Zavattini, Cesare

(1902-1989)

   Novelist, screenwriter, director. Having worked for many years as a journalist, a novelist, a painter, and a cultural organizer, in 1935 Zavattini also embraced the cinema by writing the story and screenplay for Mario Camerini's Dard un milione (I'll Give a Million, 1936). He then worked on the screenplay of Alessandro Blasetti's Quattropassi fra le nuvole (A Stroll through the Clouds, 1942) before initiating what would be his very long and fruitful collaboration with Vittorio De Sica with his screenplay for I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1943).

   In the immediate postwar period he wrote, alone or in collaboration, the screenplays of many of the great neorealist classics, as well as becoming the most prominent theoretical voice of the neorealist movement itself by championing the notion of cinema as a pedinamento (tailing or following) of everyday life in an unremitting search for truth. Although his theoretical ideas were often judged utopian and many of his projects frequently remained unrealized, he continued to be an important presence in Italian postwar culture and accrued an impressive list of screenwriting credits: he wrote Sciuscia (Shoe-Shine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), Umberto D (1952), La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, 1963), and Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1972), all for De Sica. He also collaborated again with Blasetti on Prima comunione (First Communion, 1950), with Luciano Emmer on Domenica d'agosto (Sunday in August, 1950), and with Luchino Visconti on Bellissima (1951). Widely respected both by his fellow writers and by the many filmmakers with whom he worked, he served for many years as president of the Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici (ANAC, National Film Writers Association). In 1976 he received the American Screenwriters Association Award and in 1982 both the Luchino Visconti Award and a career Golden Lion at the Venice Festival. Curiously, for someone so involved in the production of cinema, he directed only one film on his own, La veritaaaa (The Truuuuth, 1981), a fairly transparent autobiographical work in which an energetic 80-year-old man escapes from his nursing home in order to exhort people in the street to think more independently and to realize themselves through social responsibility.