Some Ideas on the Cinema

"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. The problem, he says, "lies in being able to observe reality, not to extract fictions from it." Zavattini wants to "make things as they are, almost by themselves, create their own special significance," and to analyze fact so deeply that we see "things we have never noticed before." A woman buying a pair of shoes can become a drama if we dig deep enough into her life and the lives of those around her."