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"In this ringing manifesto, Cesare Zavattini, who wrote such neorealist films as Shoeshine and Bicycle Thief for the Italian director Vittorio de Sica, laid down a challenge to all film makers "to excavate reality, to give it a power, a communication, a series of reflexes, which until recently we had never thought it had." Like Kracauer, he declares that the camera h a a "hunger for reality," that the invention of plots to make reality palatable or spectacular is a flight from the richness of real life.