Christ Stopped at Eboli (Cristo si e Fermato a Eboli) (1979)

 

Christ Stopped at Eboli

The last movie of 1979 is “Christ Stopped at Eboli” ("Cristo si è fermato a Eboli"), an Italian film by Francesco Rosi. This is a movie adaption of a book of the same name, containing the memoirs of a Carlo Levi, who was exiled from Torino in the North to the village of Aliano in the south of Italy. To all appearances a true story.

This is also exactly what this feels like. This is not a narrative following a classic story arc, there are no first, second and third act or a crisis to be resolved. A Hollywood producer would fidget with worry over this script. Instead, it tells the story of Carlo Levi (Gian Maria Volonté) arriving in Eboli as a well-educated, modern north-Italian man to what must appear to be a backwards and poor community. He is an alien fish as he moves around in the village, observing the villagers with a bemused look. Carlo is indeed an observer who is interested in everything. He paints, he writes, sometimes comments, but he tries very hard not to interfere. In this way he is like a camera among the villagers, except that, because he listens, he also tries to understand.

What Carlo gets to understand is that there is a lot more to these people than the poverty and the illiteracy that the ruling class, the fascist party likes to see. Carlo gets to know them as people and discovers that in many ways they are just as much political prisoners as he himself. There is a kinship despite the apparent gap that makes them embrace him and he care for them. And because Carlo is our eyes and ears, we do too.

I fell entirely under the spell of this movie. In its slow pace I was drawn in and came to enjoy the experience. It is in many ways a parallel to “The Tree of Wooden Clogs” in its passive observation of life as it plays out, but “Christ Stopped at Eboli” worked even better for me. With Carlo we have some actual eyes and a focus. Carlo will make observations that sometimes help explain and although Carlo’s passivity sometimes come about as impotence, it also moves the attention and the interest away from him and onto the life around him. That does not mean that he does not interfere at all. Reluctantly he becomes a doctor for the peasants and in a wonderful scene he has a discussion with Aliano’s mayor and fascist party member, Don Luigi (Paolo Bonacelli), who is censoring his letters out of the village. The letter in question contains observations on the sentiments of the villagers that can be read as a criticism of the Fascist leadership, but instead of picking a fight with the mayor, Carlo is very calm and makes quiet and undeniable observations that even the Mayor has difficultly countering. To all appearances Carlo is servile and obedient and yet pointedly subversive.

There is no doubt this is a political movie and while it is fairly harmless to be political against a fascist past, there is a very relevant and current criticism of the treatment and view of the poor south by the wealthy and dominant north. Every political analysis of Italy I ever read emphasizes this division. This made the movie relevant in 1979 and it makes it no less relevant today. Maybe today the young people of Aliano go to Munich, Bruxelles or Copenhagen instead of New York, but all the mechanisms are the same.

By some strange coincidence, I am actually going to Southern Italy on vacation this Saturday, not to Basilicata, but to Sorrento in Campania. This feels like the perfect warm up to my vacation and although I expect to find amenities a bit improved since Carlo Levi’s time, I hope to still find some of the life and energy of southern Italy.

“Christ Stopped at Eboli” hit exactly the right spot for me. I did not expect it and that makes it only so much better. You may ask, where is the drama? But life lived is plenty interesting as it is. Highly recommended.