When you’re a writer interested in filmmakers from the early-to-mid 20th century, you come to appreciate how explicit many of them were about their goals and ideas. It was an era of -isms and manifestos, when artists were inclined to have very particular beliefs about what art should be, and, just as importantly, what it shouldn’t. In one of the great provocations in the history of world cinema, Jean-Luc Godard once published an essay that named 21 French directors and told them exactly what he thought of their work:
[Y]our camera movements are ugly because your subjects are bad, your casts act badly because your dialogue is worthless; in a word, you don’t know how to create cinema because you no longer even know what it is.
Maybe it’s because I tend to shy away from confrontation in my own life, but part of me wishes that filmmakers in our own time publicly beefed like this. Imagine if, say, Ari Aster wrote an open letter calling Wes Anderson a hack, or if Greta Gerwig offered up a point-by-point dismantling of The Fablemans and insisted that Spielberg was over the hill. Sure, Tarantino has takes and Scorsese can’t stand Marvel movies, but we’re a long way from Orson Welles plainly declaring, “I hate Woody Allen.”
Whether or not they get as personal as Godard’s diatribe, cinematic manifestos mean that we don’t have to guess at what their authors understand themselves to be doing as they shepherd their projects from script to screen. They’re like the intellectual blueprints of film classics. As part of my research for the podcast’s second season, I recently reread Cesare Zavattini’s “Some Ideas on the Cinema.” Zavattini’s screenwriting credits include a shocking number of the canonical films of Italian neorealism, like Shoeshine, Umberto D., and, that staple of college syllabi (including my own), Bicycle Theives. Despite its modest title, “Some Ideas” is nothing if not ambitious. In it, Zavattini lays out a theoretical justification for what is arguably the most influential movement in film history. For him, neorealism was a rebuke of Hollywood, with its grand heroes and melodramatic plots. He didn’t want film to be an escape from reality, but an excavation of it. Zavattini uses a hypothetical movie to make his point:
A woman is going to buy a pair of shoes. Upon this elementary situation it is possible to build a film. All we have to do is to discover and then show all the elements that go to create this adventure, in all their banal “dailiness,” and it will become worthy of attention, it will even become “spectacular.” But it will become spectacular not through its exceptional, but through its normal qualities; it will astonish us by showing so many things that happen every day under our eyes, things we have never noticed before.
In the hands of a neorealist, he argues, film can be a tool for social conscience and political change. By telling stories that foreground poor and working-class characters—characters who looked a lot like the folks buying movie tickets in post-war Italy—film can even elevate the audience itself, reminding viewers that they, not kings or generals or the upper-crust heroes of fascist-era cinema, are “the true protagonists of life.”
Cesare Zavattini understood that his work emerged not from him alone, but from his historical moment, and he thought it his art form had an obligation to engage with that moment. “The cinema should never turn back,” he wrote. “It should accept, unconditionally, what is contemporary. Today, today, today.” His own scripts take this heart. To cite the most famous example, 1948’s Bicycle Thieves is unmistakably the product of Italy in the wake of World War II. The country hadn’t yet received its infusion of funds from the Marshall Plan, the American program that helped to rebuild Europe’s economy, and millions of people shared the precarious position of the film’s Ricci family, where a problem as small as a stolen bike could mean the difference between a job and joblessness, health and hunger.
“Some Ideas” goes on to assert that filmmakers have a special responsibility to depict poverty, and to depict it honestly. It directly challenges the critics who accused neorealists of having a singleminded fixation the issue, saying that such a critic “is committing a moral sin”:
He is refusing to understand, to learn. And when he refuses to learn, consciously, or not, he is evading reality. The evasion springs from lack of courage, from fear.
As you may be gathering, Zavattini was a man of sincere political commitments. While Vittorio De Sica, the director of Bicycle Thieves and a number of other Zavattini scripts, was largely apolitical, the screenwriter was a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). His comrades understood the film to be a reflection of their shared worldview. The French critic André Bazin, an important early advocate for neorealism, went so far as to say that Bicycle Thieves was “the only valid communist film of the whole last decade.” L’Unità, the PCI’s official newspaper, organized screenings.
Be they political, aesthetic, or, like “Some Ideas,” a combination of the two, manifestos can be a useful way to articulate goals and rally supporters. There are risks, though. Art is polysemic. It doesn’t mean in the same way that an op-ed or candidate stump speech means. To find a film’s “message” is, necessarily, to simplify it, to snip off the frayed edges that give it texture. This, I think, speaks to a fundamental incompatibility. Where manifestos attempt to provide answers, art asks questions. Nobody has a complete claim on a movie’s meaning, not even its director (or screenwriter), and, when taken too much to heart, a manifesto’s intellectual scaffolding can become an interpretive prison.
