, as mentioned above, expressing solidarity to an extreme. None of this should involve any equivocal contact with producers who are prepared to forge only fleeting alliances with us. Authors are alone and alone they must remain. What interests them is their creative work, so producers

Zavattini uses the word ‘static’, but immobilismo is what he means, a frozen, fearful outlook, preventing investigation and critique, typical of the fascist and post-fascist eras. 9 L’Arialda (1960) is a play by Giovanni Testori, censored for obscenity (homosexual themes were inadmissible in 1960s Italy). Zavattini’s reference to Luchino Visconti is due to the censorship of Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). 8

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cannot be involved, for, as we are witnessing at the moment, this would only weaken our position and resolve. It seems to me that if we fail to take the initiative now, we are effectively limiting the potential of the struggle to nothing more than a legal matter, for the courts to deal with, for academic debates, and for short-lived manifestos. In short, we would be making a huge mistake. Actually, I think we have already made it, as regards the Lonero Case, in which the issue of democracy was crystal clear.10 It was a rare opportunity for a head-on confrontation centred on culture. This is what inspired me to try to make a low-cost, short film with some friends, possibly, with an 8-millimetre camera over a few days, on a budget of no more than, say, a million liras, to film and quickly edit the footage regarding such an Italian cultural moment. It could be called Censorship 1960, since the problem of censorship sums up the situation. The film would be three, four or five hundred metres’ worth of footage. We will have to come up with the content and type it up without delay, on the topic of censorship, as it manifests in 1960, translated into a language that conveys the urgency of these past few months of debate.11 Before I switch to the narrative aspects, I would point out that such a short film, if it works, would itself constitute ‘the object’ I was referring to at the beginning of this chat.12 If this short were censored, we would retaliate, by screening it wherever possible, in people’s homes, as well as in the square, both openly and secretly, using all the means at our disposal, to translate the problematic of censorship into dramatic terms for distracted Italians, revealing its political and cultural aspects. This brings me back to its narrative mode. I have no intention of making any suggestions here, since I had the idea exactly one hour ago and I am still at the intuitive planning stage. These pages represent an initial attempt at formulating the idea, but I think a substantial line of thought could issue from a collaborative effort with three or four friends, who are suitably qualified for an enterprise of this nature. The documentary should evoke an atmosphere of uncontainable excitement. We must avoid working on the basis of preconceived ideas. The short can include short interviews, forays into past and even the future, using a combination of documentary materials without excluding the use of fiction, with the freedom

Emilio Lonero was the director of the Venice Film Festival of 1960. He was held responsible for the censorship of Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. Lonero was also the director of the Centro Cattolico di Cinematografia which had opposed Neo-realism in the 1950s. Cf. E. M, ‘I cattolici divisi anche sul caso Lonero’, L’Unità, 6 March 1960. 11 Three hundred metres would work out as a length of about ten minutes. 12 Zavattini always dictated his scenarios and related ancillary texts. This explains why he refers to this text as a chat. Such a spoken writing practice differed from his literary writing. The working principle was that when creating scenarios, the language should be simple and straightforward, to the point that, at times, he worked it out in dialect first, and descriptive, in a phenomenological and ekphrastic sense, of critically visualizing events, whereas in his other writing, including his cinematic diary, the syntax and structure of the text is argumentative, discursive. 10

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and novelty of expression which the purpose of short film’s unprecedented nature can allow. Is it going to consist in a series of statements by the most authoritative representatives of Italian cinema, compressed among photographs, drawings, paintings, real-life scenes, somehow conveying the message which sets us apart from the system of censorship and all its adherents? Or is it going to be a portrait of Rome where our problematic explodes in a series of contradictions and correlations that make Rome the most suitable place for analysis? Or might it be instead Milan? Or Milan and Rome together? Or a small Italian town that we’ll somehow strive to include in a trial against censorship, in the knowledge that it too is a necessary part of this cultural debate in Italy which we consider necessary today? Or will we settle for filming ten to fifteen people in a room, picking up on the spontaneous and lively debate? One this is certain. Since our aim is that this film reaches the hearts and minds of as many people as possible, even such a simple or simplistic arrangement, if the fifteen people are heroes, so to speak, of Italian cinema, theatre, and literature, it could work as very effective propaganda. To achieve such an aim would require a strong commitment, both explicit and implicit, and equally committed and radical solidarity that would serve as a call to action addressed to the general public. We could film what is written in the daily press, as ephemeral as verbal speech: an author’s monologue, recording a phonecall to the Direzione Generale dello Spettacolo [responsible for governmental censorship], to an interview to ecclesiastical figures [who also wield power in respect to censorship], as well as a range of other episodes that take on more weight when presented within the framework of a day of censorship.

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Zavattini and television (1961)1

Context Ever the attentive cultural observer, the scope of Zavattini’s interventions could not, and did not, exclude television from his gaze. Ever since the 1930s, he never excluded visual culture, as a key expression of popular culture. In 1961, he was interviewed by the communist daily L’Unità, to join the ongoing public discussion about television. Could it improve? Could it become useful? Could it add something valuable to Italian culture and current affairs? These were his questions. It was neither the first time nor the last that he critiqued the use of television, but went on to consider its underused potential. While acknowledging its power as a medium and questioning the choices made by its managers, he also pointed out the responsibility of the Italian intellectual class, looked down from its ivory tower on popular culture and television, in a form of misplaced elitism. There were notable exceptions, especially Umberto Eco, who gave a paper in a conference on aesthetics, soon after television was introduced to Italy in 1954. There were also sociologists interested in this growing phenomenon, such as Francesco Alberoni, designers such as Gillo Dorfles. For Zavattini, it was a wasted opportunity, to limit the scope of television to newscasts which were blatant government propaganda, and to highly successful shows like the pioneering quiz show Lascia e raddoppia, (Double or Quits?)

1

Zavattini, Unità, 6 May 1961, in Neorealismo ecc., 1979, 173–4. Umberto Eco, ‘Appunti sulla televisione’ (1961), later, published in Eco, Apocalittici e integrati, Milan: Bompiani, 1964, 317–57. Eco acknowledged the hypnotic effect of television, while also pointing out its potential as a site for experimentation, as well as its impact in news reportage, bringing the visual into the homes of ordinary people. In his conclusion, he thought that the rise and success of television could develop a complementary new culture, within a broadly televisual society, alongside a book-based society, and its negative aspects could be counterbalanced by educational programmes. Pier Paolo Pasolini was more pessimistic, in this, no different from Guy Debord, not underestimating its mesmerizing effects on the viewing public, which, by the early 1970s, were to contribute to what had become, in Pasolini’s view, homogenized capitalist society.

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launched in 1955, and presented by Mike Bongiorno. As one historian has noted, ‘Italy was hooked’.2 As a former publishing director and pioneer of pre-war Italian mass publishing, Zavattini could see that this was not an inevitability. Although he didn’t put it in these terms, but for the screenwriter television was a promising site for change within the public sphere, towards a greater sense of responsibility, citizenship and social conscientization, by widening participation to public discourse.

Text [Zavattini] The potential of television should be realized, in terms of developing its function as an information provider. By this, I don’t mean having longer newscasts, in the form they take today, often consisting, as they do, in biased reporting. No, I am talking about broadening its view to include major human events and contemporary debates which are taking place in the public sphere. Television should connect with as many events as possible, since each one involves direct participation, and, I would add, even physical participation, in what is happening in the world. That is democracy. Yet television is not, but should be, a medium which reflects popular participation and control over all aspects of human life. Of course it should be present on playing fields, for even sport is a vital activity, but also in Parliament, in the courts of law, where justice is administered in the name of the people, and therefore, since it is technically feasible to do so, there is no reason why it should not be administered before the eyes of the people.3 The people should have physical access to Parliament, when matters of general interest are discussed, so that the people can verify through their own eyes and ears how those whom they have chosen to represent them actually behave. The people should be present in discussions between worker unions and business unions, and present where the social forces that give life to the national economy are in contest, where strikes occur, outside the factories, and also inside the factories. [Interviewer] Up to now, the debate has always been about the attitude of national television broadcasting and its directors towards intellectuals. Don’t you think there is another angle to this issue, and namely, the attitude of intellectuals towards television?4

Foot, The Archipelago. Italy since 1945, 116. Eco later published an article about Mike Bongiorno, ‘Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno’, in Diario Minimo, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1964. 3 Recently, in Italy and elsewhere, parliamentary sessions are televised. 4 What the interviewer is implying is the intellectuals’ negative view of popular culture, including visual culture, at the time. 2

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[Zavattini] First of all, let’s be honest. It is not only a question of culture being kept out, but also of intellectuals5 choosing to ignore television. Italian culture should be animated by a greater desire to know and by a desire to shape television broadcasting, by engaging with television and using it as an expressive medium, since this is the only way it can reach the whole of its audience which coincides with the entire nation. Culture needs to make use of television broadcasting to connect with ordinary people and learn how to express itself differently. And not just for merely practical reasons. Culture can renew itself, by having to communicate with everyone and having to simplify its message and overcome the historic Italian barrier between specialized culture, academic culture, and popular culture. When there is talk of conquering a language of television, as Sergio Pugliese has been saying, we should expand the narrow sense of this statement.6 It is not only a question of inventing new technical means of expression, which is not difficult. It is something which can be worked out in practice. What matters is that culture can express its problematics on television, its internal debate, and do so without dumbing down issues. For this would mean dumbing down the viewer too, providing a surrogate of truth. No, what is required is research and investigation, and conveying clearly that which is obscure. To do so is integral to the very concept of culture.

By ‘intellectuals’, Zavattini usually referred to writers, novelists, who often wrote articles in the press, rather than media specialists, coming to the problem from the point of view of design and communication or sociological studies. 6 Sergio Pugliese (1908–1965) was a writer, playwright, journalist and broadcaster, who worked for eiar, the Italian state radio, between the wars, and, after the fall of fascism, one of the mandarins of the rai, Italian state television. Pugliese considered television the perfect site for televised theatre. Cf. Enrico Menduni, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 85 (2016), cited in http:​/​/www​​.trec​​cani.​​it​/en​​ciclo​​pedia​​/serg​​io​-​pu​​glies​​e_(Di​ziona​rio-B​iogra​fico)​, 25 July 2020. 5

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The Newspaper for Peace (1961)1

Context In 1961, Zavattini proposed to the publisher Arnoldo Mondadori, a fortnightly newspaper, to be sixty-four pages in extent, focused on peace, at a time the theme was particularly topical, under the constant threat of the Cold War, a pressing issue for Zavattini who had been awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, together with the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, in 1955. Zavattini’s proposal was that leading Italian intellectuals of the period – including Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Vittorini and Salvatore Quasimodo – would be engaging with the general public, through their articles and field research. He sought to repeat a participative approach. The readers would be encouraged to correspond with famous writers, a framework he devised and put into practice in the early 1950s, to launch the illustrated magazine Epoca, which immediately became a runaway success. The formula could be replicated, under the general editorship of Aldo Capitini, an academic and theorist, and a major figure within the peace movement in Italy, who was also a person friend. This highly topical publishing project met with funding problems, yet, the following year, the idea grew into a documentary that did make it into production, Zavattini’s The Newsreel for Peace.

Text Dear [Arnoldo] Mondadori, You have intuited very quickly, as is your custom, the ethical and technical shape of my project and I do hope that we can come to an agreement for an enterprise which, (vouchsafed by the reputation of the publisher, and of editorin-chief [Aldo Paladini], and by the contributors, those ‘regular’ names I listed for you) would be both ethically praiseworthy and timely, on a national and 1

Zavattini, Letter to Alberto Mondadori, 7 November 1961, in Cirillo, Una, cento, mille lettere, in Zavattini. Opere, Milan: Bompiani, 2005, 516–19.

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international scale. Let me go over the main aspects of this Newspaper for Peace, emphasizing that you and Aldo Capitini would obviously have the right to make any changes you see fit. The format I am suggesting is a fortnightly publication printed in offset litho, since you made the point that the other printing process would give poor results. The format would be the same as Oggi, or Gente, or abc, the extent would be sixty-four pages. I considered a weekly, which would have more drive, and constantly on the heels of events, but then I recognized the major difficulties it would face, as well as the organizational risks that would follow. The paper’s overall character, covering every angle, derives from the work of eight or nine regular contributors, writers who are going to engage systematically with the public, through correspondence. The public can become involved in an epistolary dialogue with them on any topic within the paper’s remit: combining in a single analysis political and cultural events, but also events of the mind and of the heart, carried out in many ways, and pursuing an overall objective. The novelty of the paper, from a spiritual point of view, consists in the firm belief that today the peace theme subsumes any other theme, and therefore forces everyone to address it, both practically and philosophically, and with such urgency and unwavering intention, that it requires us to act on a solution we have already identified or to find one through research.2 The public consists in so-called ordinary people. Field research cannot, at this stage, be limited to the results attained by the intellectuals in their work, but is itself participative research, and part and parcel of the exchange, feeding into it directly. The ensuing dialogue will challenge the researchers to think outside their specialized area and challenge the public to go beyond a purely emotional level of response. If I am confident of the success of Il Giornale della pace, it is because, dear Arnoldo, readers won’t be faced with the lead editorials of the dailies, that are no better than propaganda, ultimately, but confronted with a rally of the soul, which won’t make them feel excluded from lofty debate. We could also call this broadsheet a persuasive Bulletin of Conscience, to help us extricate ourselves from the confusion that tends to turn into an ongoing alienation from our obligations and our rights. At the present time, there are several peace marches taking place in our country. There are signs of change, then, but all of us, including first and foremost, Capitini, the man behind the initiative, have come to the conclusion that they should be coordinated around a rational analysis, one which has been worked through, and which pivots on an understanding of the world, with its correlated economic, political and spiritual needs. Such correlations will emerge from self-analysis and from the cultural debate sparked off by the editors of The Newspaper for Peace, individuals who will be carefully selected by Capitini. 2

The Cold War is the underlying context of ‘peace’ at the time, not a generic theme, but the intellectual challenge of dealing with the constant threat of war and annihilation of the human race, in the media and through social and political activism.

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These editors will also act as go-betweens with other public intellectuals and with the public, since the general or particular issues that arise from intense correspondence is going to prompt the contributing editors to follow up with queries on data, with further elucidation, with proposals aimed at this or that scientist, philosopher or politician, while, at the same time, stepping back from the research material to interpret it through a personal perspective and experience. Someone could object that some big political directive could, from one day to the next, totally demobilize our tension.3 I disagree. And moreover, it is also clear that we are going to witness a lull in international tension, due to the Cold War or, for short periods, the illusion of its ending. Above all, it is possible that there are going to be more ‘Monacos’ more or less extended in time, but that the task ahead is to generate widespread dissent against war, against violence, which not even nuclear disarmament will succeed in making redundant. The next challenge is to repulse the threat of nuclear weapons. Less immediate, but no less exhilarating, is the task of ensuring that the peace and war problematic be at the top of the agenda. Capitani, however, is far better equipped to explain to you, in greater depth than I could ever do, the rationale to justify doing The Newspaper for Peace, because his expert knowledge is allied with his passion. I wish to add that it seems to me that this fortnightly publication would not require a major editorial involvement, in terms of staff or other related aspects, simply because four-fifths of its content is filled by the contributors’ correspondence. I must insist on this ratio, since it constitutes not only a question of form, but also of content which will hinge completely on this structure. One-fifth should be filled by an appendix of sorts, a packed and concise news bulletin, containing updates as to what is going on internationally, in terms of the peace movement, new initiatives, tangible interventions, different angles from which to assault the problem, and new dimensions which can only result in ‘living’ peace, by grafting oneself onto its more subtle flows in Italy and further afield. The periodical is a vehicle for reading, but I can see no reason why it should not be illustrated, showing the faces of people, including their identity; I’m thinking of the protagonists and organizers of events. It should also include any other image that forces us to look at reality with all the courage that this requires. I’m serious. No empty rhetoric intended. The editor-in-chief can also keep up a correspondence with readers, counting as one of the nine or ten or eleven, and participate, as well as being the material and inspiring referent for the editorial team and standing for its open-ended 3

By November 1961, when this letter was written, the world had witnessed the end of the Algerian war on 8 January, on 15 April Cuban resistance to the us attempted coup, known as ‘The Bay of Pigs Crisis’, which threated to escalate into a nuclear war, and the erection of the Berlin Wall on 13 August. There had been a steady build-up towards creating a peace movement in Europe and the United States, in the late 1950s. Meantime, both Soviet Union and United States were carrying out more and more nuclear tests.

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editorial line, while also allowing individual contributors complete freedom, and even encouraging them to go further, since the real strength and benefit of the publication is its dialectical exchange of agreement and disagreement. My ambition concerning this periodical, dear Arnaldo, is its launch. Nothing more. My only recompense will be to know that I will have been the one who started it. Capitini says that I should be one of the regular contributors. I am not so sure that I have the competence for this type of correspondence. As for payment, if I were in charge of the budget, I wouldn’t offer contributors more than 100,000 liras per issue, demanding at least three pages of material. Clearly, these contributors should take on the task in the spirit of a unique opportunity in their lives with an equally unique commitment, while fully appreciating the honour conferred upon them by their involvement, as a bridge between themselves and reality, and, taken in this light, seeing it as an unprecedented adventure.

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Interview The confession film (1961)

Context Zavattini discussed this project for a biographical non-fiction film, of a kind he referred to as a ‘confessional film’, entitled The Guinea Pig, in a long interview about another project which was being produced at the time of the interview: The Mysteries of Rome. This was typical of him, to be launching one project, while working on another, each quite different from the other. It wanted to seize, however, a rare opportunity to shadow a famous celebrity and short-lived film actor, and carry out in-depth, testimonial, research on his life, after the actor, Maurizio Arena, had fallen out of favour with the industry. Here, at last, was a chance to expose the failings of the industry. He would do it differently, by comparison with what he had done in We Women, Bellissima, cited in his interview, and You Maggiorani, which he doesn’t mention, though in this interview, Zavattini tells Bolzoni that his plan envisages Lamberto Maggiorani, the lead actor in Bicycle Thieves, meeting up with Arena, which shows that this project has its roots in his earlier work. His other agenda was encapsulated in the question: how does a real person, not an imagined one, face a crisis like this? The only way to know would be to spend a great deal of time with the person in question. Consequently, Zavattini launched the new project with the help of his son Marco Zavattini, and of Dino P. Partesano, a young filmmaker who was also directing an episode of The Mysteries of Rome and who was chosen to direct The Guinea Pig, as well as Arena’s full cooperation.1 The field research took weeks, and months of shadowing Maurizio Arena. Another notable feature was the plan to replace the classic three-part dramatic structure with an on-screen, autobiographic diary of the main character, a real person reflecting on his life and actions, far more

1

The following text is drawn from an interview conducted by Francesco Bolzoni. Cf. Francesco Bolzoni, ‘Dei Film Inchiesta, Autobiografico e Di Altro’, in I misteri di Roma, Rome: Cappelli, 1963, later in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 242–57.

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extensive and ambitious in scope than the idea of actresses being themselves in We Women.

Text [Franceso Bolzoni] In its best expressions, Neo-realism was already a case study in Italy, of a city, a social class, a person: [Antonio] Ricci, Umberto D., Maddalena Cecconi.2 [Zavattini] This time, the person has a name and a surname; this is a significant progression. I am facing someone I seek to understand – a man – in terms of his actions and motivations; a man who is willing to submit to a difficult experiment, because he has become aware of himself; a man who enables me to understand specific phenomena of our time: success, money, vanity. I use fiction to combat fiction. This man, who is going to be at the centre of an investigative film is the actor Maurizio Arena. How am I going to make the film? I aim to use Arena as my guinea pig, a willing, cooperative guinea pig, who is convinced that an analysis of his life and career is worthwhile. In cinema, you need to forge alliances. Sometimes I succeed in this and sometimes I don’t. In this instance, I can count on a smart young director.3 He is willing to listen. He agrees with me about adopting a flexible, cinematic form, since old formulas won’t lead to new cinema, and the final result is bound to be mannered, when what is necessary is an approach which is flexible enough to be adapted to the live material in hand. This is how I visualize the investigative film: Arena is sitting in an armchair. The director convinces him to talk about his life without secrets or pretence. Here is Arena making love to the princess. Here is the working-class neighbourhood where he grew up. Here is his encounter with cinema; and, with a break, here is Maggiorani who speaks to him. Maggiorani, humiliated and depressed by cinema. Here is Arena’s mother, and what she thinks of such a son; a mother who never judges him. Here are his expenses; the Alfa Romeo Giulietta sportscars, handmade shirts and the debts with the tailor; how many thousands of liras does he have to shell out for these shirts? The two levels of the actor’s career, his private life, the official story and the story of his defeat, are deconstructed in front of our very eyes. [Bolzoni] This project reminds me of J. L. Moreno’s group psychodrama. According to this American sociologist, a worker’s every resistance to factory life is caused by his insufficient knowledge of reality, or a limited understanding of other people’s motives and of their behaviour which is influenced by inflexible Bolzoni references three fictional characters: Antonio Ricci, the protagonist of Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D. Ferrari, the lead character in Umberto D., and Maddalena Cecconi, the protagonist of Bellissima. 3 Dino B. Partesano. 2

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factory dictates. In Arena’s case, his failure is caused by his struggle to adapt a well-established personality, genuine, but basic, a handsome streetwise youth, to the complex requirements of the acting profession and its brazen exploitation by the film industry. The cure Moreno has put forward in cases of maladjustment is psychorepresentation, that is to say, on acting out one or more scenes, based on the problem under scrutiny and played by the people affected, who exchange roles and end up identifying with what affects their own, and other people’s, behaviour. Moreno, along with an entire branch of American human relations, claim that, by the end of the psycho-representation, the amateur actors are rewarded by a general sense of enjoyment. Is the investigative film centred on a man not too close, perhaps, to this kind of psychoanalytic therapy? [Zavattini] Far be it from me to ferret around someone’s personality, for the purposes of a psychoanalytical experiment which smacks of sensationalism. What interests me first and foremost is a dialogue with Arena about episodes of his life, to convey the private, secret, layer of defeat in the man. There are so many things which one never says to anyone else. Once I wanted to make a film in which nothing happened. But beneath that apparent nothing, a thousand thoughts went through one’s head, in which you judge yourself and others. Some attitudes are caused by thoughts of this kind which never come to light. This is precisely the reason why I want to go looking for them in this investigative film about a man. If I could show the thoughts of someone casting a vote, if I were able to separate out the external element (the material action of voting) from the internal (the impressions at that time, before, and after), I would be achieving something important. This autobiographical approach would help all of us express ourselves differently, outside the norm.4 Only too often, human beings act as if they were an instrument, repeating again and again what they ignore in themselves. Through a reflective diary, they would come to understand that their relation to the world is influenced, determined almost, by a series of common places, and I am not referring to the vested interests people share. These drives need to be re-examined under a new light that can only come into existence from a total willingness to be open. In the background, is the city, family life, and other people. How anonymous individuals who engage in the life of the common good, engage in civil and political life resorting to the exhausted side of their nature, would be enriched, if only they drew from what is most private and jealously held within themselves. So much would come to the fore, even dreadful aspects. Think of something terrible: war. There are many who consider war an option. For many, it has already started. The statement of fact that war has not yet broken out is, as far as they are concerned, beside the point. Such people busy themselves preparing for war. In the face of such a situation,

4

The phrase is in italics in the Italian interview.

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how could we not feel obliged to explore the hidden side of individuals and to investigate the way they think, which hides a passive, even fatalist acceptance of the possibility of war? I would like to document, from my point of view, at least, the unofficial dimension of a person who is, after all, still part of a collectivity. Individual and society are two sides of the same coin. Just as the earth revolves around the sun, and around itself, I feel that I move around myself, while also mingling with the collective. Such dynamics need to find a unitary principle within this investigative film. Any analysis of an individual would perforce be linked to an analysis of the collective. This is the thinking behind the investigative film. There is a specific scale of values in the research-based film, depending on the degree of ethical and civic participation. You cannot betray the real with investigative filmmaking. There is nothing worse than preparing for a cinema of truth, from a state of conditioning, while remaining in that state. In such a case, the research-based film would be nothing more than a mystification. One could err in artistic judgement, yes, but not to miss the point, in terms of human relations, since the investigative film, first and foremost, is a test in ethics. Later on, as the work develops, the material will fall into a shape, since we always tend to name things. One’s constant impulse, as an author of an investigative film, is the need for authenticity. This exacts no small effort. It means that the filmmaker is going to be under exceptional pressure for having adopted an unprecedented creative and production process. If he does not cultivate humility and patience in himself, nothing good will come of it. These two qualities are like the glue you need to combine intelligence and technique. They give the filmmaker the strength to hold back from the object and the person, while not pushing him to find a solution to problems which, having recourse to the imaginary, are bound to emerge. Investigative films are demanding, especially on the level of political commitment, because this one is bound to incorporate a critique, just as there is bound to be someone who will try and foil the project. As the need for knowledge grows in all of us, the enquiry will shift to other areas and the ethical stance of the authors will grow subtler. The filmmakers who specialize in this type of cinema, even the best among them, are still being judgemental. Whereas, there is a pressing need for constant two-way communication, entirely different from the top-down approach of the fable film and of some investigative films. I go and interview a man. When we are face to face, I am unable to maintain distance and unable to feel complicit. It is not right that I should look into his life from the outside. I am also a part of reality, just as he is. My character is right in front of me, but why am I here? Why have I come to interview him? This insight and its consequences on me and on the medium I use to express my ideas, produce a sudden widening of horizons, a new type of diary form. The old system of meeting other people and talking with them is exhausted. We have

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learned that we are constantly present to others, and it this continuity that I need to examine, study, understand. [Bolzoni] Some psychologists claim that the more our society becomes industrialized, the more the need for intimacy grows. People are desperate for intimacy. But even if we accept this at face value, in front of the camera, of the spotlights, of the voices of the film crew, can ordinary people express themselves completely? Won’t they respond with that part of them that is on the surface, the part which is ephemeral, and least taxing? [Zavattini] Nothing is inert. People who do not talk simply don’t exist. You will never fail to touch another human being. Naturally, the director’s sensitivity is key. Some facts speak for themselves, as for example, in the case of a person who is ill, bed-bound. But there are some human subtleties which only a person with specific investigative abilities can glean. A theme can be tackled in many ways. A man arrives in Termini railway station. One filmmaker stops to consider him for a minute, another for two, yet a third for three and so on. Another filmmaker will walk around him. Yet another takes the time to speak to him. The difference may be down to artistic intuition as to which mode of engagement is going to make the shot resonate with human qualities. The actions and the thoughts of the man will come together, in the build-up of sequences, and cinema, after telling so many fairy tales, will describe only the diary of a man; just one diary among many. Autobiography, which is not to be confused with the norm that is rife in so much literature – I am referring to authentic autobiography, in-depth autobiography – is better than the kind of commentaries about life which are written too late, after the event. Traditional cinematic drama is going to fall apart. There will cease to be a slow beginning, a crescendo, and a spectacular ending. It will be replaced by the making of a person in front of the screen; someone who is making an effort to understand what he is and is not doing, who is trying to gain an insight about his real condition, in relation to other people. [Bolzoni] Zavattini, do you think this autobiographical impetus will find a home in cinema? [Zavattini] The need for biography will grow more and more. Poets, who are already well-versed in looking at what is going on inside, but who have never had the courage or opportunity to do so, as a major part of their work, on a grand plane, on Telstar’s plane, will begin to do so. So far, they have settled for the book or the confession of a fictional character. To openly make a confession is altogether different. I resist the use of the word confession, for it implies a relation between us and the Divine, while this new impulse is essentially earthly, secular, and almost scientific. This anxiety, this intention, is born from an inner impulse which, however much we attempt to put it into words, turns into

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something completely rational. What is lacking is the scream, a turning in on oneself. I am not referring to a dialogue with the Divine, which, to a large extent, repudiates other human beings. What is missing is that splendid and precious moment which has been experienced, for centuries, again and again. By the word confession, I am referring to an absolute dialogue. Were I to speak of, rather, a relationship with myself, I would not belittle it as a sentimental, passionate, painful experience, however legitimate, however much borne of necessity it might be. When I speak of a relationship with myself, there is an obligation to enter a different kind of linguistic expression. I am not suggesting that there should be no talk of the Divine. But, if to say the least, we are bringing the Divine into it, then let us consider how it might be related to everyday actions, to what actually counts, in my everyday behaviour. Nothing, not even the most intangible matters, will be excluded from the investigative film. A poet might say: ‘There was snow on a tree, a crow fluttered its wings, some snow fell on my face. That morning my mood changed.’ This presupposes others, for the part stands for the whole. I am certain that even a humble person will have interesting and useful things to tell us. There are some who reach a level of truth, of understanding, and become artists. In this way, the veil between art and life will be torn asunder and the recognition of the huge contribution individuals make to history will grow. History ends once a second. Millions of thoughts cross my mind, most of them transient. But thoughts, we have said, decide actions. We are heroes, saints, and rogues a hundred times a day. All this should not be disregarded, to languish in the subconscious. So much talk about alienation. One way to fight it is to analyse it in its constituent parts, exploring one’s own alienation, for a start. If I refuse to try to understand myself, that is when I alienate myself. The investigative film is an ideal tool, in this sense. It constitutes the first step in getting closer to the diary form I care about. [Bolzoni] In what way are your future projects a development of the investigative film? [Zavattini] The poet Blas de Otero has invited artists to speak openly and challenge themselves to forge a continuous relation with others. This invitation is very optimistic, and I endorse it.5 This is not to say that it is so easy to express ourselves, even though we possess the means to communicate inside ourselves, for there are severe obstacles which introspection can help remove. The ultimate purpose of filming the biography of a man, of Maurizio Arena in The Guinea Pig, which will be tackled with extreme honesty, substituting false errors of judgement with actual errors, those made by a man during his life, is to shed light on a sociological phenomenon, after removing other obstacles to an open communication: the ephemeral nature of the star system that emerges 5

Blas de Otero (1916–1979) was a poet who wrote about social concerns, and a communist who spoke out against fascist Spain.

