Cesare Zavattini, the most important writer and theoretician of Italian neorealism, is best known for the scripts he wrote with Vittorio De Sica, including Shoeshine, Bicycle Thief, Umberto D. and Miracle in Milan. Zavattini has not directed a film since 1953, when he contributed the important The Love of a Mother sequence to the five-part film, Love in the City, directed by Zavattini, Fellini, Antonioni and others. Now, at the age of 80, Zavattini has directed a feature film, which he also wrote and stars in, La Verita'aaa (or, The Truuuuth). Zavattini plays Antonio, an old man who leaps the walls of a mental institution to teach something to anyone he happens to meet (from ladies on the bus to the Pope himself): namely, that the world we know is based on false thought. Words--such as peace, faith, civilization, goodness and equality--have no ideas behind them. In order to reinstate thought, these words must be “vomited up.” Antonio contrives to present his case on Italian television (R.A.I.), blocking regular programming with one “materialized” image: a child's arm, torn to pieces by a bomb. At the film's close, Zavattini appears--as Zavattini--to present a moving postscript.
In 1949, Zavattini wrote, “As a supreme act of humble confidence in reality, a film should be made of 80 minutes in a man's life,” and called for a “deep examination of conscience” in the cinema. “The cinema has used far too few images to open the eyes of our neighbors, to help them understand (and prevent) terrible events.” In its story of a “crazy” man who speaks the truth, La Verita'aaa has elements of Zavattini, the neorealist writer. From its Pirandellian structure, however, emerges a “new” figure: Zavattini, the director with a surrealistic sense of humor. La Verita'aaa was recently selected for the Museum of Modern Art's New Directors/New Films series.