The seemingly clear parameters of neorealism, codified in “Some Ideas,” have in some ways obscured important aspects of the movies that fall under its banner. As Robert S.C. Gordon writes:
Bicycle Thieves has invariably and rightly been read as a key entry in the neorealist canon, and it is as much the combined power of that canon as it is any single film that exerted such a powerful pull on the world’s audiences, critics, and film-makers. And yet, it can be argued that Bicycle Thieves (among others) could do with rescuing from the dead weight of that label, and from the overworked and oversimplified uses to which it has been put. The neorealist label has sometimes helped us forget this film’s workings as a crafted piece of film narrative, with far more to tell us than what a particular ‘-ism’ was or wasn’t; and the label has acted as a barrier to seeing in close detail the connections between the film and the struggling, changing world in which it was made (a connection that is a pivotal element of neorealist aesthetics, but which can all too easily get occluded by talk of the -ism itself).
Likewise, Peter Bondanella pushes back against the the Marxist reading implied by Zavattini’s essay, viewing the film as more existentialist than communist. “In De Sica’s universe,” he writes, “economic solutions are ultimately ineffective in curing what is a meaningless, absurd human condition.”
Of course, filmmakers rarely write manifestos anymore. (Has there been an influential one since Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95?) This kinda bums me out. I love the earnestness of the manifesto, and I love how seriously it takes art. But to approach films through a single conceptual or ideological lens is to decide in advance what they “mean” or what they’re “saying.” When an artist stays quiet, maybe it’s easier for us in the audience to actually see what they’ve put onscreen.
Fact-Checking Chatbot Charlie
For last week’s newsletter, I had a conversation with a Charlie Chaplin chatbot about, among other things, his relationship with Lita Grey, an actress he hustled to the altar when she was 16 years old and he was 35. Their marriage began before Lita had reached California’s age of consent and ended in a messy divorce that involved allegations of abuse, but Chatbot Charlie insisted that they met decades later to reconcile at his estate in Switzerland and told me that the biography Charlie Chaplin and His Times by Kenneth S. Lynn could confirm the story. I didn’t find the anecdote on a quick scan of Lynn’s book, but having not read the whole thing, I put out a call for anyone who knows their Chaplin to get in touch if they had thoughts one way or the other. Aaron Strand of the Behind the Slate film history podcast graciously followed up. Here’s Aaron’s take.
For my first podcast series I researched and produced a 5 part (10+ hour) history of Chaplin, for which I read Lynn’s book (among many others). As far as i can remember, there is no mention of a meeting between Lita and Chaplin in Switzerland. I just double checked Lynn’s book and Lita’s name does not appear after page 351. And there is no mention of her in Switzerland.
Now there are a couple of meetings between Lita and Charlie after the divorce. I went back and double checked my research and here is what I found: In the Epilogue of her final, and most accurate, book ‘Wife of the Life of the Party’ (Co-written by Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance) Lita is quoted saying the last time she spoke to Chaplin was 1943/44:
I called Charlie and I said 'you know we have two wonderful children. We went through a lot of pain - the both of us - I think we ought to be friends. I think we ought to be civil to each other,' He said 'I agree.' He came down to the house that I had built and picked me up and took me for a long ride to the beach. I was ill, and told him so, and shared with him my fear that I might not get better, although I would try and get help. He gave me encouragement and said to me, 'Lita, if it's any consolation to you, I'd like to tell you now that there are only two women that I've really loved in my life, you and the girl I'm married to now.' I looked up on his remark as vindication. He acted the way he did toward me not because he didn't love me, but he did it to protect what he created. That's the only explanation I can come to. All the bitterness of the divorce and all the rejection of the marriage and all this stuff, I finally got old enough to understand what motivated him to be so malicious. His real love was the Tramp, the character he created. That was the love of his life, the Tramp and his career. Anything that threatened the career would bring out the worst in him. I had to grow up quite a bit in order to understand this, (pg. 119-120).
Now, I believe these comments were recorded in an interview with Vance in the 90’s. And while they are a testament to her ability to survive and forgive... they still don't change the fact that Chaplin coaxed her into his steam room and raped her at the age of 16 during the production of The Gold Rush.