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from a specific case history. Take a central theme, the family, for instance. You could develop it in several directions. Five families and the five cities they live in. The first stage would be to get to know them and single out their habit patterns. The second stage would entail a critique. I could choose a communist director and a Catholic one. Their analysis would be different. By comparing their response, you could chart an accurate diagram of these families, showing what distinguishes them as well as their shortcomings. There is such a need for an open dialogue in this country. If you dare put a question to people in the street, no matter how innocuous and straightforward it might be, you will be taken by surprise. If they are quick-witted enough, they are going to take shelter in a woolly response, as shallow, as, quite possibly, untrue. Consequently, one task for the investigative film, regardless of whether it veers towards critical biography, towards broad themes, or towards autobiography, is to shake up the general public, and promote a greater desire for knowledge. This is how to destroy existential alienation and the inability to communicate, which result from an inability to speak frankly with one another, in the sense implied by Otero’s verse.

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The confession film Correspondence (1962)1

Context As Ansano Giannarelli remarked, Zavattini was not a systematic theorist, yet a theorist he was nonetheless. It is just that one finds elements of his vision where one might least expect to find them, for example, as in this instance, embedded in a private letter to a film director, Alessandro Blasetti, with whom Zavattini had worked before and after the war, contributing to the screenplay of Fabiola, and, most notably, writing the story, treatment and screenplay for First Communion. Here are some revealing points about the confessional mode as a form of personal cinema, incidental, as it happens, within a letter about the constant battle he had to fight, ever since his famous partnership with De Sica, to fight for public recognition of his authorship as a film writer, which, in interviews given by De Sica or Blasetti, was always underplayed. The second text is also embedded in a letter, this one addressed to Enzo Muzii, filmmaker and associate, in which Zavattini announces the deal with Dino De Laurentiis to launch Zavattini’s confessional mode personal cinema in 1962, through a series of autobiographies. The Guinea Pig was to feature in the series, as well as the ethnographer and writer Danilo Dolci, an extraordinary figure and pioneer of testimonial literature in 1950s Italy.2

Zavattini, Letter to Alessandro Blasetti, 30 July 1962, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, 234. 2 Danilo Dolci was a courageous reformer who trained as an architect in post-war Italy, but then became in practice an ethnographer. He worked in the village of Nomadelfia, at Fossoli, a former Nazi concentration camp. He then left northern Italy to live and work among the poor in a small village in Sicily. Through his personal efforts, a community was formed where there was none. Education, housing and new infrastructure were created, in an ongoing struggle to improve living conditions, while at the same time carrying out field research to document the situation and publishing books about it, namely the extraordinary testimonial literature of Banditi a Partinico (1955) ‘Thieves in Partinico’ and Inchiesta a Palermo (1956). Maurizio Arena had been a successful actor in the late 1950s, attracting attention for his role in Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful) (1957), directed by Dino Risi. 1

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What is interesting is not the scheme itself, which never took off, hardly surprising given the panorama of mainstream Italian cinema, but that in 1962, Zavattini was developing his theories about a new mode of cinema, and putting them into practice in the fieldwork with his guinea pig, Maurizio Arena, for a film about him, entitled La cavia or The Guinea Pig (1962). Zavattini finished his first scenario for this type of film on 8 June 1959.3 The difference was that in 1959, he had fiction in mind, in 1962, non-fiction. He returned to the early idea of fiction in several rewrites of Diary of a Woman, the last of 1971.4

Text 1 Dear Blasetti,5 How can I tell you off while at the same time succeed in not offending you, not humiliating you, since you don’t deserve it? You tell me. We were getting along just fine, dear Blasetti, since I let you know, a year ago, that I had no intention of collaborating in your film on the ego and explaining the reasons for my refusal. [...] Everything was going so well, until you somehow let drop, in a roundabout kind of way, that the title of the story for Me First (one of the three films I blame you for not making) was your idea. Dear Blasetti, I gave you such proof of my friendship, by not having a violent reaction. I immediately objected that that title was unequivocably mine, just as mine in every syllable is the whole fable. Such an unexpected reaction of yours belongs to those moments in which Blasetti the director, Blasetti the artist, the Blasetti who filmed Sun [1929], 1860 [1934], right up to your latest television work, the Blasetti of such clear, prolific, cinematic vocation, who, as I often say, allows the other Blasetti – the lawyer – whom I really dislike, to take the upper hand; he is the one who has a short memory, the one who is prepared to write rivers of ink to transform Zavattini’s twentieth-century ideas into a nineteenthcentury sonnet, for example. Vittorio De Sica interviewed by Giulio Mazzocchi, ‘Domande a Vittorio De Sica per Un mondo nuovo’, L’Europa letteraria, vi, no. 42, May 1965, cited in Zavattini, Uomo, vieni fuori! Soggetti per il cinema editi e inediti, edited by Orio Caldiron, Rome: Bulzoni, 2006, 321. 4 §1 [Zavattini’s Introduction], La cavia (1962), text dated 30 November 1962, in Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti!, Milan: Bompiani, 1979, 188–9. This section, dated 30 November 1962, was moved in Caldiron’s 2006 edition to form an endnote. Cfr. Zavattini, Uomo, vieni fuori! Soggetti per il cinema editi e inediti, edited by Orio Caldiron, Rome: Bulzoni, 2006, 245; 252–3. §2 La cavia (1962), text dated 13 April 1962. Because it forms an excellent introduction or preface to the scenario, this edition follows Mazzoni’s editorial choice in Zavattini (1979), reinstating the opening paragraphs, but distinguishing the two texts belonging to different periods, by signposting with paragraph numbers. Cfr. Zavattini, Basta coi soggetti!, 189–94. 5 Zavattini, ibidem, 234. 3

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Must I really remind you of all the themes I suggested, as ways of expressing the self, the self, the self, dramatically; which you admired so much, when we were or were not working on a project? Would you like me to remind you of my radio talk on the self-inflicted slap? Or of the confessions I inaugurated with directors and actors in ’45? Or of the article you liked so much about Z preparing the Third World War? Or of the prelude of ten or twenty confessions, which eventually formed the basis of the story of the two protagonists, imposters of their own ego, of Me First (Prima io)? Or of when I planned to make a feature-length film out of The Conference? I have been developing these ideas for years and years, always on the same theme, broached in a variety of ways and different techniques, valid even today and which, in a more reflective mode, along the lines of an investigative film, manifest in Diary of a Man (Diario di un uomo), still waiting to go into production for four years now. Even Muzii mentioned it in L’Unità, more than two years ago. This is the project I was going to do with De Sica directing it, but which poor Zavattini himself plans to act out and direct. Even public confessions I have mentioned to you fit into this picture. These are the point of arrival of the investigative non-fiction film mode; the outcome of a mutual awareness of responsibility, hour by hour, minute by minute which marks the end of metaphysical direct or indirect responsibility. But let us set aside these extreme consequences of my poetic, of which you can already identify clear signs even in the early Hypocrite ’43 (Ipocrita ’43).6 Not that I am referring to this particular level of discourse, but to all the gags, the creative inventions, dramatizations – as varied, as they were numerous – with which I crowded our discussions, our correspondence, our collaborative projects, on a far more amusing and popular level. For these reasons, you really do need to recognize that the way you approached me last year, and even worse, the way you approached me this year could hardly please me. I haven’t consulted my diaries to say all this, but if you wish, we can consult a few together. As far as this letter is concerned, my conscience is the best document. And, who knows? Perhaps you will come to realize that even some of your public statements about First Communion come across as far less friendly than you might believe. The battle waged between us, during the screenwriting stage, was always fought on what the relative emphasis should be within the film.7 And you didn’t The reference is to the founding idea in Zavattini’s writing, published in book form with this title, by Giovanni Schweiwiller and later Valentino Bompiani. Zavattini, Ipocrita 1943, in Zavattini, Opere 1931–1986, 275–310. Sections were published in 1944 and 1945, and the complete text in 1955. 7 This statement is unclear, unless one knows that Blasetti pressurized Zavattini to make changes to the screenplay, which the screenwriter resisted. In his private diary, he wrote: ‘I’m not going to give in. Either he accepts everything I do in the scenario as is, or I’m not letting him have the story.’ Cf. Io. Un’autobiografia, 160–1. The friction between director and writer emerges in the unpublished production papers. Cf. the unpublished typescript with handwritten annotations by Zavattini (Zavattini, Prima comunione, Screenplay, acz, 6

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want to add your name to First Communion, which you considered entirely mine, whereas I wanted you to, arguing that, as I told you at the time, you had made a contribution, giving more weight to certain elements, which I would have expressed more subtly. Then, during the editing stage, I did my utmost to limit as much as possible the heavy-handed treatment, and, quite exceptionally, you allowed me to work freely on the cutting, in this sense. Right? Subtlety? What subtlety? You directors, even in exceptional cases like yours, that is, of someone who is profoundly respectful of the talent of others, go through some kind of psychological transformation, such that you have a massive memory loss, as a result of which, just before embarking on a film you want to make, with the help of thirty or forty other people, not only do you forget the person to whom you owe a specific creative debt, but you also, quite arbitrarily, contest a title which, for God’s sake, could be no one else’s but the undersigned, succinct and expressive as it is. And worlds apart from the kind of moralism one would find in the short stories by Canon Thouar.8 I have never denied you a single shot from any of your films, neither directly nor indirectly. So please try and be equally respectful in my regard. You know full well that I don’t go scrounging around for ideas. On the contrary, I am the one who liberally spreads his ideas, however slight they might be, and, furthermore, allow friends and strangers alike to be involved in my work from inception to completion. I never hold back. One of my favourite pastimes, which, regrettably, I cannot change, because it is ingrained in my nature, is to narrate at one minute past ten what I was thinking at ten.

2 Dear Enzo,9 I am letting you know without delay that if all goes to plan, I have negotiated in a single sitting with De Laurentiis the first autobiography. I can reveal to you that [Danilo] Dolci is the subject; there is also the film about Arena, to Sog. R 45). He writes in the margin that the story began as a confession: ‘The truth is that the story began as a confession and now the voice and the rest is an intrusion.’ His notes reveal the disagreement between director and Zavattini over the emphasis, mentioned in the letter. In his working papers, appended to the screenplay (Zavattini acz, Sog. R 45/3, fol. 59), he asks: ‘what is the organizing principle behind the voice?’ [‘qual’è lo spiedo della voce?’] 45/3, fol. 63: ‘Voice works (or imagination) when it goes into a higher pitch, not static, not moralizing. [Then] it ruins everything. It’s unbearable and destroys the pace. Everything, if clear, and here, if the voice and the imagination are at the right rhythm or not. To change the voice from how it is now would ruin the film, making it preachy, boring. Questions: the voice. Do we need the voice? What is its purpose? Who is it directed at? Carloni or us? Don’t the events explain everything? If so, what is its purpose?’ 8 Pietro Thouar, Racconti per giovinetti, Florence: Bemporad, 1890. Pietro Thouar (1809– 1861) was an educator and writer from Florence who wrote moralizing educational books for children. But he was married, not a prelate. 9 Zavattini, Letter to Enzo Muzii, 12 September 1962, in Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, 237–8.

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be directed by [Luigi] Di Gianni. And what is more, if the first three do well – and we won’t have to wait for their release to know – we shall make more, also informed by the greatest creative freedom, which, as you might guess, I requested as a precondition. I shall save you any further comment, since you yourself will appreciate what a great victory it is and to what extent the broader picture can emerge, perfecting itself as the films develop, something you have already touched on. The deal took place nine days ago and the contract should arrive tomorrow. In any case, these autobiographies are a point of arrival, not the point of arrival; I would like to tackle and exhaust the problem and the step change this is. These films can herald a call to ethical responsibility from those who wield power and influence. Among my examples, I have included [Alberto] Moravia and I would think twice before choosing a single orientation exclusively. However, all the subjects must face the viewer with personal themes, hopes or private desperation, to share what have always been mysterious or exclusively literary aspects of their lives, some introverted, others extroverted, others still a combination. You will appreciate the temporal and spatial breadth that is possible, and what a mixed combination of communication we can adopt to establish an equal footing with the general public, one that goes beyond the frigid, unchanging conventions of journalism, so-called objectivity (useful, in other respects, but too far removed from the humble, and, at the same time, cruel commitment of I and You, I and You, I and You; in other words, of a confessional dynamic which contains an alternative which, I think, I was able to explain quite well to Nicolai-Porretta Terme). They published excerpts in the Correspondence pages of L’Unità, but making me sound more like somebody in agreement, than the person who had launched the ideas in the first place.10 Not that serious a problem, admittedly, provided they stand firm on the principle of an alternative, more than I am wont to do; something which demands willpower and uncommon courage.

The reference is to the Porretta Terme International Free Cinema, Mostra internazionale del cinema libero di Porretta Terme, a predecessor of the Pesaro Film Festival. Zavattini had a leading role in establishing Porretta Terme in 1960.

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Interview The Mysteries of Rome (1962–3)1

Context The following interview was originally published in the book I misteri di Roma (1963), within a series edited by the screenwriter Renzo Renzi ‘Dal soggetto al film’ (from scenario to film), building on Zavattini’s 1953 book on Umberto D., which included scenario, screenplay and the seminal extended interview with Michele Gandin, who interviewed Zavattini for months, resulting in the publication of ‘Some Ideas on Cinema’. The book about the non-fiction film I misteri di Roma also includes texts which were deleted in the course of the film’s production. Francesco Bolzoni’s interview covers three related topics: first, a discussion about The Mysteries of Rome, still being made at the time of the interview. Second, it contains a theoretical discussion about Zavattini’s investigative film, intended almost as a dispostif with which to challenge mainstream cinema, or at least change the status of non-fiction and squeeze into it. The third part, revolving around a separate film project, The Guinea Pig, exploring the confessional and diary mode of the investigative film form, has been contextualized and included earlier.

Text [Bolzoni] In many parts of Europe and the United States, many fledgling directors look down on film narrative that is faithful to traditional ‘narrative criteria’ and, the most daring among them, attempt ‘open works’, films without characters or plot.2 Phrases like film-reportage, free cinema, ciné verité, keep cropping up in Francesco Bolzoni, ‘Dei Film Inchiesta, Autobiografico e Di Altro’, in I misteri di Roma, Rome: Cappelli, 1963, later in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 242–57. 2 ‘Open works’ is a cultural reference to Umberto Eco’s book, Opera aperta (1962), translated as Eco, The Open Work, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1989. The relevant essay in that 1

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cultural conversations. Cesare Zavattini, at least in Italy, was the first to speak of the reportage or investigative film ... . Such a method adopting field research makes it possible to collect raw data which would be virtually useless, even to get to know society, without a clear awareness of value and limits, without, in other words, an interpretation.3 [Zavattini] I disagree that the moment of collecting and that of interpretation are separate. Raw data is transformed, even if it is shot from the right rather than from the left; even in the event that it is observed for a shorter or longer period of time; even though it be connected with a soundtrack or not. There any number of possible interpretations of data. Take a film about children. One filmmaker might stress the lyrical aspect, another, the religious, yet another, the ethical. One might frame the children’s faces in gigantic close-ups. Another would opt for a microphone to interview a group of young students. Yet another, after putting them in the frame, would then turn the cine-camera towards himself, and reflect on his own impressions. The approaches to the same subject among filmmakers doing an investigative film will vary; just as varied are the objects of the film enquiry. What matters is allowing the object the space of its own material existence. Don’t consider it a separate object; approach it, rather, with the intention of reaching a greater understanding. The main problem is both of an ethical and civic order, in terms of how much the filmmaker is able to respond to the object. While, in literature and in traditional cinema, the external impulse is less defined, less imminent, by contrast, in the film enquiry, your starting point is a concrete limitation, to the point of becoming almost a practical one. Less invention and more recording. [Bolzoni] ‘Recording’, or to study human nature objectively, character and rules of conduct; a sociologist’s task, whose academic function is to carry out an analysis of society in order to aid its subsequent planning. That is not a filmmaker’s or a novelist’s job. [Zavattini] I hope this desire to know, such focus on human beings, passionate and driven, might translate into an art form. On several occasions, I have naively observed that inevitably art will follow; that it cannot but follow. But even before it can be art, cinema is an object which reveals things, it is a tool which is powered more by method than by inspiration. Early on, it caught us by surprise, then we realized what its technology was capable of; and now we are trying to make use of the image’s power of engaging and interpellating, something which the written word lacks. For the writer has in mind an implicit type of person,

3

collection appeared in the 1950s. This is a section of the long interview by Francesco Bolzoni, ‘Dei film inchiesta, autobiografico e di altro’, in I misteri di Roma, Rome: Cappelli, 1963, later in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 242–57.

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similar to the writer, in certain respects. In literary circles, over time, a specific kind of fictional character was established, an almost abstract figure, no longer someone embodying pulsating reality, made of sweat, sounds, tangible passions. Rather, this figure is an ideal figure with whom the writer enters into a dialogue. The intrinsic, visual, nature of cinema forces the filmmaker to face a tangible reality, so immediate as to shake up the entire creative process. The filmmaker is face to face with a person who has not been abstracted through the centuries, someone who tangibly experiences joy and suffering, someone who may even relate to fashion, ultimately, a concrete human being who forces you to seek an ethical and creative process which is of different kind by comparison with the one intrinsic to literature. [Bolzoni] Some literary critics have also emphasized this ‘delay’ in contemporary Italian literature. In their view, Giorgio Bassani’s excellent novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis ‘draws on specific earlier models and on traditional, humanist literary forms and aims, having exorcized at the outset the foreign bodies of literary reality’.4 Such an aspiration towards formal totality and finish has been rejected a priori by the Mysteries of Rome group. The datum, above all else, is paramount. One might note that this working method, undeniably productive during the developing phase, in preparing the material, risks endangering the final stage. One could achieve a form of knowledge which is scientific, but not artistic. Zavattini’s ability to reinvent the real is well known. However, will the others, your contributors, always know how to make the jump from sciencebased knowledge to art-based knowledge? [Zavattini] Some won’t get past the raw document stage, some will only graze the surface of the material, and others will be capable of enticing it into expressiveness. What matters is that they all adopt an open approach. Once we begin, we’ll draw on our own energy, creativity, and imagination. I don’t reject art. But filmmakers who are interested in a certain idea of cinema don’t consider cinema as something that serves to make life beautiful (which was the prevailing conception at the time of the Renaissance), but as something capable of penetrating life, of getting to know it, and making it known in its contemporary form. You cannot reject natural talent. It would be like abolishing taste, smell, touch. You’re either gifted or you’re not. But we need to change the purpose of art, which is still conceived in terms of a Romantic aesthetic. My contributors and I accept the theory, the illusion, if you will, that art helps us to understand, to shed light on things, not only the excellence of harmony and of formal composition, but also all their other aspects. Therefore, we see art as oppositional, art as provocation, as the knowledge of a city, of a social class, of a person.

4

The novel by Giorgio Bassani, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962) which had just been published.

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[Bolzoni] At the end of October, the editing stage of Mysteries of Rome is well under way. In my latest conversations with Zavattini, he told me he has reviewed a year’s work. The film’s harshest critic is most probably going to be him.5 [Bolzoni] Are you pleased with the young filmmakers? [Zavattini] All fifteen of my contributors are within the parameters of the investigative film, some more so than others. Some of them had already been working in a similar direction to mine, before our discussions, so I didn’t have to spend much time with them. Others, as was to be expected, were less flexible in their first contact with the city. Yet, at some point, they all followed the direction we had established; and now they are ready to take the concept we developed together to its final stage. If I must make any criticism, it would have to be addressed to myself, not to them. I have not been patient enough, a crucial quality in an investigative film, an attribute which opens up certain perspectives and helps resolve challenging technical problems. For example, we didn’t have enough footage on Rome seen from the rooftops. You can’t just choose a rooftop at random and film what is in front of you. Instead, you should find a rooftop that combines perspectival beauty with utility. In other words, you also want a view over an army barracks, or over a prince’s property, over a school, onto places where something is always going on. And once you have found it, you sit and wait. I liked seeing a filmmaker behind a chimney stack, another standing slightly off balance on roof tiles and almost, but not quite, in danger. But unless you only want the public to laugh at that amusing sight, you also need to give it something more, a worthwhile event, I don’t mean journalism, I mean in a poetic sense. That is what was missing in the filming stage: an intervention. [Bolzoni] And precisely the intervention you had insisted on so much which was meant to trigger a psychological process in the people encountered. [Zavattini] Yes. Let’s use a second example to clarify what I mean by the word ‘intervention’. We all know what happened in Via Tasso.6 But it could be represented in a variety of ways. Any documentary filmmaker taken at random would film it in a one-dimensional way. He walks into a room with someone who was incarcerated there in the years of Nazi persecution and gets him to tell him what happened to him. This approach to the tragedy of Via Tasso fails to interest me. What I care about is an interpretation which highlights the collective dimension of the same event. I told the team that there is an apartment block

Zavattini, in Bolzoni, ‘Dei film inchiesta, autobiografico e di altro’, in I misteri di Roma, Rome: Cappelli, 1963, later in Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 249–57. 6 Gestapo headquarters in occupied Rome from 1943 to 1945. The apartment contained a few rooms used as a prison, where members of the Resistance were tortured. 5

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opposite the prison in Via Tasso. I have never been to see it, but I knew it had to be there. The people living in it would lean out of the window, either because they hear a shot ring out or they hear a voice saying: ‘The Pope is in the street.’ The way I envisaged it was that there would be a hundred windows crowded with faces answering our questions from the street, from window to window. Their answers would be liberating the past from its confinement, as the directional mic moved from person to person. It would take days of organization to get such a result. Firstly, it would entail the planning stage to decide the sequence, secondly, one would have to carry out research into the habits of the locals in the apartment block, and thirdly, setting up the shot and filming this great theatre of life. If I must criticize my young collaborators it would be to say that their excessive juvenile enthusiasm led them to think they could get a result in no more than a couple of hours, whereas eight, ten, even sixteen were required. Which is why the episode of Via Tasso only conveys half the emotion it could have had. [Bolzoni] Does The Mysteries of Rome at times have the same shortcomings of a certain kind of documentary film in ‘medium shot’? [Zavattini] The film lacks cinematic empathy in living out the experiences which are filmed. Its language is, from a creative perspective, not fully coherent. I don’t mean to say that my contributors, or at least some of them, are too detached. But there were times when the task of carrying out a specific intervention was overwhelming. I should have given them more freedom to move around the city. But I told them to go to the Food and Agricultural Organization, to Via Tasso, to the slaughterhouse, to locations which I had chosen. This constrained them. Nevertheless, they are now all in a position to make original investigative films, in line with their own personal choices. There can be no doubt that this experience has helped them. [Bolzoni] It is certainly no easy feat to create a new cinematic language. Do The Mysteries of Rome then seem a bit superficial, on balance? [Zavattini] I agree. While this film will make the traditional documentary form seem out of date, it lacks new qualities. In certain sequences, it resembles [Gualtiero Jacopetti’s 1962] Mondo Cane, but with a social critique which that film lacks.7 In fairness, there are certain episodes that are touching: Pentecostals awaiting a miracle; prostitutes bursting into tears and talking about God; a rabbi who kills the white cow for the benefit of his people; the woman who says Mass instead of a priest and who tells us in confidence that she has descended 7

Jacopetti’s documentary was voyeurist and orientalist. In every respect, it represented the kind of film Zavattini disliked with a vengeance. Jacopetti opted for shock, shock and more shock: his montage of sensationalist shots include Yves Klein, the painter, painting his canvases with naked women as paintbrushes, New Yorkers eating insects for dinner, diners tucking into their roast dog at a Taiwanese restaurant and a slaughter of pigs for a feast in in a fancy restaurant, in New Guinea. It was a great commercial success.

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onto earth to sort out the problems of the world; a youth who shows us a flying saucer, nothing extraordinary, mind. It actually looks like a black fly. He also claims Martians have already landed among us. These stories will help to make the film a success, but, as far as the initial intention behind The Mysteries of Rome, a new, personal language is not there. I wouldn’t have been too concerned if there had been a few more garish sequences, provided the film had also included a range of what is technically available, from 8mm to 16mm, which would have produced greater authenticity. At the same time, where the content is intense, the film casts off the onedimensional traditional documentary. I have in mind the sequence of the road construction workers which I cut at the point where it reaches the apex of drama. It would have been a mistake to insist, by letting the rest of the sequence run on. I cut it halfway. My aesthetic choice meant going from the one-dimensional to the three-dimensional. Where the traditional documentary loses intensity, a new form of documentary intervenes in a situation and then moves on. However, that is not to say that Mysteries of Rome is a useless film, since it reveals an unusual city, a city which doesn’t figure in our everyday life. This is not the city we know. The film’s provocative interventions add to what we already to what we think defines the city. Needless to say, I cannot claim to be satisfied with the result, given that I have been thinking about the investigative film model for years. Even the best investigative films, like Chronique d’une été [by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin], seem to belong to a rationale which I am less interested in today, that is, the ‘theory of the neighbour’, il coinquilino. Right now, I would much prefer to broaden such an approach, for example, by staying with the same family for the duration of an entire film, in order to explore its private history from inside. Achieving this would be feasible if the ethical imperative were supported by the technical means. What I meant when I said that ‘we would make a hole in the wall’ [buco nel muro] to observe others through it, was that we could invent the means of expression that events would oblige us to seek out. I have no doubt that a director who really wanted to represent something, say, the life of a family, would be able to create the technical means to get close to his subject matter. It is no secret that the French filmmaker [Mario] Ruspoli built himself a cine-camera to shoot his film about mental patients. We need the technical side of filmmaking to improve to such a point that it can convey our inspiration. I’ll go so far as to say that if we don’t, then we could end up violating the family. This is the kind of error you risk if your technique and your ethics don’t coincide. [Bolzoni] These days we no longer consider technique in terms of idealist aesthetics. Rather, it is viewed as a stage of inspiration. To come back to The Mysteries of Rome, do you think you would shoot it in the same way if you were to go into production tomorrow? [Zavattini] Since we are in the realms of the imaginary, let me press a magic button and backdate the film to 1952. Even if it were no different, it would

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retain its intrinsic justification. I regret not having made Italia mia at the time, for it would have been a significant development. That said, if I were to begin filming The Mysteries of Rome tomorrow, I would drop some of the sequences, however interesting they may be, to focus on some others, because, it goes without saying, the investigative film is becoming more analytical. [Bolzoni] Are you saying that depth is more important than breadth? [Zavattini] Autobiography enables one to truly dig deep into a person. The director, in this case, would refrain from imposing a world on the character, but rather elicit the most autonomy and freedom in space and time and to manipulate the technical means to the needs of the protagonist of the autobiography. I would say to Sartre, for example: Please follow as much as possible your own train of thought. Try not to force it into premeditated chapters. Try to stay with the duration of your thinking process and tackle the way decisions develop.

If the director and the protagonist can work in close collaboration, a range of stylistic choices are made possible: from the objective story, drawing on nineteenth-century narrative, to introspection, from intimate secrets confessed to the camera, to documentary-style narrative. While Sartre is talking, the cinecamera is filming Algeria where it picks up the words of a mother whose son has been killed or a handful of Algerian soil is matched by a handful of French soil. The flexible film form which I plan to use will enable me to close the gap between being and doing, between philosophy and reality, removing the bookish context in which the intellectual envelops the drama, to let the drama speak freely instead, transforming it into a visual event, into an emotional event, into a public event. But Sartre could object: Why do you want to tell me what to do? Without realizing it, dear Zavattini, by acting as a director, you are not helping me, you are coercing me instead. Be quiet. I want to have the courage to speak for an hour in close-up. The things I am about to say are so important that I can do it. You won’t find them in any of the books I have written. I am in front of millions of people and my language is going to be transformed into an open and total confession. No, Zavattini, don’t give me any advice. Allow me to find the language to express myself.

This is how, for the first time, a man could appear in all his complexity in front of millions of viewers. [Bolzoni] Such a theme seems more suitable for television than for cinema, both in terms of its composite technique and in terms of its intimacy, which is akin to the intimacy of the small screen.

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[Zavattini] Yes indeed. That would be its ideal destination. I asked myself in an article published in the press if autobiography was more suitable for television or for cinema. There is only one reply to the question: we should use the medium which guarantees the greatest margin of freedom. Is that not clear enough? [Bolzoni] What lies in store for the investigative film? Do you believe it can serve to challenge filmmakers tied to ‘the logic of narrative storytelling’ to fashion their ‘cinematic reconstructions’ in a less conventional way? Or do you think that the investigative film has, rather, a greater role to play? In the first case, consider what happened with the novel, albeit to a different extent and with different meanings. After James Joyce and Marcel Proust, no one has written nineteenth-century style fiction or, if they have, often with excellent results, they have also inserted stream of consciousness passages into traditional narrative. [Zavattini] Difficult question. I’ve thought about it often. What you are saying is that any attempt at new form, however well structured, is bound to mix preexisting form with what it creates ex novo. This is what I hope. It is correct to say that Proust’s or Joyce’s techniques have introduced new literary form and that this extends to cinematic language too. There is a continuous exchange between different art forms. But I wonder if it is time to interrupt this process of osmosis and to re-examine the entire issue of art and specifically the relation between artist and society. This ongoing continuity might be a conditioning and paralysing factor. If, in 1962, I find out that culture is not a determining factor for nations or individuals, to be quite clear about this, the nature of culture itself is in question. I don’t want osmosis to be inevitable, predetermined, destiny, devoid of purpose and detached from each of us. Each generation has a duty to be willing to consider what it has achieved and willing to tackle outstanding problems. If I think of Proust, I acknowledge that he stands for a significant cultural phenomenon. Those beautiful bubbles come to mind that grow and then fall and nothing progressive remains. This leads me to wonder if works like those written by Proust ever serve to bring about any real progress. Even if they do, it is so limited in scope that they fail to stop repetition, that is to say, to stop wars from repeating themselves over and over again. This awareness frightens me and pushes me to change the nature of the artist’s profession, at least of my own profession. I want changes to be felt. I want each of us involved in literature and cinema to say: ‘Responsibility begins with me.’ This is the reason why when I spoke about Neo-realism, I used the phrase ‘state of emergency’. In my informal and limited way, I have always emphasized the urgency of abandoning artistic autonomy, this waiting for things to work themselves out, urging commitment instead, taking a position, for its immediate utility. I have to give others what I can in the short time I have ahead of me. The investigative film allows this ambition, this desire for radical change, this search for truth to be conveyed. This is why, once you set aside certain hard choices in content, I consider the investigative film an essentially positive development.

