Introduction

Cesare Zavattini crossed the entire history of Italian sound cinema, from the 1930s until his death in 1989. If one can conceive of an Italian ‘independent-auteur cinema’, that is, a cinema capable of relating to experimentalism, attempting to free itself from traditional production modes and, at the same time, renewing the authors’ intellectual rapport with their audience, Zavattini was certainly a key, if not unique, figure in such cinema.

His importance and his contribution are gathered not only from the 80-plus films of which he was the screenwriter– often breakthrough scripts when compared to contemporary ones – but also by dwelling with utmost attention on the profound coherence of his entire body of work. In fact, Zavattini cannot simply be considered a brilliant scriptwriter and the major and most lucid theoretician of Italian neorealism. His work, in addition to the aforementioned, includes short stories and novellas, articles, papers and even paintings, all of which constitute an inseparable wholeness, created with the greatest curiosity for the new, with the most profound and heartfelt humanism, with long-sightedness and enlightening anticipations of the future of media. Most probably because of the multitalented persona and wide-ranging scope, his works are not always immediately clear and perfectly structured, and yet are perhaps among the major contributions to the understanding of the culture of the twentieth century.