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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.
List of contents
Introduction
1 Early days
2 Editorial director and screenwriter in Milan
3 Zavattini’s early fiction and diary
4 Early screenwriting
5 Post-war critique of cinema
6 Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves
7 Cinema as commitment: The Perugia Conference (1949)
8 First Communion, Miracle in Milan, Bellissima, Umberto D. and beyond
9 Italia mia, proposal for ethnographic cinema
10 Neo-realism to come
11 Manifesto films: Love in the City and We Women
12 The Parma Conference on Neo-realism
13 The Catholic Varese Conference on Neo-realism
14 Zavattini and cinematic ethnography: Un paese
15 Zavattini’s transmission of Neo-realism to Spain
16 Transmission of Neo-realism to Cuba
17 Transmission of Neo-realism to Mexico
18 Transmission to Argentina
19 Experimenting with non-fiction in the 1960s
20 Zavattini and the 1968 Venice Film Festival
21 Zavattini’s Free Newsreels
22 The Truuuuth: Zavattini’s testament?
Notes
Bibliography
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
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.