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These last few nights, I have been reading passages of writing by great thinkers, by [Jacques] Maritain and Thomas Aquinas and I have found statements which could not be any clearer. They’re perfect. And yet, it seems to me that, if one limits oneself to them, there is the danger of losing sight of specific problems rooted in history. Whereas, the investigative film constantly challenges me with such problems and invests them with energy, elevating them to a non-contingent plane. In my artistic field, I need to find the means which enable me to express myself. I have found them in the investigative film, while others will prefer to use cinematic reconstruction. What matters in either choice is that you don’t lose contact with the person; that you don’t forget that in either case the task in hand requires us to transform anonymous individuals, atoms in the mass, into persons. [Danilo] Dolci, an exemplary person, is concerned that man should not lose the sense of wonder and sensitivity before the universe. I agree. However, in addition to wonder, we must cultivate knowledge. Our job is to transform knowledge into wonder and the poetic datum into the knowledge datum, so that the external element combines with the internal. The artist should never avoid the political dimension of problems and should try to interpret problems beyond the scope of party politics. For this reason, I seek to combine within the autobiographic film form that which is internal with that which is external. Combining events with our responsibility. This is the new development. If this becomes a shared perception, then it will no longer be possible to tell the masses: ‘You must do this.’ One would have to say instead: ‘You must do this because you carry this responsibility, as well as your suffering and your pleasures.’ You too, anonymous individual that you are, are a determining agent in history. In the autobiographies, I don’t want to set anyone up as a judge of other people’s lives, but include someone who is a participant in the judging, an experience in which the viewers take an active part. Being on screen will not be a form of narcissistic contemplation, but an active dialogue. The viewers will come to realize that events don’t happen independently, but as a result of our participation. Even when I only witness an event, I still become a participant, whether I like it or not. The cinema is a medium which is better suited than any other, in that it makes it possible to develop this problematic and perhaps the investigative non-fiction film is best suited and more effective than fiction or the fable film. I don’t deny the value of ‘cinema as reconstruction’, but I maintain that it is not the only mode of expression. The reason that I go to extremes, both in my own thinking and in my behaviour, the reason I resort to paradox is simply in order to generate controversy. If I have fought with all my will against filmas-fiction, it is because it has been so dominant as to block any other form of thought and experimentation. It is so overbearing that it suppresses certain themes altogether. Consequently, the only way to show such themes has been to promote the investigative film, taking it to its extreme limits. Ten years or so ago, people would say to me: ‘You have a lot of imagination. Stick to your field. Shut up. You’ll see that what you do consistently and

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honestly will be useful.’ Had I followed such advice, I would have contributed to the divide between work of art and person, between artist and man, between politician and man, man and citizen, father and man. There was a push towards the atomization of labour, towards division, regression. I’m opposed to that. It wasn’t enough. It just isn’t enough anymore.

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‘The Newsreel for Peace’ (1962)1

Context In the 1930s, Zavattini first imagined an alternative newsreel. In those days, his proposal was for a comic newsreel which would be fun to watch, a sendup of official newsreels, later targeting those of the Istituto Luce, the governmental newsreel broadcasting. In 1962, he rethought the newsreel model as an open critique, advocating a serious newsreel which would exploit the full potential of the newsreel. Zavattini launched an appeal in the communist weekly Rinascita which didn’t work. Why? One might imagine that a captive audience, a more receptive readership would be found in specialized magazines for people making home movies. Even then, it was unlikely that it would have worked. Zavattini in his promotion of film culture through setting up and coordinating film clubs or circoli di cinema might have assumed that home movie-makers and the keen new public of film viewers were the same. In the event, his appeal was only published in Rinascita. A documentary was made – Il cinegiornale della pace or Peace Newsreel – but it took professional, young documentarians who belonged to Zavattini’s circle to step in and make it. Ansano Giannarelli and Mino Argentieri coordinated the work. If Zavattini functioned as a producer, the cinematic equivalent of what he had once been, an editorial director, a publisher, Argentieri and Giannarelli were the executive producers and the filmmakers his reporters. Yet again, Zavattini applied the organizational structure in journalism to filmmaking, to subvert traditional hierarchies in the cinema industry. Even an alternative distribution was part of the master plan. This is made clear in the words he uses to denote the functions. La redazione, the newsdesk, is not part of filmmaking, but something similar was used for newsreels, closer to journalism. Five years later his plan came to fruition, when he relaunched the alternative newsreel idea in the form of Cinegiornali liberi or Free Newsreels.

1

Zavattini, ‘Il cinegiornale della pace’, Rinascita, 1962, then in Neorealismo ecc., 236–41.

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Text This is an appeal to filmmakers all over the world, to the professionals and those who are not, but own a cine-camera, even if it’s a 16-millimetre model. We eagerly await the latest news of the general public’s views in general and specifically concerning peace.2 Our plan is to collect all the footage and edit it into a Peace Newsreel which will be screened in the streets, if we can’t get it distributed using the usual distribution networks. We’re not asking you to make fully fledged films, only footage that is from 50 metres to 300 metres in length.3 The news desk will take care of editing the footage of individual themes as effectively as they can. Nobody would dare say he or she is against peace, but often artists seem to have lost their momentum in following up on their commitment to peace, at the very time there is the need to tackle the biggest theme there is consistently and systematically, when growing in commitment and actions would have been in itself the newest cultural event of our times. Even now, cinema is failing us, proposing weak and inconsistent alternatives, despite being open to grandiose plans, major themes and bringing on the big screen all the problems of life and death, the proof, the witnessing of a genuine desire for progress and freedom. We want to overturn this predicament. We have no intention of following in the footsteps of emotional or sentimental attestations defending peace. What does it mean to speak of peace today? That is what we need to understand and convey. We should have no fear or reluctance to carry out this project. Feel free to be cruel, if need be, but above all free to handle concepts and form whichever way you like. To give you an example, in terms of writing and of journalism we would say that you can contribute a poem, a short story, an essay, a confession, testimonial writing, a primal scream, a news report, a fable or a piece of real life to The Peace Newsreel. This is no art competition, then, as you will have gathered. We’re convinced that art always shadows objectives that are historically sound. But our appeal is aimed at filmmakers and home-movie enthusiasts, as citizens and as people. For a year, let’s all try to point our lenses at the anguishing world of war and peace at its hiatus. Some say that youth culture of today are more concerned about psychological problems, deep-rooted anguish, alienations of different kinds. They are invited to investigate these preoccupations, on condition that they related them to the

Zavattini’s appeal was under the auspices of Rinascita weekly magazine and of the editorial team he was heading up. Again and again, since the 1950s, the screenwriter resorted to collaborative projects. Their collaborative nature was part of their experimentation. 3 From one-minute clips to ten-minute shots. As the text makes clear, he envisaged single shots, requiring no editing. 2

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social, collective dimension. Explore the relation between real or illusory forms of loneliness and the long way to travel towards ‘non-loneliness’, one of the best cyphers of peace. We are proposing to launch the first issue of The Peace Newsreel within 1962 and to distribute it in every country. Send in your filmed contributions, your proposals, your suggestions, a sign of your support, to the news desk of The Free Newsreel, under the auspices of Rinascita magazine, in Rome, 28, Via dei Polacchi.

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The Why? project (1963)1

Context Alberto Grifi and Giorgio Maulini, two young men interested in making films, met Zavattini in January 1963, in the hope he’d help them produce a film. He proposed an alternative: his next project, Why? This was another intervention in the direction of collaborative, investigative filmmaking. This time, it would be about young people’s relation to the older generation and to history. Things had changed, surely? An economic boom was underway. Zavattini’s point of departure was that Italians had failed to take the post-war opportunity to establish a new, equal, ethical, non-authoritarian society, after two decades of fascist dictatorship. Why?2 The next generation could ask ordinary people, people from all walks of life, that very question. This, in essence, the plan and what would come out of the field research would form the basis of this new project. It was never produced, but Grifi, Maulini and some other youngsters did carry out the research in the field, which led to a script, working collectively with Zavattini. The two texts are entries from his public cinematic diary, published in the fortnightly communist Rinascita cultural magazine. Why? fell through, but a decade later, Grifi and his friend, Massimo Sarchielli, made a documentary – Anna (1971–2) – based on extensive interviews with a sixteen-year-old pregnant girl who was taking drugs. They filmed several hours of videotape and screened it in Berlin and Venice, to great acclaim.3 For the rest of his life, Grifi acknowledged Zavattini’s legacy again and again. What he

‘21 gennaio 1963’, in Zavattini, Diario cinematografico, a cura di Valentina Fortichiari, Milan: Bompiani, 1979, 378. 2 The other filmmakers taking part in the research were: Francesco Aluffi, Roberto Capanna, Giorgio Maulini, Umberto Monaci, Pier Luigi Murgia, Andrea Ranieri, Vittorio Armentano and Marcello Bollero. The script was published in 1979 and reissued on the centenary of Zavattini’s birth, in 2002. 3 Adriano Aprà, ‘Itinerario personale nel documentario italiano’, in Lino Micciché (ed.), Studi su dodici sguardi d’autore in cortometraggio, Turin: Associazione Philip Morris and Progetto Cinema and Lindau, 1995, 281–95. 1

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learned from the screenwriter and theorists were ‘fundamental truths, things they’d never dream of teaching in film schools’.4

Text 1 21 January 1963. The day before, I spoke to two youngsters who are about twenty-three years old and looking for money to make a short of around 700 metres about housing problems. They had some pretty sharp ideas on the modern trend for all kinds of phenomena which I am not in a position to elaborate on. I observed the two. To me, they seemed one big question mark. At one point, I said: ‘Let’s make a film called Why? With you and some others, all about twenty to twenty-five.’ The inspiration (what else could I call it?) came to me from their eyes; from how they were judging me. There are so many dossiers on young people and so few on the old; on the older generation, from the point of view of the young. The way they see us, how they listen to us, how they interpret us. But we are afraid of getting to know how they judge us out of fear. The world is in our hands, we run it. But why do we govern it in such a way? With the tone of ministers speaking into a mike, just after getting off a plane? Why have we let the world get to the edge of the void? Why? Why? Why? Worn out whys, but they are new ones if they come from the new generation and I would beware of suggesting even a single one. We won’t give them a single metre of film, until they have collected sack loads of whys among their peers and will have emptied them out in front of us. We will listen, alternating despair with the sudden pleasure a real discovery brings, even when it hits us with its violence. It could even be that by the end of the process, they will grow old and we young. I would like to get thirty or so of them together in a large room and eavesdrop on them. (If I were in their midst to hear their conversations, rest assured that the conversations would change). With a pencil, we tried to do a few calculations. Maulini and Grifi were saying: ‘We’ll eat in any old place, we’ll sleep in the fields.’ But you need eight or nine million liras. Maybe we will succeed and beat the record for the lowest budget film. Is there a madman willing to take the risk? The two had just left when A. T. turned up. I mentioned their pressing outspoken, questions, tantamount to a trial, an assault, which was exactly what I was expecting to hear from these youngsters. Less than two days later, Renato Nicolai phones from Bologna (the long chime of long-distance calls has been done away with, to spare you the emotional turmoil). Nicolai amazes me: ‘I heard from A.T. yesterday, in Rome, about the plan for the film Why?’ Nicolai is the midst of a film organization which was set up at Porretta Terme, in the free atmosphere of that festival. Once 4

Alberto Grifi, cited in Sirio Luginbühl and Raffaele Perrotta, Lo schermo negato. Cronache del cinema non ufficiale, Brescia: Shakespeare, 1976, 68–73.

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we wanted to make a film called The Cervi Brothers. Nicolai has written an excellent libretto.5 At the time, in Reggio Emilia, I was a guest of the Lyons Club. At the end of the meal, between one toast and the next, I said we would make The Cervi Brothers for cinema. After a silence lasting a few seconds, someone remarked that that would be a good way to fuel hatred, when, instead, what was needed was peace. I tried to explain to those kind gentlemen, and there were some public officials among them too, that hatred stems from ignorance of events, but I am hopeless at defending an argument, and nobody was convinced. But I insisted that the film would be made. But it hasn’t. So, Nicolai is coming on Thursday and we are going to take a close look at the project. I must confess that the fact that money from Reggio Emilia is going to kick start the project increases my satisfaction. Those two youngsters have become five already, and while I write they are in a coffee bar talking and blaming us.

2 26 March 1963. I have already published the news in Rinascita about a film some young people are working on, a film which is the outcome of their questions and those of many other young people whom they interviewed in Naples, Milan, and other places.6 I spent a few evenings happily surrounded by the heat of their questions and making some measure of progress in the harsh discipline of listening to other people. I must remind my readers that these youngsters want to use the film to put on trial the generation of twenty-five-year olds and upwards, which they will soon join, and probably faced with the prospect of sacrificing the surprise and indignation which animates them at the moment. Thus, they intend to take advantage of this incandescent moment to throw their interviews and related questions into the pond, questions which are undoubtedly useful, because they are genuine. But I wish to say this at the outset that what emerges is in no way quarrelsome or presumptuous, nor the usual finger pointing at the older generation, just for the sake of it, or out of intellectual laziness, or transient fury. There is, rather, deep down, a bitterness stemming perhaps from feeling that all the mistakes of this era are so vast, so allembracing, that they grow in size and envelop them at precisely the moment in which they passing judgement over them. For this reason, although they began as judges, they are aware of the fact that by the end of the trial, they could well be on the opposite side. But I would not wish to anticipate the ideas of these young people, first of all because, in seeking a specific cinematic form of expression, they will shape it and give it deeper significance; and secondly, because I would risk confusing myself

The film was made eventually, but directed by Gianni Puccini, in 1968, on Zavattini’s scenario and screenplay. The seven sons of the Cervi family were massacred during the civil war that broke out in Italy during the retreat of the German army, following Italy’s surrender to the Allies in 1943. 6 Zavattini, ‘26 marzo 1963’, Diario cinematografico, 386–90. 5

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with them, when what I am most interested in, and this I find exhilarating, is follow them, if anything, not anticipate their moves, and make a note of their experience. This is possibly the first in my life when I am trying not to interfere too much with the autonomous unfolding of other people’s lives. I heard some whys as ancient as mankind and whys linked to the most ephemeral casuistry; some are unrivalled in their naivety and others alarming, poignant. I shall cite a handful. They have collected about a thousand whys among their peers from all social classes and are working through them with a view to select those which, taken as a whole, sum up our era. But since I don’t have all the papers to hand, I shan’t always quote them verbatim, giving the exact words and style, which is so important. ‘Why should I sit exams at university when I could be working from home to work out the problems, to then send the answers, being in a better position to recall them more easily, in a more peaceful environment?’ This person must be a saint, but I shall refrain from making any comments. ‘How can we possibly talk of disarmament where there is so much mutual mistrust and such substantial fear? It is still very far from seriously being implemented.’ ‘Why is it that your state and private education, be it overtly or surreptitiously, having pointed out the evil, is only inclined to instruct us in the defence from such evil and never to carry out actions to make that evil disappear?’ This suggests the rift between parties on the Left, without forgetting what we can describe as the administrative battle of structures. The next generation feels that their parents have grasped everything, and that their weakness doesn’t consist in a lack of intelligence, but of character. They don’t have confidence in their parents’ ability to act in consequence of what they know. One of them in his outburst took it out on interviews that are useless. He is right. We should have a strong reaction when we watch on television, for example, some personalities who sometimes criticize terrible situations, which are inevitably locked into the kind of environment where television is made. [...] ‘Why do you think it is reasonable to impose on your children a certain religion at birth?’ ‘Dad, you’re such a conformist, how did you ever get to where you are now? Or were you always like that?’ ‘How can you speak of disarmament in an environment in which there is so much mutual diffidence and such dread dominates?’ ‘Why is it that your education system, both public and private, having pointed out the evil, implicitly or explicitly, tends to educate us in defending that evil and never teaches us to struggle to be rid of it?’ I could go on for hours. I have noticed that the theme of cinema is quite rare (but I have yet to work through a pile of papers). I do think though that the concept of cinema no longer developing as a history of cinema, but as a history of culture, is not easy to disseminate. Allow me to elaborate. We should not consider new issues within cinema, only from the point of view as to whether cinema engages, or fails to engage, with them, but because they really are a new phenomenon; that is to say, in terms of culture. But this would involve far too radical transformations in our customary relation to the sphere of entertainment in general terms, and with its economic and management structures, as has already been pointed out.

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Rinascita round table (1965)1

Context On 5 June 1965, a new law concerning Italian cinema, proposed by the socialist Achille Corona, then minister of tourism and spectacle, was passed. It was the first public acknowledgement that cinema was not confined to its industrial activity, but also an integral part of culture. Although it was also intended to support Italian cinema, it was only a token gesture that changed nothing. The following month, the communist weekly magazine Rinascita organized a round-table discussion, about Italian culture during the years of the Resistance. How untimely! Zavattini, for one, would have expected the agenda to be the new law. He was invited to participate and gave the paper below. The other participants were two painters, Renato Guttuso and Carlo Levi, also the author of the groundbreaking memoir about his political exile in the 1930s and his exile or confino decided by the fascist regime, in the deep, and invisible South, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945). Also present was Mario Alicata, the communist politician and Member of Parliament, and editor-in-chief of L’Unità, the Communist Party daily newspaper. Alicata had been an active member of the Cinema group which discussed cinema in a series of articles published before the war and worked on Visconti’s Obsession (1943). He had also been active in the Italian Resistance. Zavattini, who was by then no longer publishing his cinematic diary in Cinema Nuovo, having moved it to Rinascita, seized the opportunity to subvert the anachronistic agenda about self-congratulation of the party and the Resistance for a post-mortem, with a view to turning the attention to the present state of cinema, picking up where Neo-realism had left off, to concentrate on lost opportunities and raising the issue of a genuine commitment which would require developing a socially engaged cinema, not a socially engaged single film or two. This was recurring problem: a short-sighted approach, a lack of overview, which he sums up with the phrase ‘cinema, not films’. Obsession, Luchino Visconti’s film which Mario Alicata and the rest of the Cinema group 1

Zavattini, ‘Posizione e funzione della cultura italiana negli anni della Resistenza’, in Neorealismo ecc., 278–9.

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were involved, wasn’t the only film heralding Neo-realism. The task in hand wasn’t a round table to celebrate the past, but to table an analysis as to what had happened to cinema since. The burning issue wasn’t content, but vision. It doesn’t come as a surprise that his contribution wasn’t that welcome to the other participants, however couched in diplomacy it was, which would explain why it was not published in Rinascita. In a separate interview, recorded by Mino Argentieri at the same time, he dwells on social engagement, rather than commemoration of the past. The question in the air which he never asks directly is what was the Communist Party prepared to do to effect change within the film industry? There was content, and there were the economics, of cinema as an industry. For Zavattini, it was clear that the party had hindered the development of Neo-realism and New Italian Cinema, not supported it. Both his intervention at the Rinascita round table and his interview with its editor were only published much later, in 1979, in the Bompiani trilogy of his cinema writings.2

Text I think that even making sense of the past was one dimensional and while it is true to say that the cinema launched a conscientization of the past, but one would have to be a conformist not to admit that its most obvious characteristics were sentimental and patriotic, and not at all at the level of the most advanced thinking outside fascist ideology. We cannot explain the defeat of later cinema if we fail to comprehend that what was new, was neither new enough, nor profound enough, not even in the films we have in mind, because their foundation had not been shaken up by any all-pervasive revolution. It remained still humanist in nature and the continuity of a humanist culture was implicit, one which subdivided values into three neat categories, one could say, and namely, art, religion, and politics. The point of departure was a kind of popular epic which served its purpose to some extent. But it concealed a deeper problematic: the new man with all that this phrase entails.3 I deny that there was a single prophetic film.4 There were several great films which tackled the emotional culture of the time, without antagonizing it directly, but attempting its renewal.5 I don’t wish to cite the great works dealing with the obvious, for nobody was obvious in those days, Zavattini, ‘Contro il passato nel cinema’, in Neorealismo ecc., 258–78. The concept of a new man, and of a new world, in Zavattini’s thought, is closely related to the concept of new culture, a phrase used by Antonio Gramsci in his writings. For Zavattini, the new man would be a social being, a responsible citizen, capable of political agency. 4 His veiled reference is Visconti’s film Obsession (1943), which Alicata and other communists were involved in. The passage concerns Italian pre-war cinema, in the period before Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany. 5 His reference relates to, among others, The Children Are Watching Us (1943), directed by Vittorio De Sica and scripted by Zavattini.

2

3

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but almost obvious. Those films were the preface to a deeper analysis, which should have taken advantage of the season of freedom, of extreme creative freedom. But no, it never happened. Embedded within them was the worm of commemoration. The cinema has failed, because it has not followed up on the revolutionary élan of the moment. Not only did it not have any influence on politics, it never even attempted to influence it or free itself from its conditioning. On a larger scale, we are faced with the history of the failure of culture, and at the level of the everyday, a sadder history, of people not rising to the occasion. But the two failures are interdependent, and this statement is not made from an old culture perspective, but from a new culture perspective, for such an assertion heralds an analysis of all the consequences and working out all the connections. The recurring element is inconsistency, and a lack of follow through. It is typical of a particular culture, I mean to say, typical of a specific interpretation of life, which, even in the best of cases, sets down abstract ethical guidelines. A culture that embraces history must be of use to everyone and even to say as much is to say something new. But such an assertion demands a follow up, planning, and practical organization. When I speak of the failure of cinema, I am also referring to the medium-specific nature of the medium which should translate into a plan of action involving a commitment towards developing new technical means and new channels of communication. But no, we have settled for established, traditional systems instead. This reflects no new thinking whatsoever, but conventional thinking. Even the best filmmakers have always worked within conventional modes of practice. The reason for this is that there has never been a problematic concerning cinema, only films. In other words, as I have said on other occasions, we face a new wave of individualist culture in current film practice and history which is a throwback to pre-war cinema.

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‘First Conversation’ (1966)1

Context Zavattini worked closely with documentary filmmakers on various occasions since the early 1950s. The Newsreel for Peace and The Mysteries of Rome were documentaries. A confirmation of Zavattini’s continued investment in non-fiction filmmaking as a privileged film form is apparent in 1966, in his contributions to a new documentary film magazine, Cinema Documentario. It is worth recalling his 1954 and 1955 experiment of magazine photodocumentaries published in Cinema Nuovo, aimed at finding new investment and new production channels for topical scenarios with an emphasis on the documentary, non-fiction. The circle of critics and filmmakers involved in Cinema Documentario included Virgilio Tosi, a key figure in Italian film club circles, the screenwriter Renzo Renzi, the documentary filmmakers Libero Bizzarri, Gianfranco Mingozzi and Michele Gandin, and the film critic Lino Miccichè, founder of the Pesaro Film Festival. Zavattini invites the reader to think big. Part of the problem was the film industry, but part of it was the audience and how the industry preferred to pander to its taste. So what was needed was a shift of focus. Could progress include progress in creating a film culture in Italy? Education was required. It wouldn’t happen unless the cine-camera was introduced into the school curriculum, as a medium to create visual essays. He had made a similar appeal in 1955, when he suggested that still cameras should be introduced into schools, in his introduction to the collected photo-stories published by Cinema Nuovo that year. Zavattini is concerned about the indifference to current affairs in the general public. But who does he imagine are his readers? They can’t be the home-movie filmmakers, whom he hopes might broaden their focus in the future. Because he states that they lack any such commitment, that film culture is lacking in them. He is quite clear about them. He says as much: 1

Zavattini, ‘Conversazione prima’, Cinema Documentario, no. 1, April–June 1966, then in Neorealismo ecc., 280–3.

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They have no intention of sidestepping mainstream cinema’s limitations and corruption. Having broken out of cinematic illiteracy, they continue to expect others to explore the world and then tell them about it.

Therefore, his thought-provoking ‘Conversations’ were aimed at budding documentarians. He invites his readers to reflect, to envisage a time when the possibility of home movie-making becoming personal, introspective could become a reality. Could they, he suggested, intervene to create new initiatives aimed at home-movie enthusiasts, to elicit change, by launching competitions? What was, or might have seemed, utopian back in 1966 is no longer so. Thirty years later, the bbc invited viewers to do just that. They were to send in their home movies. Of course, in the intervening three decades, video cameras had been invented, editing simplified and had become a domestic object. As it turned out, amateur filmmakers responded, and in great numbers, and much of what they sent in were personal, first-person narratives. What had changed in the intervening years was the development of a film culture. Zavattini’s provocative article also includes thoughts about the first-person narrative, not understood as a narcissistic exercise, but as a means of gaining insight about oneself. In 1960s Italy, a film culture still existed exclusively within the film clubs. Jacques Rancière framed as what art and aesthetics does: ‘a redistribution of the sensible’.2 Seeing, seeing differently, seeing oneself differently, as through a self-reflective lens of the personal camera, is already a political action and one which resists the what Zavattini in his article calls ‘integration’, doubtless, in the wake of Umberto Eco’s essay collected in Apocalittici e integrati (1964), in which Eco uses the word ‘integrated’ to define a conformist, someone no longer capable of independent thought or opinion. Several years later, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote about ‘homologation’ which conveys the same idea. In the background was the Marxist principle of a general public which had become a victim of a ‘culture industry’, along the lines set out by Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), where the two philosophers speak of the ‘coercive nature of society alienated from itself’, which had control over the individual self, a society in which broadcasting was a one-way street, and the consequences of television would be ‘quite enormous’, and ready-made clichés would be the rule.3 Zavattini makes a reference to one-dimensional man which must originate in Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. The Ideology of Industrial Society (1964), which came out in Italian translation the same year it was first published in English, adding a Freudian element to an analysis of modern alienation.4

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum, 2010, 139. Also, Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, translated by Steven Corcoran, Cambridge: Polity, 2009. 3 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, London and New York: Verso, 2008 [1944], 120–67; 124. 4 Herbert Marcuse, L’uomo ad una dimensione, Turin: Einaudi, 1964. 2

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Text There can be no doubt that there has been technological innovation. But there would have been far more innovation had there also been a greater sense of urgency to effect change. While in other sectors the outcome is positive, in cinema, in my modest opinion, while far more people are using cameras and cine-cameras, they are hardly using them for increasing social commitment. How many times has it been said that the day everyone had a cine-camera would be the day of the Revolution, in the sense of a cinema as primarily ethical avantgarde, a specific contribution to a culture of socially engaged action? Virtually the opposite has happened. And the government is not to blame, as is the case for radio and television government monopolies. No, there has been no adverse automatic pressure in this sense. Millions of individuals who own a cine-camera are integrated.5 They have no intention of sidestepping mainstream cinema’s limitations and corruption. Having broken out of cinematic illiteracy, they continue to expect others to explore the world and then tell them about it. This is the consequence of an education which doesn’t involve you on a personal level. Film is not taught in secondary school and pupils are not given cine-cameras to compose an essay. Yet the cine-camera can help break down the hierarchies of verbal language. How else can you explain not taking advantage of the extraordinary potential freedom non-mainstream cinema can provide? It is perhaps due to its inferiority complex towards the feature-length film, resulting in a limited outlook, unable to see beyond the film short. Not many people know that restricted choices are not to be considered a limitation to creativity. No. They have access to a unique medium that can provoke enquiries which would otherwise take a very long time to carry out, when they are not banned altogether. Too many consider the cinema of shorts simply a stepping-stone towards feature-length cinema and it is this very approach of theirs which determines their conditioning, both practical and in terms of aspirations or lack thereof. There are also those – including intellectuals, scientists and artists – who feel awed by the tools, grammar and syntax of cinema, which have been increasingly mythologized over time. Consequently, cinema history is a history of a few contributions; a wonderful history, if incomplete. I’m an optimist, but when I want to think less empirically than usual, I try to view the cinema not as a closed history, but a history located within cultural history, or rather, in history. That is when I see the compromises more clearly, the betrayal of alternatives, and, as far as I personally am concerned, a drop in an ocean, my own compromises which, in the context of a general silence about such matters, seem less significant. 5

To be ‘integrated’ meant to be someone who was a conformist to public discourse, in later 1960s parlance, a ‘square’. The word ‘integrated’ appears in Eco’s Apocalittici e integrati (1964).

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Are we too late to do anything for that ‘cinema together’ which attracted us so much and which only a handful of people criticized, for, supposedly, being contemptuous of an individual’s values? Although the statistics concerning the Italian film industry are looking promising in terms of the international market, cinema is in a bad way. Nor am I the only one to say so. I wouldn’t dare to mention such a topic, if it weren’t for all the people, young and old, who are complaining about it. We should keep in mind that there is so much expectation for change. There is the possibility that other expressive means will become available, but technological innovation alone is not the answer. We should not ignore the consequences of the little that was achieved by a generation, to pursue instead only an autonomous, formal cinema, acceptable to the powers that be. Let us consider, then, home-movie makers. This enormous mass of people with no purpose. Could they become a positive force to tease out the needs that are barely below the surface? Or are you going to resort to the same old objection that you won’t find any distribution channels outside the network of cinemas whose owners, by the way, are becoming increasingly powerful and have more and more influence on law-making? Of course it is true to say that, at the outset, the channels are few and far between, and it goes without saying that their expansion would depend on the sheer volume of what needs to be said. We have locked ourselves into our adversaries’ framework and organization. We have shied away from being unpopular, unsuccessful, accepting all along the mainstream definition. It is very likely that interpellating home-movie enthusiasts will attract accusations of superficiality, of lacking any potential development. However, if it is true that cinema is bankrupt, then we would have to acknowledge that it wasn’t such a bad idea to dig for alternatives, to establish new, autonomous contacts outside the norm and with indifference towards the outcome at ground level. Yet again, the fear of isolation has betrayed us, so that we forgot who we were. I am not proposing that we turn our backs on mainstream cinema. Nothing is so black and white. But we should consider fighting on two levels. We should also exploit 8-millimetre camera, not to mention Leica still cameras, and making short films, only three hundred metres of footage, or even ten metres, one hundred, four hundred, twenty. Whatever length is appropriate to that particular feeling or reason you wish to express. A scream, a monologue, a dialogue, a story, an investigation, no working outside any genre or following the rules of one – no genre or all genres, or the genre the most independent filmmaker wishes to invent. Would it be feasible to give home-movie enthusiasts who are only beginning to get organized a single theme? Or would imposing a theme risk stunting creativity? I was once obsessed with the theme of peace as crucial. It has to be said, it still is crucial. Critics suspected me of being ideological, as if attaching to the cinema a responsible function on the Left and the Right weren’t in itself ideological. I protested in vain that what I had found out led me to the conviction that peace was an impossibility, as things stood, rebus sic stantibus. And consequently, that investigative filmmaking needed to explore this impossibility which manifested

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itself precisely where one would least expect it within the social fabric, including in oneself. But I thought that if we were the protagonists, the main focus of attention, then the onus would be on getting to know ourselves. This led me to encourage autobiographical filmmaking. The idea was to explore the possible, starting from the impossible, not veering towards acceptance of the status quo, and do so through self-reflection, by becoming aware of one’s own subliminal acceptance of messages and resisting it. It entails investigating our relationship with society at large as individuals, as well as our individuality and the interconnection between the two modes of being, so as to try and take stock of a unified self; namely, the individual self and the social self. Those were the days! I’m not convinced that this is fruitless avenue to pursue: be it the theme of peace or democracy, regardless of how empty they have become, when you hear them uttered on the television newscasts. Rescue them from such a context and place them in this other one of home-movie filmmakers and what happens? After an initial uncertainty – where should I point the lens? Towards me? My father? My boss? On a flower? On a road accident or a bathtub? – even in the worst-case scenario, we would obtain useful information about the man in the street. We live under the general impression that everything is fine. True, nothing blatantly appalling seems to be taking place. But as far as I am concerned, I had the most tragic and frightening impression recently, while I was watching a documentary in which Milanese strangers were being asked what they thought of the war in Vietnam. Many of them weren’t thinking anything. They refused to think.

