Cesare Zavattini’s Neo-realism and the Afterlife of an Idea

David Brancaleone is Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies, Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland, where he teaches history and theory of art, film, photography and visual culture. An art history graduate from La Sapienza, Rome, he gained an MA in Italian Studies at University College London, UK and, in 2002, his doctorate at the Warburg Institute, University of London, UK. In 2019, he published the two-volume Zavattini, il Neo-realismo e il Nuovo Cinema latino-americano which reconstructs and documents Zavattini's cultural interventions in Latin America and his specific contribution to the global dimension of Neo-realism in the latter half of the twentieth century. This publication provided the critical and contextual basis for the curation of a major retrospective exhibition, 'Zavattini oltre i confini', Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2019.

This extensively researched and intricately informative biography of Zavattini fills a void in film scholarship. The difficulty in tackling Zavattini is achieving insightful analysis due to the rarely mentioned and forgotten aspects and periods of his career; the author ably includes such episodes such as La porta del cielo and La veritaaaà. Given the breath of information from sources accessed and discussed by the author, in particular from the Zavattini archive, this book offers important cultural analysis and information that a reader one hundred years from now should be able to grasp and enjoy.

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