Cesare Zavattini Selected Writings Volume 2 9781501317057, 9781501317088, 9781501319921

Table of contents :
Volume 1
Cover_Volume 1
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction to Volume 1
Part I: Pre-war
Chapter 1: Stories from the Comic Trilogy (1931-41)
Context
Text
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Chapter 2: Chronicles from Hollywood (1927-33)
Context
Text
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Chapter 3: Scenario: The Nervous Tic Clinic (1936)
Context
Text
Chapter 4: Miss Great Celebrity Signatures: Letter to Giuseppe Amato, 1 July 1938
Context
Text
Chapter 5: Scenario: Miss Great Celebrity Signatures (1938)
Context
Text
Chapter 6: Scenario: Everyone Should Have a Rocking Horse (1938)
Context
Text
Chapter 7: Scenario: Five Poor Men in a Motorcar (1939)
Context
Text
Chapter 8: Scenario: Totò the Good (1940)
Context
Text
Part II: Post-war
Chapter 9: Scenario: Italy 1944 (1944)
Context
Text
Chapter 10: Scenario: Sciuscià (1945)
Context
Text
Chapter 11: Sciuscià: Letter to Massimo Ferrara, 6 July 1981
Chapter 12: Scenario: Bicycle Thieves (1948)
Context
Text
Chapter 13: ‘What We Want’ (1950)
Context
Text
Chapter 14: Scenario: The Great Deception (1948)
Context
Text
Chapter 15: The Great Deception: Letter to Géza von Radváni, 9 March 1950
Chapter 16: Scenario: First Communion (1949)
Context
Text
Chapter 17: First Communion : Correspondence
Context
Text
1
2
Chapter 18: Scenario: Bellissima (1950-1)
Context
Text
1
2
Chapter 19: ‘The origins of Umberto D.’ (1951)
Context
Text
Chapter 20: Umberto D. in Zavattini’s diary (1948-51)
Context
Text
Chapter 21: Scenario: Umberto D. (1951)
Context
Text
Chapter 22: Treatment: Umberto D. (1951)
Context
Text
Chapter 23: Screenplay (extract): Umberto D. Umberto’s Lodgings. The Kitchen. Dawn (1951)
Chapter 24: Zavattini, Miracle in Milan, La Voce Repubblicana, 7 July 1951
Chapter 25: Scenario: Miracle in Milan (1950)
Context
Text
Chapter 26: Scenario: Italia mia (1951-2)
Context
Text
1
2
3
4
5
6
Episodes which can be filmed without delay
Chapter 27: Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village (1955)
Context
Text
1
Chapter 28: The Story of Catherine: ansa Press Comuniqué (1952)
Context
Text
Chapter 29: Scenario: The Story of Catherine (1952)
Context
Text
Chapter 30: Love in the City: Voice-over and dialogue excerpt (1953)
Context
Text
1
2
Dialogue from opening short sequences
Chapter 31: The Story of Catherine: Interview (1962)
Context
Text
Chapter 32: Scenario: A Child’s Funeral (1954)
Context
Text
Chapter 33: Scenario: The Roof (1955)
Context
Text
Chapter 34: Scenario: México mío (1955-8)
Context
Text
1
2
3
4
5
Chapter 35: Scenario: Short Love Story (1958)
Context
Text
Chapter 36: Correspondence with Carlos Velo (1955-8)
Context
Text
1
2
3
Chapter 37: Scenario: Diary of a Woman (1959)
Context
Text
Chapter 38: Scenario: Revolución en Cuba (1960)
Context
Text
Chapter 39: Scenario: Anti-racist Film (1960)
Context
Text
Chapter 40: Fernando Birri, Letter to Zavattini, 9 March 1957
Context
Text
Chapter 41: Scenario: The Little Dictator (1960) 
Context
Text
Chapter 42: Treatment: The Little Dictator (1960) 
Context
Text
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Chapter 43: Scenario: Colour versus Colour (1960)
Context
Text
The Film Colour versus Colour (Abstract Painter vs Figurative Painter). A drama on canvas
Chapter 44: Scenario: Censorship 1960
Context
Text
Part one (Introduction)
Part two (main body)
Themes for the main body
Part Three (conclusion and perspective)
Chapter 45: Scenario: The Newsreel for Peace (1962)
Context
Text
1
Chapter 46: Scenario: The Guinea Pig (1962)
Context
Text
1
2
3
Chapter 47: Scenario: The Mysteries of Rome (1962)
Context
Text
Chapter 48: Scenario: Assault on Television (1962)
Context
Text
Chapter 49: Scenario: Why? (1963)
Context
Text
Chapter 50: Scenario: Free Newsreels (1967)
Context
Text
Chapter 51: Scenario: The Seven Cervi Brothers (1968)
Context
Text
1
2
The Cervi Brothers
Chapter 52: Scenario: Revolution (1969)
Context
Text
Chapter 53: Adapting The Children of Sánchez (1971)
Context
Text
Chapter 54: Scenario: Italia mia tv version (1974-6)
Context
Text
Chapter 55: Scenario: Aldo Moro, Before, During, After (1978)
Context
Text
1
2
Chapter 56: Scenario: The Truuuuth (1981)
Context
Text
The Truuuuth, 1981
Chapter 57: Transmission test: Telesubito (1983)
Context
Text
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Volume 2
Cover_Volume 2
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction to Volume 2
Part I: Pre-war
Chapter 1: ‘The Directors’ Gift’, from The Hollywood Chronicles (1933)
Context
Text
Chapter 2: ‘The Frustrations of a Young Scriptwriter’ (1936)
Context
Text