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Interview ‘Four Questions Addressed to Filmmakers’ (1967)1

Context This text comprises Zavattini’s replies to an interview to filmmakers in the form of a typed questionnaire. He replied on 15 August 1967. It belongs to the period immediately before an important three-day conference organized by Zavattini and some documentarians in Reggio in Emilia to launch a new filmmakers’ organization, the Free Newsreels. Zavattini argues that it was time To think of how to enter people’s homes with a few metres of celluloid, 16mm or even 8mm – easier said than done, I know – and invent partypolitical style rallies within the four walls of the home, ‘a guerrilla war’, outside normal networks, and outside market laws of supply and demand.

Zavattini’s interview shows that in 1967, only a matter of days before the discussions took place, he was thinking in terms of ‘groups of non-cinema’, an embryonic phrase to denote what he soon called ‘Free Newsreels’, free, in the sense of oppositional to ‘official cinema’, as a new organizational structure for guerrilla filmmaking.

Text Question 1. What substantial differences exist within the Italian cinema today by comparison with the ‘difficult years’?

1

Zavattini, ‘Quattro domande agli uomini di cinema’, 25 August 1967, in Tullio Masoni and Paolo Vecchi (eds), Cinenotizie in poesia e prosa, Turin: Lindau, 2000, 147–52.

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[Zavattini]: I’m going to reply to your questionnaire with a little hesitation, since I am full of doubts and feel I have to accept some responsibility. Your questions trigger more questions than answers. Were we brave enough then? Cruel enough? Aren’t the works and the areas we covered very, very few? Wasn’t a metaphorical cinema unquestioningly pursued, facilitating the return of narrative modes which mirrored then, and still do, a culture which was unable to radically renew itself? We owe our gratitude to some of the filmmakers of the time. However, the difference between the two cinemas does not concern this or that filmmaker, this or that film. It concerns the political climate in which the work was made then and is made still to this day. We might define the climate of the time as collective. Today’s climate, conversely, is individualistic. But values, which do exist, don’t have a purchase on reality, based on their relative importance and worth. The climate is akin to that of Copernican astral or Einsteinian bodies, take your pick, placed in a Ptolemaic heaven which, from the onlooker’s point of view, is an immense fixed heaven, in which any movement is lost. In other words, the antithesis, given the current times, has to avail itself of too many of the tools belonging to the thesis, and in the very moment it appears, it tends to assume the appearance of what is being rejected.2 In those years, more by intuition, than by reasoned argument, as often happens in key moments in time, every artistic act contained a radical critique against the traditional role of culture. The distinction between culture and politics seemed to be the obstacle in the way of forming an entirely different conscience which sought to put into practice immediately what it had already worked out for itself. Today, by comparison, politics has no ambition of becoming culture and culture steps aside to let politics wield its detested power, something to which it is accustomed, shaping us day by day. In such a situation, can we really have any confidence that cinema can contribute to radical change? Consider how it is currently set up, that is to say, bear in mind that its structure is geared to consumption, and imposed by such a strong and multi-layered power base as to impact on the very nature of society.

2

A common reference to a specific dialectical method of argument employed by nineteenthcentury German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. His ‘dialectical’ method works through a contradictory process between opposite points of view. Through aufheben, or sublation, a negation of the first statement (the thesis), by an objection (antithesis), leads to a subtler statement (synthesis), which is also subject to further change, on acquiring new knowledge, thus becoming, in its turn, the new ‘thesis’. Cf. Hegel’s The Encyclopedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences [Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I (1817)], translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991. Cf. Julie E. Maybee, ‘Hegel’s Dialectics’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https​:/​/pl​​ato​.s​​tanfo​​rd​.ed​​u​/arc​​hives​​/win2​​019​/ e​​ntrie​​s​/heg​​​el​-di​​alect​​ics/,​ accessed 27 July 2020.

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Question 2. Do you think that the injection of American capital, industrializing cinema, and the political climate, have contributed to devitalize our cinema or destroy its original character? [Zavattini]: Your list of the factors which sabotaged the original form of Italian cinema, factors which are indisputable, don’t impact as much on cinema as they do on the political state of affairs of the country. Question 3. Do you believe in a free, independent, low cost, counter-current, production which aims to develop a relationship with the public which is devoid of celebrity lionizing? [Zavattini]: In my modest opinion, it would be pointless to believe in the optimism of Question 3, if the multiple causes of ‘devitalization’ and an effective response to them didn’t add up to a political interpretation of the phenomenon. Was there an Italian approach to interpreting reality? If there was even the slightest glimmer of one, then it would be worth tracing it, to make it become more than just a glimmer in the dark contemporary wood, and make it pivotal within ‘counter’-production. Is counter-production feasible, without assuming political responsibility and without making the assumption that one can automatically eliminate antagonisms which are impossible to reconcile on a political level?3 There is no such thing as a pax cinematografica, in my opinion. There can be no alliances in the cinema world, if they are impossible in politics. Otherwise, one would fall into a conception of cinema clouded over by false problems. Indeed, what was it that was expected of cinema? What is it now? The outcome which was expected from politics and which is still expected: more freedom to investigate situations, following on from a parity between thought and action. In that glimmer, referred to earlier, the categorical imperative of knowledge eclipsed the rest and was political in nature if, and only if, it brought art to trial, accusing it to always arrive at the scene of the crime too late. To many, it seemed that art, in the course of its creation and consumption, shared certain interpretations of the time and space in which it was made, which became, more or less openly, the political norm. Is it no longer so? Question 4. Which experiences or results, abroad or in Italy, do you consider positive signs? Where, ideally, could Italian cinema open up new and fruitful opportunities for itself? [Zavattini]: To move in the direction of new perspectives, in response to Question 4, I am therefore convinced that it is necessary to operate outside mainstream

3

Ten years earlier, in 1956–7, by organizing the Economic Conference of Italian Cinema, Zavattini had tried to do just that, namely to reconcile opposing positions within the Italian film industry and break the deadlock. But his experience clearly indicated that it was an impossible task. Characteristically, this realization did not put him off.

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cinema. Or at least, outside, as well. I shall also join others and applaud the success of Italian cinema at the Venice Film Festival. I have high expectations for this year’s edition. But it would be a mistake to get over-enthusiastic. In the current situation, it would take far more than that and I have already outlined the reasons why this is so. Success can sabotage a strategic plan, in that success itself harbours the elements of a certain type of society in which a subtle form of mutual corruption between public and author plays out. This was anticipated by the cinema of that time, but then tactical impatience got the better of us and we were fooled, allowing acceptance to set in, and everyone agreed to be accommodating and to compromise. Clearly, to attempt a cinema which totally ignores the powerful current organizational machine might seem like trying to empty the sea with a spoon, and that it would be too hard, too dangerous, to face an inevitably long period of unpopularity. It may well be. But my poor eyes fail to see any other way to give back to cinema that determining, revolutionary function which lasts the space of a morning, but proved itself to exist in the reality of the moment. We must be patient – call it the strategy of patience – starting a conversation with ordinary people, bearing in mind that cinema is a cine-camera and a man, who has to free himself from his inferiority complex in the face of official cinema. To think of how to enter people’s homes with a few metres of celluloid, 16mm or even 8mm – easier said than done, I know – and invent party-political style rallies within the four walls of the home, ‘a guerrilla war’, outside normal networks, and outside market laws of supply and demand. If only we had attempted it at the time, many would be basking in glory today, and technology would have evolved accordingly, on a limited scale, initially, then exponentially, along the lines of this cinema, so unpredictable in terms of length and content and aesthetic developments, if we really want to take those into consideration. Initially, it would be a cinema of conspiracy. But no, what am I saying? Some groups would be formed, publicly, which would be called, say, ‘Groups of NonCinema’ (in Reggio Emilia, we are currently thinking about forming Groups of Non-Theatre), such low-cost a cinema that, by comparison, current low-cost films are capitalist productions. By the way, the scarcity of contributions to cinema is appalling, with the effect of reducing it to the dialectics of an élite. It would be above all a cinema made by many for the many, and also, a cinema in instalments, in which all possible languages converge onto world primary needs, having precious little in common with this August bank holiday in these awful years which we were trying very hard to make seem less awful. All it would have taken, for example, and this is still so, was a modest 16-millimetre film newsreel, with a plethora of contributions against a culture which, even when it does look to the future, only does so in expectation of a great painting, a great book, a great film, such that history might make a leap ahead. Consider these short newsreels, which could be made even in a village of a thousand inhabitants, and imagine a natural coordination among such groups, a spontaneous exchange of films, from one end of Italy to the other. You can’t plan and predict the practical and ideal developments. Fifty per cent is planned,

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the rest left to work carried out to fulfil the plan. It’s not avant-garde. It isn’t experimentalism. It is about making contact with the reality of the nation, through the use of a cheap cine-camera, and establishing a dialogue which is more in depth and less monotonous that pre-electoral debates. Even film clubs could be transformed into newsreel producers. For every filmmaker who will go no further than informative newsreels, there will be two who will be able to provoke the necessary scandals, marked by new expression and new field research. Does a common denominator exist between these youths, these villages, these cities, between modest and critical short newsreels? It does, provided there is no fear of stating openly that it cannot but exist politically, and forgive me if, essentially, I have only summarily repeated some old wishes of mine.

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Zavattini, ‘Why I am not resigning from anac’ (1968)1

Context In Italian cinema history, resistance and rebellion against the cinema industry began long before May 1968. Zavattini’s attempt to get the industry around a table to discuss the future of Italian cinema and put art on the industrial agenda dates from 1956 with the the Economic Cinema Conference. But he had published articles and given conferences much earlier, in the 1930s and 1940s, in which he blamed producers for their negative influence on film as an art form. On 6 March 1968, the national filmmakers’ organization split in two: Antonioni, Blasetti, Bolognini, Comencini, Fellini, Germi, Lattuada, Leone, Loy, Monicelli, Patroni-Griffi, Pietrangeli, Scola, Sordi, Visconti and Zampa left the Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici (anac) to form Associazione Autori Cinematografici Italiani (aaci). These famous directors were among the 105 members who walked out, objecting to what they saw as the intrusion of politics within the film industry. By this, they also included simply putting pressure on the government to reform the industry with legal instruments. Some of the anac members, the ones who remained and who were led by Zavattini, had argued in favour of ‘creating the conditions and the legal means which make a different cinema possible’.2 This was the unfinished business of 1956–7, broached by Zavattini and others at the Economic Cinema Conference which clearly didn’t see French auterism as the answer to Italian problems.

Text The anac Assembly has already accepted the resignations of some of its members and acknowledged that a group of them has set up a new association. 1

2

Zavattini, ‘Allargare l’area della conoscenza e della verità’, 6 March 1968, anac assembly, statement by Zavattini, Neorealismo ecc., 284–6. Argentieri, Neorealismo ecc., 286. Zavattini provides the figure in his statement. Ibidem, 284.

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As to our association, anac, its programme is based on two points: a stronger defence of the industrial sector’s economic interests and the defence of Italian cinema. Which kind of Italian cinema? Is it still possible to defend the whole of Italian cinema? The defence of Italian cinema has been for years the political objective of anac. During those years there was a severe economic crisis in the sector and the most urgent problem seemed to be one of survival, at any cost. It also seemed that the problem of freedom of expression equated with the struggle against administrative censorship. Today, however, the economic status of Italian cinematography seems very healthy. Yet, although two hundred and fifty films are produced a year, the Italian film industry finds itself in a critical state. While traditional, administrative censorship continues to limit the freedom of expression, even by virtue of its mere existence, it is no longer a determining factor. The most effective form of censorship lies elsewhere, and namely, in how the film industry is structured. The investors are happy, filmmakers are not. The mercantile nature of private industry and the serious inadequacies of the State in supporting another kind of cinema – un altro cinema – a useful cinema, have caused a series of inevitable knock-on effects: the anonymity and sameness of films, conditioned by the supposed needs of the international market, a consequent discouragement of any original experimental research of language and content; a deafness, or censorship, of anything which might be happening in the world or at home, deemed a threat for the system. Filmmakers have acted as instruments for such an involution, together with the general public, also implicated in the consumption cycle. They have both created it and both are its victims. Despite all this abundance, Italian cinema is in a critical state. Actually, cinema as a whole is faced with such a crisis, which is more serious and wider spread than any economic crisis. It impacts on the very function of cinema and cinema’s responsibilities. All the more so today, a time of pressing, dramatic, worldwide radical societal transformations. There is no point in an ethical plea to individual responsibility. What is needed is that we create the conditions and the means to make a different cinema possible, one with an ongoing civic conscience. To this end, we need to assemble, discuss, and develop a broad and honest debate, identify concrete proposals, and work towards putting them into practice. We need to create a new unity and a new impetus towards establishing the societal relevance of cinema. Whoever uses a cine-camera to broaden the field of knowledge and truth has the right to belong to anac.3 Why I am staying in anac One hundred and five of our members have resigned. It’s not only a historic fact. It’s also sad. The secessionists are those who made Italian cinema and will continue to make it. I have worked with many of them and, for the past twenty3

This is a reference to the fact that, until then, the association had been very restrictive as to who could become a member, and this had caused debate and challenges to the existing rules of eligibility.

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five years, I have participated in the life of Italian film associations. They have abandoned anac, unwilling to give any thought to account for their activities within the association. They slammed the door and left. But I am staying. I’m staying in anac, because of all the lessons I have learned from our struggle and for the ideas behind the association. Actually, I’m staying in anac with even greater determination than ever before. The state of our cinema can benefit from filmmakers’ solidarity, rather than have to suffer from their divisions, regardless of the broad subjective ways in which cinema can be understood. This is the reason why I have always fought for staying united. Internally, we have succeeded in containing internal, individualist, pressure, the national trait of confusing personal problems and states of mind with ideas. In other words, in here, we have established a democratic tradition and in order to continue going forward, it would have been necessary to accept the democratic dynamic, learning how to lose, as well as learning how to win. I have always considered a red herring the problem of distinguishing film features from film shorts and all that it entails.4 Indeed, I have always rejected discriminations of any kind. Our friends’ discriminations limit the creative reach of our cinema, reducing it to a restricted market; leaving it, in other words, more or less covertly, at the mercy of the film industry and of the Establishment, to use a current term. Our friends have chosen to form a caste, when the exact opposite is required. This is not the time for a caste. The time is ripe to open the doors to anyone and everyone who is working to make cinema. All those who are hacking their way through the forest of myths and rites, so as to make more space for truth, as much space as they can, and as much space as is needed, even if they do it with only a humble 8-millimetre cine-camera, are filmmakers. There are so many people in Italy today who are seeking to establish a dialogue with the public, outside time-honoured channels, and indeed against those same channels. The technical medium is getting cheaper and cheaper, provoking a veritable revolution, by multiplying the voices that can be heard, and increasing public interventions, expanding the range of cinematic languages and of expressive modes. All this is pointing to a new phenomenon: giving back to the camera its original independence, and a radically new dynamic of social critique. How can anac not take all this into account? Even among those of us who have decided to stay, there will be discussions in earnest and polemic; a majority and a minority is going to emerge. If we accept at the outset these rules of engagement, we shall succeed in resolving all the procedural, financial, and technical matters those who have resigned have brutally dumped on us.

4

This is reference to a distinction made by members of the outgoing filmmakers’ breakaway group, between those with a right to belong to the association and those who, they argued, did not qualify, because they didn’t make features. This distinction would have excluded all Zavattini’s circle of influence, comprising documentary filmmakers. But that was not his primary reason to reject it.

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This is not to say that we should not take advantage of this dissent in our ranks to increase our self-criticism and carry out a dialectically better equipped politics of cinema, to enable us to fight consistently and effectively towards establishing an authentic free cinema. It is perhaps too easy to make a prophesy, that, should the secessionists not closet themselves in petty, narrow-minded, professionalism, then they are going to have to face the difficult reality of our cinema, thrown out from the front door, but subsequently turning up again at the back door of their new headquarters, with or without a swimming pool. How can they avoid it? Which is why I sincerely hope they will be at our side once again to face the struggle. We shall be only too happy to welcome them on these occasions.

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‘Free Newsreels’ (1968)1

Context The first Free Newsreels Bulletin was published in June 1968. By that time, a new network of filmmakers had already formed. In May, free newsreel groups were set up in different parts of Italy, from Turin, Mantua, Parma, Bologna, Pesaro, Guastalla, Impruneta, Montalpino, to Florence, Reggio Emilia, to Rome and Campobasso in the south.2

Text The most frequent question about free newsreels among those who are interested in them is this one: does a distribution circuit already exist? The most appropriate place for a centre would be Rinascita magazine, where I first spoke of free newsreels this summer; and in Rinascita, four or five years ago I proposed The Newsreel for Peace, which is the ancestor of free newsreels. Free newsreels need to set up their own circuit, as opposed to a circuit setting them up. If a free newsreel comes into existence in Carrara, then Carrara itself will become its primary interlocutor and supporter. They need to be rooted geographically in the local reality from which the newsreel’s local subject matter will emerge. The modes of distribution coincide with the free newsreels’ creative actions and their inspiration. Channels exist which free newsreels can use, apart from industrial networks, but we have to free ourselves completely from the traditional concept of a circuit, or we are going to become subservient to the system that established the circuit in the first place, and its related products.

Zavattini, ‘A proposito dei cinegiornali liberi’, in Bollettino dei Cinegiornali liberi, no. 1, June 1968, 5. This text appeared in the first of five Free Newsreels, all reprinted in Roberto Nanni (ed.), Una straordinaria utopia: Zavattini e il non film. I cinegiornali liberi, Reggio Emilia 6–7 March 1998, Reggio Emilia: Archivio Audiovisivo del movimento operaio e democratico and Comune di Reggio Emilia and Archivio Cesare Zavattini, Roma-Reggio Emilia, 1998. 2 Cf. Reports by the fledgeling groups in Bollettino dei Cinegiornali liberi. CL-1, no. 1, June 1968. 1

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What follows is not a romantic statement: all you need is a wall to screen these newsreels. The very notion of a picture house revives existing economic structures which the free newsreels seek to fight. Their simplicity without ties and their mobility are conducive to an impact of growing presence on the ground, achieved through an economy of means. Free newsreels need to grow exponentially and discover, not without their air of conspiracy, inspiration for content to be produced fast. Speed is their ethical essence which the other cinema cannot possibly match, because of the way it functions, and because of its underlying concept of what information is. The other cinema will come across as slower and slower in the face of the pressure of more and more Italian diaries conveyed by the free newsreel mode of expression. Don’t be worried about coming across as being in the wrong, because of your constant struggle, because of your ongoing critique, and for always being against. Over the past twenty years, habit patterns, the pursuit of personal financial gain, not to mention hypocrisy, have formed a hard shell which can only be knocked out with a sledgehammer. Such an approach is tempered, however, by a sense of responsibility so close to us that it is our shadow, and the network we must build belongs to the public sphere, before being artistic or cinematic in general. Like a cat with a tin can tied to its tail, free newsreels will carry with them their expressive needs, language, and even the sound of the can. Maybe they won’t proceed with the movements of a cat, but we must plan the speed of intervention, in telegraphic terms, rather than epistolary terms, based on an outlook which is social and connected, which is why we have called it continuous cinema.3 In Reggio Emilia we are doing two things: the first is the Reggio Emilia Free Newsreel. Its first edition will be coming out next month. The second is the imminent publication of a monthly bulletin which will provide news of all the free newsreels and their contents and whatever else can serve as a stimulus, as solidarity and connexion for up-and-coming free newsreels in Sicily or in Piedmont. The Reggio Emilia Centre won’t be providing any advice on content. Instead, it insists on the effective independence of each free newsreels. Each one to come into being is a victory of resistance against the underlying counter-reform of those in power. Another frequent question is what camera to employ. Using the same kind of camera would facilitate exchanges between free newsreels, at least those currently under development. But it seems an unnecessary imposition to set a standard, be it an 8-millimetre camera or a Super8, a 16- or a 35 millimetre. We have no intention of confirming existing technological myths nor of stopping people in their tracks. An 8-millimetre camera can get in anywhere, like an eel. It has keen sight, but poor hearing. 16-millimetre cameras are expensive and the 35-millimetre camera is even pricier. We think function dictates which machine to use. In other words, we think that what you need to say, when it is well3

Words in bold in the original text are rendered in italics in this English translation, to achieve the same emphasis.

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thought out and clear to understand, will find the shortest route to connect with the many. Reggio Emilia is, as I have said before, all in favour of decentralization and supporting practical and conceptual autonomy. Experience will help us. Customary forms of collaboration will be challenged the more the logic of open access to the cine-camera among more people prevails. The statement that anyone can use a camera might sound merely polemical, but it is a fact that anyone can take part in making Free Newsreels. There is a temptation to give examples of how a Free Newsreel might be put together, in terms of content. This was done for The Newsreel for Peace. In this case, however, that temptation will be resisted, to avoid limiting the creative or critical thrust of those who are going to be making Free Newsreels. We already established the key points seven months ago, in Rinascita magazine, and more recently in a daily paper, Paese Sera. We also presented them at Bologna, during the Conference on Free Cinema, launched at Porretta Terme, and during the aid Conference in Algiers.4 There are no limitations of any kind. A Free Newsreel is made up of proposals, protest, critique, defence, Vietnam, God, heart transplants, art, lsd, divorce, eros, cowardice, the class society, the moon, peace and war. Diatribes or carefully reasoned argument? Messages which are one, five, or ten minutes long? In colour or in black and white? Three hundred metres or a thousand? Weekly or fortnightly? In first person or third? With or without actors? Introverted or extroverted approaches? Objective or subjective? In the same issue, will there be a single topic or many? Lyrical or dramatic? Anything goes. Mix it all up. It is not a question of being chaotic, but of allowing the unlimited freedom Newsreels need in order to exist. Genre is dead forever. Long live genre, when it can become critical in the context of Free Newsreels! A photograph can be the key element of an issue of Free Newsreels, and someone could make us look at it for five minutes, if there is a reason to do so. We won’t be surprised if an individual in the public eye should have a fit in front of us, yelling that obscene word in extreme close-up, because he, the author of thirty volumes, in that moment in time can find no other way to express his indignation. It may be that someone is chased away by the police, after setting up the projector in the public square without a permit.5 Anyone who needs information or wishes to make suggestions should write to the Centre for Free Newsreels, c/o the Municipal Office of Reggio Emilia. More soon in these columns. Zavattini, along with some of the Italian filmmakers who had worked with him on his documentaries, Lori Mazzetti, Nelo Risi, Ansano Giannarelli, was among the invited participants at the 1968 Annual General Conference of the International Association of Documentarists (aid), held that year in Algiers (25 February–1 March 1968). Other delegates included the pioneers of twentieth-century documentary, Joris Ivens, Georges Franju, Agnés Varda and Jean Rouch. Cf. C. Mario Lanzafame and Carlo Podaliri, ‘Zavattini and Africa. Traces and Research’, in Alberto Ferraboschi (ed.), Zavattini Beyond Borders, Reggio Emilia: Corsiero Editore, 2019, 129–48. 5 Zavattini is speaking from experience, He witnessed such situations while filming The Mysteries of Rome. 4

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Zavattini, letter to Luigi Chiarini (1968)1

Context Zavattini’s letter is directed to his friend and colleague Luigi Chiarini. In 1935, Chiarini had been involved in founding the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the prestigious Rome film school, and later was appointed its general director, and, in 1938, he founded and edited the film magazine Bianco e Nero, which attracted major international film theorists. In the 1950s, he worked on many scenarios and film projects, in collaboration with Zavattini. He also fought governmental censorship in the 1950s, and, as the editor of La Rivista del Cinema Italiano, had published Zavattini’s book on Umberto D., which included his seminal ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’ (1952). But at this juncture, in 1968, he and Zavattini were on opposite sides. Chiarini was now the director of the Venice Film Festival which anac, the association of film authors, including both screenwriters and film directors, politically opposed, mainly thanks to the political work of Zavattini and of the Free Newsreels cooperative movement for a new cinema. On 19 August, he wrote to Chiarini, seeking to establish a dialogue, in the foreknowledge, as a main organizer for anac, that it would be virtually impossible to have one.

Text Dear Chiarini, In three, or four days’ time, I shall be in Venice. I hope to see you, then again, I hope I don’t. The situation is rather complicated, as far as personal relations between old friends like you and me are concerned. I am coming on behalf of anac, you are against anac and anac is against Venice. I am not ruling out that we might clash on the steps of the Cinema Pavilion. I share anac’s ideas, especially its strategy, and I do hope you will agree that for twenty-five years I

1

Zavattini, Io. Un’autobiografia, 243–4.

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have disseminated (to say planted the seed would be too presumptuous) a few intuitions and principles – some of them quite stubbornly – which have ended up informing the current standoff. In other words, I am looking forward to going to Venice. I think that the rejection of the Venice Film Festival makes sense, in so far as it is timely, coming at the same time as other struggles, so for us to come also expresses our solidarity for those struggles, some of them only recently over, others yet to take place.2 It is paradoxical that a man so full of élan, freedom, and a critical awareness like you, should end up siding with the conservative faction. The cinema has been beleaguered by opposition against its development and continues to be faced with resistance against it, with the clear objective to prevent it from being autonomous. If it were, it would be able to express in a timely way contemporary, social, and political needs. Opposing Venice is no childish and pointless rebellion, but the outcome of demands which you and I have also helped identify and pursue, and which current events have rescued from a certain lethargy and slow evolution, faced with the blatant urgency which defines the moment we are currently living.

2

Ansano Giannarelli, Zavattini Sottotraccia, Rome: Edizioni Effigi and Archivio Audiovisivo Del Movimento Operaio e Democratico, 2009, 59. For example, in 1958, Chiarini had co-scripted with Zavattini and Renato Nicolai the colour documentary Sette contadini, by Elio Petri, about the massacre of all seven Cervi brothers, assassinated by the Germans in November 1943.

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anac Press Conference, Venice Film Festival (1968)1

Context The press statement below was read out to the media reporting on the Venice Film Festival. This is where a large group of filmmakers organized a successful protest which effectively blocked the 1968 Festival. The events forced the media to cover the protest, rather than discussing the films to be screened at the Festival. The protest was organized and run by anac members, including Zavattini himself, Pasolini, Maselli, Lionello Massobrio, Marco Ferreri, and supported by the students from the Rome Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and a range of organizations: the Italian Federation of Film Clubs, the Federation of University film circles, arci, the Communist Party cultural association, by film magazine desks, including Cinema Nuovo, Cinema Sessanta, Filmcritica and Cinema e Film, Zavattini’s Free Newsreels association, the Cinema Section of the pci and the Socialists of the psiup and several others.2 In Italy, as previous texts suggest, there had been a long process of debate leading into the protest by filmmakers. Back in March, months before the protest began in France, the Italian association of filmmakers split, and over one hundred members resigned to form a separate association. They rejected what they perceived as a politicization of anac which was pushing for new government policies to support the Italian cinema industry and, more importantly, they distanced themselves from the argument that it was time ‘to create the conditions and the tools for a different cinema altogether’.3 Conversely, these members, who included in their ranks famous auteurs such as, among others, Antonioni, Blasetti, Fellini, Visconti and Luigi Zampa, favoured retaining the existing system. Surprisingly, the splinter faction intent on preserving the status quo ante was the group to whom French filmmakers had extended their solidarity, though that group was, to all intents and purposes, against the May protest in France

Zavattini, ‘Conferenza stampa dell’ anac, 24 agosto 1968’, in Neorealismo ecc., 287–8. Mino Argentieri, ibidem, 288. 3 Mino Argentieri, ibidem, 286. 1

2

anac

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and contrary to any effort to question the Italian cinema industry as it stood in 1968, and any attempts made to change it. The rift was healed only four years later.

