For a Cinema of the Blind and Visionaries: The Forgotten Lessons of Cesare Zavattini (Preview)
by Giuliana Minghelli

To truly understand what is in the name Cesare Zavattini, it might be useful to forget, for the moment, his association with filmmaker Vittorio De Sica, his work as screenwriter and editor on famous postwar films such as Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, Umberto D., and his role as tutelary deity and apostle of neorealism. The name Cesare Zavattini, or Za for short, would be better approached as a field of creative energy fueling and often short-circuiting the Italian cultural scene and its cinema during the last century with reverberations across global cinema.

AN EVERYDAY BIOGRAPHY
Given his profound belief in the material basis of all human life and experience, it seems appropriate to enter the planet Zavattini by dwelling on some of those earthly elements that could shed light on the artist’s temperament, cultural background, and visual poetics. “Really to understand Zavattini the man as well as Zavattini the writer, one must know something about his birthplace,” so William Weaver prefaces the 1970 collection Sequences from a Cinematic Life, the first book-length English translation of Zavattini’s writings.

Luzzara, where Zavattini was born in 1902, is a small agricultural town on the banks of the Po River in the province of Reggio Emilia. There is nothing remarkable about Luzzara; it is provincial Italy at its most anonymous. Nonetheless, leafing through the pages of Un paese, the photobook that Zavattini created in 1955 with American photographer Paul Strand, we encounter this same Luzzara as a land of epic landscapes and quietly dignified people whose simple words draw a compelling picture of 1950s Italy. It is in the seemingly unremarkable, everyday world of Luzzara that Zavattini learned early on one of the revolutionary tenets of his poetics that eventually shaped postwar cinema—the banal does not exit. Once invested with an attentive eye and ear, the most ordinary reality becomes extraordinary and revelatory, an infinite repertory of images “worth narrating in every moment.”

In Luzzara, Zavattini’s family ran an elegant café and pastry shop in the center of town. Always busy and always struggling with debts, the entire family worked in the popular café, leading an existence that left little space for intimate and private moments. “The caffettieri [baristas] do not have a home even when they have one, one even eats among clients, cohabitants,” Zavattini will reminisce years later in Going Back. The open space of the café, where the whole community comes and goes as in a seaport, where words flow with the coffee and liquors, where stories are heard and told, is a space of meeting and listening which profoundly shaped Zavattini’s poetics. The cinema of the encounter, his Utopia, at once aesthetic and political, of civic cohabitation in a living space that is shared and for which we share responsibility, finds its roots here. In Luzzara, living the life of the caffettieri, Zavattini developed his unique art of storytelling that introduced into Italian literature and then cinema the view from the street, the world seen from the eyes of the “common man,” a direct and simple language, resonating with the living voices of people.

After Luzzara, Zavattini lived in the northern city of Bergamo with an uncle, then in Rome, in whose vicinity the family moved during WWI, and then in Parma where, after dropping out of law school, he started his career as a journalist for a local newspaper. A voracious reader but mediocre student, Zavattini found in the streets, variety theaters, and cinemas his true university. Before Charlie Chaplin, his idol was the Italian stage performer Leopoldo Fregoli, the greatest and most versatile quick-change artist of his day, famous for his extraordinary impersonations and rapid change of roles. Fregoli, the artist as a protean being, dashing on and off stage, resonates with the ebullient artistic temperament of Zavattini. In the space of a few years during the 1930s, he too would undergo swift and amazing transformations: from obscure provincial journalist to the most acclaimed fiction writer in Italy, popular magazine writer and editor, cultural trendsetter and, toward the end of the decade, sought-after screenwriter. Then, in the postwar period, he emerged as one of the main figures of neorealism, theorist of a modern ethical cinema, engaging tirelessly in cultural and political initiatives that shook the Italian cinematic establishment.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 3