Chapter 3: Letters to filmmakers, Il Settebello (1938–9)
Context
Text
1. To Giuseppe Amato
2. To Mario Camerini
3. To the Scalera Brothers
Chapter 4: ‘The Best Dreams’ (1940)
Context
Text
Chapter 5: ‘Notebook’ (1940–1)
Context
Text
2
Chapter 6: Radio eiar Interview (1942)
Context
Text
Chapter 7: ‘One Minute of Cinema’ (1942)
Context
Text
Chapter 8: The Imola Conference (1942)
Context
Text
Chapter 9: ‘The Importance of the Script’ (1942–3)
Context
Text
Part II: Post-war
Chapter 10: Radio interview: Fascism and post-war Italy (1983)
Context
Text
Chapter 11: ‘Poetry, Italian Cinema’s only Business’ (1945)
Context
Text
Chapter 12: ‘Three Questions’ (1946)
Context
Text
Chapter 13: ‘Italy Wants to Know’ (1947)
Context
Text
Chapter 14: ‘I’m an Optimist’ (1949)
Context
Text
Chapter 15: ‘Is Cinema going to Die?’ (1949)
Context
Text
Chapter 16: Perugia Conference: ‘Cinema and Modern Man’ (1949)
Context
Text
Chapter 17: Letter to Father Morlion (1949)
Context
Text
Chapter 18: ‘Scrap Scripts’ (1950)
Context
Text
Chapter 19: ‘Italian Cinema Tomorrow’ (1950)
Context
Text
Chapter 20: ‘Taking Issue with the Present’ (1951)
Context
Text
Chapter 21: Interview: ‘Cinema, Zavattini and Reality’ (1951)
Context
Text
Chapter 22: ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’ (1952)
Context
Text
Chapter 23: ‘What Is a Flash Film’ (1952)
Context
Text
Chapter 24: Flash Film: ‘A Development of Neo-realism’ (1952)
Context
Text
Chapter 25: Enzo Muzii attacks Zavattini: ‘Adult Realism’ (1953)
Context
Text
1
2
Chapter 26: ‘Theses on Neo-realism’ (1953)
Context
Text
Chapter 27: The Story of Catherine in Zavattini’s diary (1952)
Context
Text
Chapter 28: Voice-over: Love in the City and an excerpt of dialogue (1953)
Context
Text
Chapter 29: Shadowing (1953)
Context
Text
Chapter 30: Parma Conference: ‘Neo-realism as I see it’ (1953)
Text
Chapter 31: Zavattini’s first trip to Cuba in his diary (1953)
Context
Text
Chapter 32: The Havana Conference (1953)
Context
Text
Chapter 33: Milan Conference (1954)
Context
Text
Chapter 34: Neo-realism as ethics (1954)
Context
Text
Chapter 35: Transcendence in Zavattini’s diary (1954)
Context
Text
Chapter 36: Neo-realism and Italia mia Correspondence (1952–8)
Context
Text
Italia mia: Letter to Giulio Einaudi, 28 February 1952
Italia mia: Giulio Einaudi to Zavattini, 28 June 1952
Italia mia: Zavattini to Arturo Lanocita, 20 December 1952
Italia mia: Zavattini to Giulio Einaudi, 27 February 1953
Italia mia: Zavattini, ‘To Potential Contributors’ (1953)
Italia mia: Zavattini to Giorgio Fenin, 26 March 1958
Chapter 37: Un paese. Portrait of an Italian Village. Correspondence (1952–3)
Context
Un paese: Zavattini to Bruno Fortichiari, 27 November 1952
Un paese: Zavattini to Paul Strand, 13 January 1953
Un paese: Paul Strand to Zavattini, 23 January 1953
Un paese: Zavattini to Einaudi, 30 October 1953
Chapter 38: Zavattini, ‘Strand the Photographer, 13 April 1953’
Chapter 39: Zavattini, Introduction to Cinema Nuovo photographic stories (1955)
Context
Text
Chapter 40: Alfredo Guevara, ‘Cuba’, Cinema Nuovo, no. 51, 1955
Context
Text
Chapter 41: Guevara, letter to Zavattini, 2 April 1955
Context
Text
Chapter 42: José Massip to Zavattini, 26 April 1955
Context
Text
Chapter 43: Guevara, letter to Zavattini, 4 May 1955
Context
Text
Chapter 44: Zavattini, letter to Guevara, 12 May 1955
Chapter 45: ‘Letter from Cuba’ (1955)
Context
Text
Chapter 46: Paris Conference: ‘Useful Cinema’ (1956)
Context
Text
Chapter 47: ‘The Economic Conference of Cinema’ (1956)
Context
Text
1
2
3
Chapter 48: ‘The Loneliness of Zavattini’ (1958)
Context
Text
1
2
3
Chapter 49: Zavattini, letter to Guevara, 2 January 1959
Context
Text
Chapter 50: Fernando Bernal, letter to Zavattini, 29 May 1959
Context
Text
Chapter 51: Guevara, letter to Zavattini, 29 September 1959
Chapter 52: Zavattini, letter to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1 November 1959
Chapter 53: ‘How to Write a Screenplay’ (1959)
Context
Text
Chapter 54: icaic Conference, 15 January 1960
Context
Text
Chapter 55: Zavattini, letter to Gaetano Afeltra, 15 February 1960
Context
Text
Chapter 56: Zavattini, letter to Valentino Bompiani, 7 March 1960
Chapter 57: Cuban filmmakers on Zavattini, Cine cubano (1960)
Context
Text
Chapter 58: Héctor García Mesa and Eduardo Manet, Cine cubano (1960)
Context
Text
Chapter 59: ‘Debating with the Opponents of Commitment’ (1960)
Context
Text
Chapter 60: Zavattini, letter to Lino Miccichè, 2 November 1977
Chapter 61: Zavattini, letter to Benito Alazraki, 30 October 1954
Context
Text
Chapter 62: Prologue and Epilogue: El Neorrealismo cinematografico italiano (1955)
Context
Text
1
2
Chapter 63: Mexican Bellas Artes Conference, 24 August 1955
Context
Text