Text We contest the Italian and foreign cinematographic system. We contest a particular kind of cinema which is limited in scope and suffocated by rigid rules decided by a political and economic structure which finds in film festivals its highest form of celebration and self-validation. Even principled festivals, which admit culturally effective film works, share a conception of cinema in which whoever wants to make cinema for the political struggle in the heart of the reality of actual events is still constrained. Once a year, a festival selects films from different countries. These films, limited to a short period of time, and presented to worldwide press, create an illusion of an active, widespread, cinematographic conscience, decisive and satisfactory in terms of the struggle. The truth is that festivals have become the false consciousness of cinema. They conceal the appalling disproportion between what should be done as an intervention in the struggle for a truly free cinema and what is actually done. There is an ongoing pressure to create the illusion that a small number of films which have somehow avoided the net of hegemonic cinematographic practice should be sufficient to create the impression that the cultural development of cinema is growing fast. Festivals end up submitting to the reality of the industry, instead of creating a new dynamic in all the areas of cinema, from initial conception to production, distribution and viewing. Festivals needn’t attempt to correct their policies. No, they should be reversed. The problem isn’t down to communicating the current status of cinema, but rejecting outright and a priori its pace, its slow unfolding in terms of current events. Events move at a faster pace than cinema. The organizers of the Festival have carried out a vulgar, opportunist manoeuvre to make it seem that our protest is linked in some way with the offence against freedom that is being perpetrated against a nation. We say that it is precisely because we are aware of the tragic reality which surrounds us and are also aware of cinema’s very limited participation in wanting to know about such reality, let alone intervening, that we have, for this reason and in this context, been encouraged and gained new confidence in the actions we are carrying out. We are fighting for a cinema which rebels against spasmodic festival structures and their rituals imposed by capitalism, and even the best among them are no different in this respect. It is false to say that we are intent on destruction. On the contrary, among the many concrete proposals, one envisages the renewal of cinema resulting in a Venetian hub, built on the ashes of current reformist compromises, in which continuous activities take place, regular meetings organized for filmmakers and not only for them, but also for cooperation between filmmakers and intellectuals, and between filmmakers, intellectuals

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and members of the public, to seek new forms of cinema, and to do so with a constant, even daily commitment to activities, within a permanent international centre which subvert and interrupt existing calendar-based rituals, which, within a short space of time will provide cinema with a powerful capability to intervene which it currently lacks.

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‘The Cine-camera as a Weapon’ (1969)1

Context By 1969, many free newsreels had been made and the free newsreel coordination had developed into a movement with centres in many Italian cities. The first part of this article proposes the need for guerrilla filming, seen as a simple action to make a visual diary of significant events, at a time of heightened political activity in Italy. In the second part, Zavattini, who was present during the occupation of the Luce Institute, the state newsreel producer, summons up, in what can be considered a virtual free newsreel, a moment in time, a cinematic page from his personal diary, to convey what it was like to be there, providing in this way an example of weaponizing the cine-camera to make a free newsreel.

Text The point is not to impose suggestions, but to say that even just a hundred metres of old footage can be all it takes to make a free newsreel, provided you take into account the time which has elapsed since that document was made and reflection in order to explore the material for what it yields to understand better the situation we are living today. Some free newsreels can be entirely dedicated to debates, or to pressing questions, or reconstructions of an event, or even the outcome of a badly made newsreel, shown accompanied by a new soundtrack containing its critique, with the purpose of illustrating the causes of its failure, such as a lack of engagement with contemporary issues; could be a lack of connection with the struggle or of a too disengaged perspective or some other cause. In the last few days, for example, the Luce Institute has been occupied

1

Zavattini, ‘La cinepresa come arma’, in Bollettino dei Cinegiornali liberi, March 1969, 34. This text appeared in the second of five free newsreels, all reprinted in Roberto Nanni (ed.), Una straordinaria utopia: Zavattini e il non film. I cinegiornali liberi, Reggio Emilia 6–7 March 1998, Reggio Emilia: Archivio Audiovisivo del movimento operaio e democratico and Comune di Reggio Emilia and Archivio Cesare Zavattini, Roma-Reggio Emilia, 1998.

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by the workers and the Ente Gestione by filmmakers, actors and the unions.2 Incredible but true: not a camera in sight in those corridors or projection halls. Every now and again, someone would find a corner to tell a friend the story for his next film. The trouble is that we are all of us implicated in the procedural workings of the cinema industry, both in terms of organization and planning. The cine-camera is not a weapon quite yet. That is to say, no one feels the need to grab it at any moment as you would do with a weapon. The reason is probably that the association with the struggle has not yet been made completely, but we are getting there. There can be no doubt that there should have been a cinecamera to hand in that situation for anyone who wished to use it, better still, more than one. It could have served to shoot thirty metres or even a hundred. And the simple action of editing that footage would have produced a diary of that event which was extraordinary: workers and filmmakers brought together, solely thanks to the workers’ initiative. Those days could have been interpreted by observing what was going on: their impulsive actions, their contradictions, their relatedness to other situations taking place in Italy; their doubts, fatigue and enthusiasm, their long late nights, their moments of weakness and their individual and collective victories; the heated debates within the Occupation Committee, the assemblies, sometimes crowded and sometimes deserted, and, above all, certain discussions taking place here and there.3 These exchanges conveyed the effort being made to extricate ourselves from an ambiguous situation, one which invests the cinema, the theatre, and book publishing, in a continual tension between revolution and reform, between global and partial struggle, between a dreamed consistency and practical inconsistency. You could barely hear the sound of alibis, in good or bad faith, sense the joy of feeling united, capable of carrying out extreme actions and the fear, once people left the Luce Institute and were back out in the street, of being reabsorbed by particular everyday needs. The collections, the Maoist posters that created confusion, the internal and external conflict in opting for tactical or strategic choices, the desperate phone calls, the spies, the personal rivalries that remerged, but which were, at least for the duration, set aside; the women, fellow comrades taking part in the self-same struggle, but females nevertheless; the hurried and mysterious apparitions of people no one had ever met; the arguments flaring up out of nowhere, and false information circulating. Listening to an inflexible, in vitro, version of the difficult position of the unions, in respect of any ideology; their

The state documentary producer Istituto Luce was occupied for twenty days in 1969. Cf. Franco Montini and Enzo Natta, Una poltrona per due: Cinecittà tra pubblico e privato, Turin: Effata Editrice, 2007, 3. Alfredo Angeli, Rosso malpelo schizza veleno, Rome: Fazi Editore, 2005, 84. 3 Zavattini was an eyewitness, which explains the virtual free newsreel quality of this article, which reads almost like a scenario for its style. The positioning of the article in the magazine layout also seems poignant, appearing as it does on the back page of the Free Newsreels Bulletin. It is the last word; a word of encouragement to make free newsreels go down the route of a diary of struggle. 2

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having to negotiate between the institutional reality and what was going on over and above it outside; discussions that reached a crescendo just as dawn was breaking, and the sympathy of the workers towards filmmakers, if tempered by diffidence and their effort to overcome years and years of misinformation and orchestrated hostility.

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‘Pesaro Film Festival and Free Newsreels’ (1969)1

Context This text, published as a supplement to the fourth Free Newsreels Bulletin published in October 1970, was a communiqué handed out to the press in September 1970, during the Pesaro Film Festival by members of the Free Newsreels. The Pesaro Festival was originally set up in opposition to the Venice Film Festival, with the intention of establishing an alternative model. But, as Zavattini explains in the text, it soon became an auterist site of activity, in which screenings were accompanied by specialist round tables, showcasing the directors. The article, accompanied by the public intervention at Pesaro, was an attempt at forcing a debate with the cultural élite. The previous year, Free Newsreel members had walked out of Pesaro in protest and in 1968 the Pesaro organizers were not involved in the subversion of the Venice Film Festival organized by anac and the Free Newsreel group. Once again, what was at stake was a committed cinema, a political cinema, in the new sense of a grassroots guerrilla cinema. The article confirms Zavattini’s presence at an international forum for documentarians held in Algiers in the spring of 1968 where he presented the Free Newsreels in the context of the developing world which attracted an enthusiastic reception, including Joris Ivens’s promise to participate in the future.2

Zavattini, ‘La mostra di Pesaro e i cinegiornali liberi’, in Supplemento al Bollettino dei Cinegiornali Liberi, n. 4, dato a Pesaro in settembre, Bollettino dei cinegiornali liberi, no. 4, October 1970, 34. This text appeared in the second of five Free Newsreels, all reprinted in Nanni (ed.), Una straordinaria utopia. 2 Zavattini, ‘I cinegiornali liberi’, Paper given at the students’ Civis headquarters, March 1969. Typescript. The text was reproduced photographically and reprinted in Nanni (ed.), Una straordinaria utopia. The first Free Newsreels Bulletin, published in June 1968, contains a photographic reproduction of a postcard by Ivens sent to Zavattini in support of the initiative. 1

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Text This is the text contained in the press release handed out by members of our editorial office to journalists who were present at this year’s Pesaro exhibition, which we publish here to inform our readers. Last year, we of the Free Newsreels, walked out of the Pesaro Film Festival, because we saw that it was still organized as a curated collection than as a platform for promotion. It is organized along the lines of Venice, if slightly better, but still following the same cultural line, that is to say, too shallow in its approach to the needs for an interventionist cinema, needs which have developed within the reality of our country. It is a merit to inform the public and critics with screenings of committed and advanced films from all over the world. But we think no one finds this satisfactory, if this happens with no effect of radical renewal of Italian cinema. But you must want these impacts and must seek them out. What is Pesaro doing to seek them out? Where in this venue exactly is that connection made between the informative stage and the intervention stage to effect change? Is a stimulating and creative word coming from the 1970 Pesaro Festival towards all these new events aimed at an anti-institutional cinema, antiindustrial, against profit and mass alienation, but, on the contrary, genuinely democratized through a grassroots setup of the production, distribution and screening – even allowing for their contradictoriness and lack of homogeneity? Previous Pesaro film festivals of these years made specific commitments in this sense, which included establishing a new type of relation with the audience, research and a focus on new ways of using cinema as a means of counterinformation and struggle. But this year, there is no sign of progress of any kind. There has been a deliberate avoidance of recovering any overarching discourse which, as a reflection of the historic moment, on a national and international level, constitutes the shift of a cinema dependent on and relating to contemporary events. Instead, the public debate is reduced to ‘meetings with the authors’, and it is no accident that the choice falls on that specialist figure, who is typical of the division of labour and of mainstream cultural privilege. We refuse to believe that, in this way, when the feast of the struggle is over, the saint of popular participation should be the one to be fooled. Rather, it is crucial to engage in this debate with even greater energy, especially in light of the recent institution of the Regions which, in every sense, must become the place where popular power and creativity can be enacted, whose undeniable maturity the autumn workers’ struggle have shown. The Regions need to initiate and accelerate this process towards autonomy, including a cultural autonomy of the working class, which will spell the end of the concentration and authoritarian centralism of Rome administration, impacting on all of us in its rites of power and vested interests which need to be broken up.

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Therefore, a total reversal of principle and method is needed, one which even Pesaro to favour, given its political composition. This would mean dealing with cinema not as central to cultural elitism, something which it is not in essence, but as it really is, that is to say, a part of mass culture and today we say of the masses, not for the masses, in the precise sense of masses in the context of the most advanced struggles of the working-class movement; protagonists of a history being made today and in the immediate future. A reasonable objection would be that a film festival of this nature, with all its institutional limitations, cannot be expected to do everything and be concerned about everything. Well then, we object that it would be a start to begin to make a few indicative choices, by, for example, initiating at Pesaro a critical debate on what has been done and what needs to be done in terms of cinema. More than organizing a film festival, this requires planning, the kind of planning suggested by the Venice demonstrations of 1968, at least in broad lines, as regards the South, one of the most subaltern areas of popular culture and at the same time the area with most problems in Italy. Tackling ‘Cinema and the South’ would have the benefit of rescuing Pesaro from its generic approach and the insidious process of cultural homogenization, usually considered as a phenomenon in isolation. It would also have the merit of connecting a battle against international imperialism (which characterize the films brought to Pesaro only on a modest scale) to the no less urgent battle against home-grown capitalism. This is only one of several potential directions which require people to overcome the hesitancy that the awareness of the contemporary situation has already cast off, using the ways and means at their disposal.

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Political film (1970)1

Context These texts were recorded on 9 September 1970 (§1), 24 July 1970 (2§) and 14 October 1971 (§3), as part of an ongoing series of interviews with Zavattini, conducted by the film critic and journalist Giacomo Gambetti. The interviews began in the mid-1960s and continued with regular meetings until the early 1980s. These recordings are among those published in 1986.2 Zavattini continued thinking over the relation between film and politics after his last trip to Cuba in 1959–60. One of the legacies of Neo-realism was a third way, not Hollywood, not Soviet social realism, but an elliptical realism with a social message able to sidestep both propaganda and didacticism. He had suggested adopting an elliptical approach to the Cubans, but these reflections belong to a period of greater radicalization, when he was producing and organizing Free Newsreels as counter-cinema, sidestepping mainstream distribution circuits. This is the immediate context, the movement launched by Zavattini and a group of filmmakers in late 1967, around the Free Newsreels, comprising independent filmmaking, setting up a grassroots social film network, political organization, debate, theorizing and making guerrilla cinema. In the early 1950s, attempts were made too to work outside the film industry’s organizational structures. Carlo Lizzani’s alternative production, funded by cooperatives set up for that purpose, comes to mind.3 As he saw it, television had the potential of bridging the gap between event and film, but its promise had not been fulfilled so far and experimentation, such as it was, was very limited. Films made for television, even documentaries, tended to be formulaic. Neither cinema nor television were measuring up to the real need for authentic communication. Furthermore, they were author-centred, and one-way communication. Whereas, Free Newsreels pointed the way forward, in Zavattini interviewed by Giacomo Gambetti, 9 September 1970, in Gambetti, Zavattini mago e tecnico, Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo Editore, 1986, 178–80. 2 Gambetti, ibidem, 1986. 3 Eligio Imarisio, ‘La Cooperativa spettatori produttori cinematografici, irripetuta meteora sul firmamento cinematografico’, in La parabola del neorealismo nelle Cronache di poveri amanti di Carlo Lizzani, Rome: Carocci editore, 2014, 19–27. 1

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that, in addition to new content, they posited two-way communication, the best example of this being Apollon, made by the print workers, in close collaboration with the film crew. To be relevant, cinema had to be national, understood in Antonio Gramsci’s sense of the word, to mean addressing people’s lives and their needs, and doing so would be genuine political cinema, a network of films reaching the whole country, rather than meaning one-off films on single issues, shown in the alternative niche circuit of art films, and generally acclaimed for their ‘political’ content.

Text 1 Political film, today. What is it? What does it mean?4 In one sense, it entails picking up where Neo-realism left off. But it would make no sense to adopt the concepts of 1945–6 – at least not in the way they have been generally understood, that is to say, in the narrow sense of a choice to make films about real stories. Rather, as it so happened, they freed themselves from existing organizational structures, to carry out genuine political work. Today, what interests me the most is ‘alternative’ cinema. I take ‘political’ to mean a cinema that want to do politics, by which I mean a cinema that objects to political norms that turn culture into apartheid, and instead wants to start from scratch, by putting everything into question, on a far more advanced basis of understanding. This is why to have the presumption, as I do, of speaking once again in terms of Neo-realism is legitimate, only in terms of national Neorealism.5 A cinema is national whenever it configures itself to address current pressing needs – popular, mass needs – which, as such, at a given historic moment, are widescale, national needs. Neo-realism itself was well aware of the need to bring up to date the type of struggle, in tune with the times, which meant engaging with the contingent historic situation. Clearly, then, if at the war’s end, the very decision to tackle the political problems of the period was already, in itself, a challenge to the system, now, we have to establish what today’s political problems are, taking stock of what kind of reality we are faced with in the present. The shift that has occurred since then is that the concept of cinema which Neo-realism involved (ordinary people, real world, and so on), was still intrinsically part of a capitalist outlook. Contemporary cinema must now tackle the situation determined by capitalism head on, taking into account, on the one hand, its organization, on the other,

4 5

Zavattini, 9 September 1970, in Gambetti, ibidem, 178–80. On the concept of ‘national’, as opposed to nationalist, in the later political sense, and national-popular, Zavattini is drawing on Gramsci’s theory of national-popular culture, cf. Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971, 135–41.

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how the masses make use of all the media at their disposal, or don’t make use of them and consequently slow down their dynamic of struggle. This line of action has led to rejecting what I have called the now-and-then cinema, replaced by continuous cinema, that is to say, by a cinema carrying the same charge, with the same impact, to be found in the continuous flow of events or, equally, mirror their absence of continuity, as opposed to the continuity of solutions one finds in the other cinema, which belongs to those structures of time and reality that we must leave behind.6 The rise of television could have been, and should have been, the technical opportunity and choice medium to broadcast such continuous information flows, but it hasn’t become one, for well-known reasons. Clearly, then, the internal organization of cinema tends to resemble television, but as a separate entity. The refusal of labour7 within the system is the Revolution and has led to disagreements among those members of the Left, who prefer to seek limited concessions from the system. But Neo-realism’s logical development, given its political dynamic, could not but result in making fundamental political choices, as part of the heightened political antagonism in the country.8 From the outset, Neo-realism could not be compromising. Its point of departure, its premiss, led it to evolve from populism, sentimentalism, and celebration, to mapping the social situation, an activity inevitably connected to investigative work, right down to the basic elements of conducting enquiries, in the full knowledge that an investigative intervention can go no further than the level of political awareness of struggle with which it is conducted. The very shift from a narrative practice to an essayistic one, built on principles of investigative research, implied an idea of cinema which rejected the architecture of profit in favour of an architecture of change in the short term. Since the beginning of Neo-realism, there were political implications in opting for actualizing in the short term. Expectations for an even shorter timespan today come with obvious cultural implications.9 The use of the cine-camera has developed and aspires to equate with the use of words, aspires to simplification, By ‘other cinema’, as earlier, the writer is referring to mainstream cinema. By ‘refusal of labour’ Zavattini literally meant going on strike, but he uses a phrase that was current at the time, deriving from the far Left. In the 1960s, a group of Marxist intellectuals known as ‘workerists’ formed around Quaderni Rossi (1961–5), a theory journal of the Left, as well as a workshop of Marxist study, edited by Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri. Tronti, author of Operai e capitale, Milan: Einuadi 1966, and Toni Negri were the main figures, as well as Raniero Panzieri, the editor of La Classe. The operaismo group argued that the crisis of capitalism would be furthered through systematic conflict at the stage of production, through factory strikes, in antagonism with the Communist Party’s reformist compromising at all costs. 8 momento caldo del paese: In Italy, the autumn of 1969 was referred to as l’Autunno caldo, the ‘hot autumn’, the time of the widespread factory strikes and continuing, and more focused, student protest, now also linked to the factories. The social and political context of this interview was a moment of strong rebellion and the development of Il movimento, the movement. Zavattini’s appeal for a political cinema sought to combine the legacy of Neorealism with contemporary struggle. 9 In other words, Zavattini is theorizing the need to close the gap between life and art, between social needs and cinema, shifting the focus and problematic from adequation between screen 6 7

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so as to identify with those words which signal needs, engaging with them in their irrefutable existence, with less of a tendency towards elaboration, mediation or sublimation. It would be odd to go as far as recognizing that Neo-realism wanted to do away with capitalism for a goal which had nothing to do with profit and then be surprised by all the consequences that fidelity to such a premiss entails. The social or choral dimension was unique to Neo-realism, in that it presupposed a time which was completely foreign to profit, a time of struggle, of action. It involved a more or less deliberate search for something which was always already integral to cinema, even on a technical level. Often, technological development in the making constitutes the search for something which exists, already there from the beginning, with the determining features of its intellectual practice and where it sits historically self-contained within it. Neo-realism also contributed to correct the almost exclusive escapist use of cinema. If yesterday the crisis was a crisis of stories, and a crisis within stories, today, it is the crisis of cinema and within cinema. Today, the crisis is determined by the imperative that we must film together, yesterday, by it was determined by wanting to film after the event.10

2 The real leap forward today is to find creativity at the very heart of events.11 Thus, we have to do away with the no-man’s land between events and the cinema. This is obvious, but I am the one who has said it, modestly speaking. And you will understand that I didn’t think up the Free Newsreels, for example, as new type of alternative circuit. They were, rather, the first intervention to break with the alternative circuit altogether; an attempt to break out of an art form which separates the viewers from the artist, not only in terms of cinema, but in any art form whatsoever.

3 Consider, for example, the entire Neo-realist dynamic as a pre-television stage.12 I think this is very important. Television, in terms of film and in terms of field research, and reportage has done nothing more than develop a thematic, a discourse, and hypotheses which were all integral to Neo-realism. Neo-realism never succeeded in obtaining the industrial, economic, and practical support required to develop, since the cinema had its own established consumerist structure, length, and topics. But Neo-realism denied all of this. This time and real time to the one between research, results and cinematic action in response to findings. 10 Zavattini’s emphasis. 11 Zavattini, 24 July 1970, in Gambetti, ibidem, 183–4. 12 Zavattini, 14 October 1971, in Gambetti, ibidem, 180–2.

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explains why Neo-realism had already understood that what was needed was films of varying length, of five, ten, one, nine, forty, seventy minutes. It had also established that the enquiry or case study format, which wasn’t popular with audiences, could be explored in great depth and become popular, not meant in any derogatory sense. As far as I was concerned, seeing fieldwork through to the bitter end had the benefit of enhancing the research with new data, and almost leading in the direction of a fictional story, not because that was the ultimate objective, but because a profound grasp of an investigation brings with it such revelations about people, such insights concerning society and human nature that we are in the habit of betraying by manipulating the imagination. Whereas, by adopting research as part of our practice, the result would lead to a more direct, more real process of imagining. One evening, you might chance upon a man who has just got out of gaol, on television, someone like Cesaroni who speaks to you and this is what he wanted to say, and the reportage is one of the many aspects. That kind of structure should not be confused with genuine reportage. It is only one of many elements reportage makes possible. But cinema wouldn’t even allow you to do it at all, if it had not been for television. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, and not without difficulty, cinema would have eventually been in a position to avail itself of these possibilities. It comes as no surprise, then, that television did not develop all its potential and the opportunities it had, since it settled for less. It settled for broadcasting a film, understood as a ninety-minute time-frame and a norm of narrative serenity, which ‘tranquility’ it then spread in other directions too. Cinematic discourse has failed to explore the wide range of its potential, and, equally, television broadcasting has also failed. It is always a question of content, for even the latest, so-called ‘political’ films are significant, in so far as they express a content which was earlier, to some degree, belittled through compromise. There is always the same old, never ending effort, to work against conditioning, and doing so through the medium of radio, cinema, television, video cassettes. You can do it through any of these. The real problem is saying something that breaks out, ripping assumptions asunder, all the more so for being repressed up until now. Even in doing so, there are so many formats to choose from, and the outcome, the end product, the films are still industrialized products, and the author too, without realizing it, is still conditioned. No matter how far he goes, he always stops short. And this is why there is a real need to carry on, regardless of unpopularity and failures, to make cinema, using the camera in collaboration with free circuits, militant, alternative circuits. But why even talk in terms of circuits? Let’s break it down to the simplest denominator: I am talking about the need to make cinema with interlocutors, the ones contingent necessity will lead you to. And no matter if they are a million, ten million, or that we will find them over here or over there.

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‘The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat’ (1971)1

Context From the summer of 1967, Zavattini and the rest of the organizers worked in two directions: seeking, on the one hand, contacts with the unions, with the Communist Party, which had supported Zavattini’s first experimental newsreel, The Newsreel for Peace, with unitelefilm, the party’s film department, chiefly responsible for making propaganda, and later with arci, the Communist Party’s cultural organization, and with grassroots organizations and groups. The Left was divided in its reception. Attempts at political filmmaking made by the Student Movement in 1968 in the university context were short-lived. Because the Free Newsreels were seen as an expression of the pci, the Student Movement boycotted them, for example, in Venice, during the Film Festival where only the Free Newsreel group was active in making demands and protesting. Many of the films they made were produced by unitelefilm and their pool of professional documentary filmmakers. But the best known, Apollon, was the work of a collective which included the printers at the print plant where their occupation had lasted a year and had won out. Although it was a collective effort in every way, Ugo Gregoretti, a member of the Free Newsreels group, presented it as his own work. His next Free Newsreel, Contratto (Contract), was financed by the pci’s union, the cgil. Both films were expressions of the ideas and plans developed by the Free Newsreels Collective since 1967, with their roots in various forays into the documentary by Zavattini, especially The Newsreel for Peace and The Mysteries of Rome. Plans to develop a new kind of Free Newsreel, called The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat, represented an attempt to focus the project, through direct collaboration with the communist union, the cgil, and closely related cultural organizations such as arci and possibly unitelefilm. In July 1970, the third 1

‘Tavola rotonda sul cinegiornale libero del proletariato fra Benocci, Bernari, Boldini, Branca, Fulci, Pagliarini, Roscani, Zavattini’, Bollettino dei Cinegiornali liberi, no. 5, October 1971, 1–32. A photographic repoduction appeared in Nanni (ed.), Una straordinaria utopia: Zavattini e il non film. I cinegiornali liberi.

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Free Newsreels Bulletin published a text about this new development which was relatively recently reprinted in an anthology of related texts.2 The following was a transcript of Zavattini’s intervention at a group discussion, a round table, in which he and members of arci and the unions discussed the next stage of development of the Free Newsreels. The full debate is too long for inclusion, so only Zavattini’s intervention has been included. Reference is made to the topical July 1970 revolt of Reggio Calabria, which had only just begun on 14 July and was to last a year.

Text 1 The Free Newsreels Bulletin is dedicating its fifth issue to the theme of The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat. The main aspects of The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat appeared in issue no. 3 of the Bulletin. As far as we of the Free Newsreels Collective are concerned, the planned Free Newsreel of the Proletariat, which we want to launch as soon as possible, comprises the outcome of our work to date, as well as a plan for future action, directed at affirming the potential and the necessity of an autonomous cinema, existing outside the structures, both in terms of creation and fruition, as we have said many times before; a decentred cinema to facilitate the greatest number of locations for counter-information in our country, and their coordination. We have always spoken explicitly of a political cinema in opposition to industrial cinema. The awareness of this kind of cinema now exists. We could call it the second moment of Italian cinema, understood as its tension towards becoming the expression of the country’s most advanced popular needs. The first moment of Italian cinema took place because it coincided with a profound sense of making history, characterized by a sharp break with a particular form of cultural, social, and political approach, in other words, a rejection of an entire culture. An enormous event has taken place: the demystification of bourgeois cinema, which had been imposed as the one and only viable form of cinema, with varying degrees of success, in different parts of the world. The struggle between 2

‘Il cinegiornale libero del proletariato’, Bollettino dei Cinegiornali liberi, no. 3, July 1970, 3–4. A reproduction of a typescript of a shorter version, containing only the first few paragraphs, appears in Nanni (ed.), Una straordinaria utopia: Zavattini e il non film. I cinegiornali liberi, and was reprinted in Masoni and Vecchi (eds), Cinenotizie in poesia e prosa, 2000. For the purposes of this book, an entirely different text, produced in a dialogical situation, rather than in manifesto format, has been selected: Zavattini, ‘Tavola rotonda sul cinegiornale libero del proletariato fra Benocci, Bernari, Boldini, Branca, Fulci, Pagliarini, Roscani, Zavattini’, Bollettino dei Cinegiornali liberi, no. 5, October 1971, 1–32. It appears as a photographic reproduction in Nanni (ed.), Una straordinaria utopia: Zavattini e il non film. I cinegiornali liberi, but appears for the first time as a text in its own right, albeit in translation.

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conservative and antagonist forces has identified in this freelance cinema, so to speak, a useful, typical, intrinsic, and inevitable means of communication. We discovered that the gap between one free film product and another weakened, or even destroyed, a product’s constructive contribution. In the space between one product and the next, power manages to insinuate itself once again. This realization led us to identifying the need for an instrument, characterized by continuity, and this constituted the practical and conceptual leap to forging strong links with the most genuine, avant-garde force, the working-class movement itself. We could say that Italian political cinema of the immediate post-war reflected a new generalized sentiment, both critical and self-critical, but somewhat possibilist.3 Whereas, now that there is a sharply defined antagonistic situation, either cinema is going to take on its consequences or revert to its ambiguities. We therefore insist on the validity of The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat, as an uninterrupted means for struggle, at the service of the working class. The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat will have no truck with existing culture, which functions entirely within the limits of its own boundaries. Instead, it defies the control of all mass media, which, simply put, in its origin and ongoing activity, stand for a specific interpretation of reality that validates the conservation of power. Protective of his role, the Minister in office stated a few months ago that he has no intention of assisting political cinema, thus explicitly confirming where his allegiances lie. fnp intends to work for a mass culture which is in tune with mass action.

2 We are part of the class struggle. We are aligned with the extreme Left, and welcome all those expressions of decisive, effective, political antagonism against the regime. Clearly, we are not limited by party-political definition, nor are we a wall on which anybody can write what they like. We need to widen the dialectical field to further the vision I have conveyed. If The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat had been ready a year ago, we would have given 100 per cent support to the Unions at the time of the struggle, just as now we support the Union in its political and unified outlook.4

3 4

‘possibilist’ (from French: possibiliste: willing to settle for a compromise, reformist). Zavattini is referring to the 1969 Autunno caldo (Hot Autumn), a year when the workers’ annual contract bargaining between unions and companies was particularly intense, with widespread strikes taking place across major industrial cities. The second stage of the Free Newsreels locked on to political issues, especially through the experience of CL2 of Rome or Apollon, the second Free Newsreel produced in Rome, about a victorious year-long factory occupation.

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3 We define this cinema, summed up in The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat, with a phrase attempting to sum up its principles of freedom and unprecedented novelty, namely, a cinema of reflection. What this means is that each problem is critically framed. If we were not in tune with the current level of development of the class struggle, we would not believe in the work we are doing, and if we did not value the process of analysis – the process we have defined reflective, whereby you can take any product whatsoever, even a previously made film, and analyse it from a contemporary critical vision – we would have no faith whatsoever in our efforts. This hypothesis may seem a mere detail, even a purely aesthetic detail. Instead, it assumes the significance of an ethical issue, entailing the problem of how, and in what way you tackle situations, reality, or what is going on around us. You do it with total, not limited, freedom. To do so, you have to reject the old formula of a before and an after, a synthesis, in favour of analysis, that is to say, active participation in the event while it is unfolding. The more you take on all its elements, the more effective it is.

4 To clarify a point I made earlier, we want to go to the different places, for example, where events have taken place and, primarily, are taking place, which, we believe, are the outcome of class struggle: Avola, Agrigento, and Reggio Calabria.5 We go there as a cinema, which tries to understand the situation and reconstruct it with the workers, the masses.

5 In this sense, The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat goes one step further than Apollon and Contract, just as Apollon and Contract went further than the first Pesaro Free Newsreel. So we need to acknowledge the limitations which exist at each stage of development, while also acknowledging the indicative and promotional value of some of the elements which have emerged in an intervention of this kind, such as experimenting with creating an independent circuit, trying out new ways of doing things, adopting forms of organization that are switched on through action.

