Cesare Zavattini

Cesare Zavattini wrote the films that neorealism is remembered by, and wrote the argument for making them. He came from Emilia, worked as a journalist and humorist, and published surreal comic novels before he went near a film set. His partnership with Vittorio De Sica produced Shoeshine in 1946, Bicycle Thieves in 1948, Miracle in Milan in 1951 and Umberto D. in 1952, and it is not possible to separate the director's achievement from the writer's. The theory he set out was radical and he meant it literally: cinema should abandon invented plots and follow real people through ordinary time, and the ideal film would be ninety minutes of a man's life in which nothing happens. Umberto D. is the closest anyone came - a pensioner who cannot pay his rent, and a long sequence of a maid waking up and grinding coffee that does nothing for the story at all. Bicycle Thieves was cast without professional actors: the father was a factory worker, and David O. Selznick's offer of Cary Grant for the part was refused. The politics were the point and the state noticed. The Andreotti law of 1949 let the government withhold export licences from films that showed Italy badly, and a minister publicly told De Sica that dirty linen should be washed at home. He went on writing for forty more years, into comedies with Sophia Loren that paid for the rest, and campaigned to the end of his life for cheap cameras in ordinary hands - film letters, as he called them, made by the people the films were supposed to be about.

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