Cesare Zavattini’s Neo-realism and the Afterlife of an Idea

How many Zavattinis are there? During a life spanning most of the twentieth century, the screenwriter who wrote Sciuscià, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D. was also a pioneering magazine publisher in 1930s Milan, a public intellectual, a theorist, a tireless campaigner for change within the film industry, a man of letters, a painter and a poet. This intellectual biography is built on the premise that in order to understand Zavattini’s idea of cinema and his legacy of ethical and political cinema (including guerrilla cinema), we must also tease out the multi-faceted strands of his interventions and their interplay over time. The book is for general readers, students and film historians, and anyone with an interest in cinema and its fate.

This extensively researched and intricately informative biography of Zavattini fills a void in film scholarship. The difficulty in tackling Zavattini is achieving insightful analysis due to the rarely mentioned and forgotten aspects and periods of his career; the author ably includes such episodes such as La porta del cielo and La veritaaaà. Given the breath of information from sources accessed and discussed by the author, in particular from the Zavattini archive, this book offers important cultural analysis and information that a reader one hundred years from now should be able to grasp and enjoy.

David Brancaleone is Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies, Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland, where he teaches history and theory of art, film, photography and visual culture. An art history graduate from La Sapienza, Rome, he gained an MA in Italian Studies at University College London, UK and, in 2002, his doctorate at the Warburg Institute, University of London, UK. In 2019, he published the two-volume Zavattini, il Neo-realismo e il Nuovo Cinema latino-americano which reconstructs and documents Zavattini’s cultural interventions in Latin America and his specific contribution to the global dimension of Neo-realism in the latter half of the twentieth century. This publication provided the critical and contextual basis for the curation of a major retrospective exhibition, ‘Zavattini oltre i confini’, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2019.