5

On 14 July 1970, Reggio Calabria became the site of a year-long revolt which broke out when Catanzaro was designated as the regional capital, not Reggio, and municipal rivalries reached a peak. The dispute broadened out to become one about poverty, and therefore of interest to Zavattini and the Free Newsreels Collective. Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giovanni Bonfanti filmed scenes of the city besieged by the Neo-fascist extreme Right, as part of the documentary 12 dicembre (1972). Cf. John Foot, ‘The Revolt of Reggio Calabria: 1970’, The Archipelago. Italy since 1945, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, 196–8.

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I am referring to the many criticisms which isolate the end product, as if it were a unique example defining the entire Free Newsreels project, when it only contains a few aspects of it. Their rarity doesn’t help. It encourages this kind of logic of seeing the whole in the single object, particular to a traditional order of thinking.6

6 I would say that the step change compared to pure and simple Free Newsreels, the ultimate purpose of The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat, consists in this political will to achieve daily participation in the actual struggle. What Pagliarini is saying is that we could face an unexpected risk. If we ran some courses, we would create a series of mediations which would once again institutionalize the camera as a medium, taking it back to old formulas. Of course there is a need for a grammar and a syntax, so to speak, but we would run the risk of creating yet again a division between two moments, when our challenging effort is the unified moment. Of course, you need organization. Indeed, it is the same issue we were tackling in terms of circuits. We ran the risk of turning the alternative circuit into yet another congealed way of conceiving of the use of cinema. By saying circuits of situations, we have broadened the scope and created a mobile geography which is determined by actual developments within the struggle. Thus, the connexion between production and consumption becomes ever more functional and creative.

As Zavattini states elsewhere, at issue was not the quality of individual films, but a practice of revolutionary cinema, understood as embracing on-screen and off-screen activity, and as creating ‘circuits of situations’, rather than limiting it to diffusion through an independent film circuit.

6

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‘Time and Cinema’ (1975)1

Context Sometime between 1972 and 1975, Zavattini took part in one of a series of Conferences, organized by the Cultural Circle of Aversa, one of several opportunities created for the general public to hear the views of prominent Italian intellectuals of the time, writers, architects, sociologists, filmmakers: Franco Ferrarrotti, Cesare Musatti, Liliana Cavani, Sabatino Moscati, Bruno Zevi and many others. Zavattini spoke about time and cinema, not in the way in which André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze do, in terms of cinematic time becoming durational cinema, that is, of time as it unfolds within a film, but of the relation between the time of the event on-screen and the time of the event off-screen: hence not duration, but delay.

Text Cinema, like so many other cultural products, always came either too soon or too late, and I used to say: ‘I’m too late on the scene of the crime.’ Critique always concerned what had already happened, never about what was happening. The reason for this was the way in which intellectuals operated, and namely, they didn’t consider it necessary to be involved until after the event. Just now, in this very instant, I was thinking that Christ, for example, never asked himself (let us for a moment pretend that he had cinema at his disposal): ‘Should I use a camera, or should I use the word?’ Actually, he used nothing. It was later that others have used words and written the Gospel and now they are even making films about Christ. But essentially, Christ had a sense of immediacy, of intervening during [the event]. Well, I have asked myself if this concept of

1

Centro Culturale Merolla. Zavattini responded to his friend, the writer Carlo Bernari, whose novel Tre operai he had been instrumental in getting published in the 1930s, while Zavattini worked for Rizzoli publishers in Milan, as editorial director (‘La parola e l’immagine’ was published by the Aversa Cultural Circle in their Quaderni, no. 2, 1975). Cf. Neorealismo ecc., 157.

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during would be feasible, even using the cinematic medium I have gone as far as defining it as the closest to reality, so much so that the obstacle existing in other intellectual modes of expression has been destroyed by the cinematic medium. See how cine vérité, for example, started with this word, since truth as such was more important than its expression in life, and in doing so, it opposed the traditions of literature which is why we might use a different word, instead of the word literature. For literature is already laden with forms that legitimize the function of subsequent commentary, the role of later and not the search for the during. Why? Because the during can be so tragically urgent at a given time that the best way to write is, paradoxically, not to write at all. And anyway, writing is an activity that, by its very nature, demands a measure of space, a measure of time. But this alienates it from the need, such a strong one, to be in the foray, in the street.

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Grassroots interventions (1976)1

Context Zavattini was interviewed by the extra-parliamentary Left-wing group Servire il popolo. He knew at least two of its activist members, Marco Bellocchio and Elda Tattoli, committed members at the time, both of whom had been actively involved in Zavattini’s Free Newsreels network, from the very beginning. Zavattini makes an essential distinction: political cinema is not the same as cinema containing a political theme. To put the question to him was to put it to someone who had theorized and organized the Free Newsreels, as an alternative grassroots film network and as a political film practice, guerrilla filmmaking, a kind of filmmaking which deviated from the idea of political cinema of, for example, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers or Peter Watson’s The War Game, the first, about the war of independence leading to the decolonialization of Algeria from the point of view of the former subaltern, the second, a dramatization of the impact of a nuclear strike, when public discourse was using propaganda to minimize it. For Zavattini, a genuine political cinema, to all intents and purposes, would have to question the institution of mainstream cinema itself, its mode of production and its relations of production and work outside of those structures.

Text When I speak of intervention from below, there is nothing demagogical in what I say. Rather, I am suggesting a decentralized, experimental practice, antithetical to centrism, which I consider the organizing principle of a repetitive or conservative culture. ‘From below’ does not refer to the cine-camera in the hands of the people, but, rather, how the camera is used under the hegemony of a ruling class, even though this too creates a space for destructive intentions – as I think I have already mentioned.

1

Zavattini, ‘Intervenire dal basso’, ibidem, 408–9.

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It is not enough for a film to contain a political theme, for us to call it political cinema, and, therefore, to speak of a movement. Great. We’re expanding our horizons. I fear that, even if people didn’t need cinema nor did they want to become the new screenwriter, we would get no further than a kind of Left-wing liberalism, which excludes initial creative input and use. More is required. Nor is it a matter of going home on Sunday night with a few metres of celluloid, from your filming earlier that day (which reminds me of trains for the working class). No, an alternative cinema is based on the premiss of its likely exclusion from cinema itself, if, in the course of the struggle, this eventuality became a necessity. For the time being, the alternative consists in this premiss: that the subaltern should be the protagonist of society, because the ruling class has failed on all counts, and no one doubts that this is so. This also applies to cinema. The use value of any existing means of communication should be reconsidered in this light. Today the mass movement requires forms of expression which would help it to recognize itself, (no contradiction in terms here) and to have confidence in cinema, when, and only when, it does not coincide with the same old slogan that art is always revolutionary. I am speaking of an art which is, at the very least, willing to put itself in brackets, even when dealing with such a mystifying concept. Art or non-art? Cinema does not depend on this dilemma for its dramatic uncertainty. An uncertainty which informs any intellectual product. You cannot hope to obtain everything with so little, with only a partial responsibility, and, above all, a partial critique against the industry. Old analyses, no doubt, but it seems to me that they are renewed, under the pressure of the current situation in Italy, which is pressing for total autonomy, albeit inspired by democratic principles. It is not a question of renewing a dead discourse, nor of repeating the old mistake of sticking to a type of cinema that is inferior to reality, regardless. Inferior even in the sense of failing to break with the vicious circle of rigid institutionalizing and self-institutionalization. I think that a new movement for a new popular cinema in the above sense is not only possible, but also necessary.

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Screenwriting (1977)1

Context Zavattini’s door was open to all, including an undergraduate who wanted to ask him about dramaturgy in screenwriting, the topic of the dissertation. He challenged the industrial system and its best practice, because he questioned its foundations, stating that an aesthetics without an ethics is purely formal. You wouldn’t ask a question of this kind unless you presupposed that cinema is an autonomous sphere which is governed by static laws. Such an assumption was the very opposite of what Zavattini had fought for, argued against and tried, in several ways, to combat and resist.

Text In America they make screenplays. In Italy they make screenplays. Screenwriters still exist, but that is not to say that this is an authentic process: it is a production process, one which is entirely bound up in its form, since circumstances, events, conflicting interests, the chaos of so many ideas and their consumption, only end up creating a delay. There is, however, a broader set of situations which needs to be understood, and which makes you question the product of industrial cinema in different terms from how it is understood today. It makes you question even whether to make a film in the first place. To put so much emphasis on the film, as we still do, and go on doing, is, in itself, a compromise, because there is no reason to say that you must make a film, nor that the way to do it should be through these stages of scenario, treatment, and screenplay. So then you begin to wonder. How does this all work? Consider that the cinema, the cine-camera, has specific potentialities and that the camera, which you cannot do without, can move away from these institutional laws. For now, there is 35-millimetre film. There is Super8, but there are going to be new tools

1

Zavattini, ‘La sceneggiatura’, in Neorealismo ecc., 413–14.

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in the future which really will be as light as breath, as fast as counting, and then, it stands to reason that your topic will be conditioned by such new media and you will be ready and willing to appropriate them for a kind of use value which becomes a social and political use value. No one suspects that cinema can be understood differently from how, even today, many young people conceptualize it, the ones who go almost in a devout procession to the screenings to the various film studios.2 Nothing wrong with that, on condition that they take them on board, as something to be understood, and then move on. If, and when, they begin to think in terms of ‘the screenplay is by ...’, then, they are falling into a trap. It is a mistake to think that there is no connexion between an advanced stage of conscience and the lack of development in the means of expression. Since, whatever is said with current mass communication media is lagging behind the general situation, which latter receives no stimulus from the media, only a delay. This is the huge paradoxical event we are witnessing today. Cinema is contributing to slow down the development of thought. Perhaps all this is self-evident. Maybe it is. This is what I think and what I am prepared to say on the subject. I am no longer convinced that I can say: ‘Let’s resolve the matter through cinema.’ At one point, you could say that, because the medium and what you wanted to express were at one. This was indeed true, to the extent that you could once state: ‘My interpretation of life, my self-awareness of life and death can make use of the medium, as if tomorrow ... . This is what I need. The inter-dependence of medium and conscience, and so on.’ But then, what happened in the real world around us? What happened was that all those who shared that understanding, that intuition concerning the medium, changed. As always happens in history, they abandoned the development of their new mode of expression, levelling out their work to its lowest potential. This is what I used to say in the past. Today the cinema is flat because it is absent from what is going on in the real world. I went to see Taxi Driver. I already knew there would be added value in it. But that is not the problem. Alongside those who have settled for mediocrity, are those who had to compete with them to get ahead. They settle for what they can, and are content with their lives. This wouldn’t be so terrible if it didn’t coincide with the fact that history is flattened out, we constantly settle for less, all of us, including me, since I can’t put into practice a drastic alternative. You can’t always say that while the scenario is good, the film is not. Or that the two are so well matched. Value is always down to the creative act. In how society is organized today, only some are in a position to be creative, while the rest are not. Here’s another argument for you. The reason films worth making

2

Zavattini’s reference is to the Film Studio, an independent film club, run by Adriano Aprà in Rome, showing ‘art films’, which created a niche, and reduced alternative cinema to an alternative aesthetic experience, devoid of any of the social responsibility Zavattini had championed.

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can be considered films at all, is that this distinction, this hierarchy, has been demolished or has been limited. I would be willing to discuss the scenario, the treatment, and screenplay dynamics, with one reservation: that such a discussion is thirty years out of date. One might challenge such a view, but the fact remains that the discussion is no longer relevant. Consequently, it would be best to think in terms of a different order of ideas altogether, and, possibly, of breaking out of this vicious circle. If you embark on your thesis on the grounds of such a mythology [of cinema], you will be blocking any new possibilities of a different way of thinking altogether, you risk getting stuck in old positions.

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The Truuuuth (La veritàaaa) (1978–81)1

Context The Truuuuth (La veritàaaa) began as a script for television, entitled Assault on Television (1962). It developed over the years. Despite many rewrites, and changes of casting – Zavattini considered different comedians for the lead role, including the folksinger Enzo Jannacci and the comedian Roberto Beningni – the central idea behind the film never changed. He resorted to satire to convey a testamentary message: the urgent need for radical change, at both a personal and a social level, based on his ethics and his politics. In the grounds of the asylum, an inmate remarks on the news, the ‘social facts’ in the daily paper. The Cold War seems far from over. Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars project is exacerbating the conflict of the superpowers, while massacres are taking place in many parts of the world, including Lebanon. The headlines about war in different countries appear in the frame. A litany of wars since 1945 are listed. While Antonio is commenting on current events, you hear the sound of chanting and marching for peace and see the placards outside the asylum walls. But for Antonio chanting won’t change matters. What is the problem? To find out, he escapes and joins a tour to the catacombs. He interrupts the tour guide to say the things nobody ever wants to hear, and meets the tour’s general approval. His newly found acolytes follow him to Piazza Venezia, where he commands their attention from the same balcony where Mussolini once gave his speeches to adoring, Italian masses. Now Antonio, aka Zavattini, will tell Italians the truth, how things stand, pointing out the gap between values and hypocrisy, the gap between words and actions. Then Antonio breaks into the state television studios to set up a free television channel, ‘The Channel of Freedom’. People of all ages and walks of life queue up to be interviewed and say what they think: the truth, their truth. At last they are given a voice, including a national hero from the past, none other than Giuseppe

1

Zavattini, interviewed by Gambetti, 15 December 1980, in Gambetti, Zavattini mago e tecnico, 338–41, and Zavattini, interviewed by Gambetti, 16 December 1982, in Gambetti, ibidem, 341–2, and Zavattini, interviewed by Gambetti, 6 November 1980, 348.

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Garibaldi, whose epic victories belong to the history of Italian independence – Garibaldi, the paradigm of probity. ‘Is this what Italy has come to?’ A large screen displays archival footage of bombing. Antonio tries to prevent a bomb from exploding by rewinding the footage. Officials from the television studios beat him up for encouraging people to take control of public space in his ‘Television Channel of Truth’ (a reference to the rise of independent broadcasting in Italy). The bomb whistles, then detonates. When the smoke disperses, a woman and a dead child appear on the tv screen. Antonio speaks to her, picks up the child’s limb and promises her he will show it to the pope, who is bond to understand. Surely he can be persuaded to do something about the war. He calls on the pope at his balcony, confronts him with the light of logic, but the pope’s response to the material evidence of suffering is nothing more than a series of sentimental pieties. Then the police inspector and the asylum male nurse arrest Antonio. He removes his costume to reveal Zavattini the writer and filmmaker. In a ‘Postscript’ Zavattini at eighty takes centre stage, now filmed within the film as himself, himself, material evidence of a lifetime. The truth about contemporary society was The need, taken to its extreme urgent and necessary limits, to get to know, in the midst of a confusing and contradictory (and irresponsible) situation as ours in contemporary Italy, a little more than is already known, to be in a position to say that one has come close or at least made a public effort, to get to know the ‘mythical’ truth.2

The title in Italian adds a few vowels to the word ‘truth’: La Veritàaaa!, to signify a calling out, a rhetorical, bombastic prolonged sound, emptied of any meaning whatsoever, expressing only a need for something absent, and a gap between words and their objects, and most importantly, between social facts and inaction. The truth? What truth? There is no such thing, some say. Zavattini meant, of course, the undeniable reality of suffering and the unreality of ignoring it. Therein lies the true madness, not in asking awkward questions as Zavattini aka Antonio aka a modern-day Quixote was doing. Was it too crazy to imagine a new world and hadn’t such an aspiration been Elio Vittorini’s in the immediate post-war, in his landmark article ‘Una nuova cultura’ (‘A new culture’) for Il Politecnico of September 1945? This was Vittorini’s wake-up call to Italian intellectuals to get involved, to take social responsibility: Man has suffered in society, man suffers. And what does culture do for the man who suffers? It tries to console him. [...] Could we ever have a culture which is capable of protecting man from suffering, instead of limiting itself 2

Zavattini, ‘17 December 1980’, in ibidem, 269. By ‘mythical truth’ Zavattini was suggesting that the Italian status quo was so unbelievable as to contribute to the world of make-believe.

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to consoling him? A culture which prevents, warns off, helps to eliminate exploitation and slavery, and triumph over material needs, this is what the old culture in its entirety needs to become.3

But it didn’t happen in post-war Italy, despite the fall of fascism. And that was the point of the film. There are thousands and thousands of manuscript pages held in two archives, the Zavattini Archive in Reggio Emilia and the aamod Archive in Rome. One reason for this prodigious output and lavishing of the writer’s attention on this project was to find a way, drawing on his many prose experiments, to combine his personal cinema of diary and confession register with what he saw as a critique of a lack of critique, a lack of critical thinking, in the early 1980s, after the waning of the revolutionary moment in Europe, from 1968 until the late 1970s. In fiction, the voices are the voices of invented characters. Could they speak the truth, nevertheless? Was there a way to invent a Don Quixote who speaks sense? Who is not a dreamer nor a utopian? This was his challenge. Could the mediation of acting, of fictional characters, be dispensed with altogether? Can art engage directly with the surrounding world? These questions were still his lingering problematic, at the time of writing and rewriting copious versions of The Truuuth. One way of compacting his targets was to single out ideology or false thinking. On a deeper level, the question of the mediation of fiction had to give way to another question, and namely that ideology prevents us from engaging directly with the surrounding world, as we can experience it directly through the five senses. To simplify, mystification and disneyfication are his targets. His repeated references in these text to the untranslatable la ‘pensée unique’ require an explanation, because this phrase encapsulates deception, illusion, falsity, untruth, which his fictional character Antonio, paradoxically confined to a mental asylum, tries to fight. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new slogan appeared in the French and Italian press: La ‘pensée unique’ which is a signifier for mainstream command capitalist ideology. Zavattini seized upon it, in the course of his rewrites. He deployed, for want of a better word, this powerful catchphrase, to attack mainstream conformist thinking, and basically the lack of critical thinking or criticality.4 The 16-millimetre colour film was first broadcast on rai 2 on 5 January 1982 and later released in the cinemas. It is accessible on YouTube, but without English subtitles to date. The following excerpts are from several interviews with Giacomo Gambetti about Zavattini’s film.

3 4

Elio Vittorini, ‘Una Nuova Cultura’, Il Politecnico, no. 1, 29 September 1945, 1. Nicolas Kaciaf, ‘La “pensée unique” entre mythe politique et slogan mobilisateur’, in Xavier Crettiez and Isabelle Sommier (eds), Les Dimensions émotionnelles du politique. Chemins de traverses avec Philippe Braud, Rennes: PUR, 2012.

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Text 1 [Giacomo Gambetti]: Cesare, are you really going to be the director of The Truuuuth?5 [Zavattini]: I started off with film culture and now I have extended the scope to culture in general, concerned as I am that there is a crisis affecting every aspect of our lives. The growth of a broader culture can only take place if people acquire greater insight than they currently have. The problem today is how do you convey such an idea into the scene of a film? In a play, you can talk for half an hour to express a few ideas, but in a film you have to keep moving, running. My problem consists in the shift from a privileged film culture to a form of culture in which the cinema is only one of its components. This is the reason I want to make this film, why I must make this film. Nor is it so outrageous that this idea came into my mind. I have always dabbled in works that involved direction, ever since San Giovanni Decollato [1940] was offered to me to direct.6

2 [Zavattini]: I have been told that The Truuuuth will go into production on 1 July.7 Now it seems that television is requesting a ninety-minute film, at the very time when Z – faced with the problem of financial production constraints – had literally invented an hour-long film, a chamber film; stylistically original, atypical, lively, and engaging in terms of viewer perception. This approach should not change, however, even in a ninety-minute version. The lead character will not be Beningni, as originally planned. A Beningni who was supposed to represent Zavattini, so that, in a postscript, Zavattini in person was to appear on the screen to clarify the identity swop and plumb the depths of meaning. Now the protagonist will be Cesare, from the beginning to the end, postscript included. In the meantime, some of the situations Zavattini created and described for The Truuuuth, as interpreted by Beningni, have popped up in another film, written and directed by someone else.

Zavattini, interviewed by Gambetti, 31 July 1978, in Gambetti, Zavattini mago e tecnico, 283–4. 6 Saint John Beheaded, a film featuring the comedian Totò, directed by Amleto Palermi. Zavattini was a co-screenwriter. 7 Zavattini, interviewed by Gambetti, 5 May 1981, in Gambetti, Zavattini mago e tecnico, 285. 5

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3 Look, it seems to me that in The Truuuuth right up to the end, when the word the end appears on the screen, I was still getting it wrong.8 That is the point when everyone says: ‘wasn’t he great!’ and I said. Now wait a minute, everybody. And this time, I enter the scene as myself, that is, the character, the protagonist vanishes, an imaginary creation, and I appear and I say: ‘here I am, ladies and gentlemen, dressed as my character. I am just like him. Up until now, I have been using an intermediary, just like the human mind has been erring during these past thousands of years.9 And I have to find the courage, myself, to be myself in front of you with no intermediaries blocking the way.’

4 Antonio attacks, makes accusations, offends, but also comes to the realization that there are no half measures.10 Everything has to change. [...] ‘I have come to understand’, says Antonio, ‘that the situation is not going to change unless human beings change the way they are; how they think, or better, how they think that they think. Nothing new can come of people such as they are. Only situations which are always slightly better or slightly worse. Nothing more than variations, always the outcome of impoverished, suffocating thought, which only the people who are attached to the privileges they receive from it feel at their ease with it.’ ‘The only thought is non-thought, the rejection of its current form, to experience new thought which springs from kick-starting the brain’s thought production, that is to say, a dynamic which can take us in any number of new directions. Now, we are stuck in a single, narrow, direction, leading nowhere. New Christianity in a nutshell is: everyone thinking. Give everyone the means, the conditions, to think for themselves. Thinking with what is currently available is tantamount to not thinking at all.’

5 When I speak of the crisis of thought, it is clear that it is a crisis that is conditioned and determined by this void, which is the non-participation of the public, the masses, understood as the single individual multiplied by as many as we currently are in number. Individuals lack understanding, awareness, insight.

Zavattini, interviewed by Gambetti, 6 November 1980, in Gambetti, ibidem, 348. Zavattini is loosely referring to analogical thinking, in which the object of perception is mediated by the imagination. Can mediation be dispensed with altogether? Can we engage directly with the world around us? This is his problematic. His is a materialist and phenomenological solution to being in the world. 10 Zavattini, interviewed by Gambetti, July 1978, in Gambetti, ibidem, 286. 8 9

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It is not true that a film produces insight.11 It only develops awareness in those who already possess some. Not to mention television! The same problem occurs with this medium. The number of independent television broadcasting channels is growing, but who controls them?12 Consequently, thought cannot develop, because it remains pensée unique, a monopoly, and I have the certainty of leaving behind a world in which not a single step has been made, despite the extraordinary means for human emancipation at our disposal. [Giacomo Gambetti]: The theme of your film, the film you are currently working on, La veritàaaa, in your opinion, will it be like a synthesis? How is it going to fit in to your approach poised as it is between alchemy and technique? [Zavattini]: Quite right. I was forgetting about that. What a perfect question. What I’d like to say, as if I had only one eye still open, that your question obliges me to give an unambiguous answer. Look here. I well know that I have an explosive creativity – I guess that I am not the only one to possess such a gift – but I can only speak for what I know about myself. It manifests today in the very same way it did in the past, through posing a few questions and coming up with answers to a few of them, sometimes. Fable, and fable alone has conveyed answers, many times.13 But if I had to take stock of questions and answers, the magic of it all, the technique, the books, paintings, films, and whatever else I have done, all it adds up to is a few insights, nothing more. And if I am here today with one eye open and one eye closed, to see if those insights go as far as casting light on the way ahead, I have to tell you that the answer is more negative than positive. This is my assessment. When I cast my mind on the book about God or think about The Truuuuth, I feel enthusiastic; I have a sense that I am getting somewhere with it all. It’s that same impression I always have; it never changes. But this time, I would like to shoulder direct responsibility and not procrastinate. For purely time-based considerations too, since I don’t have that much time left at my disposal. I am almost glad of it, because it forces me to come to a conclusion. All that remains to be seen is how much am I going to waste through giving in to my fascination and shortcomings, if we care to be generous about it. It is no coincidence that there is an unexpected ending to the film The Truuuuth, and you know the reason why that is. I confided in you. I called it the

Zavattini, interviewed by Gambetti, 15 December 1980, in Gambetti, Zavattini mago e tecnico, 338–41. 12 The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the rise and growth of independent television channels. Increasingly, Silvio Berlusconi became a major player in the ownership and control of independent television channels. 13 Gambetti’s transcription is at fault in this sentence. It reads: ‘molte volte ha solo attraversato la favola, dato una risposta.’ But the logical sense dictates that it should read: ‘molte volte ha solo attraverso la favola, dato una risposta.’ 11

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p.s. the postscriptum, to put across my need to break out of mediations. Do you think I don’t know that there are some whose experience of such things reached tragic levels? One author committed suicide, because of his inability to be of any assistance to other people, or of resolving his own internal contradictions. Now, it could well be that these last works add up to nothing at all, or, on the contrary, that I will deserve some applause; not that I wouldn’t know how to attract applause. Then again, as I hope you have realized, from what you know about me, I am not looking for financial gain. So when I say ‘the truth’, this is not something pre-planned, not a ready-made discourse for delivery. I am talking about something which should manifest, something which should germinate, and explode, if, that is, and only if, I manage to put myself into a state, whereby I can free myself of all the experience accrued through time, which I carry with me. What do I anticipate might happen? It could be that nothing at all is going to happen. It might be that the most I can hope for is the strength to feel doubt, this sense of uncertainty, and not find the strength to free myself from its prison, and settle for telling myself the usual reassuring sentence: ‘But look, at least you made some kind of a contribution.’ That may be true, but I have this pressing need, a need which is the very same that I have had all these years, ever since the immediate post-war and which I transferred not only to saying: ‘make this film’, but to state: ‘cinema is the opportunity.’ What form it might take didn’t matter to me. Nor was I that concerned about the outcome. Not certainly the result which attracts so many to the cinema, with, in my opinion, only an illusory wish to know, but actually, a strong desire not to know. After all, poets are terribly intimidating today, in how human relations are structured, you understand. So, then, what is my purpose now? It’s quite simple. I am a man who wants to tell the story of how cinema became for me the focus of certain moments of awareness and of reflection, and so on. There is no doubt about this. So should I not make the effort to relate my personal history, and tell it in my own way, and talk about my hardship, my suffering, as a child, about the dramatic scenes I witnessed, and speak of the Italy I saw through my own eyes? I am someone who was born at the beginning of the century, when the land was a land with a certain character – I have written already about this in the past; there was the struggle between socialists and fascists, between rich and poor. But when I say poor, I mean those who have to beg to stay alive. Visconti made magnificent films. Others made magnificent films, everyone did, but for my part, I condensed a theory which should have grown into a new event for the entire nation. It didn’t. What happened was that the nation, after supporting new cinema for a certain period of time, turned its back on it, retreating into a generic aesthetic critique instead. So what is the situation like today? Cinema exists today, but it is far from being what I would consider cinema. As I see it, today cinema is part of a network of several mass media, and namely, cinema in relation to television, in relation to radio, to private television broadcasting channels, to a different approach to

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publishing from what publishing could be. All this is very significant, as far as I am concerned. And I say that this has happened while I was distancing myself almost entirely, negative as that may sound, from cinema, while I was growing more and more interested in media we could describe as privileged, which, from my point of view, share the same problematic of communication and information. This goes back to some of my Neo-realist convictions based on what I came to consider a total lack of connexion with the reality of the masses. For me, the key issue became what to make of this human inability to address problems. For so long, I have been thinking about the problem that sums up all other problems, the problem of reality. Reality is that which we fail to do and which, conversely, we should be doing. This has become my central concern. From this emerges the antithesis I mentioned to you; and namely, that man is shit, but man is at the same time important. I don’t want to tell any more stories, because a story is a delay, in that it is a mediation of the real. And yet, my very nature is naturally drawn to telling more stories. So now, I am going to do something different. To tell the story, while transforming how the narrative filters reality, making the mediation better than a mediation of the real. This requires such an effort that I am not certain I can carry it off. However, there is a sense in which everything is interconnected. Revolution is not something that has to involve violence, but it always requires taking a line of thinking to its ultimate conclusion, after framing it well, and having the gumption to experiment.

