“I have to concentrate all my attention on today’s man. The historical burden that falls on me and that I wouldn’t - and couldn’t - brutally shrug from my shoulders, it mustn’t prevent me from having the desire to rescue this man, but not the others, from his pain, using the means I have. This man (that’s one of my two or three obsessions) has a surname and a name, he’s part of the society in a world that concernes me without misunderstandings and I feel its charm, I have to feel it so strong that I want to talk about it, just about it and I won’t give it a false name because that false name is still a veil between me and reality, it is something that delays me, just a little while, but it delays me the complete contact with its reality and consequently the incentive to take part to modify this reality. Say that I’m wrong or worse, I think that for Neorealism it is really consequential to reach from the forgery to the reality”. (Zavattini)
From Zavattini’s words at least two fundamental aspects of Neorealism themes appear: the reference to actuality, and so neither literary or film works have as content: middle class’ life during Fascism (Moravia), the South’s problems (Alvaro, Carlo Levi, Bernari, Vittorini, Silone, Jovine, Brancati), poverty during Fascism, the holocaust and the concentration camps (Primo Levi), antifascism and the worker’s life (Pratolini), the Resistance (Calvino, Pavese, Fenoglio), the war and the indigence in the immediate post war (Moravia), and the engagement that has to characterize the work and the own life of the author in contributing to free the poor classes from misery and poverty; exactly this aspect gets in touch most of the artists of that time with the theses of Lukacs and Gramsci that will get near the cultural policy of PCI.
From the preceding words of Zavattini a problem comes out too, the possibility to represent reality or the one relative to the way of understanding the same reality.
The risk we run is that of falling in a naturalism that is condemned by Lukacs because it represents reality in a restricted and superficial way, while realism is, according to the Hungarian philosopher, a synthesis in which the essential characters of a period in all its contradictions are absorbed: “The deep kmowledge of life never stops to the observation of the daily reality, but, on the contrary it consist of the capacity to catch the essential elements and to invente, on the basis of them, characters and situations that are absolutely impossible in the everyday life, and that are anyway able to reveal in the light of the highest logics of contradictions, those tendences, those working forces whose action is badly visible in the dimness of the everyday life.”
It’s not difficult to recognize some aspects of Lukacs’ theory in the following words of Zavattini: “A tipical example can be found in The Bicycle thief. A child follows his father along the road; at a certain point he’s going under a car. His father doesn’t note anything at all. This incident is invented: but it is invented with the intention of inventing a little daily event that is anyway loaded with life. But of that life that is so important to deserve that we fight with all our forces against the other life and the other events, brought on the cinema’s screen for fifty years, because they’re always too big and false.