Chapter 64: Interview: ‘Three films by Zavattini in Mexico’, 5 September 1955
Context
Text
Chapter 65: Zavattini, letter to Alvaro Beltrani, 20 October 1955
Context
Text
Chapter 66: Carlos Velo, letter to Zavattini, 7 November 1955
Context
Text
Chapter 67: Zavattini, letter to Felipe Carrera, 29 January 1956
Context
Text
Chapter 68: Zavattini, letter to Velo, 5 October 1958
Context
Text
Chapter 69: Elio Petri, letter to Zavattini, 1 April 1962
Context
Text
Chapter 70: ‘An Act of Courage’ (1960) and ‘On Censorship’ (1960)
Context
Text
1
2
Chapter 71: Zavattini and television (1961)
Context
Text
Chapter 72: The Newspaper for Peace (1961)
Context
Text
Chapter 73: Interview: The confession film (1961)
Context
Text
Chapter 74: The confession film: Correspondence (1962)
Context
Text
1
2
Chapter 75: Interview: The Mysteries of Rome (1962–3)
Context
Text
Chapter 76: ‘The Newsreel for Peace’ (1962)
Context
Text
Chapter 77: The Why? project (1963)
Context
Text
1
2
Chapter 78: Rinascita round table (1965)
Context
Text
Chapter 79: ‘First Conversation’ (1966)
Context
Text
Chapter 80: Interview: ‘Four Questions Addressed to Filmmakers’ (1967)
Context
Text
Chapter 81: Zavattini, ‘Why I am not resigning from anac’ (1968)
Context
Text
Chapter 82: ‘Free Newsreels’ (1968)
Context
Text
Chapter 83: Zavattini, letter to Luigi Chiarini (1968)
Context
Text
Chapter 84: anac Press Conference, Venice Film Festival (1968)
Context
Text
Chapter 85: ‘The Cine-camera as a Weapon’ (1969)
Context
Text
Chapter 86: ‘Pesaro Film Festival and Free Newsreels’ (1969)
Context
Text
Chapter 87: Political film (1970)
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Text
1
2
3
Chapter 88: ‘The Free Newsreel of the Proletariat’ (1971)
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Text
1
2
3
4
5
6
Chapter 89: ‘Time and Cinema’ (1975)
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Text
Chapter 90: Grassroots interventions (1976)
Context
Text
Chapter 91: Screenwriting (1977)
Context
Text
Chapter 92: The Truuuuth (La veritàaaa) (1978–81)
Context
Text
1
2
3
4
5
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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

vii

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

vi

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’

viii

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.

1

2

Cesare Zavattini

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

3

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

5

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

Stories from the Comic Trilogy (1931-41)

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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

Stories from the Comic Trilogy (1931-41)

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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

3

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

Scenario: The Nervous Tic Clinic (1936)

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

Scenario: Totò the Good (1940)

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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.

Scenario: Totò the Good (1940)

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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.

10

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

Scenario: Sciuscià (1945)

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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.

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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

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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.

17

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.

18

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.

22

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.

Scenario: Miracle in Milan (1950) −− −− −− −− −− −−

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

10

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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.

13

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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.

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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.

20

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

6

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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.

4 5

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

6

Zavattini, ‘La cavia’, in Uomo vieni fuori!, 252–3.

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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 f