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Index actors and acting  Vol. 1 26, 27, 49, 64, 74, 102, 104, 106, 107, 111, 130, 142, 184, 186, 189, 213, 265, 270, 282, 317–25, 382, 385, 387; Vol. 2 6, 14, 15, 16, 18, 61, 79, 116, 118, 119, 123, 125, 139, 140, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 159, 160, 161, 167, 173, 179, 191, 193, 201, 335, 412; see also Maurizio Arena adaptation  Vol. 1 51, 138, 169, 217, 218, 246 n.8, 277, 281, 342, 364, 365; Vol. 2 30, 38, 91, 171, 172, 227, 271, 275 Afeltra, Gaetano  Vol. 2 268–9 Agenzia nazionale stampa associata (ansa)  Vol. 1 137, 205 agitprop  Vol. 2 265, 320 Agosti, Silvano  Vol. 1 341 n.2 Agrarian Reform (Cuba)  Vol. 1 271, 274; Vol. 2 263, 265, 267, 269, 270, 308 Alazraki Algranti, Benito  Vol. 1 256, 260; Vol. 2 289, 292 Alazraki Algranti, Laura  Vol. 1 256 Aldo Moro, Before, During, After  Vol. 1 373–83 Alea, Tomás Gutiérrez  Vol. 1 285; Vol. 2 220, 222, 224, 226, 253, 257 Alicata, Mario  Vol. 1 123; Vol. 2 8, 24, 53 n.5, 362, 363 n.3 alienation  Vol. 1 344, 371; Vol. 2 330, 338, 339, 356, 366, 391 Aluffi, Francesco  Vol. 1 339 n.2; Vol. 2 358 Alvaro, Corrado  Vol. 2 31 n.2, 42, 59, 65 Amato, Giuseppe  Vol. 1 38; Vol. 2 15, 46 Amidei, Sergio  Vol. 1 5, 80, 91; Vol. 2 240 n.3, 287

Anderson, Lindsay  Vol. 2 155 n.14 Andreotti, Giulio  Vol. 1 178, 196, 225, 226, 242, 368, 378; Vol. 2 81; see also censorship Anellito, Anillo meravejoso  Vol. 1 262; Vol. 2 313 anti-communism  Vol. 1 372 n.7; Vol. 2 290; see also Hollywood Ten; McCarthyism anti-Crocean  Vol. 2 140; see also Croce anti-fascism  Vol. 1 21, 193, 354, 355; Vol. 2 284, 321; see also fascism anti-hero  Vol. 1 108, 138, 351 n.7 anti-narrative cinema  Vol. 1 10; Vol. 2 61 Anti-racist Film  Vol. 1 273–4; see also racism anti-screenplay  Vol. 1 387; see also screenwriting Antonioni, Michelangelo  Vol. 1 211, 308, 312; Vol. 2 8, 8 n.2, 202, 240 n.3, 298, 375, 384 Apollon  Vol. 1 360–1, 375; Vol. 2 394, 398, 400 n.4, 401; see also Free Newsreels; Gregoretti Ardizzone, Gianni  Vol. 1 313, 315 n.10 Arena, Maurizio  Vol. 1 317–25; Vol. 2 333–9, 340 n.2, 341, 343; see also The Guinea Pig Aristarco, Guido  Vol. 1 123, 125, 282 n.21; Vol. 2 127, 160, 175, 181, 183, 183 n.6, 219, 223 Armentano, Vittorio  Vol. 1 339 n.2; Vol. 2 358 Around the World  Vol. 1 181, 183 artistic autonomy  Vol. 1 308, 342, 344; Vol. 2 35, 55, 80, 91, 108 n.138, 114 n.181, 260, 263, 268, 320, 351, 352, 381, 391, 406

430

Index

art pour l’art (art for art’s sake)  Vol. 1 303; Vol. 2 236, 247, 249, 263, 264, 277, 283 Assault on Television  Vol. 1 331–4, 384; Vol. 2 410–12; see also The Truuuuth Association of Comic Writers  Vol. 2 42 Associazione Autori Cinematografici Italiani (aaci)  Vol. 2 375 Associazione nazionale autori del cinema (anac)  Vol. 1 363; Vol. 2 375 Astruc, Alexandre  Vol. 2 35, 35 n.3 Autori Associati (Associated Authors)  Vol. 2 31 n.2 Ayfré, Amédée  Vol. 1 92, 93; Vol. 2 120, 146; see also Bazin; Brunello Rondi; Kracauer; Merleau-Ponty; phenomenology Bánky, Wilma  Vol. 1 26 Barbachano Ponce, Manuel  Vol. 1 50, 51 n.3, 242, 251, 256, 261, 262, 263, 273, 364, 366; Producciones Barbachano Ponce  Vol. 1 244, 251 n.14, 256, 260; Vol. 2 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 232, 252, 256, 289, 290, 304, 305, 311, 312, 314, 316 Barbachano Ponce, Miguel  Vol. 2 316 n.2 Barbaro, Umberto  Vol. 1 351 n.7; Vol. 2 8, 8 n.2, 34, 38 n.8, 65, 66; see also Perugia Conference Bardi, Pietro  Vol. 1 90 Baroja, Pío Caro  Vol. 2 292, 292 n.1, 294 Bartolini, Luigi  Vol. 1 90 Barzman, Ben  Vol. 2 66 Batista, Fulgencio y Zaldívar  Vol. 1 270, 271, 273, 285, 286, 287, 304; Vol. 2 169, 169 n.3, 251, 258, 268, 279, 287, 288 The Battle of Algiers  Vol. 2 405 Battleship Potemkin  Vol. 2 177, 283 Bazin, André  Vol. 1 91, 92; Vol. 2 120, 403; see also Ayfré;

Brunello Rondi; Kracauer; Merleau-Ponty; phenomenology Bellissima  Vol. 1 3, 23, 102, 127–34; Vol. 2 6, 31 n.3, 91, 333, 334 n.2 Bellocchio, Marco  Vol. 1 343 n.2; Vol. 2 405 Beningni, Roberto  Vol. 1 384; Vol. 2 410, 413 Berlanga, Luis  Vol. 1 287; Vol. 2 222, 290, 290 n.2 Bernari, Carlo  Vol. 2 151, 398 n.1, 399 n.2, 403 n.1 Bertolucci, Attilio  Vol. 1 21, 30 Bessie, Alvah  Vol. 2 66 Bicycle Thieves  Vol. 1 1, 2, 3, 5, 23, 90–8, 99, 99 n.1, 101–7, 111, 124, 137, 170; Vol. 2 65, 67, 101, 102, 184 n.9, 293, 333, 334 n.2 ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! Vol. 2 177 Birri, Fernando  Vol. 1 275, 276, 277, 278, 282 n.21, 284; Vol. 2 318; see also Escuela documental de Santa Fe Tire dié; Un paese Blasetti, Alessandro  Vol. 1 5, 80, 108, 109, 111, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134; Vol. 2 17, 31 n.3, 65, 78, 78 n.1, 202, 204, 240 n.3, 298, 340, 341, 342 n.7, 375, 384 Blonde under Lock and Key  Vol. 2 31, 31 n.2, 44 Bo, Carlo  Vol. 1 307 Boccasile, Gino  Vol. 1 38; Vol. 2 44 Bollero, Marcello  Vol. 2 339 n.2; Vol. 2 358 Bolognini, Mauro  Vol. 2 375 Bompiani, Valentino (Count)  Vol. 1 9, 269, 270, 303; Vol. 2 36, 58, 59, 201, 268, 270, 363 Bonfanti, Giovanni  Vol. 2 401 Bontempelli, Massimo  Vol. 1 10 bozzettismo  Vol. 1 212; Vol. 2 137 n.31, 141 n.56, 162 n.23 braceros  Vol. 1 243, 244, 245, 246, 248; Vol. 2 302 n.38, 308 Bragaglia, Carlo Ludovico  Vol. 2 31 nn.3–4 Brecht, Bertolt  Vol. 1 22

Index Brunetta, Giampiero  Vol. 1 4 Buñuel, Luis  Vol. 2 302 n.41, 318 n.2 Calvino, Italo  Vol. 1 311; Vol. 2 203, 212–14; see also humour; Nonsense; raccontini Camerini, Mario  Vol. 1 5, 30, 56, 108; Vol. 2 8–14, 17, 35, 39, 40, 54 n.1, 65; see also Imola Conference Campanile, Achille  Vol. 1 46; Vol. 2 9, 11, 15 Campanile, Pasquale Festa  Vol. 1 178 n.8; Vol. 2 86, 87, 110 Cannes Film Festival  Vol. 1 137, 138, 167, 168, 170, 226, 261; Vol. 2 211, 212, 232, 256 n.3, 312 Capanna, Roberto  Vol. 1 339 n.2; Vol. 2 358 Capital  Vol. 1 74; Vol. 2 36, 108, 119, 122, 159, 169, 193, 290, 372 capitalism  Vol. 1 105, 301, 375; Vol. 2 109, 109 n.144, 115, 115 n.188, 385, 392, 394, 395 n.7, 396 Capitini, Aldo  Vol. 1 311; Vol. 2 329, 330, 332 Capra, Frank  Vol. 2 39 Carri, Alessandro  Vol. 1 393 Castellani, Renato  Vol. 2 65, 202, 298 Castello, Giulio Cesare  Vol. 2 154 Castro, Fidel  Vol. 1 269, 270, 271, 288 n.2; Vol. 2 251, 255, 256, 258, 269, 282, 287 Castro, Raúl  Vol. 2 255, 256 Cauich, Humberto  Vol. 2 305 censorship  Vol. 1 38, 40, 50, 193, 218, 225, 226, 242, 262, 264, 338, 339, 340, 365, 371; Vol. 2 10, 81, 83 n.3, 107, 140, 145, 172, 174, 175, 177, 184 n.7, 240 n.3, 242, 243, 248, 376, 382; see also Andreotti; Censorship 1960; ‘On Censorship’ Censorship 1960 Vol. 1 306–10

431

Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (ccc)  Vol. 2 66, 321, 324 n.10 Centro Sperimentale di cinematografia di Roma  Vol. 1 123, 275; Vol. 2 8, 34, 110 n.156, 222, 224, 225, 232, 382, 384 Chaplin, Charlie  Vol. 1 25, 26, 30, 285, 315; Vol. 2 11 n.7, 12, 16, 34, 118, 267, 273 Chiaretti, Tommaso  Vol. 2 320–1 Chiarini, Luigi  Vol. 1 123, 206, 349; Vol. 2 90, 142, 143, 153, 153 n.4, 167, 191, 232 n.2, 249 n.3; ‘Letter to Luigi Chiarini’ 382–3 A Child’s Funeral  Vol. 1 217–21 Christian Democrat Party (dc) Vol. 23, 196, 227, 367, 373, 378, 380; Vol. 2 81, 145, 184 n.7, 232 n.2, 300 n.25, 320 Christianity  Vol. 1 192, 250, 334, 344, 386, 389, 390, 396; Vol. 2 25, 71, 72, 106, 106 n.126, 107, 132, 134 n.17, 189, 281, 403, 414 Chronicles from Hollywood  Vol. 1 21–9; Vol. 2 5, 34 ‘The Cine-camera as a Weapon’  Vol. 2 387–9 Cinecittà  Vol. 1 39, 130, 131, 132, 134, 233, 385; Vol. 2 10 n.5, 17, 51, 143 Cinema  Vol. 1 64, 111, 123, 212; Vol. 2 5, 8, 8 n.2, 24, 30, 38 n.8, 46 cinema and history  Vol. 1 125, 182, 185, 225, 288, 292, 315, 318, 328, 329, 337, 342, 363, 376, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 386; Vol. 2 19, 30, 36, 37, 64, 67, 69, 99, 103, 103 n.100, 109, 109 n.146, 123, 127, 128, 130, 131, 155, 155 n.14, 156, 157, 162, 166, 181, 192, 193, 195, 206, 210, 217, 222, 226, 234, 239, 243, 252, 258, 260, 265, 266, 267, 277, 277 n.8, 284, 285, 295, 298, 300, 304, 306, 308, 309, 322, 323, 338, 339, 350, 353, 356, 358, 361, 364,

432

Index

367, 373, 375, 391, 394, 396, 399, 408 Cinema Documentario  Vol. 2 365 Cinema Illustrazione  Vol. 1 21, 23, 127; Vol. 2 5 Cinema Nuovo  Vol. 1 123, 136, 215, 277, 278, 282, 312, 348; Vol. 2 89, 127, 159, 166, 181, 183 n.6, 201, 207, 208, 217–19, 220–1, 362, 365, 384 cinema of urgency  Vol. 1 316, 344, 375, 393, 394; Vol. 2 26, 85, 87, 132, 138, 152, 158, 167, 179, 186, 223, 240, 243, 324, 330, 352, 367, 383 cinéma vérité  Vol. 1 331, 342; Vol. 2 306 n.3 Clair, René  Vol. 1 28, 137 Cocteau, Jean  Vol. 1 138; Vol. 2 67 cohabitation  Vol. 1 3, 94, 199, 199 n.3, 309, 368; Vol. 2 99, 99 n.57, 133, 135 n.26, 148, 150, 155, 156, 164, 193, 194, 301; see also ethnographic cinema; ‘hole in the wall’; shadowing Cold War  Vol. 1 1, 311, 353 n.10; Vol. 2 65, 66, 104 n.105, 329, 330 n.2, 331, 410 collaboration  Vol. 1 5, 56, 111, 179, 206, 260, 287, 303, 337, 346, 349, 362, 363, 387, 388; Vol. 2 8, 11, 31, 51, 73, 89, 113, 113 n.178, 115, 115 nn.187–8, 115 n.191, 137, 171, 180, 190, 202, 205, 214, 232, 241, 261, 272, 275, 287, 290, 310, 351, 381, 382, 394, 397, 398 collective (experience)  Vol. 1 66, 188, 205, 225, 252, 280, 341, 343, 344, 362, 363, 372, 383; Vol. 2 78, 95, 96 n.34, 104, 125, 125 n.3, 126, 130, 135, 135 n.27, 156, 183, 185, 189, 192, 242, 249, 263, 307, 309, 310, 336, 348, 357, 371, 388, 398; see also Free Newsreels Collective

Colour versus Colour  Vol. 1 3, 303–5; Vol. 2 270, 286 comedy  Vol. 1 5, 11, 12, 22, 42, 108, 109, 169, 218, 309, 384; Vol. 2 9, 28, 10 n.6; see also‘The Frustrations of a Young Scriptwriter’; The Nervous Tic Clinic Comencini, Luigi  Vol. 2 375 Comic Trilogy  Vol. 1 9–20; Vol. 2 12 n.11; see also humour; Nonsense; raccontini Comitato di liberazione nazionale (cln)  Vol. 1 73, 352 Vol. 1 202; see also Italian Resistance commitment (social and political)  Vol. 1 324, 341, 345, 383; Vol. 2 58, 79, 81, 128, 129, 140, 157, 159, 164 n.27, 182, 185, 200, 211, 218, 235, 267; see also ‘Debating with the Opponents of Commitment’ Committee for National Liberation (cln)  Vol. 1 352, 357, 372 n.7 confessional film  Vol. 1 5, 50, 102, 129, 134, 196, 261, 265, 334, 365, 372, 386; see also First Communion; The Guinea Pig conscience  Vol. 1 93, 102, 105, 342; Vol. 2 36, 51, 67, 69, 198, 206, 238, 330 conscience of cinema  Vol. 2 74, 75, 168, 176, 178, 186, 187, 192, 234, 239, 243, 244, 247, 258, 286, 294, 309, 310, 371, 376, 385, 408; see also Neo-realism Contratto  Vol. 2 398; see also Apollon; Free Newsreels; Gregoretti Corona, Achille  Vol. 2 362 Cortazár, Mercedes  Vol. 1 287; Vol. 2 273 Cosulich, Callisto  Vol. 1 90; Vol. 2 302 n.39 counter-cinema  Vol. 1 375; Vol. 2 119, 320, 372, 393 counter-information  Vol. 1 311 counter-television  Vol. 1 394 Croce, Benedetto  Vol. 2 140 n.55

Index Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry (icaic)  Vol. 1 269, 273, 287, 303; Vol. 2 171, 253, 255, 256, 259, 262, 268, 272, 274, 277, 278 n.17, 279, 280, 320; see also Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry Conference Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry Conference  Vol. 2 262–7 culture  Vol. 1 91, 128, 182, 306, 310, 312, 314, 337, 341, 345, 346, 351, 361, 362, 364, 370, 371, 377, 381 culture of poverty  Vol. 1 364 Daniels, Bebe  Vol. 1 26 ‘Debating with the Opponents of Commitment’  Vol. 2 276–86; see also commitment De Beauvoir, Simone  Vol. 2 260 Debord, Guy  Vol. 2 326 n.1 Decadentismo  Vol. 2, 132, 133 n.6 De Chirico, Giorgio  Vol. 1 370; Vol. 2 38 De Concini, Ennio  Vol. 1 80 de la Colina, José  Vol. 2 305 n.2 Del Fra, Lino  Vol. 1 369, 369 n.4; Vol. 2 240 n.3 Della  Volpe, Galvano  Vol. 2 67 Delta padano  Vol. 2 83 n.3, 161, 161 n.22 De Martino, Ernesto  Vol. 1 194; Vol. 2 148; see also ethnographic cinema De Santis, Giuseppe  Vol. 1 5; Vol. 2 8, 24, 31, 65, 73, 179, 202, 233, 234, 240 n.3, 246 n.5; see also Rome, 11 o’Clock De Seta, Vittorio  Vol. 2 90, 120, 246 n.5 De Sica, Vittorio  Vol. 1 50, 77, 78, 79, 80, 89, 90, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 111, 123, 126, 136, 137, 138, 146, 167, 168, 169, 170, 177, 178, 179, 185, 190, 196, 197, 217, 218, 222,

433

225, 226, 229, 242, 265, 276, 277, 283, 308, 368 n.2; Vol. 2 10 n.6, 298 n.16 diary  Vol. 1 109, 123, 136–7, 170, 197, 203, 268, 273, 285, 312, 327, 329, 335, 348, 360; Vol. 2 28; see also ‘Scrap Scripts’ diary film  Vol. 1 266, 317, 318; Vol. 2 78, 130, 139 n.48, 305; see also En el balcón vació and ¡Torero! Diary of a Woman  Vol. 1 265–7; Vol. 2 341; see also The Guinea Pig Di Gianmatteo, Fernaldo  Vol. 2 199, 200 Di Gianni, Luigi  Vol. 1 313, 314 n.7, 318; Vol. 2 344 Direzione generale dello spettacolo  Vol. 1 50, 226 Diritti, Giorgio  Vol. 1 313 documentary  Vol. 1 3, 4, 74, 105, 136, 181, 190 n.22, 212, 215–16, 222, 223 n.3, 242, 256, 260, 261, 275, 276, 278, 282, 283, 349; Vol. 2 8, 8 n.2, 22, 29, 67, 75, 80, 83 n.3, 81, 91, 94, 94 n.17, 97 n.43, 100, 100 n.68, 102, 109 n.146, 110 n.156, 120, 128, 137 n.38, 146, 148, 152, 161 n.22, 163 n.25, 171, 179, 182, 188, 204, 208, 213, 222, 222 n.3, 224, 230, 231, 232, 258, 271, 289, 292, 301, 305, 306 n.3, 311, 312, 318, 318 n.2, 324, 329, 348, 349, 349 n.7, 350, 351, 355, 358, 365, 369, 377 n.4, 381 n.4, 383 n.2, 388 n.2, 398, 401 n.5; see also Aldo Moro, Before, During, After; Assault on Television; Censorship 1960; Free Newsreels; The Guinea Pig; Italia mia tv version; México mío; The Mysteries of Rome; The Newsreel for Peace; non-fiction; Revolución en Cuba; Revolution; The Story of Catherine; Why? Dolci, Danilo  Vol. 1 318; Vol. 2 340, 340 n.2, 343, 353

434

Index

durational cinema  Vol. 1 94, 218; Vol. 2 19, 30, 85, 98 n.54, 120, 292, 298 n.16, 403–4; see also Neo-realism; Umberto D. Eco, Umberto  Vol. 1 22, 22 n.4, 22 n.5; Vol. 2 326, 326 n.1, 327 n.2, 345 n.2, 366, 367 n.5 Economic Conference on Cinema  Vol. 2 238–46, 372 n.3, 375 editing process  Vol. 1 23, 29, 80, 133, 170, 186, 226, 243, 246, 247, 260, 307, 314, 329, 341, 343, 362, 369 n.6, 376; Vol. 2 9 n.4, 38, 38 n.8, 90, 100 n.69, 109 n.144, 160, 343, 348, 356, 356 n.3, 366, 388 Einaudi (publishers)  Vol. 1 197, 311; Vol. 2 201, 202, 202 n.3, 203, 204, 207–9, 212, 212 n.8, 213 El Joven Rebelde  Vol. 2 287 El Mégano  Vol. 2 222, 226, 227, 229, 231 El Petróleo  Vol. 1 244, 261, 262; Vol. 2 312, 313 Emmer, Luciano  Vol. 1 136; Vol. 2 142, 202, 240 n.3 En el balcón vació  Vol. 2 305 Epoca  Vol. 2 58, 214, 329 escapism  Vol. 1 351 n.7, 367; Vol. 2 94 n.19, 107, 107 nn.130–1, 197, 197 n.3, 396 Escuela documental de Santa Fe  Vol. 1 276, 278; see also Birri; Tire dié Espaldas mojadas  Vol. 1 262; Vol. 2 298, 298 n.15, 313 ethics  Vol. 1 51, 74, 80, 125, 178, 205, 208, 210, 216, 218, 248, 250, 251, 278, 279, 281, 283, 304, 308, 309, 314, 316, 321, 324, 326, 329, 332, 346, 376, 390; Vol. 2 20, 26, 51, 56, 96, 125, 132, 135 n.27, 152, 166, 184, 262, 264, 276, 283, 284, 336, 350, 407, 410; see also ‘Neorealism as ethics’ ethnographic cinema  Vol. 1 91, 178, 222–41, 242–55, 260–4, 290,

317–26; Vol. 2 148–51; see also De Martino; field-research; The Guinea Pig; Italia mia; México mío; The Mysteries of Rome; The Roof; shadowing ethnographic photography  Vol. 1 196–204; Vol. 2 217–19 event  Vol. 1 11, 12, 26, 39, 45, 81, 90, 92, 108, 110, 113, 135, 186, 187, 189, 191, 194, 205, 210, 216, 232, 265, 268, 271, 273, 274, 324, 328, 329, 330, 338, 344, 353, 361, 369, 370, 374, 375, 378, 383; Vol. 2 20, 52, 64, 80, 86, 88, 93 n.15, 97, 98, 98 n.52, 98 n.54, 100 n.69, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 109, 110, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 132, 134, 134 n.19, 150, 154, 159, 193, 194, 195, 198, 200, 234, 240, 249, 263, 265, 266, 267, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 294, 302, 315, 348, 351, 353, 387, 388, 393, 396, 399, 401, 403, 408, 416; see also moment; non-event everyday life  Vol. 1 9, 10, 11, 22, 25, 56, 91, 92, 128, 178, 182, 185, 188, 190, 192, 213, 223, 229, 243, 245 n.6, 247 n.10, 248, 249, 251, 253, 264, 321, 328, 351, 362, 369, 372 n.7, 386; Vol. 2 15, 16 n.3, 22 n.6, 34, 58, 64, 76, 109, 120, 122, 128, 131, 146, 156, 190, 225, 242, 263, 284, 294, 299, 300, 350; see also non-event Everyone Should Have a Rocking Horse  Vol. 1 50–5; Vol. 2 44; see also humour; Nonsense; Totò the Good; Miracle in Milan Fabbri, Diego  Vol. 1 74 fable  Vol. 1 10, 25, 55, 103, 104, 167, 168, 182, 184, 226, 227, 272, 385, 392; Vol. 2 9, 38, 46, 52, 69, 80, 100, 100 n.63, 100 n.66, 106, 108 n.135, 116,

Index 116 n.115, 179, 293, 336, 341, 353, 415 Fabrizi, Aldo  Vol. 1 105, 111, 124, 132 Fairbanks, Douglas  Vol. 1 25–7 fascism  Vol. 1 22, 38, 40, 50, 73, 190, 200, 202, 225, 227, 266, 267, 276, 313, 318, 335, 338, 348, 350, 352, 354, 355, 357, 358, 359, 370, 371, 376; Vol. 2 51–3, 132, 155 n.14, 155 n.15, 192, 252, 328 n.6, 358, 372 n.7, 374, 380, 412; see also antifascism Fellini, Federico  Vol. 1 136, 207, 211, 212, 308, 312, 326; Vol. 2 120, 181, 182 n.5, 240 n.3, 321, 375, 384 Fernanti, Gastone  Vol. 2 142, 143 Ferrara, Giuseppe  Vol. 1 314 n.7; Vol. 2 247–50 Ferrara, Massimo  Vol. 1 89 n.1, 314 n.7, 364 n.1, 366 Ferrari, Giovanni  Vol. 2 213 Ferreri, Marco  Vol. 1 207; Vol. 2 89, 124, 384 Festa Campanile, Pasquale  Vol. 1 178 n.8; Vol. 2 85–7, 110 n.149 field research  Vol. 1 73, 178, 197, 223, 225, 243, 244, 262, 282 n.21, 317, 322; Vol. 2 73–7, 110 n.156, 132 n.4, 148–51, 341, 396; see also De Martino; ethnographic cinema; shadowing film clubs  Vol. 1 281, 312; Vol. 2 34, 81, 166, 167, 171, 175, 180, 224, 256, 272, 305 n.2, 314, 315, 355, 365, 366, 374, 408 n.2 film culture  Vol. 1 128, 312; Vol. 2 81, 160, 171, 310, 314, 315, 355, 365, 366, 413 Film Culture  Vol. 1 93; Vol. 2 202 film industry  Vol. 1, 5, 23, 28, 99, 102, 105, 128, 131, 185, 260, 279, 280, 282, 317, 321, 331, 340, 341, 342, 343, 346, 370; Vol. 2 15–18, 24–7, 30, 34–46, 54–5, 393; see also Parma

435

Conference; Perugia Conference; ‘Taking Issue with the Present’ First Communion  Vol. 1 5, 50, 102, 108–26, 129, 134; Vol. 2 340, 342, 342 n.7, 343 Five Poor Men in a Motorcar  Vol. 1 56–63, 78; Vol. 2 31, 40 Flaiano, Ennio  Vol. 2 240 flash-film  Vol. 1 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211, 315; Vol. 2 85, 116, 116 n.197, 119–23, 124–6, 130, 142, 143, 193; see also Rigoglioso; The Story of Catherine folklore  Vol. 1 185, 247; Vol. 2 207, 212, 212 n.9, 225, 227, 307 Fortichiari, Bruno  Vol. 1 199; Vol. 2 208, 210, 212 Fortini, Franco  Vol. 1 91 Franci, Adolfo  Vol. 1 80 Franciolini, Gianni  Vol. 2 202 Freddi, Luigi  Vol. 2 10, 10 n.5 free cinema  Vol. 1 342, 343; Vol. 2 155, 302, 344 n.10, 345, 378, 385; see also Porretta Terme Conference on Free Cinema Free Newsreels  Vol. 1 4, 179, 313, 340–7, 360–3, 367, 375, 394; Vol. 2 119, 355, 357, 370, 379–81, 382, 384, 387, 387 n.1, 388 n.3, 390, 390 nn.1–2, 391, 393, 396, 398–402, 405; see also ‘The Cine-camera as a Weapon’; grassroots movement; guerrilla cinema Free Newsreels Bulletin  Vol. 2 379, 388 n.3, 390, 390 n.2, 399 Free Newsreels Collective  Vol. 1 179, 375, 394; Vol. 2 398, 399, 401 n.5; see also collective ‘The Frustrations of a Young Scriptwriter’  Vol. 2 8–14; see also Imola Conference gags (trovate)  Vol. 1 13, 51, 64, 285, 287; Vol. 2 11, 12, 39 n.10, 40, 40 nn.11–12, 45, 149, 342 Gamboa, Fernando  Vol. 1 179, 243, 244, 246, 260, 261, 262,

436

Index

276 n.8; Vol. 2 238, 289, 290, 291, 294, 311, 312, 314 Gandin, Michele  Vol. 1 136, 222, 223 n.3, 225, 226 n.18; Vol. 2 90–2, 93 n.9, 116 n.194, 123, 124, 129, 213, 218, 240 n.3, 345, 365 Garbo, Greta  Vol. 1 26; Vol. 2 17 García Ascot, Jomí  Vol. 1 50, 262; Vol. 2 304 García Mesa, Héctor  Vol. 1 287; Vol. 2 262 n.2, 267, 272, 274, 274 n.1 Garrante Garrone, Alessandro  Vol. 1 307 Gatti, Attilio  Vol. 1 136 Gazzetta del Popolo  Vol. 2 39 Gazzetta di Parma  Vol. 1 9, 21 n.1, 23 n.9; Vol. 2 9 Genina, Augusto  Vol. 1 80; Vol. 2 202 Germi, Pietro  Vol. 2 65, 202, 375 Ghione, Riccardo  Vol. 1 207; Vol. 2 89, 124 Giannini, Guglielmo  Vol. 1 372 n.7; Vol. 2 42 Gibson, Wynne  Vol. 1 28 Gilbert, John  Vol. 1 26 Giuliano, Salvatore  Vol. 1 381 Gogol, Nicolaj  Vol. 1 139; Vol. 2 171, 177 Gómez, Amaro  Vol. 2 273 Gómez, Manuel Octavio  Vol. 1 287; Vol. 2 273 Graetz, Paul  Vol. 1 184 Gramsci, Antonio  Vol. 2 181, 321, 323, 363 n.3, 394, 394 n.5; see also new culture; Il Politecnico; Vittorini grassroots movement  Vol. 1 340, 365, 375, 394; Vol. 2 390, 391, 393, 398, 405–6; see also ‘The Cine-camera as a Weapon’; The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat; Free Newsreels; guerrilla cinema; The Newsreel for Peace The Great Deception  Vol. 1 3, 101–7 Gregoretti, Ugo  Vol. 1 361 n.2; Vol. 2 398; see also Apollon; Free Newsreels

Grifi, Alberto  Vol. 1 339 n.2; Vol. 2 358–9, 359 n.4; see also Why? Grupo de Nuevo Cine (Mexico)  Vol. 2 304, 305 n.2 Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (guf)  Vol. 2 127 guerrilla cinema  Vol. 1 312, 340–7, 360–3, 375; Vol. 2 119, 370, 373, 387, 390, 393, 405; see also The Cine-camera as a Weapon; The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat; Free Newsreels; grassroots movement; The Newsreel for Peace Guevara, Alfredo  Vol. 1 268, 269, 271 n.6, 273, 285 n.2, 303; Vol. 2 166, 171, 172, 172 n.2, 178, 180, 220, 222, 222 n.3, 224 n.4,  225, 229, 232, 251, 253, 255, 255 n.1, 256 n.3, 262, 263, 265, 268, 277, 287, 309 n.3 Guevara, Ernesto Che  Vol. 2 263, 263 n.5, 268 The Guinea Pig (La Cavia)  Vol. 1 265, 317–25, 326 327 n.5; Vol. 2 6, 333–9, 340, 341, 344, 345 Hernández, José  Vol. 1 287; Vol. 2 260 n.4, 273 Hiroshima, Mon amour  Vol. 2 283 ‘hole in the wall’  Vol. 1 94; Vol. 2 350; see also cohabitation; ‘scene of the crime’; shadowing Hollywood  Vol. 1 2, 3, 23, 39, 49; Chronicles from Hollywood 21–9; Vol. 2 ‘The Directors’ Gift’  5–7, 98 n.54, 393 Hollywood Ten  Vol. 2 66; see also anti-communism; McCarthyism ‘How to Write a Screenplay’  Vol. 2 259–61; see also antiscreenwriting; ‘Screenwriting’ humour  Vol. 1 1, 2, 11, 13, 22, 23, 24, 30, 50, 51, 56, 64, 65, 109, 169, 217, 248, 331; Vol. 2 5, 8, 8 n.4, 9, 11, 34, 35, 36, 40, 40 n.12, 42, 46, 112 n.169, 177; see also magic realism; Nonsense; raccontini

Index Hypocrite ’43 Vol. 1 109; Vol. 2 342 I am the Devil  Vol. 1 9, 11, 65; Vol. 2 31, 46; see also humour; magic realism; raccontini icaic Conference  Vol. 2 262–7; see also Instituto Cubano de Arte y Industria Cinematográfica Il becco giallo  Vol. 1 22 Il Bertoldo  Vol. 1 22; Vol. 2 8 n.4, 11 Il Contemporaneo  Vol. 2 58, 183 n.6 I’ll Give a Million  Vol. 1 108; Vol. 2 8, 9, 10, 10 n.5, 11, 12, 31, 35, 39, 40 Il Politecnico  Vol. 1 91; Vol. 2 58, 156 n.18, 299 n.19, 411, 412 n.3; see also Gramsci; new culture; Vittorini Il Settebello  Vol. 1 22; Vol. 2 8 n.4, 15 Imola Conference  Vol. 1 11, 30, 64, 65 n.4; Vol. 2 8, 34–46; see also Camerini Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (idhec)  Vol. 1 275 Instituto Cubano de Arte y Industria Cinematográfica (icaic) Vol. 1 269, 273, 285, 287, 303; Vol. 2 81, 171, 253, 255, 256, 259, 268, 272, 274, 277, 278 n.17, 279, 280, 320; see also icaic Conference intellectuals  Vol. 1 17, 310, 311, 313, 343, 344, 367; Vol. 2 51, 53, 56, 93, 128, 156, 164 n.27, 196, 227, 238, 258, 279, 323, 326, 327, 327 n.4, 328, 328 n.5, 329, 330, 331, 351, 360, 367, 385, 403, 404, 411 International Association of Documentarists (aid)  Vol. 2 38, 381 n.4, 390 International Catholic Organization for Cinema (ocic)  Vol. 1 226; Vol. 2 66, 321, 324 n.10 investigative cinema  Vol. 1 179, 196, 269, 278, 282, 283, 314, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 328, 329, 335, 338, 342, 344, 371,

437

372, 388; Vol. 2 90, 111, 116, 132, 138, 138 n.44, 139, 140, 151, 156, 157, 182, 184, 234, 271, 301, 324, 333–9, 342, 345–54, 358–61, 368, 395 investigative journalism  Vol. 1 179, 371, 372, 388; Vol. 2 58–60; ‘Italy Wants to Know’, 145, 157 Ionesco, Eugène  Vol. 2 277, 281 Iron Curtain  Vol. 2 66, 67 Italia Domanda (Italy Wants to Know)  Vol. 2 58–60, 214 Italia mia  Vol. 1 2, 4, 73, 177, 195–7, 207, 212, 223, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 268, 269, 326; Vol. 2 85, 86, 87, 134, 139, 139 n.48, 222, 223, 225, 229, 271, 289, 311, 316, 351; see also Italia mia book project; Italia mia tv version Italia mia book project  Vol. 2 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 212, 213, 214 Italia mia tv version  Vol. 1 367–72 Italian Communist Party (pci)  Vol. 1 123, 223, 349, 375; Vol. 2 58, 66, 71, 181, 258 n.3, 318, 384, 398 Italian Federation of Film Clubs  Vol. 2 175 Italian Resistance  Vol. 1 91, 138, 192, 309, 313, 338, 341, 370; Vol. 2 53 n.5, 174, 196, 198, 282, 283, 284, 301 n.29, 321, 348 n.6, 362, 375; see also Comitato di liberazione nazionale; The Seven Cervi Brothers Italy 1944 Vol. 1 73–6 Ivens, Joris  Vol. 1 1, 276, 311, 362 n.7; Vol. 2 66, 260, 319, 329, 381 n.4, 390, 390 n.2 Jannacci, Enzo  Vol. 1 384; Vol. 2 410 The Jazz Singer  Vol. 1 26 Jolson, Al  Vol. 1 26 journalism and research  Vol. 1 23, 41, 57, 128, 278, 282, 283, 314; Vol. 2 39, 58–60, 79, 80, 137 n.36, 145, 157, 193, 258, 344, 348, 355, 356; see also investigative journalism

438

Index

Journey to Italy  Vol. 1 191 n.25 Keaton, Buster  Vol. 1, 25; Vol. 2 35 Kerouac, Jack  Vol. 2 277, 281 Kracauer, Siegfried  Vol. 1 3, 93; Vol. 2 5; see also Ayfré; Bazin; Brunello Rondi; Merleau-Ponty; phenomenology Lacerba  Vol. 1 10 La scuola dei timidi (The School for the Shy)  Vol. 2 31, 31 n.4 La strada  Vol. 2 181, 182 n.5 La terra trema  Vol. 1 127, 212; Vol. 2 102 Lattuada, Alberto  Vol. 1 74, 138 n.7, 139, 194, 211; Vol. 2 65, 166, 171, 173–80, 202, 240 n.3, 375 La Voce  Vol. 1 10 Lenin Peace Prize  Vol. 1 1, 276, 311; Vol. 2 329 Leone, Sergio  Vol. 2 375 Let’s Talk a Lot about Me  Vol. 1 9, 10, 12, 13–18; Vol. 2 11, 11 n.7, 31, 46; see also humour; magic realism; raccontini Levi, Carlo  Vol. 1 311; Vol. 2 329, 362 The Little Dictator  Vol. 1 285–6, 287–302; Vol. 2 258; see also satire Lizzani, Carlo  Vol. 1 123, 207, 208, 211, 351 n.7; Vol. 2 66, 153 n.4, 240 n.3, 393 Lodz, Jean  Vol. 1 314 n.7 Lonero, Emilio  Vol. 2 321, 324, 324 n.10 Longanesi, Leo  Vol. 2 8, 8 n.2, 31 n.2 Loren, Sofia  Vol. 1 10, 217, 218, 265, 318; Vol. 2 271 Los Inundados (Flooded Out)  Vol. 1 275; Vol. 2 318; see also Birri Løtz Film School (Poland)  Vol. 2 66 Love in the City  Vol. 1 207, 211, 212, 215, 223, 276, 326, 374; Vol. 2 89, 116 n.196, 130, 139, 142, 144, 145, 152, 188, 189 n.2, 222 n.3 Loy, Nanni  Vol. 2 375

Lumière brothers  Vol. 2 19, 20, 67, 67 n.4 McCarthyism  Vol. 1 196; Vol. 2 66; see also anti-communism; Hollywood Ten Maggiorani, Lamberto  Vol. 1 2, 23; The Great Deception 101–5, 106, 107; Vol. 2 333, 334; see also Bicycle Thieves magic realism Everyone Should Have a Rocking Horse  Vol. 1 50–5; Totò the Good  Vol. 1 64–70; Miracle in Milan  Vol. 1 167– 76; Vol. 2 40 n.12, 44, 45; see also humour; raccontini Magnani, Anna  Vol. 1 105; Vol. 2 61, 214 Malaspina, Luciano  Vol. 1 314 n.7 Mangini, Cecilia  Vol. 1 369 n.4 Man with a Movie Camera  Vol. 2 38, 135 n.26 Marchesi, Marcello  Vol. 1 46; Vol. 2 46 n.21 Marotta, Giuseppe  Vol. 1 80, 217, 218; Vol. 2 9, 11 Martí, José  Vol. 2 262–4 marxism  Vol. 1 3, 375; Vol. 2 67, 135 n.28, 162 n.24, 181, 298, 366, 395 n.7 Marzabotto  Vol. 1 313 Maselli, Francesco (Citto)  Vol. 1 206, 207, 211, 276; Vol. 2 89, 142, 143, 191, 213, 384 Massip, José  Vol. 1 287, 303; Vol. 2 225, 225 n.1, 228, 229, 232, 272–4 Massobrio, Lionello  Vol. 2 384 Mastrocinque, Camillo  Vol. 1 40; Vol. 2 31 Mastrocinque, Gino  Vol. 1 40; Vol. 2 44 Mastroianni, Marcello  Vol. 1 265, 318 Maulini, Giorgio  Vol. 1 339 n.2; Vol. 2 358–9 Mazzetti, Lorenza (Lori)  Vol. 2 155 n.14, 381 n.4 Mekas, Jonas  Vol. 2 202, 353 Méliès, Georges  Vol. 2 19, 23, 67

Index Melloni, Mario  Vol. 2 240 n.3 Mercader, María  Vol. 1 138 n.3–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  Vol. 1 3, 94; Vol. 2 120; see also Ayfré; Bazin; Brunello Rondi; Kracauer; phenomenology Metz, Vittorio  Vol. 2 46 n.21 México mío  Vol. 1 178, 242–55, 261, 262, 263; Vol. 2 252, 304, 307, 311–13, 316 Miccichè, Lino  Vol. 1 127, 139 n.7, 275 n.4; Vol. 2 287, 365 micro-events  Vol. 1 109, 212; see also event; moment; non-event Mida, Massimo  Vol. 1 314 n.7 Miracle in Milan  Vol. 1 1, 2, 13, 50, 51, 64, 136, 138, 167, 167–76, 226; Vol. 2 9, 19, 21 nn.4–5, 39 n.10, 40 n.12, 53 n.4, 100, 100 n.66, 106, 107, 108, 302, 302 n.39; see also gags; humour; magic realism; Nonsense; Totò the Good Modernism  Vol. 1 1, 9, 10, 93, 217, 256, 265; Vol. 2 22 n.6 moment  Vol. 1 11, 12, 14, 15, 50, 91, 92, 93, 126, 127, 128, 133, 161, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 194, 205, 208, 209, 212, 217, 225, 245, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 258, 263, 265, 267, 292, 307, 308, 309, 316, 318, 321, 323, 328, 329, 336, 341, 361, 369, 371; Vol. 2 33, 52, 84, 97, 97 n.51, 98, 98 n.54, 103, 104 n.102, 122, 143, 145, 284, 321, 371, 416; see also event Monaci, Umberto ; Vol. 1 339 n.2; Vol. 2 358 Mondadori (publishers)  Vol. 1 9, 38, 217, 312; Vol. 2 15, 51, 58, 189 n.2, 201, 214, 329 Mondaini, Giaci  Vol. 2 11, 11 n.9, 31, 39 Mondo Libero  Vol. 2 142, 142 n.1 Monicelli, Mario  Vol. 1 74, 287; Vol. 2 375 Montale, Eugenio  Vol. 1 370

439

Moravia, Alberto  Vol. 1 11; Vol. 2 65, 205, 275, 329, 344 Morlion, Felix  Vol. 2 66, 71 Moro kidnapping  Vol. 1 381 Mosca, Vito  Vol. 2 9, 11 Movimento Sociale Italiano (msi)  Vol. 2 320, 321 Murgia, Pier Luigi  Vol. 1 339 n.2; Vol. 2 358 Mussolini, Benito  Vol. 1 73, 76, 265–6, 348, 384; Vol. 2 27 n.6, 51, 53, 410 The Mysteries of Rome  Vol. 1 4, 179, 317, 326–30, 369, 388 n.4; Vol. 2 333, 345–54, 365, 381 n.5, 398 Neo-realism  Vol. 1 77–89, 90–8, 99–10, 101–7, 127–34, 135–95, 242–55, 275–84; Vol. 2 65–70, 78–122, 127–9, 130–41, 148–65, 201–6, 236–7, 292–5 Neo-realist Bulletin  Vol. 2 167, 198, 220, 223, 240 The Nervous Tic Clinic  Vol. 1 30–7; Vol. 2 31, 42 new culture (nuova cultura)  Vol. 2 156 n.18, 299 n.19, 309 n.29, 321, 411; see also Gramsci; Il Politecnico; Vittorini The Newspaper for Peace; Vol. 2 329–32 The Newsreel for Peace  Vol. 1 311– 31, 340, 341, 347 n.4, 375; Vol. 2 329–32, 355–7, 365, 379, 381, 398; see also The Newspaper for Peace non-fiction  Vol. 1 4, 9, 40, 73, 106, 108, 178, 211, 212, 223, 226, 277, 326, 363 n.8, 369, 374, 394; Vol. 2 6, 19, 67, 67 n.4, 71, 85, 89, 100 n.66, 105 n.110, 109 n.143, 120, 130, 145, 146, 152, 182, 201, 306 n.3, 311, 312, 320, 333, 341, 342, 345, 353, 365; see also documentary non-professional actors  Vol. 1 104 n.3, 197, 385, 394; Vol. 2 112, 116 n.198, 173, 179

440

Index

Notarianni, Pietro  Vol. 2 240 n.3 Obsession  Vol. 1 78 n.5; Vol. 2 5 Ocampo, Vitoria  Vol. 1 283 ‘On Censorship’  Vol. 2 320–5; see also Censorship 1960 oral history  Vol. 1 225, 244, 268; see also ethnographic cinema The Overcoat (Il cappotto)  Vol. 2 171, 175, 176, 180 Paisà  Vol. 2 102 Pannunzio, Mario  Vol. 2 n.2 Papini, Giovanni  Vol. 1 10 The Parliamentary Inquiry into Poverty and Unemployment  Vol. 2 152, 163 n.25, 164, 168 Parma Conference  Vol. 2 152–9; see also Neo-realism; Perugia Conference; ‘Taking Issue with the Present’ participation  Vol. 1 94, 208, 305, 361, 375, 381, 396; Vol. 2 58, 74, 82, 97 n.43, 111, 137, 150, 156, 158, 185, 191, 200, 241, 245, 261, 283, 297, 308, 309, 327, 336, 353, 385, 391, 401, 402, 414 Pasado Meridiano  Vol. 2 276 Pasolini Pier Paolo  Vol. 1 311, 368 n.3; Vol. 2 86 n.2, 91, 113 n.179, 114 n.181, 118 n.206, 126 n.127, 277, 326 n.1, 329, 366, 384, 401 n.5 Patroni-Griffi, Giuseppe  Vol. 2 375 Patti, Ercole  Vol. 2 9, 11, 13, 39 peace (anti-war)  Vol. 1 300, 332, 340, 341, 345, 351, 368, 379, 388, 389, 394; Vol. 2 104, 104 n.105, 151, 279, 295, 302; see also The Newsreel for Peace Perugia Conference  Vol. 2 65–70; see also Barbaro; Neo-realism; Parma Conference; ‘Taking Issue with the Present’ Pesaro Festival of Free Cinema  Vol. 1 276 n.4; Vol. 2 344 n.10, 365, 390–2, 401

Petri, Elio  Vol. 1 5, 98; Vol. 2 73, 74, 89, 110 n.156, 227 n.2, 233, 233 n.1, 234, 318, 318 n.1, 318 n.3, 383 n.2; see also Rome, 11 o’Clock phenomenology  Vol. 1 3, 91, 92, 93, 120, 139, 145, 223, 374; Vol. 2 30, 66, 76 n.2, 85, 120, 146, 324 n.12, 414 n.9; see also Ayfré; Bazin; Kracauer; MerleauPonty photo-documentary  Vol. 1 79, 127, 278, 282, 283; Vol. 2 217–19, 365 Pietrangeli, Antonio  Vol. 2 65, 142, 240 n.3, 375 Pina, Francisco  Vol. 2 294 Piovene, Guido  Vol. 1 10, 307 Piperno, Marina  Vol. 1 312, 314 n.7 Pirandello, Luigi  Vol. 1 3, 11, 21, 22, 25, 102, 106, 127, 128, 194; Vol. 2 6, 12 n.10, 82 Pittigrilli (Dino Segre)  Vol. 1 38; Vol. 2 38 Pontecorvo, Gillo  Vol. 2 405 Ponti, Carlo  Vol. 1 74, 178, 188 n.20, 207, 318, 326; Vol. 2 288 The Poor are Mad  Vol. 1 9, 10, 16 n.17, 18–20, 30, 56, 65, 169; Vol. 2 31, 46; see also humour; magic realism; Nonsense Porretta Terme Conference on Free Cinema  Vol. 2 344, 344 n.10, 359, 381; see also Free Cinema Portella delle Ginestre (Mafia massacre)  Vol. 1 381, 381 n.7 poverty  Vol. 1 52, 99, 168, 201, 258, 299, 329, 364, 368 n.3; Vol. 2 53 n.4, 81, 82, 83 n.3, 104, 105, 106, 106 n.122, 107, 107 n.128, 131, 132, 143, 152, 153, 160, 161, 161 n.22, 168, 169, 173, 174, 177, 178, 183, 293, 299 n.21, 318 n.3, 401 n.5; see also Five Poor Men in a Motorcar; Miracle in Milan Pratolini, Vasco  Vol. 2 151, 181, 183, 183 n.6

Index producers  Vol. 1 24, 29, 102, 104, 106, 169, 243, 262, 265, 309, 312, 327; Vol. 2 7, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 44, 45, 46, 54, 55, 63, 64, 81, 89, 106 n.122, 124, 137 n.34, 146, 175, 196, 214, 217, 223, 226, 230, 238, 239, 245, 290, 306 n.3, 313, 323, 355, 374, 375 public opinion  Vol. 1 23, 68, 69, 70, 308, 309, 322, 344, 368, 369, 372, 387; Vol. 2 29, 37, 54, 59, 81, 124, 131 n.3, 136, 175, 180, 239, 240, 241, 246, 266, 284, 290, 300, 308, 309, 326, 327, 329, 330, 331, 339 Puccini, Gianni  Vol. 1 349, 351 n.7; Vol. 2 234 Pudovkin, Vsevolod  Vol. 1 198; Vol. 2 66 Qualunquismo  Vol. 1 372 n.7 Quasimodo, Salvatore  Vol. 2 164 n.27, 329 Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps among the Clouds)  Vol. 1 111; Vol. 2 35 raccontini (short stories)  Vol. 1 2, 12, 9–20, 21, 50, 56, 64, 68, 145, 169, 218, 277; Vol. 2 9, 12 n.11, 39 n.10, 40 n.12, 112 n.169; see also Calvino; humour; magic realism; Nonsense racism  Vol. 1 273, 338; Vol. 2 169, 258 Raíces  Vol. 1 260; Vol. 2 289, 290, 292, 298, 310 Ranieri, Andrea  Vol. 1 339 n.2; Vol. 2 358 Rea, Domenico  Vol. 1 282, 282 n.21; Vol. 2 151 Red Brigades  Vol. 1 373–83 Reitz, Karel  Vol. 2 155 n.14 Renzi, Renzo  Vol. 2 159, 160, 175, 213, 345, 365 Rèpaci, Leonida  Vol. 2 242

441

reportage  Vol. 1 268, 271; Vol. 2 137 n.38, 182, 188, 326 n.1, 345, 346, 396, 397; see also documentary; investigative journalism revolution  Vol. 1 276, 303–5, 333, 342, 352, 360–3; Vol. 2 21, 363, 367, 377, 388, 395, 417; Cuban Revolution  Vol. 1 268–72, 273, 311; Vol. 2 86, 169, 171, 253, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 262 n.2, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 275–86, 297, 320; Mexican Revolution  Vol. 1 365, 366, 370; Vol. 2 317 Rigoglioso, Caterina  Vol. 1 205–10, 211–12, 216, 216 n.2; Vol. 2 85, 116, 116 n.197, 119, 121, 124–6, 130, 139, 140, 142–4, 188–94, 222 n.3, 223; see also The Story of Catherine Rinascita  Vol. 1 312, 336, 341; Vol. 2 65, 102, 353, 355, 356 n.2, 357, 358, 360; Rinascita round table  Vol. 2 362–4 Risi, Dino  Vol. 1 207, 317; Vol. 2 340 n.2, 381 n.4 Rizzoli, Andrea  Vol. 1 56; Vol. 2 10–12, 31 Rizzoli, Angelo  Vol. 1 22, 138; Vol. 2 9, 39, 41 Rizzoli (publishers)  Vol. 1 22, 189 n.2, 201, 403 n.1 Rocco and His Brothers  Vol. 2 320, 321, 323 n.9, 324 n.10 Rome, 11 o’Clock  Vol. 1 5, 6, 179, 223, 374; Vol. 2 73, 74, 89, 110 n.156, 227 n.2, 233; see also De Santis Rome, Open City  Vol. 2 102 Rondi, Brunello  Vol. 2 120, 146; see also Bazin; Kracauer; Merleau-Ponty; phenomenology Rondi, Gian Luigi  Vol. 2 78, 146 The Roof (Il tetto)  Vol. 1 179, 222–41, 276, 277, 282, 326; Vol. 2 73, 91, 290 Rossellini, Renzo  Vol. 1 207, 208

442

Index

Rossellini, Roberto  Vol. 1 105, 130, 177, 178, 186 n.17, 188 n.20, 189 n.21, 190, 191 n.25, 196, 207, 223, 242, 308; Vol. 2 61, 65, 102, 112 n.163, 120, 138 n.41, 142, 163 n.111, 201, 202, 213 Rossi, Anton Germano  Vol. 1 39; Vol. 2 11 Sadoul, Georges  Vol. 2 66, 260 Salinari, Carlo  Vol. 2 183 n.6 Samugheo, Chiara  Vol. 1 282, 282 n.21 Sartre, Jean-Paul  Vol. 1 313; Vol. 2 260, 351 satire  Vol. 2 8 n.4, 9, 12, 45, 171, 176, 177, 258, 277, 305; see also Chronicles from Hollywood; The Little Dictator; The Truuuuth ‘scene of the crime’ (luogo del delitto)  Vol. 1 14; Vol. 2 372, 403; see also ethnographic cinema; ‘hole in the wall’; shadowing Schweiwiller, Giovanni  Vol. 2 342 n.6 Sciuscià  Vol. 1 5, 56, 77–89, 99, 111, 124; Vol. 2 102, 184, 184 n.9 Scola, Ettore  Vol. 1 265, 318; Vol. 2 375 ‘Scrap Scripts’  Vol. 2 73–7 screenwriting  Vol. 1 5, 13, 29, 40, 89, 91, 94, 99, 106, 108, 110, 114, 123, 124, 128, 133, 145, 177, 197, 209 n.6, 242, 243, 260, 262, 265, 306, 317, 349, 360, 374; Vol. 2 6, 8, 10, 13, 14, 19, 21 nn.4–5, 30, 31, 39, 42, 45 n.17, 46, 44, 46, 47–8, 51, 53 n.4, 88, 90, 91, 108 n.138, 113, 113 nn.178–9, 114, 114 n.181, 133, 137 n.36, 149, 184 n.9, 227, 233, 253, 255, 259, 267, 273, 275, 286, 287, 288, 290, 298 n.16, 302, 316, 340, 342, 342 n.7, 345, 360, 407; ‘Screenwriting’ (see anti-screenplay; ‘How to Write a Screenplay’)

Senso  Vol. 2 127, 181, 182, 183, 183 n.6 The Seven Cervi Brothers  Vol. 1 348– 58; Vol. 2 360, 360 n.5, 383 n.2; see also Italian Resistance shadowing (pedinamento)  Vol. 1 53, 184, 198, 223, 225, 247, 313, 317, 320 n.7, 327; Vol. 2 24, 90, 99 n.57, 111, 148–51, 193, 194, 234, 318 n.4; see also ethnographic cinema; Maurizio Arena Shadowing People  Vol. 1 223 Short Love Story  Vol. 1 256–9 Signorina Grandi Firme (Miss Great Celebrity Signatures)  Vol. 1 38–49 Silent Era cinema  Vol. 1 3, 21, 25, 26, 30; Vol. 2 5, 6, 79 social actors  Vol. 1 317; Vol. 2 73, 123 social facts  Vol. 1 3, 99, 106, 227, 341, 374; Vol. 2 85, 93, 93 n.14, 126, 141, 161, 190, 195, 196, 234, 248, 249, 277, 410, 411 socialism  Vol. 1 346, 350, 380; Socialist Party 373, 375; Vol. 2 26, 53, 66, 72, 96 n.14, 132, 277, 281, 362, 384, 416 socially engaged cinema (‘Useful Cinema’)  Vol. 2 236–7 Soldati, Mario  Vol. 2 10, 13, 65, 204 Sordi, Alberto  Vol. 2 375 Soviet realism  Vol. 1 351 n.7; Vol. 2 66, 67, 145, 172, 181, 277, 393 spiedo (‘the spit’, analogy for unifying principle)  Vol. 1 5, 105, 110; Vol. 2 342 n.7; see also screenwriting Stoppa, Paolo  Vol. 2 240 n.3 The Story of Catherine  Vol. 1 179, 205–16, 223, 374; Vol. 2 73, 89, 124, 142, 188, 222 n.3, 311; see also Rigoglioso Strand, Paul  Vol. 1 179, 196, 197–200, 277, 278, 282; Vol. 2 66, 202, 207, 208, 209, 209 n.5, 210, 211, 212; ‘Strand

Index

443

the Photographer’  215–16, 217; see also Un paese Stroheim, Eric Von  Vol. 1 27, 28, 29; Vol. 2 34

The Truuuuth (La veritàaaa) Vol. 1 3, 4, 23, 177, 314 n.7, 331, 384–92, 394; Vol. 2 410–17; see also satire; television

‘Taking Issue with the Present’  Vol. 2 81–4; see also Parma Conference; Perugia Conference Talkies  Vol. 1 21, 26, 27; Vol. 2 5 Tamburella, Paolo William  Vol. 1 80 Taviani, Paolo  Vol. 2 90, 120 Taviani, Vittorio  Vol. 2 90, 120 Telesubito  Vol. 1 393–6 television  Vol. 1 331–4; Assault on Television (see Telesubito; The Truuuuth!) Termini Station  Vol. 1 193, 326; Vol. 2 138, 139, 302 terrorism Aldo Moro, Before, During, After  Vol. 1 373–83 testimonial writing  Vol. 1 197, 261, 268, 308, 364; Vol. 2 74, 217, 330, 340, 340 n.2, 356 Testori, Giovanni  Vol. 2 320, 323, 323 n.8 Tilgher, Adriano  Vol. 2 10 Tire dié (Throw me a Dime) Vol. 1 275, 276, 278; Vol. 2 318; see also Birri; Un paese Togliatti, Palmiro  Vol. 1 378 ¡Torero! Vol. 1 257, 260, 261; Vol. 2 304, 311 Torres, Oscar  Vol. 1 287 Tosi, Virgilio  Vol. 2 365 Totò  Vol. 2 35, 40, 42, 43, 413; see also Totò the Good Totò the Good  Vol. 1 50, 64–70, 136, 169; Vol. 2 19, 21 n.4, 46, 53 n.4; see also humour; magic realism; Miracle in Milan; Nonsense; Totò transcendence  Vol. 1 253; Vol. 2 199–200 Trombadori, Antonello  Vol. 1 123; Vol. 2 24, 53 n.5, 240 n.3, 258, 258 n.3 Trujillo, Rafael  Vol. 1 285–6; Vol. 2 258

Umberto D.  Vol. 1  1, 3, 4, 23, 91, 93, 108, 135–66, 185; Vol. 2 85, 87, 88, 90–2, 102, 108 n.138, 139 n.47, 172, 214, 290, 298, 298 n.16, 319, 334, 334 n.2, 345, 382; see also durational cinema; Neo-realism Unione Nazionale per la Diffusione del Film Italiano all’Estero (unitalia)  Vol. 2 171, 180, 287 Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village  Vol. 1 1, 3, 4, 23, 91, 93, 108, 135, 136, 137, 138–44, 145–66, 185; Vol. 2 207–14, 217; see also ethnographic photography; photo-documentary; shadowing urgency  Vol. 1 185, 226, 316, 344, 361, 367, 370, 374, 393, 394; Vol. 2 85, 87, 132, 138, 152, 158, 179, 186, 223, 240, 243, 324, 330, 352, 367, 383; see also cinema of urgency; Free Newsreels Valmarana, Paolo  Vol. 2 153, 153 n.3 Vancini, Florestano  Vol. 2 83 n.3, 161 n.22 Venice Film Festival  Vol. 1 124, 125, 126, 263, 307, 375; Vol. 2 238, 289, 321, 324 n.10, 358, 373, 382–4, 390–2, 398; see also Cannes Film Festival Verdone, Mario  Vol. 1 123; Vol. 2 232 n.2 verfremdungseffekt (distanciation)  Vol. 1 22, 342; Vol. 2 338, 339, 356, 391 Verga, Giovanni  Vol. 2 5, 8, 24 Vertov, Dziga  Vol. 2 38 n.8, 135 n.26, 232 n.2, 306 n.3 Viazzi, Luciano  Vol. 1 314 n.7

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Index

Vidor, King  Vol. 1 29; Vol. 2 5, 7, 29 n.3, 37 Vietnam  Vol. 1 344, 349, 362; Vol. 2 369, 381 Vigorelli, Giancarlo  Vol. 2 153, 153 n.4, 167 Viola, Cesare Giulio  Vol. 1 80 Visconti, Luchino  Vol. 1 78, 102, 127, 128, 212, 306, 308, 370; Vol. 2 5, 181, 183, 183 n.6, 320, 321, 323 n.9, 324 n.10, 363 n.4, 375, 384, 416 Vittorini, Elio  Vol. 1 311; Vol. 2 58, 151, 156 n.18, 299 n.19, 329, 411, 412 n.3 Von Stroheim, Erich  Vol. 1 27, 29 The War Game  Vol. 2 405 Watson, Peter  Vol. 2 405

Wechsler, Lazar  Vol. 1 373 We Women  Vol. 1 23, 215; Vol. 2 6, 130, 139, 152, 214, 333, 334 What Scoundrels Men Are! (Gli uomini, che mascalzoni...) Vol. 2, 10; see also Camerini Why?  Vol. 1 335–9; Vol. 2 358–61; see also Grifi; The Why? Project The Why? Project  Vol. 2 358–61 ZaLab  Vol. 1 312 Zambon, Pasquale and Luisa  Vol. 1 191, 222; Vol. 2 191, 222 Zampa, Luigi  Vol. 2 65, 139, 139 n.49, 240 n.3, 375, 384 Zanuck, Darryl F.  Vol. 1 108 Zavattini Seminar (Cuba)  Vol. 1 287, 303; Vol. 2 272, 274–6 Zurlini, Valerio  Vol. 2 213

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